Published by EH.NET (March 2001)

Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy

and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2000. 412 pp. $22,95 (paper), ISBN: 0-8223-2491-1; $64.95

(cloth), ISBN: 0-8223-2454-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gregory Clark, Department of Economics, University of

California-Davis.

One of our popular diversions here in California is “channeling” the thoughts

of those who have passed on to the spirit world. Michael Perelman has

seemingly by these methods made contact with Karl Marx himself. For his book

is a lively polemic directed at the Classical political economists, full of

allegations of double dealing and bad faith, that the master himself would

have been proud to deliver. Marx lives. He lives in Chico, California.

Perelman interprets Classical political economy as a political program in

search of an intellectual justification. Classical economists wanted to

promote the interests of the new capitalist class. To this end the Classical

system celebrated the virtues of the free market. But free markets were of no

use if the capitalist class could not recruit the wage slaves they needed for

their factories. So Classical economists simultaneously promoted intervention

in markets to strip the peasantry and handicraft workers of the vestiges of

their independence and reduce them to the wage labor. They advocated in Marx’s

terms (or at least in the terms of Marx’s English translators) “primitive

accumulation” as necessary to make a market economy. But they did not advocate

this openly: thus the “secret history of primitive accumulation.” Free

competition was optimal, unless it produced an independent peasantry unwilling

to submit to wage labor. “While energetically promoting their laissez-faire

ideology, they championed time and again policies that flew in the face of

their laissez-faire principles” (pp. 2-3).

Exhibit A in Perelman’s indictment of the Classical mob is the case of the

Game Laws. The Game Laws banned the landless and small owners in the

countryside from taking game animals. Thus in England by the laws of 1670 to

take game even on your own land a person had to meet a very substantial

property qualification. In both England and Scotland these laws became more

severe as the eighteenth century progressed, and more people were convicted

under the laws. Why, asks Perelman, did the new capitalist class and their PR

agents, the Political Economists, support these feudal restrictions in favor

of the country squires? They did so because it took away the sources of

support that kept the poor in the countryside from the factory door. They did

so because a hunting peasant was an idle peasant and an insolent peasant, not

a docile and dependable worker.

That is the Perelman claim. What is his evidence? The main evidence that

Classical political economy promoted the game laws to dispossess the peasantry

is their almost complete silence on the subject! Adam Smith, “that great

master of capitalist apologetics” (p. 49), was, writes Perelman, the only

Classical Economist to ever mention the Game Laws. Smith, however, condemned

the game laws as a feudal relic, noting that “The reason they give is that the

prohibition is made to prevent the lower sort of people from spending their

time on such unprofitable employment; but the real reason is that they

delightin hunting” (p. 50). In light of this Perelman concludes this

discussion by noting generously that “Although Smith refuses to acknowledge

any association between the Game Laws and the interests of capital, he

deserves some credit for broaching the subject, since all other political

economists failed to make any mention whatsoever” (p. 51).

Since Classical writers cunningly concealed their support and promotion of the

Game Laws by not discussing them, or pretending to be opposed to them, their

guilt is established by the silence of their friends in Parliament on the

issue. “When Parliament debated the Game Laws again in 1830, not one prominent

spokesperson for political economy called for their abolition” (p. 54). The

alternative hypothesis, that Classical economists really thought the Game Laws

were a feudal relic too minor to bother with, is not explored.

Exhibit B in the indictment of the Classical mob is their treatment of

household “self provisioning” or as Perelman also refers to it “the social

division of labor.” Here again we know of their bad faith in this matter in

the contrast between their obvious desire to destroy self-provisioning and

force all workers into the market and their public silence on the issue. Thus

“Smith, insofar as he addresses the subject, treated the social division of

labor as the result of voluntary choices on the part of free people” (p. 90).

On the other hand any random statement by anyone criticizing sloth or

indiscipline by independent producers is sign of a plan to eliminating

independence and create a proletariat.

It is true that Classical economists often wrote about the indolence of the

poor and of smallholders. But was this casual moralizing just a relic of

earlier modes of discourse, on the way to a more systematic way of thinking

about the economy? Here I read their general silence on the issue very

differently. It is the silence that shows that concern with forcing the poor

to labor for wages was a peripheral element of their system. Perelman, has to

transform this casual silence into a much more sinister conspiracy to conceal.

The book makes little progress in that direction. Indeed the bold links drawn

on the most tenuous of evidence are one thing that distinguishes the Chico

Marx from the original. Those connections are so bold that this book might

better be placed on the shelf with the “grassy knoll” and “Roswell” genres.

As a historian who has written on England in the Industrial Revolution period

I have a more innocent interpretation of the Classical conspiracy of silence

on the alleged expropriation of the peasantry. This is that the process

whereby independent peasants and artisans became wage laborers was already

largely complete in England by the time the Classical economists arrived on

the scene in the eighteenth century. Their silence on the issue is a silence

of true indifference. They had no need to conspire in the expropriation of

the means of subsistence by capitalists, because a free labor market was in

place. The issue of common rights, access to land, and self-provisioning had

been settled in favor of wage labor by 1700 in all but the rural fastnesses of

the Scottish highlands. Even before the formal Parliamentary enclosure

movement of 1750 and later common rights had mainly become private tradable

rights of access unlikely to be owned by the poorest workers. Truly common

areas with free access were limited and of little value (see Leigh

Shaw-Taylor, “Did Agricultural Laborers Have Common Rights?” forthcoming,

Journal of Economic History, and “Labourers, Cows, Common Rights and

Parliamentary Enclosure: The Evidence of Contemporary Comment, c. 1760-1810″

forthcoming, Past and Present).

Perelman, like Marx, suffers from a wildly romantic vision of a pre-industrial

England of laughter and leisure that accords little with reality. Marx had the

excuse that he was writing at a time when little was known about that past.

Gregory Clark is Professor of Economics at the University of California,

Davis.

Published by EH.NET (November 2000)

Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin, editors, Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. iii + 375 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0195641094.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Arturo Giraldez, Modern Languages and Literatures Department, University of the Pacific.

?

This collection of essays was edited in 1988 by two professors of the L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and was published originally in French by the institution’s publishing house. The volume was produced after a conference on the same topic organized by these two eminent historians some years before. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam points out in the “Foreword,” it was a response to the perspective taken by Dutch historians of the Early Modern Period who considered the trading world of Asia in terms of the European Companies and the reaction of ‘non-Western’ societies. The economic dynamism was perceived as coming from Europe and acting upon backward economies. Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin tried to promote a contrary view of an Asian history “that was largely controlled by its internal rhythms, even if related in complex ways after 1500 to various forms of European commercial and political presence” (Subrahmanyam, p. i). This historical debate is not new; it follows controversies involving specialists in Indian, Chinese and African histories. Despite the twelve-year lapse between the French version and the current translation, these essays come at a time when the debate between Eurocentric paradigms and new historiographic perspectives is taking on a new life. The work of Andre Gunder Frank, Ken Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong, among others, place China and the ‘rise of the West’ in a different light, showing the importance of China in world history before the beginnings in Britain of the so called ‘Industrial Revolution.’ (See Andre Gunder Frank (1998) ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of California Press; Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and R. Bin Wong (1997) China Transformed. Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. A recent exposition of the ‘Eurocentric’ paradigm is David Landes (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, New York: Norton. For a criticism of these ideas, see James M. Blaut (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians, New York and London: Guilford Press.)

Despite inherent theoretical problems related to the meaning of the term ‘Europe,’ with even greater confusion in the case of the term ‘West,’ those intellectual constructs form the basis of historical interpretations of wide acceptance. This set of ideas considers past developments in the “European West” as essentially endogenous processes that produced economic and social institutions whose rationality and efficiency renders them the paradigm of economic modernization. Eurocentric views have the common trait of creating an intellectual template to be applied to the transformations of other societies and ranking them accordingly to the similarities and differences from an ideal historical development. To counteract this view, Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin have collected a vast array of articles dealing with the dense network of exchanges from the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the African East Coast to the shores of China and Japan. The Europeans — Portuguese, Spaniards, English and Dutch — took advantage of pre-existing dense economic networks but their disruptions did not essentially upset their control by Asian powers until the nineteenth century.

Four main themes structure the authors’ historiographical perspective: 1) “Harbor Towns” as centers of economic stimulation; 2) The role of Islam in developing merchant networks since the ninth century; 3) The study of merchant ‘diasporas’; and 4) The ‘Continuity’ of business in Asia.

Chronologically, the collection begins with Chen Dasheng and D. Lombard’s “Foreign Merchants in Maritime Trade in ‘Quanzhou’ (‘Zaitun’): Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries” and ends with “The Major Japanese Groups of Enterprises (Kigyoshudan), Heirs to the Zaibatsus” by Bertrand Cheng. This time span was chosen to avoid an Asian economic history “in which all exchanges are seen through the prism of a periodization, whose pulse is to be found in Lisbon, London or Amsterdam” (Lombard, p.3).

Cities were crucial to trade in Asian waters. Denys Lombard distinguishes between the ‘hydraulic’ city connected to an agricultural space and merchant cities, which depended, in fact, on the maritime nexus and its links with foreign land (p.114). An early case was Quanzhou in China: “a precursor of the merchant cities that we shall later see at different points of the Indian Ocean.” (Dasheng and Lombard, p.20). Luis Filipi F.R. Thomaz studies Melaka in the sixteenth century. Genevieve Bouchon places Calicut in relationship with the Arab world, Ceylon, the Moluccas and the trade with China. Studying the city-port of Surat, Ashin Das Gupta discovers how the arrival of the Dutch and English and the Portuguese departure opened a window of opportunity for Indian merchants to became ship-owners (pp.105-112). This is a good example of how Asian entrepreneurs were able to take advantage of changes produced by the European presence.

Islam played a great role in merchant networks after the ninth century. We find Muslim communities in Quanzhou in the eleventh century; by the sixteenth century they were present in Hurmuz, Malacca, Mindanao and Manila. “As late as the 19th and 20th centuries, Islam continued to animate a whole series of intermediate networks from one end to the Indian Ocean to the other” (Lombard, pp. 5-6). Several authors study these Muslim merchants: Hadramis, Gujaratis, Ismailis, Bohras, Kashmiris, Panthay, and so on.

One of the most intriguing aspects illustrated by these essays is the “continuity” of merchant family networks and how they took advantage of the opportunities provided by different social contexts. When “Saudi Arabia developed into a petro-economy state, it attracted a flood of Hadrami emigrants; two Hadrami multi-millionaires were known everywhere, Bin Mahfuz and Bin Laden” (R.B. Serjeant, p.149). Hadrami origins come from Yemen. Claude Markovits studies other industrial groups in India like the Kasturbhais family of Gujarati merchants whose ancestor, Shantidas Zaveri, was ‘jeweler’ to the Mughal Imperial Court. The family owned textile factories but during the 1960s the group expanded into the chemical industry in collaboration with European companies, ICI and CIBA. They passed from traditional merchants to modern industrialists: “This adaptation has been achieved without any basic modification in the working methods or in the forms of organization” (Markovits, p.318). Similar cases can be found among the Chinese Hakka studied by Claudine Salmon. In 1862 Aw Chi Ching, a Hakka doctor from Fujien settled in Rangoon where he practiced traditional medicine and sold medicinal herbs. His descendents marketed a remedy called “Tiger Balm” of great mass appeal. They began advertising in Chinese newspapers in Hong-Kong, Macao and Northern China. To fight competitors in the balm business they bought newspapers in Guandong, Amoy, Singapore, Hong-Kong and Penang. Despite losing their properties in China after the Revolution, the family overcame the post World War crisis. A successor, Sally Aw, bought newspapers in Hong-Kong and Australia and also invested in a variety of businesses. The Hakka network was a great contributor to family success. After World War II one family member founded the first Hakka Bank in Singapore, the Chong Qiao Yinhang.

The vicissitudes of business development in Japan are well exemplified by one prominent conglomerate of the country: “The Iwasaki family had created the Mitsubishi company, which was the result of a commercial enterprise installed in Nagasaki and financed by the Tosa fief. It had closely collaborated with the earlier Meiji administrations” (Akamatsu, p.365). Before World War II Mitsubishi was one of the ‘Big Four’ Zaibatsus — the others being Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. “However, as early as the 1950s, a new type of structure called kigyoshudan emerged to regroup the erstwhile zaibatsus” (Chung, p.367). Mitsubishi is one of them. The previous cases go beyond mere anecdote, implying large theoretical issues. In the words of Lombard (p. 7): “The question still remains whether the recent development of Asian capitalism is a reproduction of Western capitalist systems or an outgrowth of an independent stand taken with regard to them.”

Asian merchants were not always able to develop into industrialists. Another completely different role was the symbiotic relationships between Chettiars and Kalangs with European powers. The Chettiar studied by Hans-Dieter Evers were a Tamil caste of South India. Initially they were moneylenders whose activities expanded to South Africa, Mauritius, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, South Vietnam and Indochina at the end of the late nineteenth century. The Chettiar expansion coincided with development in South-East Asia of the corporate plantation system and the mining and logging industries. “The Chettiar money-lenders played a major role in the transformation of the remaining peasant subsistence economy and connecting it with the export crop-producing sectors” (Evers, p. 206). They also provided capital to Chinese, Burmese, Pathan and Sinhalese moneylenders, but at the same time were connected with European banking institutions. “Chettiar agents had turned peasants into ‘capillaries of a network of financial arteries leading to the banks of London and Paris'” (Evers, p. 208). The Kalangs are a group of Javanese merchants studied by Claude Guillot. Fatimah, a Kalang woman, involved herself in money lending, like her mother, and in buying and selling gold. The gold was melted down and made “into pure gold ingots that Fatimah personally took to sell to the Javasche Bank in Batavia.” After World War I, this bank “introduced Fatimah to diamond merchants from Antwerp.” The family became the most prominent diamond merchants of the Dutch East Indies (Envers, pp. 272-73).

One might criticize the editors’ decision to “set aside all that we know of the European networks” (Lombard, p.4). Ignoring the presence of the Europeans in Asian waters implies ignoring the substantial links developed between Asian economies, America and other colonial powers. For instance, the Chinese tributary system used Japanese and American silver as one of its main monetary substances; and in the nineteenth century the Atlantic economy, Australian gold, Chinese tea and Indian opium formed a network of exchanges with the British playing a pivotal role. This observation does not detract from the quality of the collection. The essays are full of information and their findings should be carefully incorporated into current historical narratives.

Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin were much aware of the difficulties of studying Asian economies. Whereas European companies and countries contain rich sources amenable to statistical treatment, that is not the case for many economies in the Indian Ocean and China Sea. That explains why many of the essays’ authors use biographical sources and anthropological research to fortify their cases. However, to dismiss their findings because of lack of statistical information would be a serious mistake. In so-called western societies many economic activities are not reported in a reliable numerical form, such as the drug trade that forms part of the, non-reported, “submerged economy.”

Sanjay Subrahmanym’s “Foreword” finishes with the following thoughts that express very well the book’s theoretical relevance. “It is a timely reminder, at the end of the twentieth century, that the family firm, the merchant community, and the networks of capital-raising and investment based on kinship, affinity, and sociability, are still a reality that one needs to contend with, in Asia, but also perhaps in Europe and even in America” (p.ix).

Overall, this is an excellent collection that is tremendously useful for the historian and social scientist willing to get acquainted with aspects of economic and social history usually known only to specialists. It is a deep loss that both Jean Aubin and Denys Lombard are no longer with us. Both were great examples of an excellent French tradition in social sciences. Also two other contributors to the volume, Ashin Das Gupta and R.B.Serjeant died in the last decade of the twentieth century. The book is a great occasion to get acquainted with their work.

Arturo Giraldez has published several articles (in collaboration with D. O. Flynn) on precious metals in the modern era and has edited Metals and Monies in a Global Economy (Aldershot: Varioum, 1997). Also he is a general co-editor of the Variorum collection The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900.

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Published by EH.NET (July 1, 2000)

Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap and Bernardo Mueller, Titles, Conflict and

Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian

Frontier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. xiv + 227 pp.

$49.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-472-11006-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by D. Bruce Johnsen, George Mason University School of Law.

Titles, Conflict, and Land Use comes very close to being a tour de

force. The authors provide a careful and largely convincing theoretical and

empirical analysis of both the evolution of property rights to land and the

determinants of violent conflict on the Brazilian frontier. Although the book

has important policy implications — most notably that a failure of private

property rights, and not corporate capitalism, is probably the main threat to

the Amazon rain forest — the authors downplay policy analysis in favor of

hypothesis testing. This book is essential reading for development economists,

economic historians, public choice economists, serious environmental scholars,

and followers of New Institutional Economics. I also recommend it to those

interested in the evolution of property rights in cyberspace or any other new

frontier.

Several of the book’s early chapters address the history and current structure

of Brazilian land policy, describing in detail the relevant legal, regulatory,

constitutional, and political institutions that have influenced frontier

settlement. Brazil’s land holdings have always been highly concentrated owing

to a system of large land grants the Portuguese Crown made to promote early

settlement. The Crown issued these grants under the condition that recipients

put the lands into beneficial use, but due to low land values over the long

course of time this condition has rarely been met or enforced on the frontier.

Beginning in the 1930s, the modernization of Brazilian agriculture led to

widespread agrarian unemployment, a large and growing class of poor landless

peasants, and corresponding social unrest. Given the large tracts of idle and

unproductive frontier land, public sentiment and political favor eventually

turned to land reform to achieve social justice (and quite possibly social

efficiency) by reducing the inequitable distribution of land holdings. Despite

organized and often successful resistance to land reform by large landholders,

the current Brazilian constitution allows the federal government to expropriate

private lands that have not been put into beneficial use.

Land reform policy is now carried out primarily by INCRA, a federal agency

created in 1970 to administer frontier settlement. INCRA performs its mission

largely by organizing settlement on public lands, expropriating unproductive

private lands for settlement by squatters, and securing title for settlers. As

it turns out, organized squatter groups have become increasingly adept at

controlling the land reform agenda by planning effective invasions of likely

parcels and using violence strategically to induce INCRA to press for

expropriation. Although Brazilian statutory law requires that owners of

expropriated land receive just compensation, in practice landowners are

unlikely to receive fair market value. This prospect often leads them to resist

squatter invasions through various legal or extra-legal means, such as eviction

or armed intimidation, all of which are costly and likely to lead to violent

conflict.

To explain the evolution of frontier property rights, the authors develop an

analytical framework in which land values decline with distance from the

central market and the differential value between titled and untitled land

rises with land values and declines with distance. The data clearly support

these underlying relationships. Further empirical analysis reveals that the

length of a settler’s tenure on a plot substantially increases the likelihood

the plot will be titled, that title clearly has a positive effect on

land-specific investment, and that land-specific investment dramatically

increases land value. In cases involving a squatter invasion, the participation

of a squatter organization significantly increases the likelihood of

expropriation, and the percentage of a landholding that has been cleared (a

proxy for beneficial use) significantly reduces the likelihood of successful

expropriation. This naturally leads landowners to clear their lands to

strengthen property rights.

The authors infer from the evidence that INCRA tends to undertitle high-valued

land claims near market centers, possibly because INCRA’s performance is judged

on the number of families initially settled rather than on the quality of the

final settlement project. Although this is surely plausible, the inference

seems premature because we have no measure of the value of INCRA’s scarce

resources in alternative activities and because we know very little about the

costs and benefits of establishing title relative to alternative institutions.

To explain the determinants of violent conflict, the authors develop a

game-theoretic model with three possible outcomes from squatter invasions: the

landowner may evict the squatters, INCRA may expropriate the parcel for the

squatters’ benefit, or the squatters may remain on the land indefinitely with

no expropriation. The probability the landowner evicts the squatters increases

with what the authors characterize as “landowner violence,” and the probability

the squatters either remain on the land indefinitely or mobilize a successful

INCRA expropriation increases with “squatter violence.” The authors use this

model to generate comparative statics regarding the effects on landowner and

squatter violence from changes in the level of property rights security,

changes in land values, parametric shifts in the parties’ cost functions, and

changes in the positions of the courts regarding evictions.

My main concern with the model is that it assumes each side understands the

rules of the game and knows the relevant probability functions, valuations, and

costs. With full information, however, why would violence ever occur? What the

authors characterize as violence is really an input provided by the parties to

encroach or resist encroachment and bears no necessary relationship to actual

violent conflict, which is an outcome. By failing to account for this, the

authors neglect the selection effect so familiar to law and economics scholars

in explaining which legal disputes are selected for litigation. A legal rule

more favorable to plaintiffs, say, a change from negligence to strict liability

for injuries due to defective products, will not necessarily lead to more

litigation (violence). It simply shifts the parties’ expectations and changes

the character of the disputes that get litigated.

The authors recognize earlier in the book that “there must be some uncertainty

in the outcome that contributes to violence.” But uncertainty, alone, may not

be enough if the parties hold identical expectations. Rather, asymmetric

information about probabilities, valuations, or costs seems necessary to

generate violence conflict. A model capable of explaining violent conflict

might hypothesize two different types of landowners and squatters — say,

aggressive and passive — with each group receiving a costly signal about the

other’s type that is accurate on average but subject to imperfectly correlated

errors. Violence occurs when the parties hold mistaken beliefs about one

another’s type.

From this perspective, violence is a costly but effective method of correcting

mistaken signals. Conditional on land reform policy, violence might even be

seen as a socially efficient signaling mechanism compared to the alternative.

Apparently, the alternative is for INCRA to expropriate private lands and then

match settlers to those lands in an orderly process free from violence. The

success of squatters in controlling the matching process through organized

invasions suggests that INCRA is incapable of efficiently generating the

necessary information. For all its drawbacks, a process of targeted invasions

backed by the threat of violent conflict may be superior.

This hypothesis has testable implications, the most obvious of which is that

the parties will have a mutual interest in minimizing information asymmetry and

the associated social losses from violence. By categorizing land disputes

according to various characteristics, we should be able to predict that

information asymmetry will decline as a given category of disputes recurs and

the parties learn. New categories of disputes reflecting a different

combination of characteristics than has previously been witnessed will be most

prone to violent conflict, while routine categories of disputes will be the

least prone to violent conflict. I cannot resist noting that the common ability

of human beings to recognize patterns and to reason by analogy allows them to

anticipate outcomes and to avoid or minimize costly signaling. This knowledge

is a public good that appears subject to network effects and may be one

plausible explanation for how human beings have escaped the infinite regress

problem, in which all rents are dissipated. That the rule of law, which

institutionalizes this knowledge by relying on precedent, is strongly

associated with wealth accumulation should come as no surprise.

According to the asymmetric information hypothesis, the magnitude of changes in

land values, rather than the level of land values, should be associated with

information asymmetry and should lead to an increase in violent conflict.

Indeed, the authors include a measure of land value changes in their empirical

analysis of violent deaths and its coefficient is positive and marginally

significant. If available, the variance of land values in an area might have

even greater predictive power.

The presence of INCRA in an area should increase information asymmetry and

violent conflict. Although INCRA might act predictably under normal

circumstances, as land disputes escalate there comes a point at which public

sentiment leads INCRA to dramatically change its stance in favor of supporting

squatters. Through some range, it therefore seems plausible that landowner and

squatter expectations regarding INCRA involvement will differ, leading to

violent conflict. According to the authors’ empirical work, the presence of

INCRA in an area has a large and highly significant positive effect on violent

deaths.

Additional measures of information asymmetry might be the presence of

overlapping agency jurisdiction, changes in law or judicial sentiment, and

changes in political administration. Early on in a squatter organization’s

existence we should expect more violent deaths in the disputes it organizes,

but over time this effect should diminish as the organization gains a credible

reputation.

The authors may be correct in conceding that land reform is in some broad sense

socially efficient, but this should translate into the inference that settling

the large population of unemployed landless peasants on the Brazilian frontier

can somehow be made privately efficient for frontier landowners. Why, in spite

of their considerable political influence, have they been unable to accomplish

this through sharecropping or land rental arrangements? I can even imagine a

group of neighboring landowners agreeing to give away a portion of their lands

to settlers in hopes that doing so would expand the market and generate

improvements in infrastructure sufficient to compensate for their ceded lands.

An entertaining explanation for this failure is that through some kind of

invisible hand process the owners of Brazil’s frontier lands have been

inadvertently acting to forestall the familiar rent dissipation from premature

settlement. But with the Brazilian government unable to credibly commit to

enforcing landowners’ claims, in what might be characterized as an episode of

Malthusian rational expectations rent dissipation took the form of a large

buildup in the population of unemployed peasants that ultimately overwhelmed

landowner interests. Land reform is then seen as the political manifestation of

the race to first possession.

D. Bruce Johnsen is author of “The Formation and Protection of Property Rights

Among the Southern Kwakiutl Indians,” Journal of Legal Studies 15: 41-67

(1986).

Published by EH.NET (March 2000)

John McDonald, Production Efficiency in Domesday England, 1086. London

and New York: Routledge, 1998, xiv + 240 pp. $85 (cloth), ISBN:

0-415-16187-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Maristella Botticini, Department of Economics,

Boston University.

On the cover page of John McDonald’s Production Efficiency in Domesday

England, 1086 it might be appropriate to include a warning label: “Reading

this book may have fatal consequences for certain scholars.” The reason is

simple: it takes a lot of energy and passion for a medievalist to keep reading

the book after page

14 when the author starts employing high-tech economic models (chapters 2 and

3) and fancy regressions (chapters 4). On the other hand, patient medievalists

(and other scholars as well) will be rewarded by learning that scholars have

been basically wrong

in arguing that English estates were run inefficiently by Norman conquerors.

According to McDonald (Professor of Economics at Flinders University of South

Australia) these estates were run at similar efficiency levels to comparable

production units in more modern economies, such as farms in the postbellum

U.S. South, farms in contemporary California, and surface coalmines in the U.S

(p. 137).

After a clear and insightful introductory chapter that describes the main

features of the English economy at the

time of the Norman conquest,

elucidates the data of the Domesday Book, and outlines the main themes of the

book, the reader enters with chapters 2 and 3 into a “jungle” of technical

models that explain the techniques used by the author to measure production

efficiency in agriculture. The core of the book is in chapters 4 and 6 where

McDonald applies these techniques to a sample of estates surveyed in the

Domesday Book (those of Essex lay estates).

The book addresses important questions such as: Which ten ants-in-chief ran

efficient estates? How was productivity affected by soil type, the size of the

estate, the tenancy agreement, the institutional framework of the time and the

proximity of a market center? Which inputs made the major contribution to the

net value of output? Did slaves make a greater contribution to the manorial

lord’s net income than peasants? What was the effect of feudal and manorial

systems, which discouraged mobility of inputs, on the system of production,

input productivities and total output produced? Given technology and the

institutional framework, were estates run efficiently?

Multivariate regression analysis carried out in chapter 4 indicates that

efficiency depended on the spatial location of the farm (in which hundred the

farm was located), but was not affected by the type of soil and proximity to

urban economies. Larger farms tended to be more efficient suggesting that

economies of scale were at work. Efficiency was influenced by whether an estate

was held in demesne by the

tenant-in-chief (estates being held in demesne tended to be more efficient) and

who the tenant-in-chief was. Estates with relatively more grazing were more

efficient than estates with relatively more arable or mixed farming. The

existence of some ancillary resources on the farm (beehives, mills, or

saltpans) seems to have made estates less efficient, whereas fisheries and

vineyards do not seem to have had any effect. Overall, English estates were run

efficiently by Norman conquerors. Yet the restrictions

and rigidities imposed by feudal and manorial systems had a negative impact on

agricultural efficiency (pp. 140-143).

While I highly recommend this book to both economists and historians, I think

it is worthwhile to stress some weaknesses. The first issue is why the author

does not compare medieval English agriculture to English agriculture in later

centuries. This would have been even more interesting than comparing Domesday

England to contemporary California farms or U. S.

surface coalmines. We could learn, for example, how the demise of the feudal

and manorial systems of production affected agricultural production in England,

or how the development of more important and significant urban centers

(compared to Maldon and Colchester in 1086) influenced agricultural

efficiency. Second, given that it is not always clear whether the annual value

of an estate included ancillary resources, one wonders if this can make the

comparisons of the efficiency of various estates meaningless. The author

dismisses the argument by arguing that the existence of ancillary resources

would have had opposite effects and that therefore their overall impact on

efficiency was probably minimal. But what about other incomes from feudal

rights that could have entered into the annual values of estates?

Another critical point is the organization of the book. The technical chapters

2 and 3 should have gone into large appendices. Those who know the frontier

technique are bored by reading these chapters; those who do not have the

knowledge to understand these chapters can be really discouraged from reading

the

book. A further minor criticism is of technical nature and has to do with the

multivariate regressions. The question is why the author does not include fixed

or random effects to

account for variables that do not vary across a tenant-in-chief or whoever was

running the farm. His abilities, experience, and other unobservable variables

could have affected the way he ran his estates.

The book requires a lot of patience and passion

for high-tech economy history. If one is willing to persevere and arrive at the

end of the book,

the effort is rewarded. Someone else can apply the same frontier technique to

Norfolk and Suffolk, for which, together with Essex, the Domesday Book provides

the most detailed information, and check whether McDonald’s findings still hold

for these counties. More importantly, someone can do the same exercise on

English agriculture for later periods and tell us whether and how the demise of

the feudal system affected agricultural efficiency.

Maristella Botticini’s research focuses on marriage markets, dowries,

intergenerational transfers, credit markets and Jewish lenders, and agrarian

contracts in medieval and Renaissance Tuscany. Her recent work includes “A

Tale of ‘Benevolent’ Governments: Private Credit Markets,

Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Medieval and Renaissance

Italy,” Journal of Economic History 60 (March 2000): 164-89 and “A

Loveless Economy? Intergenerational Altruism and the

Marriage Market in a Tuscan Town, 1415-1436,” Journal of Economic

History 59 (March 1999):

104-21.

Published by EH.NET (February 1999)

David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of

History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xvi + 536.

$35 (hardcover), ISBN: 019505377X. $16.95 (paperback), ISBN: 019512121X.

Reviewed for EH.NET by John H. Munro, Department of Economics, University of

Toronto.

Let me begin on a positive note. This is indeed a most impressive work: a

vigorous, sweeping, grandiose, and contentious, though highly entertaining,

portrayal of European and North American economic history, from the High Middle

Ages to the present, viewed through the lens of “long-wave” secular price-

trends. Indeed its chief value may well lie in the controversies that it is

bound to provoke, particularly from economists, to inspire new avenues of

research in economic history

, especially in price history. The author contends that, over the past eight

centuries, the European economy has experienced four major “price-

revolutions,” whose inflationary forces ultimately became economically and

socially destructive, with adverse consequences that provoked various complex

reactions whose “resolutions” in turn led to more harmonious, prosperous, and

“equitable” economic and social conditions during intervening eras of “price

equilibria”. These four price-revolutions are rather too neatly set out as the

following: (1) the later- medieval, from c.1180-c.1350; (2) the far better

known 16th-Century Price-Revolution, atypically dated from c.1470 to c.1650,

(3) the inflation of the Industrial Revolution era, from c.1730 to 1815; and

(4) the 20th century price-revolution, conveniently dated from 1896 to 1996

(when he published the book).

Though I am probably more sympathetic

to the historical concept of

“long-waves” than the majority of economists, I do agree with many opponents of

this concept that such long-waves are exceptionally difficult to define and

explain in any mathematically convincing models, which are certainly not

supplied here. For reasons to be explored in the course of this review, I

cannot accept his depictions, analysis

, and explanations for any of them. This will not surprise Prof. Fischer, who

is evidently not an admirer of the economics profession. He is particularly

hostile to those of us deemed to be “monetarists,” evidently used as a

pejorative term. After rejecting not only the “monetarist” but also the

“Malthusian,

neo-Classical, agrarian, environmental, and historicist” models, for their

perceived deficiencies in explaining inflations, and after condemning

economists and historians alike for imposing rigid models in attempting to

unravel the mysteries of European and North American economic history,

Fischer himself imposes an exceptionally rigid and untenable model for all four

of his so-called price-revolutions, containing in fact selected Malthusian and

monetarist elements from these supposedly rejected models.

In essence, the Fischer model contends that all of his four long-wave

inflations manifested the following six-part consecutive chain of causal and

consequential factors, inducing new causes, etc., into the next part of the

chain. First, each inflationary long-wave began with a prosperity created from

the preceding era of price-equilibrium, one promoting a population growth that

inevitably led to an expansion in aggregate demand that in turn outstripped

aggregate supply, thus — according to his model

— causing virtually ALL prices to rise. Evidently his model presupposes that

all sectors of the economy, in all historical periods under examination, came

to suffer from Malthusian-Ricardian diminishing

returns and rising marginal costs, etc. Second, in each and every such era,

after some indefinite lapse of time, and after the general population had

become convinced that rising prices constituted a persistent and genuine trend,

the “people” demanded and

received from their governments an increase in the money supply to

“accommodate” the price rises. As Fischer specifically comments on p. 83: “in

every price-revolution, one finds evidence of frantic efforts to expand the

money supply, after people have discovered that prices are rising in a secular

way.” Third, and invariably, in his view, that subsequent and continuous growth

in the money supply served only to fuel and thus aggravate the already existing

inflation. He never explains, however, for any of

the four long-waves, why those increases in money stocks were always in excess

of the amount required “to accommodate inflation”. Fourth, with such

money-stock increases, the now accelerating inflation ultimately produced a

steadily worsening impoverishment of the masses, aggravated malnutrition,

generally deteriorating biological conditions, and a breakdown of family

structures and the social order, with increasing incidences of crime and social

violence: i.e., with a rise in consumer prices that outstripped generally

sticky wages in each and every era, and with a general transfer of wealth from

the poorer to richer strata of society. Fifth, ultimately all these negative

forces produced economic and social crises that finally brought the

inflationary forces to a halt,

producing a fall in population and thus (by his model) in prices, declines that

subsequently led to a new era of “price-equilibrium,” along with concomitant

re-transfers of wealth and income from the richer to the poorer strata of

society

(where such wealth presumably belonged). Sixth, after some period of economic

prosperity and social harmony, this vicious cycle would recommence, i.e., when

these favorable conditions succeeded in promoting a new round of incessant

population growth, which inevitably sparked those same inflationary forces to

produce yet another era of price-revolution, continuing until it too had run

its course.

While many economic historians, using more structured Malthusian-Ricardian type

models, have also provided a similarly bleak portrayal of

demographically-related upswings and downswings of the European economy,

most have argued that this bleak cycle was broken with the economic forces of

the modern Industrial Revolution era. Fischer evidently does not. Are we the

reforecondemned, according to his view, to suffer these never-ending bleak

cycles– economic history according to the Myth of Sisyphus, as it were?

Perhaps not, if government leaders were to listen to the various nostrums set

forth in the final chapter,

political recommendations on which I do not feel qualified to comment.

Having engaged in considerable research, over the past 35 years, on European

monetary, price, and wage histories from the 13th to 19th centuries, I am,

however, rather more qualified

to comment on Fischer’s four supposed long-waves. Out of respect for the

author’s prodigious labors in producing this magnum opus, one that is bound to

have a major impact on the historical profession, especially in covering such a

vast temporal and spatial range, I feel duty-bound to provide detailed

criticisms of his analyses of these secular price trends, with as much

statistical evidence as I can readily muster. Problematic in each is defining

their time span,

i.e., the onset and termination of inflations. If many medievalists may concur

that his first long- wave did begin in the 1180s, few would now agree that it

ended as late as the Black Death of 1348-50. On the contrary,

the preceding quarter-century (1324-49) was one of very severe deflation,

certainly in both Tuscany (Herlihy 1966) and England. In the latter, the

Phelps Brown and Hopkins “basket of consumables” price index (1451-75 =

100) fell 47%: from 165 in 1323 (having been as high as 216 in 1316, with the

Great Famine) to just 88 in 1346. Conversely, while most early-modern

historians would agree that the 16th-Century Price Revolution generally ended

in the 1650s (certainly in England), few if any would date its commencement so

early as the 1470s. To be sure, in both the Low Countries and England, a

combination of coinage debasements, civil wars, bad harvests, and other

supply-shocks did produce a short-term rise in prices from the later 1470s to

the early 1490s; but thereafter their basket-of-consumables price-indices

resumed their deflationary downward trend for another three decades (Munro

1981, 1983). In both of these regions and in Spain as well (Hamilton 1934), the

sustained rise in the general price level, lasting over a century, did not

commence until c.1520.

For Fischer’s third inflationary long-wave, of the Industrial Revolution era,

his periodization is much less contentious, though one might mark its

commencement in the late 1740s rather than the early 1730s.

The last and most recent wave is, however, by far more the most controversial

in its character. Certainly a long upswing in world prices did begin in 1896,

and lasted until the 1920s; but can we really pretend that this so neatly

defined century of 1896 to 1996 truly encompasses any form of long wave when we

consider the behavior of prices from the 1920s?

Are we to pretend that the horrendous deflation of the ensuing Great Depression

era was just a temporary if unusual aberration that deviated from this

particular century long (saeclum) secular tend? Fischer, in fact,

very

rarely ever discusses deflation, ignoring those of the 14th century and most

of the rest. Instead, he views the three periods intervening between his price-

revolutions as much more harmonious eras of price-equilibria: i.e. 1350-1470;

1650 – 1730; 1820 –

1896; and he suggests that we are now entering a fourth such era. In my own

investigations of price and monetary history from the 12th century, prices rise

and fall,

with varying degrees of amplitude; but they rarely if ever remain stable,

“in equilibrium”.

Certainly “equilibrium” is not a word that I would apply to the first of these

eras, from 1350 to 1470: not with the previously noted, very stark deflation of

c.1325 – 48, followed by an equally drastic inflation that ensued from the

Black Death over

the next three decades, well documented for England, Flanders (Munro 1983,

1984), France, Tuscany (Herlihy 1966),

and Aragon-Navarre (Hamilton 1936). Thus, in England, the mean quinquennial PB

& H index rose 64%: from 88 in 1340-44 to 145 in 1370-74, fal ling sharply

thereafter, by 29%, to 103 in 1405-09; after subsequent oscillations, it fell

even further to a final nadir of 87 in 1475-79 (when,

according to Fischer, the next price-revolution was now under way). For

Flanders, a similarly constructed price index of quinquennial means

(1450-74 = 100: Munro 1984), commencing only in 1350, thereafter rose 170%:

from 59 in 1350-4 to 126 in 1380-84, reflecting an inflation aggravated by

coinage debasements that England had not experienced, indeed none at all since

1351. Thereafter, the Flemish price index plunged 32%, reaching a temporary

nadir of 88 in 1400-04; but after a series of often severe price oscillations,

aggravated by warfare and more coin debasements, it rose to a peak of 138 in

1435-9; subsequent ly it fell another 31%, reaching its 15th century nadir of

95 in 1465-9 (before rising and then falling again, as noted earlier).

Implicit in these observations is the quite pertinent criticism that Fischer

has failed to use, or use properly, these and many other price

indices–especially the well-constructed Vander Wee index (1975), for the

Antwerp region, from 1400 to 1700, so important in his study; and the Rousseaux

and Gayer-Rostow-Schwarz indices for the 19th century (Mitchell &

Deane 1962). On the other hand, he has relied far too much on the dangerously

faulty d’Avenel price index (1894-1926) for medieval and early-modern France.

Space limitations, and presumably the reader’s patience, prevent me from

engaging in similar analyses of price trends

over the ensuing centuries, to indicate further disagreements with Fischer’s

analyses, except to note one more quarter-century of deflation during a

supposed era of price equilibrium: that of the so-called Great Depression era

of 1873 to 1896, at least within England, when the PB&H price index fell from

1437 to 947, a decline of 34% that was unmatched, for quarter-century periods

in English economic history, since the two stark deflations of the second and

fourth quarters of the 14th century. (The Rousseaux index fell from 42.5% from

127 in 1873 to 73 in 1893).

My criticisms of Fischer’s temporal depictions of both inflationary long-waves

and intervening eras of supposed price equilibria are central to my objections

to his anti-monetarist explanations for them, or rather to his

misrepresentation of the monetarist case, a viewpoint he admittedly shares with

a great number of other historians, especially those who have found

Malthusian-Ricardian type models to be more seductively plausible explanations

of

inflation. Certainly, too many of my students, in reading the economic history

literature on Europe before the Industrial Revolution era, share that beguiling

view, turning a deaf ear to the following arguments: namely, that (1) a growth

in population cannot by itself,

without complementary monetary factors, cause a rise in all prices, though

certainly it often did lead to a rise in the relative prices of grain,

timber, and other natural-resource based commodities subject to diminishing

return and supply

inelasticities; and thus (2) that these simplistic demographic models involve

a fatal confusion between a change in the relative prices of individual

commodities and a rise in the overall price-level. Some clever students have

challenged that admonition,

however,

with graphs that seek to demonstrate, with intersecting sets of aggregate

demand and supply curves, that a rise in population is sufficient to explain

inflation. My response is the following. First, all of the historical prices

with which Fischer and my students are dealing

(1180-1750) are in terms of silver-based moneys-of-account, in the traditional

pounds, shillings, and pence, tied to the region’s currently circulating silver

penny, or similar such coin, while prices expressed in terms of the gold-based

Florentine florin behaved quite differently over the long periods of time

covered in this study. Indeed we should expect such a difference in price

behavior with a change in the bimetallic ratio from about 10:1 in 1400 to about

16:1 in 1650,

which obviously reflects the fall in the relative value or purchasing power of

silver — an issue virtually ignored in Fischer’s book. Second, the shift, in

this student graph, from the conjunction of the Aggregate Demand and Supply

schedules,

from P1.Q1

and P2.Q2, requires a compensatory monetary expansion in order to achieve the

transaction values indicated for the two price levels: from 17,220,000 pounds

and 122,960,000 pounds, which increase in the volume of payments had to come

from either increased

money stocks and/or flows. Even if changes in demographic and other real

variables, shared responsibility for inflation by inducing changes in those

monetary variables, we are not permitted to ignore those variables in

explaining historical inflations.

Admittedly, from the 12th to the 18th centuries, to the modern Industrial

Revolution era, correlations between demographic and price movements are often

apparent. But why do so few historians consider the alternative proposition

that much more profound, deeper economic forces might have induced a complex

combination of general economic growth, monetary expansion, and a rise in

population, together (so that such apparent statistical relationships would

have adverse Durbin-Watson statistics to indicate significant serial

correlation)? Furthermore, if population growth is the inevitable root cause of

inflation, and population decline the purported cause of deflation, how do such

models explain why the drastic depopulations of the 14th-century Black Death

were

followed by three decades of severe inflation in most of western Europe?

Conversely, why did late 19th-century England experience the above-noted

deflation while its population grew from 23.41 million in 1873 (PB&H at 1437)

to 30.80 million in 1896 (PB&H

at 947)?

Nor is Fischer correct in asserting that, in each and every one of his four

price-revolutions, an increase in money supplies followed rather than preceded

or accompanied the rises in the price-level. For an individual country or

region, however

, one might argue that a rise in its own price level, as a consequence of a

transmitted rise in world or at least continental prices would have quickly —

and not after the long-time lags projected in Fischer’s analysis — produced an

increase in money supplies to satisfy the economic requirements for that rise

in national/regional prices. Fischer, however, fails to offer any theoretical

analysis of this phenomenon, and makes no reference to any of the well-known

publications on the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments [by Frenkel

and Johnson (1976), McCloskey and Zecher (1976), Dick and Floyd (1985, 1992);

Flynn (1978) and D. Fisher (1989), for the Price Revolution era itself]. In

essence,

and with some necessary repetition, this thesis contends:

(1) that a rise in world price levels, initially arising from increases in

world monetary stocks, is transmitted to most countries through the mechanisms

of international commerce (in commodities, services, labor) and finance

(capital flows); and (2) that monetized metallic (coin) stocks and other

elements constituting M1 will be endogenously distributed among all countries

and/or regions in order to accommodate the consequent rise in the domestic

price levels, (3) without involving those international bullion flows that the

famous Hume “price- specie flow” mechanism postulates to be the consequences of

inflation-induced changes in national trade balances.

In any event, the historical evidence clearly demonstrates that, for each of

Fischer’s European-based price-revolutions, an increase in European monetary

stocks and flows always preceded the inflations. For the first,

the price-revolution of the “long-13th century” (c.1180-c.1325), Ian Blanchard

(1996) has recently demonstrated that within England its elf,

specifically in Cumberland-Northumberland, a very major silver mining boom had

commenced much earlier, c.1135-7, peaking in the 1170s, with annual silver

outputs that were “ten times more than had been produced in the whole of

Europe” for any year in

the past seven centuries. By the 1170s,

and thus still before evident signs of general inflation or a marked

demographic upswing, an even greater silver mining boom had begun in the Harz

Mountains region of Saxony, which continued to pour out vast quantities of

silver until the early 14th century. For this same

“Commercial Revolution” era, we must also consider the accompanying financial

revolution, also evident by the 1180s, in Genoa and Lombardy; and though one

may debate the impact that their deposit-

and-transfer banking and foreign-exchange banking had upon aggregate European

money supplies,

these institutional innovations undoubtedly did at least increase the volume of

monetary flows, and near the beginning, not the middle, of this first

documented

long-wave.

For the far better known 16th-Century Price Revolution, Fischer seems to pose a

much greater threat to traditional monetary explanations, especially in so

quixotically dating its commencement in the 1470s, rather than in the 1520s.

Certainly Fischer and many other critics are on solid grounds in challenging

what had been, from the time of Jean Bodin (1566-78) to Earl Hamilton

(1928-35), the traditional monetary explanation for the origins of the Price

Revolution: namely, the influx of Spanish

American treasure. But not until after European inflation was well underway,

not until the mid-1530s, were any significant amounts of gold or silver being

imported

(via Seville); and no truly large imports of silver are recorded before the

early 1560s (a

mean of 83,374 kg in 1561-55: TePaske 1983), when the mercury amalgamation

process was just beginning to effect a revolution in Spanish-American mining.

Those undisputed facts, however, in no way undermine the so-called

“monetarist” case; for Fischer, and far too many other economic historians,

have ignored the multitude of other monetary forces in play since the 1460s.

The first and least important factor was the Portuguese export of gold from

West Africa (Sao Jorge) beginning as a trickle in the 1460s;

rising to 170 kg per annum by 1480, and peaking at 680 kg p.a. in the late

1490s (Wilks 1993). Far more important was the Central European silver mining

boom, which began in the 1460s, at the very nadir of the West European

deflation, which had thus raised the purchasing power of silver and so

increased the profit incentive to seek out new silver sources: as a

technological revolution in both mechanical and chemical engineering.

According to John Nef (1941, 1952), when this German-based mining boom reached

its peak in the mid 1530s, it had augmented Europe’s silver outputs more than

five-fold, with an annual production that ranged from a minimum of 84,200 kg

fine silver to a maximum of 91,200 kg — and thus well in excess of any amounts

pouring into Seville before the mid-1560s. My own statistical compilations,

limited to just the major mines, indicate a rise in quinquennial mean

fine-silver outputs from 12,356 kg in 1470-74 to 55,025 kg in 1534-39 (Munro

1991). In England, 25-year mean mint outputs rose

from 18,932 kg silver in 1400-24 to 33,655 kg in 1475-99 to 59,090 kg in

1500-24; and then to 305,288 kg in 1550-74 (i.e., after Henry VIII’s

“Great Debasement”); in the southern Low Countries, those means go from 54,444

kg in 1450-74 to 280,958 kg in 15 50-74 (Challis 1992; Munro 1983,

1991).

In my view, however, equally important and probably even more important was the

financial revolution that had begun in or by the 1520s with legal sanctions for

and then legislation on full negotiability, and the contemporary establishment

of effective secondary markets (especially the Antwerp Bourse) in fully

negotiable bills and rentes, i.e., heritable government annuities; and the

latter owed their universal and growing popularity, compared with other forms

of public debt, to papal bulls (1425,

1455) that had exonerated them from any taint of usury. To give just one

example of a veritable explosion in this form of public credit (which thus

reduced the relative demand for gold and silver coins), an issue that Fischer

almost completely ignores: the annual volume of transactions in Spanish

heritable juros rose from 5 million ducats (of 375 maravedis) in 1515 to 83

million ducats in the 1590s (Vander Wee 1977). Thus we need not call upon

Spanish-American bullion imp orts to explain the monetary origins of the

European Price Revolution, though their importance in aggravating and

accelerating the extent of inflation from the 1550s need hardly be questioned,

especially, as Frank Spooner (1972) has so aptly demonstrated,

even anticipated arrivals of Spanish treasure fleets would induce German and

Genoese bankers to expand credit issues by some multiples of the perceived

bullion values. Fischer, by the way, comments (p. 82) that: “the largest

proportionate increases in Spanish prices occurred during the first half of

the sixteenth century — not the second half, when American treasure had its

greatest impact.” This is simply untrue: from 1500-49, the Spanish composite

price index rose 78.5%; from 1550-99, it rose by another 92.1% (Hamilton

1934).

Changes in money stocks or other monetary variables do not, however,

provide the complete explanation for the actual extent of inflation in this or

in any other era. Even if every inflationary price trend that I have

investigate d, from the 12th to 20th centuries, has been preceded or

accompanied by some form of monetary expansion, in none was the degree of

inflation directly proportional to the observed rate of monetary expansion,

with the possible exception of the post World War I hyperinflations.

Consider this proposition in terms of the oft-maligned, conceptually limited,

but still heuristically useful monetary equation MV = Py [in which real y = Y/P

= C + I + G+ (X-M)]; or, better, in terms of the Cambridge “real cash

balances” approach: M = kPy [in which k = the proportion of real NNI (Py) that

the public chooses to hold in real cash balances, reflecting the constituent

elements of Keynesian liquidity preference]. Some Keynesian economists would

contend that an increase in M, or in the rate of growth of money stocks, would

be accompanied by some

offsetting rise in y (i.e. real NNI), whether exogenously created or

endogenously induced by related forces of monetary expansion, and also by some

decline in the income velocity of money, with a reduced need to economize on

the use of money. Since mathematically V = 1/k, they would similarly posit

that an expansion in M,

or its rate of growth, would have led, ceteris paribus — without any change in

liquidity preference, to a fall

in (nominal) interest rates, and thus, by the consequent reduction in the

opportunity costs of holding cash balances, to the necessarily corresponding

rise in k (i.e., an increase in the demand for real cash balances; see Keynes

1936, pp. 306-07). Sometimes, but only very rarely, have changes in these two

latter variables y and V (1/k) fully offset an increase in M; and thus such

increases in money stocks have also resulted, in most historical instances, in

some non-proportional degree of inflation: a rising P, as measured by some

suitable price index, such as the Phelps Brown and Hopkins

basket-of-consumables. [Other economists,

it must be noted, would contend that, in any event, the traditional Keynesian

model is really not applicable to such long-term

phenomena as Fischer’s price-revolutions.

Keynes himself, in considering “how changes in the quantity of money affect

prices… in the long run,” said, in the General Theory (1936, p. 306):

“This is a question for historical generalisation rather than for

pure theory.”]

For the 16th-century Price Revolution, therefore, the interesting question now

becomes: not why did it occur so early (i.e., before significant influxes of

Spanish American bullion); but rather why so late — so many decades after the

onset of the Central European silver-copper mining boom?

Since that boom had commenced in the 1460s, precisely when late-medieval

Europe’s population was at its nadir, perhaps 50% below the 1300 peak, and just

after the Hundred Years’ War had ended, and just

after the complex network of overland continental trade routes between Italy

and NW Europe had been successfully restored, one might contend that in such an

economy with so much “slack” in under-utilized resources, especially land, and

with elastic supplies for so many commodities, both the monetary expansion and

economic recovery of the later 15th century , preceding any dramatic

demographic recovery, permitted an increase in y proportional to the growth of

M, without the onset of diminishing returns an d without significant inflation,

before the 1520s By that decade, however, the monetary expansion had become

all the more powerful: with the peak of the Central European silver-mining

boom and with the rapid increase in the use of negotiable, transferable

credit instruments; and, furthermore, with the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk

Sultanate (1517), which evidently diverted some considerable amounts of

Venetian silver exports from the Levant to the Antwerp market.

The role of the income-velocity of money

is far more problematic. According to Keynesian expectations, velocity should

have fallen with such increases in money stocks. Yet three eminent economic

historians — Harry Miskimin

(1975), Jack Goldstone (1984), and Peter Lindert (1985) — have sought

to explain England’s16th-century Price Revolution by a very contrary thesis:

of increased money flows (or reductions in k) that were induced by demographic

and structural economic changes, involving interalia(according to their

various models) disproportionate changes in urbanization, greater

commercialization of the rural sectors, far more complex commercial and

financial networks, changes in dependency ratios, etc. The specific

circumstances so portrayed, however, apart from the demographic, are largely

peculiar to 16th- century England and thus do not so convincingly explain the

very similar patterns of inflation in the 16th-century Low Countries, which had

undergone most of these structural economic changes far earlier. Certainly

these velocity model s cannot logically be applied to Fischer’s three other

inflationary long-waves. Indeed, in an article implicitly validating Keynesian

views, Nicholas Mayhew (1995) has contended that the income-velocity of money

has always fallen with an expansion in money stocks, from the medieval to

modern eras, with this one anomalous exception of the 16th-century Price

Revolution. Perhaps, for this one era,

we have misspecified V (or k) by misspecifiying M: i.e., by not properly

including increased issues of negotiable credit; or perhaps institutional

changes in credit (as Goldstone and Miskimin both suggest) did have as dramatic

an effect on V as on M. Furthermore, an equally radical change in the coined

money supply (certainly in England), from one that had been principally gold

to one which, precisely from the 1520s, became largely and then almost entirely

silver, may provide the solution to the velocity paradox: in that the

transactions velocity attached to small value silver coins, of 1d., is

obviously far higher

velocity than that for gold coins valued at 80d and 120d. Except for a brief

reference to Mayhew’s article in the lengthy bibliography, Fischer virtually

ignores such velocity issues

(and thus changes in the demand for real cash balances) throughout his

eight-century survey of secular price trends.

Finally, Fischer’s thesis that population growth was responsible for this the

most famous Price Revolution (and all other inflationary long waves) is hardly

credible, especially if he insists on dating its inception the 1470s. For most

economic historians (Vander Wee 1963; Blanchard 1970;

Hatcher 1977, 1986; Campbell 1981; Harvey 1993) contend that, in NW Europe,

late-medieval demographic decline continued into the early 16th-century;

and that England’s population in 1520 was no more than 2.25 million,

compared to estimates ranging from a minimum of 4.0 to a maximum of 6.0 or even

7.0 million around 1300, the upper bounds being favored by most historians. How

— even if the demographic model were to be theoretically acceptable — could

a modest population growth from such a very low level in the 1520s, reaching

perhaps 2.83 million in 1541, and peaking at 5.39 million in 1656, have been

the fundamental cause of persistent, European wide-inflation, already underway

in the 1520s?

According to Fischer, the ensuing, intervening price-equilibrium

(c.1650-c.1730) involved no discernible monetary contraction, and similarly,

his next inflationary long-wave (c.1730-1815) began well before any monetary

expansion became — in his view — manifestly evident. The monetary and price

data, suggest otherwise, however, incomplete though they may be. Thus, the data

complied by Bakewell, Cross, TePaske, and many others on silver mining at

Potosi (Peru) and Zacatecas (Mexico) indicate that their combined outputs fell

from a mean of 178,692 kg in 1636-40 to one of 101,534 kg in 1661-5, rising to

a mean of 156,497 kg in 1681-5

[partially corresponding to guesstimates of European bullion imports, which

Morineau (1985) extracted fr om Dutch gazettes]; but then sharply falling once

more, and even further, to a more meager mean of 95,842 kg in 1696-1700. During

this same era, the Viceroyalty of Peru’s domestically-

retained share of silver-based public revenues rose from 54% to 96%

(T ePaske 1981); the combined silver exports of the Dutch and English East

India Companies to Asia (Chaudhuri 1968; Gaastra 1983) increased from a

decennial mean of 17,293 kg in 1660-69 to 73,687 kg in 1700-09, while English

mint outputs in terms of fine sil ver (Challis 1992) fell from a mean of 19,400

kg in 1660-64 (but 23,781 kg in 1675-79) to one of just 430.4 kg in 1690-94,

i.e., preceding the Great Recoinage of 1696-98. From the early 18th century,

however, European silver exports to Asia were well more

than offset by a dramatic rise in Spanish-American, and especially Mexican

silver production: for the latter (with evidence from new or previously

unrecorded mines: assembled by Bakewell 1975, 1984; Garner 1980,

1987; Coatsworth 1986, and others), aggregate production more than doubled

from a mean of 129,878 kg in 1700-04 to one of 305,861 kg in 1745-49.

Possibly even more important, especially with England’s currency shift from a

silver to a gold standard, was a veritable explosion in aggregate

Latin-American gold production: from a decennial mean of just 863.90 kg in

1691-1700

zooming to 16,917.4 kg in 1741-50 (TePaske 1998). Within Europe itself, as

Blanchard (1989) has demonstrated, Russian silver mining outputs, ultimately

responsible for perhaps 7%

of Europe’s total stocks,

rose from virtually nothing in the late 1720s to peak at 33,000 kg per annum in

the late 1770s, falling to 18,000 kg in the early 1790s then rising to 21,000

kg per year in the later 1790s.

Finally, even though changes in annual mint outputs are not valid indicators

of changes in coined money supplies, let alone of changes in M1,

the fifty-year means of aggregate values of English mint outputs (silver and

gold: Challis 1992) do provide interesting signals of longer-term monetary

changes: a fall from an annual mean of 348,829 pounds in 1596-1645 to one of

275,403 pounds in 1646-95, followed by a rise, with more than a full recovery,

to an annual mean of 369,644 pounds in 1700-49 (thus excluding the Great

Recoinage of 1696-98). Meanwhile, if the earlier Price Revolution had indeed

peaked in 1645-49, with the quinquennial mean PB&H index at 680, falling to a

nadir of 579 in 1690-94, the fluctuations in the first half of the 18th-century

do not demonstrate any clear inflationary trend, with the mean PB&H index

(briefly peaking at 635 in 1725-9) stalled at virtually the same former level,

581, in 1745-49. Thereafter, of course,

for the second half of the 18th century, the trend is very strongly and

incessantly upward, with almost a

doubling in PB&H index, to 1093 in 1795-9.

Whatever one may wish to deduce from all these diverse data sets, we are

certainly not permitted to conclude, as does Fischer, that inflation preceded

monetary expansion, and did so consistently. Such a view becomes all the more

untenable when the radical changes in English and banking and credit

institutions, following the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694-97,

are taken into account: the consequent introduction and rapid expansion in

legal-tender paper bank note issues (with prior informal issues by London’s

Goldsmith banks), and more especially fully negotiable,

transferable, and discountable Exchequer bills, government annuities,

inland bills and promissory notes, whose veritable explosion in circulation

from the 1760s, with the proliferation of English country-banks, hardly

requires any further elaboration, even if these issues are given short shrift

in Fischer’s book. In view of such complex changes in Britain’s financial and

monetary structures,

subsequent data on coinage outputs have even more limited utility in

estimating money stocks. But we may note that aggregate mined outputs of

Mexican silver more than doubled, from a quinquennial mean of 305,861 kg in

1745-49 to 619,495 kg in 1795-99, while those of Peru more than tripled, from

34,318 kg in 1735-39 (no data for the 1740s) to 126,354 kg in 1795-99 (Garner

1980, 1987; Bakewell 1975, 1984; J.

Fisher, 1975).

Having earlier considered the so-called and misconstrued

“price-equilibrium” of 182 0-1896, let us now finally examine the inception of

the fourth and final long-wave commencing in 1896. Fischer again contends that

population growth was the “prime mover,” despite the fact that Britain’s own

intrinsic growth rate had been falling from its

1821 peak [from 1.75 to 1.31 in 1865, the last year given in Wrigley-Davies-

Oppen-Schofield (1997)]. For evidence he cites an assertion in Colin McEvedy

and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (1978) to the effect that

world population, having increased by 35% from 1850 to 1900,

increased a further 53% by 1950. Are we therefore to believe that such growth

was itself responsible for a 45.2% rise in, for this era, the better structured

Rousseaux price-index [base 100 = (1865cp +1885cp)/2]: from 73 in 1896 to 106

[while the PB&H index rose from 947 in 1896 to 1021 in 1913]?

As for the role of monetary factors in the commencement of this fourth long

wave, Fischer observes (p. 184) that “the rate of growth in gold production

throughout the world was roughly the same before and after 1896.” This

undocumented assertion, about an international economy whose commerce and

finance was now based upon the gold standard, is not quite accurate.

According to assiduously calculated estimates in Eichengreen

and McLean

(1994), decennial mean world gold outputs, having fallen from 185,900 kg in

1850-9 to 135,000 kg in 1880-9 (largely accompanying the aforementioned 44%

fall in the Rousseaux composite index from 128 in 1872 to 72 in 1895),

thereafter soared to

a mean of 255,600 kg in 1890-9 — their graph of annualized data shows that

the bulk of this increased output occurred after 1896 — virtually doubling to

an annual mean of 513,900 kg in 1900-14.

World War I, of course, effectively ended the international gold-standard era,

since the Gold- Exchange Standard of 1925-6 was rather different from the older

system; and the post-war era ushered in a radically new monetary world of fiat

paper currencies, whose initial horrendous manifestation came in the hyper

inflations of Weimar Germany, Russia, and most Central European countries, in

the early 1920s. For this post-war economy, Fischer does admit that monetary

factors often had some considerable importance in influencing price trends; but

his analyses, even of the post-war radical, paper-fuelled hyperinflations, are

not likely to satisfy most economists, either for the inter-war or Post World

War II eras, up to the present day.

This review, long as it is, cannot possibly do full justice to an eight-century

study of this scope and magnitude. So far I have neglected to consider his

often fascinating analyses of the social consequences of inflation over these

many centuries, except for brief allusions in the introduction, where I

indicated his deeply hostile views to persistent inflation for its inevitably

insidious consequences: the impoverishment of the masses, growing malnutrition,

the spread of killer-diseases, increased crime and violence in general, and a

breakdown of the social order, etc.

While some of

the evidence for the latter seems plausible, I do have some concluding quarrels

with his use of real wage indices. Much of our available nominal money-wage

evidence comes from institutional sources on daily wages, which, by their very

nature, tend to be fixed over long periods of time [as Adam Smith noted in the

Wealth of Nations (Cannan ed.

1937, p. 74), “sometimes for half a century together”). Therefore, for such

wage series, real wages rose and fell with the consumer price index, as

measured by, for example, our Phelps Brown and Hopkins basket-of-consumables

index. Its chief problem (as opposed to the better constructed Vander Wee

index for Brabant) is that its components, for long periods, constitute fixed

percentages of the total composite index,

irrespective of changes in relative prices for, say, grains; and they thus do

not reflect the consumers’ ability to make cost-saving substitutions.

Secondly, they are necessarily based on daily wage rates, without any

indication of total annual money incomes; thirdly, the great majority of

money-wage earners in pre-modern Europe earned not day rates but piece-work

wages, for which evidence is extremely scant.

But more important, before the 18th century (or even later), a majority of the

European population did not live by money wages; and most wage-earners had

supplementary forms of income, especially agricultural, that helped insulate

them to some degree from sharp rises in food prices. If rising food prices hurt

many wage-earners, they also benefited ma ny peasants,

especially those with customary tenures and fixed rentals who could thereby

capture some of the economic rent accruing on their lands with such price

increases. It may be simplistic to note that there are always gainers and

losers with both inflation and deflation — but even more simplistic to focus

only on the latter in times of inflation, and especially simplistic to focus on

a real wage index based on the PB&H index. And if deflation is so beneficial

for the masses, why, during the deflationary period in later 17th and early

18th century England, do we find, along with a rise in this real-wage index, a

rise in the death rate from 23.68/1000 in 1626 to 32.14/1000 in 1681,

thereafter falling slightly but rising again to an ultimate peak of

37.00/1000 in 1725 (admittedly an era of anomalous disease-related

mortalities), when the PB&H real-wage index stood at 60 —

some 24% higher than the RWI of 36 for 1626? One of the many imponderables yet

to be considered, though one might ponder that sometimes high real wages

reflect labor shortages from dire conditions, rather than general prosperity

and more equitable wealth and income distributions, as Fischer suggests.

Finally, Fischer’s argument that inflationary price-revolutions were always

especially harmful to the lower classes by leading to rising interest rates is

sometimes but not universally true, even if rational creditors should have

raised rates to protect themselves from inflation. Thus, for the Antwerp money

market in the 16th century,

the meticulous evidence compiled by Vander Wee (1964, 1977) shows that

nominal interest rates fell over this entire period [from 20% in 1515 to 9% in

1549 to 5% in 1561; and on the riskier short term loans to the Habsburg

government, from a mean of 19.5

% in 1506-10 to one of 12.3% in 1541-45 to 9.63% in 1561-55]. In the next

price-revolution, during the later 18th century, nominal interest rates did

rise during periods of costly warfare, i.e., with an increasing risk premium;

but real interest rates actually fell because of the increasing tempo of

inflation (Turner 1984), more so than did real wages for most industrial

workers.

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denrees, et tous les prix

en general, depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en l’an 1800,

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Peter Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas,

1546-1700 (Cambridge, 1972).

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– 1735,” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft

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(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 105-51.

Peter Bakewell, ed., Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas, Variorum Series:

An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450 –

1800 (London, 1997):

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Russia’s ‘Age of Silver’: Precious-Metal Production and Economic Growth in the

Eighteenth Century (Routledge: London and New York,

1989).

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Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 23 (19 70), 427-45.

Ian Blanchard, “Lothian and Beyond: The Economy of the ‘English Empire’ of

David I,” in Richard Britnell and John Hatcher, eds., Progress and Problems in

Medieval England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,

1996), pp. 23-45.

Michael Bordo, “Explorations in Monetary History: A Survey of the

Literature,” Explorations in Economic History, 23 (1986), 339-415.

Bruce Campbell, “The Population of Early Tudor England: A Re-evaluation of the

1522 Muster Returns and the 1524 and 1 525 Lay Subsidies,” Journal of

Historical Geography, 7 (1981), 145-54.

Christopher Challis, “Lord Hastings to the Great Silver Recoinage, 1464 –

1699,” in Christopher E. Challis, ed., A New History of the Royal Mint

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

, 1992), pp. 179-397; C.E. Challis,

“Appendix 1. Mint Output, 1220-1985,” pp. 673-698.

John Coatsworth, “The Mexican Mining Industry in the Eighteenth Century,”

in Nils Jacobsen and Hans- Jurgen Puhle, eds., The Economies of Mexico and Peru

during the La te Colonial Period, 1760 – 1810 (Berlin 1986), pp. 26-45.

Harry Cross, “South American Bullion Production and Export, 1550-1750,” in John

Richards, ed., Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

(Durham, 1983), Appendix II, p. 422.

T revor Dick and John Floyd, Canada and the Gold Standard: Balance of Payments

Adjustment under Fixed Exchange Rates, 1871 – 1913 (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Barry Eichengreen and Ian W. McLean, “The Supply of Gold Under the

pre-1914 Gold Standard,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 47:2 (May

1994),

288-309.

John Fisher, “Silver Production in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1776-1824,”

Hispanic American Historical Review, 55:1 (1975), 25-43.

Douglas Fisher, “The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation,” Journal of

Economic History, 49 (December 1989), 883 – 902.

John Floyd, World Monetary Equilibrium: International Monetary Theory in an

Historical-Institutional Context (Philadelphia, 1985).

Dennis Flynn, “A New Perspective on the Spanish Price Revolution: The Monetary

Approach to the Balance of Payments,” Explorations in Economic History, 15

(1978), 388-406.

Jacob Frenkel and Harry G. Johnson, eds., The Monetary Approach to the Balance

of Payments (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976),

especially Jacob Frenkel and Harry Johnson, “The Monetary Approach to the

Balance of Payments: Essential Concepts and Historical Origins,” pp. 21-45;

Harry Johnson, “The Monetary Approach to Balance-of-Payments Theory,” pp.

147-

67; Donald N. McCloskey and J. Richard Zecher, “How the Gold Standard Worked,

1880-1913,” pp. 357-85.

FS. Gaastra, “The Exports of Precious Metal from Europe to Asia by the Dutch

East India Company, 1602-1795 A.D.,” in John F. Richards, ed.,

Precious Metals in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds(Durham, N.C.,

1983), pp. 447-76.

Richard Garner, “Long-term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A

Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review, 67:3

(1987), 405-30.

Richard Garner,

“Silver Production and Entrepreneurial Structure in 18th-Century Mexico,”

Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft

Lateinamerikas,17 (1980), 157-85.

Jack Goldstone, “Urbanization and Inflation: Lessons from the English Price

Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” American Journal of

Sociology, 89 (1984), 1122 – 60.

Earl Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain,

1501-1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934; reissued 1965).

Earl Hamilton, Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre,

1351 – 1500 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1936).

Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100 – 1540 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1993).

John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348-1530

(Studies in Economic History series, London, 1977).

John Hatcher, “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century: Some New Evidence,”

Economic History Review, 39 (Feb. 1986), 19-38.

David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The

Social History of an Italian Town, 1200-1430 (New Haven and London, 1966).

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

(London, 1936).

Peter Lindert, “English Population, Wages, and Prices: 1541 – 1913,” The

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15 (Spring 1985), 609 – 34.

Nicholas Mayhew, “Population, Money Supply, and the Velocity of Circulation in

England, 1300 – 1700,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser.,

48:2 (May 1995), 238-57.

Harry Miskimin, “Population Growth and

the Price Revolution in England,”

Journal of European Economic History, 4 (1975), 179-85. Reprinted in his Cash,

Credit and Crisis in Europe, 1300 – 1600 (London: Variorum Reprints,

1989), no. xiv.

B.R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, eds. Abstract of British Historical

Statistics (Cambridge, 1962)

John Munro, “Mint Outputs, Money, and Prices in late-Medieval England and the

Low Countries,” in Eddy Van Cauwenberghe and Franz Irsigler, ed.,

Munzpragung, Geldumlauf und Wechselkurse / Minting, Monetary Circulation and

Exchange Rates, (Trierer Historische Forschungen, Vol. VIII, Trier,

1984), pp. 31-122.

John Munro, “Bullion Flows and Monetary Contraction in Late-Medieval England

and the Low Countries,” in John F. Richards, ed., Precious Metals in the

Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, N.C., 1983), pp. 97-158.

John Munro, “The Central European Mining Boom, Mint Outputs, and Prices in the

Low Countries and England, 1450 – 1550,” in Eddy H.G. Van Cauwenberghe,

ed., Money, Coins, and Commerce: Essays in

the Monetary History of Asia and Europe (From Antiquity to Modern Times)

(Leuven: Leuven University Press,

1991), pp. 119-83.

John Nef, “Silver Production in Central Europe, 1450-1618,” Journal of

Political Economy, 49 (1941), 575-91.

John Nef, “Mining

and Metallurgy,” in M.M. Postan, ed., Cambridge Economic History, Vol. II:

Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1952),

pp. 456-93. Reprinted without changes, in the 2nd revised edn. of The Cambridge

Economic History of Europe, Vol. II, edited by M.M. Postan and Edward Miller

(Cambridge, 1987), pp. 691-761.

E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of en Centuries of

the Prices of Consumables Compared with B Building Wages,” Economica, 22

(August 1955), and “Sevuilders” Wage-

Rates,” Economica, 23 (Nov. 1956),

reprinted E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and

Prices (London, 1981), containing additional statistical appendices not

provided in the original publication.

Frank Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France,

1493-1725 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972)

John TePaske, “New World Silver, Castile, and the Philippines, 1590-1800 A.D.,”

in John F. Richards, ed., Precious Metals in the Medieval and Early Modern

Worlds (Durham, N.C.

, 1983), pp. 424-446.

John TePaske, “New World Gold Production in Hemispheric and Global Perspective,

1492 – 1810,” in Clara Nunez, ed., Monetary History in Global Perspective, 1500

– 1808, Papers presented to Session B-6 of the Twelfth International Eco nomic

History Congress (Seville, 1998), pp. 21-32.

Michael Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750 – 1830, Studies in Economic History

Series (London, 1984).

Herman Vander Wee, Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy,

14th to 16th Centuries,

3 Vols. (The Hague, 1963). Vol. I: Statistics; Vol.

II: Interpretation, 374-427; and Vol. III: Graphs.

Herman Vander Wee, “Monetary, Credit, and Banking Systems,” in E.E. Rich and

Charles Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. V:

T he Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe(Cambridge, 1977), chapter V,

pp. 290-393.

Herman Vander Wee, “Prijzen en lonen als ontwikkelingsvariabelen: Een

vergelijkend onderzoek tussen Engeland en de Zuidelijke Nederlanden,

1400-1700,” in Album aan geboden aan Charles Verlinden ter gelegenheid van zijn

dertig jaar professoraat (Gent, 1975), pp. 413-47; reissued in English

translation (without the tables) as “Prices and Wages as Development Variables:

A Comparison Between England and the Southern Net herlands,

1400-1700,” Acta Historiae Neerlandicae, 10 (1978), 58-78.

Ivor Wilks, “Wangara, Akan, and the Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth

Centuries,” in Ivor Wilks, ed., Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the

Kingdom of Asante (Athens, Ohio

, 1993), pp. 1-39.

E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and R.S. Schofield, English Population

History from Family Reconstitution, 1580- 1837 (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Published by EH.NET (November 1998)

Daniel Jacoby, Laboring for Freedom: A New Look at the History of Labor in

America. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. 224 pp.

$61.95 (hardcover); $22.95 (paperback), ISBN: 0765602512 (hardcover);

0765602520 (paperback).

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics,

University of

Massachusetts at Amherst.

Not so long ago, Labor History was a simple field chronicling the growth of

labor unions and labor-oriented political parties on the assumption that the

organized working class was to be the cutting

edge of social change. Upholding the banner of the organized working class,

labor historians from John R. Commons through Philip Foner and David Montgomery

shaped our conception of American industrial history from the 1920s through the

1980s.

In recent

years this simple vision of labor history has collapsed along with its Marxist

social theory. Critical of white,

male-dominated unions advancing a narrow, anti-Communist, and sometimes

politically conservative agenda, radicals rejected the old institutional

history. They sought to substitute a new labor history celebrating the

rank-and-file and focused on the radical opponents of the established union

leadership. Some rejected unions altogether to chronicle the history of groups

traditionally outside the unions, including household workers and racial

minorities. Speaking a new language of culture, gender, and race, some have

replaced the labor union with the community and transposed the locus of

struggle from the state and the workplace

to the social

group and the family.

Instead of strikes and elections, social struggles have become more abstract

and universal, contests over the definitions of words and the social

constructions of our realities.

From a different perspective, many neoclassical economists have joined

historians and anthropologists in rejecting the old labor history’s focus on

working-class institutions. Past labor historians,

they charge, have underestimated the ability of individual workers to better

their circumstances by using competitive markets. They have shown how free

workers have improved their circumstances, forcing up wages at undesirable jobs

by leaving them for alternative employment. Unions and cultural constructs,

they argue, are epiphenomena. The underlying reality

is the economic circumstances of society shaped by relative factor supplies

and technological change.

No longer is there a shared consensus about what labor history is or how to

place new works in a clear, ongoing chronicle.

Into this confusion comes Daniel Jacoby with a new vision of labor history as

the history of freedom. An economic historian at the University of Washington

at Bothell, Jacoby has written on public education and labor relations in the

Progressive Era. Here, he interprets American labor history as a struggle by

individual workers to gain ‘freedom,’ to win more power and more opportunity to

act without constraint. Jacoby interprets the struggle historically. It

changes over time because technology, social constructions, and institutions

shape the possible scope for opportunity and freedom in each period.

Behind this historical circumstance lies a still-greater contradiction, that

between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom,

between ‘freedom from’ constraint and ‘freedom to’ act. Jacoby makes this

traditional dichotomy a useful tool by showing how in the United States the

distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’

freedom has been manifested as a struggle over “independence or contract.” The

American Revolution, Jacoby argues, made

“republican independence” the nation’s creed, linking freedom to the ownership

of productive property. In 1776 this left little for blacks or women, largely

excluded from property ownership. But the American Revolution provided the

language with which Americans pragmatically dismantled “remaining bastions of

traditional authority” (page 33) including slavery and gender inequality.

Republicanism, Jacoby shows, was an expansive doctrine; its logic demanded that

America push freedom forward to encompass others,

to free the slave and to make blacks and women the legal equals of white men.

But at the same time that American society was conducting this republican

struggle for freedom from caste privilege,

it experienced growing division between capitalists and a growing class of

proletarian wage earners. For women and for ex-slaves,

extending the right to sell their wage labor power and to make contracts in the

wage-labor market was an extraordinary burst of freedom. (This was true as

well, although Jacoby says little about them, for the former European and

Asian serfs and small peasants who came to America and comprised much of our

wage labor force.) But the situation was very different for white male

laborers who became proletarian wage laborers instead of independent

producers. For them, the right to contract marked a loss of control over their

work, a loss of freedom, compared to some earlier, or anticipated, status as

free producers, managing their work independently. As proletarians, they

discovered, as Jacoby notes,

that in the traditional creed of republican independence “only property, not

merely the freedom to contract it, yielded an adequate basis for real

independence” (page 55). No longer able to achieve autonomy on their own,

these workers were forced to look towards social institutions and collective

action to gain freedom.

Having established the parameters of the controversy over freedom and contract,

Jacoby proceeds to interpret American history as the struggle between

‘freedom-from-constraints-on-labor-

contracts’ and ‘freedom-as-opportunity-to-regulate-work-

collectively.’ In the late-nineteenth century, Supreme Court Justice Stephen

J. Field extended the Fourteenth Amendment prohibition of legislation denying

individuals of any fundamental rights to an absolute protection of the right

of individuals and corporations to make contracts. Under the legal doctrine of

“Substantive Due Process,” courts between the 1880s and 1930s disallowed a

broad range of collective legislation and worker action regulating wages,

hours of work, and the conditions of employment. Substantive due process

protected individuals’ freedom from social and political constraints, by

assuring them their opportunity to make contracts.

But it ignored the basic inequality in opportunity between wealthy employers

and their workers. Jacoby shows how Progressive-era reformers sought to

reconcile contractual equality with capitalist property relations by extending

public education. Education was to assure equality of opportunity, to be “the

last countervailing force”

to economic tendencies undermining “labor freedom in the United States” (page

99). But an effective balance to powerful employers came only in the 1930s

when state support for labor unions allowed effective collective bargaining and

New-Deal era legislation and court decisions restricted the right to contact.

Expanding positive freedom came at the expense of negative freedom from

constraint.

The old labor history often ended with the New Deal,

vie wing it as the final achievement of the American labor movement.

Jacoby goes further. Although gender disappears from America’s struggle for

freedom in his later chapters, he carries his discussion of freedom into the

1990s, writing about Civil Rights and union struggles in the post-World War II

era. In the concluding chapters, Jacoby warns against the impact of free

markets on worker standards in the era of the “global piano.” He fears a

“race to the bottom” driving working

conditions and wages in advanced economies down to the level of the poorest.

Jacoby notes how Germany, Japan, and some other advanced countries have avoided

this threat from globalization through regulatory policy and advanced education

and suggests that the United States might learn from their experience. Thus

his work ends on a salutary note, recognizing past progress and warning

against future threats.

Laboring for Freedom provides a survey of American history that might be

useful for students in courses in economic history and history generally as

well in courses in labor history as such. The book provides little new

research. Instead, its merit is in the reinterpretation of older material,

placing an existing literature into a provocative new framework. Jacoby’s book

is deceptively thin. It has fewer than 170 pages of text but Jacoby packs into

this limited text a new synthesis of American history built around labor. This

is a significant achievement in a work that should be read widely by historians

and all social

scientists.

Gerald Friedman Department of Economics University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Gerald Friedman is the author of State-Making and Labor Movements:

France and the United States, 1876-1914 (Cornell University Press,

1998) as well as numerous

articles on the history of organized labor in the United States and Europe.

EH.NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by EH.NET (April 1998)

David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So Rich and Others So Poor. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. 544 pp. $30.00 (cloth) ISBN: 0393040178.

Reviewed for EH.NET by J. Bradford De Long, Department of Economics, University of California-Berkeley.

David Landes has studied the history of economic development for more than half a century. His look at economic imperialism and informal empire in nineteenth-century Egypt (Bankers and Pashas) tells the story of how small were the benefits (either for Egyptian economic development or for the long-run power and happiness of the ruling dynasty) bought at extremely high cost by borrowing from European bankers. His unsurpassed survey of technological change and its consequences in Europe since 1750 (The Unbound Prometheus) remains the most important must-read book for serious students of the industrial revolution. His study of clock-making as an instance of technological development (Revolution in Time) provides a detailed look at a small piece of the current of technological development. His works are critical points-of-reference for those who seek to understand the Industrial Revolution that has made our modern world.

Now David Landes turns to the grandest question of all: the causes of the (so far) divergent destinies and relative prosperity levels of different national economies. The title echoes Adam Smith, but Landes is interested in both the wealth and poverty of nations: Adam Smith lays out what went wrong as the background for his picture of how things can go right, while Landes is as interested in the roots of relative–and absolute–economic failure as of success.

He pulls no punches–of Columbus’s followers treatment of the inhabitants of the Caribbean, Landes writes that “nothing like this would be seen again until the Nazi Jew hunts and killer drives of World War II.” Landes makes no compromises with any current fashion. Readers will remember how columnist after columnist decried high-school history standards (which, truth be told, were not very good) that required students to learn about a fourteenth-century African prince, Mansa Musa, but not about Robert E. Lee; readers of Landes will find three pages on Mansa Musa, and none on Master Robert.

We are all multiculturalists now; or, rather, serious historians have long been multiculturalists.

Nevertheless, Landes’s economic history is a profoundly Eurocentric history. It is Europe-centered without apologies–rather with scorn for those who blind themselves to the fact that the history of the past 500 years is Europe-centered.

Now Landes does not think that all history should be Eurocentric. For example, he argues that a history of the world from 500 to 1500 should be primarily Islamocentric: the rise and spread of Islam was an “explosion of passion and commitment… the most important feature of Eurasian history in what we may call the middle centuries.”

But a history oriented toward understanding the wealth and poverty of nations today must be Eurocentric. Goings-on in Europe and goings-on as people in other parts of the world tried to figure out how to deal with suddenly-expansionist Europeans make up the heart of the story of how some–largely western Europe and northwest Europe’s settler ex-colonies–have grown very, very rich.

Moreover, relative poverty in the world today is the result of failure on the part of political, religious, and mercantile elites elsewhere to pass the test (rigged very heavily against them) of maintaining or regaining independence from and assimilating the technologies demonstrated by the people from Europe–merchants, priests, and thugs with guns in the old days, and multinationals, international agencies, and people armed with cruise missiles in these new days–who have regularly appeared offshore in boats, often with non-friendly intent. To try to tell the story of attempted assimilation and attempted rejection without placing Europe at the pivot is to tell it as it really did *not* happen.

Thus Landes wages intellectual thermonuclear war on all who deny his central premise: that the history of the wealth and poverty of nations over the past millennium is the history of the creation in Europe and diffusion of our technologies of industrial production and sociological organization, and of the attempts of people elsewhere in the world to play hands largely dealt to them by the technological and geographical expansions originating in Europe.

He wins his intellectual battles–and not just because as author he can set up straw figures as his opponents. He wins because in the large (and usually in the small) he has stronger arguments than his intellectual adversaries, who believe that Chinese technology was equal to British until 1800, that had the British not appeared the royal workshops of Mughal India would have turned into the nucleus of an industrialized textile industry, that equatorial climates are as well-suited as mid-latitude climates to the kind of agriculture that can support an Industrial Revolution, that Britain’s industrial lead over France was a mere matter of chance and contingency, or any of a host of other things with which Landes does not agree.

Landes’s analysis stresses a host of factors–some geographical but most cultural, having to do with the fine workings of production, power, and prestige in the pre-industrial past–that gave Eurasian civilizations an edge in the speed of technological advance over non-Eurasian ones, that gave European civilizations an edge over Chinese, Arabic, Indian, or Indonesian, that made it very likely that within Europe the breakthrough to industrialization would take place first in Britain.

And by and large it is these same factors that have made it so damn difficult since the Industrial Revolution for people elsewhere to acquire the modern machine technologies and modes of social and economic organization found in the world economy’s industrial core.

Landes’s account of why Eurasian civilizations like Europe, Islam, and China had an edge in technological development over non-Eurasian (and southern Eurasian) civilizations rests heavily on climate: that it is impossible for human beings to live in any numbers in “temperate” climates before the invention of fire, housing, tanning, and sewing (and in the case of northern Europe iron tools to cut down trees), but that once the technological capability to live where it snows has been gained, the “temperate” climates allowed a higher material standard of living.

I am not sure about this part of his argument. It always seemed to me that what a pre-industrial society’s standard of living was depended much more on at what level of material want culture had set its Malthusian thermostat at which the population no longer grew. I have always been impressed by accounts of high population densities in at least some “tropical” civilizations: if they were so poor because the climate made hard work so difficult, why the (relatively) dense populations?

It seems to me that the argument that industrial civilization was inherently unlikely to arise in the tropics hinges on an–implicit–argument that some features of tropical climates kept the Malthusian thermostat set at a low standard of living, and that this low median standard of living retarded development. But it is not clear to me how this is supposed to have worked.

By contrast, I find Landes’s account of why Europe–rather than India, Islam, or China–to be very well laid out, and very convincing. But I find it incomplete. I agree that it looks as if Chinese civilization had a clear half-millennium as the world’s leader in technological innovation from 500 to 1000. Thereafter innovation in China appears to flag. Little seems to be done in developing further the high technologies like textiles, communication, precision metalworking (clockmaking) that provided the technological base on which the Industrial Revolution rested.

It is far from clear to me why this was so. Appeals to an inward turn supported by confident cultural arrogance under the Ming and Ch’ing that led to stagnation leave me puzzled. Between 1400 and 1800 we think that the population of China grew from 80 million to 300 million. That doesn’t suggest an economy of malnourished peasants at the edge of biological subsistence. That doesn’t suggest a civilization in which nothing new can be attempted. It suggests a civilization in which colonization of internal frontiers and improvements in agricultural technology are avidly pursued, and in which living standards are a considerable margin above socio-cultural subsistence to support the strong growth in populations.

Yet somehow China’s technological lead–impressive in printing in the thirteenth century, impressive in shipbuilding in the fifteenth century, impressive in porcelain-making in the seventeenth century–turned into a significant technological deficit in those same centuries that China’s pre-industrial population quadrupled.

Landes’s handling of the story of England’s apprenticeship and England’s mastership–of why the Industrial Revolution took place in the northwest-most corner of Europe–is perhaps the best part of the book. He managed to weave all the varied strands from the Protestant Ethic to Magna Carta to the European love of mechanical mechanism for its own sake together in a way that many attempt, but few accomplish. Had I been Landes I would have placed more stress on politics: the peculiar tax system of Imperial Spain, the deleterious effect of rule by Habsburgs and Habsburg puppets on northern Italy since 1500 (and the deleterious effect of rule by Normans, Hohenstaufens, Valois, Aragonese, and Habsburgs on southern Italy since 1000), the flight of the mercantile population of Antwerp north into the swamp called Amsterdam once they were subjected to the tender mercies of the Duke of Alva, more on expulsions of Moriscos, Jews, and French Protestants (certainly the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an extraordinary shock to my seventeenth-century DeLong ancestors), the extraordinary tax burden levied on the Dutch mercantile economy by the cumulated debt of having had to spend from 1568 to 1714 fighting to achieve and preserve independence, and so forth.

I also would spend more time on Britain itself. I, at least, find myself wondering whether Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a near-run thing–whether (as Adam Smith feared) the enormous burden of the Hanoverian fiscal-military state might not have nearly crushed the British economy like an egg. Part of the answer is given by John Brewer’s Sinews of Power, a work of genius that lays out the incredible (for the time) efficiency of Britain’s eighteenth-century fiscal-military state. Most of the answer is the Industrial Revolution. And some of the answer is (as Jeffrey Williamson has argued) that the burden of the first British Empire did indeed significantly slow–but not stop–industrialization.

I don’t know what I think of all the issues in the interaction of the first British Empire, the British state, and British industrialization. Thus I find myself somewhat frustrated when Landes quotes Stanley Engerman and Barbara Solow that “It would be hard to claim that [Britain’s Caribbean Empire was] either necessary or sufficient for an Industrial Revolution, and equally hard to deny that [it] affected its magnitude and timing,” and then says “That’s about it.” I want to know Landes’s judgment about how much. Everything affects everything else, and when economic historians have an advantage over others it is because they know how to count things–and thus how to use arithmetic to make judgments of relative importance.

But the complaint that a book that tries to do world history in 600 pages leaves stuff out is the complaint of a true grinch.

So where does Landes’s narrative take us?

If there is a single key to success–relative wealth–in Landes’s narrative, it is openness. First, openness is a willingness to borrow whatever is useful from abroad whatever the price in terms of injured elite pride or harm to influential interests. One thinks of Francis Bacon writing around 1600 of how three inventions–the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press–had totally transformed everything, and that all three of these came to Europe from China. Second, openness is a willingness to trust your own eyes and the results of your own experiments, rather than relying primarily on old books or the pronouncements of powerful and established authorities.

European cultures had enough, but perhaps only barely enough. Suppose Philip II Habsburg “the Prudent King” of Spain and “Bloody” Mary I Tudor of England had together produced an heir to rule Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, and England: would Isaac Newton then have been burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, and would the natural philosophers and mechanical innovators of seventeenth and eighteenth century England have found themselves under the scrutiny of the Inquisition? Neither Giordano Bruno, Jan Hus, nor Galileo Galilei found European culture in any sense “open.”

If there is a second key, it lies in politics: a government strong enough to keep its servants from confiscating whatever they please, limited enough for individuals to be confident that the state is unlikely to suddenly put all they have at hazard, and willing once in a while to sacrifice official splendor and martial glory in order to give merchants and manufacturers an easier time making money.

In short, economic success requires a government that is, as people used to say, an executive committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie–a government that is responsive to and concerned for the well-being of a business class, a class who have a strong and conscious interest in rapid economic growth. A government not beholden to those who have an interest in economic growth is likely to soon turn into nothing more than a redistribution-oriented protection racket, usually with a very short time horizon.

Landes writes his book as his contribution to the project of building utopia–of building a much richer and more equal world, without the extraordinary divergences between standards of living in Belgium and Bangladesh, Mozambique and Mexico, Jordan and Japan that we have today. Yet at its conclusion Landes becomes uncharacteristically diffident and unusually modest, claiming that: “the one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well…”

Such a change of tone sells the book short, for there are many additional lessons that emerge from Landes’s story of the wealth and poverty of nations. Here are five: (1) Try to make sure that your government is a government that enables innovation and production, rather than a government that maintains power by massive redistributions of wealth from its friends to its enemies. (2) Hang your priests from the nearest lamppost if they try to get in the way of assimilating industrial technologies or forms of social and political organization. (3) Recognize that the task of a less-productive economy is to imitate rather than innovate, for there will be ample time for innovation after catching-up to the production standards of the industrial core. (4) Recognize that things change and that we need to change with them, so that the mere fact that a set of practices has been successful or comfortable in the past is not an argument for its maintenance into the future. (5) There is no reason to think that what is in the interest of today’s elite–whether a political, religious, or economic elite–is in the public interest, or even in the interest of the elite’s grandchildren.

It is indeed very hard to think about problems of economic development and convergence without knowing the story that Landes tells of how we got where we are today. His book is short enough to be readable, long enough to be comprehensive, analytical enough to teach lessons, opinionated enough to stimulate thought–and to make everyone angry at least once.

I know of no better place to start thinking about the wealth and poverty of nations.

(This review is a longer draft of a review subsequently published (at 1/3 the length) by the Washington Post..)

J. Bradford De Long Department of Economics University of California- Berkeley

De Long is co-editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives; Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research; visiting scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; and former (1993-1995) deputy assistant secretary (for economic policy), U.S. Treasury.

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H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-Business (January 1998)

Arup Banerji. Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-30. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1997. xxiv + 237 pp. Tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $69.95 (Cloth), ISBN 0-312-16293-6.

Reviewed for H-Business by Alan Ball, Marquette University

Private Trade in Early Soviet Russia

I agreed eagerly to review Arup Banerji’s study of private entrepreneurs in early Soviet Russia, assuming that it would extend (or challenge) the findings of earlier works. Soviet/Russian archives have been open for a decade, now, and should be able to support a fresh exploration of private business during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. For example, such a book might offer brief biographies of individual private traders or devote itself primarily to private trade in non-Slavic republics. It might provide more extensive coverage of the “Roaring Twenties” atmosphere in principal Soviet cities–especially the nightclubs, bars, casinos, restaurants and so forth frequented by (among other people) newly-wealthy entrepreneurs, as in Russia today. A separate chapter would also be welcome on public opinion(s) regarding these merchants, as would new (and more abundant) material on their fate in the 1930s, when laws banned most of their former activities.

In short, numerous topics and questions remain that would benefit from archival documents inaccessible when I worked on the subject fifteen years ago. Not only would historians welcome sources permitting a deeper exploration of major aspects of Soviet society in the 1920s, the findings of such work might be revealing to those studying private enterprise in post-Soviet Russia. Short of that, a new book on NEP would still be valuable if it offered a thoughtful challenge of important conclusions prevalent in the scholarly community.

Unfortunately, professor Banerji’s book attempts none of these things. It covers ground well known to other specialists and does not modify or reject basic assumptions among contemporary scholars. Most disappointing of all, the volume relies exclusively on familiar sources, with nothing at all from Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (the Russian State Archive of the Economy) or any other Russian archive. Late in the 1990s, it is difficult to imagine a work of this sort published without Russian archival documentation.

That said, the book itself is a reliable guide to private trade in the early Soviet period to the extent that it competently reviews many of the basic conclusions already published elsewhere. An introductory chapter covers private trade before NEP, including the unsuccessful efforts to ban such commerce during the Civil War. In this period (1918-1920) the state proved unable to take on the task of distributing essential goods itself, and thus private trade continued, furtively, in various itinerant, petty guises–nothing like the more settled and substantial network of merchants that had existed before the Revolution. So essential was private trade during the Civil War that many officials tolerated it, regardless of its illegality.

Next, professor Banerji presents an overview of state policy: the crises that convinced Lenin to legalize private trade in 1921; sterner measures taken against private entrepreneurs in 1923/24; a relaxation of pressure under the New Trade Practice in 1925/26; followed by ever harsher actions in the last years of the decade. Against this background, he then focuses on taxation of private enterprise and the sources of credit available to it (with taxation a much more important concern for most vendors than the availability of credit). As one would expect, the tax burden varied with the state’s general line on private trade, noted above.

Part II begins with a statistical look at private trade: the changing number of participants over the decade; their placement in various categories depending on the size and nature of their operations; the value of their sales; products commonly sold; and so forth. Then come two chapters devoted to private trade of specific products–certain manufactured goods and grain, respectively. In the case of grain, for instance, professor Banerji notes the government’s difficulty in obtaining the volume it desired from the peasants, which led late in the decade to “emergency measures” incompatible with free grain trading and thus with NEP. He adds that he does not share the view, common among Bolsheviks of the day, that private traders were a principal cause of the government’s grain collection difficulties.

The final chapter opens with its thesis, namely that the liquidation of legal private trade occurred prematurely, before the state had devised a distribution system to replace it. Private trade was not a threat to socialist construction, professor Banerji concludes, and should not have been crushed as Stalin and his associates assumed control of the Party at the end of the decade. Yet the crackdown commenced and drove private trade back to the surreptitious or petty forms it had assumed during the Civil War. Meanwhile, in the “socialist sector,” alternatives for consumers included rationing and “trade deserts” (no stores or no goods at all). Not until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev did the Soviet Union again acquire a leader convinced of the need to legalize private trade to a degree equaling (and eventually surpassing) the opportunities permitted during NEP.

No specialist in the period will find any of this a revelation. The book’s main themes are as familiar as its sources. However, the volume is distinguished by the large serving of tables and other statistics packed into its pages. Authors of other recent works, while aware of the data (mostly from Soviet sources published during NEP), have not chosen to include so much of it in their books and articles. If the statistical emphasis makes Merchants and Markets slow-going for the general reader, it may prove of use to a future researcher scrutinizing the figures for details on a specific point or for a fuller sense of the contents of the original Soviet sources. This, along with professor Banerji’s confirmation of colleagues’ findings, are the book’s principal services to the historical profession.

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Thomas G. Rawski, ed., Economics and the Historian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xiv + 297 pp. Bibliography and index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-07268-5; $17.00 (paper), ISBN 0-520-07269-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Lynne Kiesling, College of William and Mary

Economic historians fill a peculiar, and sometimes uncomfortable, intellectual gap in the social sciences. In an ever-fracturing and increasingly compartmentalized scholarly environment, the economic historian may not find a welcoming, collegial home with either historians or economists; the notion of a truly interdisciplinary analysis is more rhetoric than reality for many scholars.

This volume of essays seeks to bridge the gap in the direction of historians. Arguing that economic analysis contributes a useful set of tools to historical scholarship, the eight economic historians writing these essays attempt to negate the stereotype of economic analysis as false quantification and so much mathematical esoterica. These chapters are well written, tightly argued, and should be of value both to the historian looking to learn more about the economic approach to history and to the economist looking for a clear presentation of the general methodological foundations of “historical economics.”

In his introductory chapter Thomas Rawski starts by observing how pervasive economic factors are, and were, in everyday situations, and that economists and historians ignoring each other is a two-way street:

“Even if man does not live by bread alone, economics lurks beneath the surface of any historical inquiry. The economist who hesitates to peek outside the confines of his models can overlook cultural influences on markets. Likewise the historian of labor, of agriculture, of trade policy, of elite politics, of the church, of international conflict, of the arts, of migration, ideas, industrialization, universities, technology, demography, or crime ignores the economic approach at the risk of losing important lines of explanation” (p. 1).

After noting the apparent enthusiasm of economists for the benefits of history, Rawski goes on to discuss briefly the ideas underlying basic economic models; by doing so he lays a foundation of understanding in the reader for the more sophisticated analyses presented in the subsequent chapters.

Rawski also wrote the second chapter, in which he discusses the analysis of economic trends. Historical analysis is especially suited to studying long-term changes in factors such as “economic welfare, distribution of income and wealth, degree of commercialization, patterns of cropping, organization of economic activity, [and] significance and functioning of various economic institutions” (p. 15). Getting to the heart of a common misperception that historians often hold concerning economic modeling, Rawski clearly points out that examining long-term changes in such factors is meaningless without putting the trend in its relevant economic context. Rawski then refers to the most common way to explore aggregate trends across time and across countries, national income accounts, and briefly explores the three areas of economic activity that national income accounts miss: household production, underground activity, and unrecorded costs. However, when we look at broad trends we are looking for general tendencies across time, and national income accounts give us an imperfect, but rather consistent, indication of these tendencies or trends. After a useful explanation of how national income accounts are derived, on both the expenditure and the output sides, Rawski also examines economic cycles and trends within them.

Jon Cohen then provides an interesting discussion of the role of institutions in economic analysis, a currently fruitful area of research in some fields of economics. Cohen defines institutions as “efficient ways of organizing human activity where markets alone will not suffice” (p. 60), such as the firm or the family. In the most basic, most restricted economic model of human behavior, all resources in the economy find their highest value use through the market, without any need for relationships beyond those stemming from market activity. Clearly, this simplistic model abstracts too far from the real relationships of life, all of which do have some economic component (even friendship does–when we spend time with friends and do things for and with them, we forego opportunities to do other things that might also be of value to us). Cohen focuses on the family, the farm, and the firm as institutions that work in conjunction with the market, in a more realistic model of human behavior. In the course of discussing why such institutions exist and what benefits they provide, Cohen highlights the property rights literature building on Coase’s work analyzing the existence of the firm.

Exploring labor economics and labor history, Susan Carter and Stephen Cullenberg creatively construct a dialogue between “Clio” and “Hades,” two professors of history and economics, respectively, on the relative merits of their methodologies. They first discuss social norms and market forces as determinants of female labor-force participation, subsequently covering the individual choice between work and leisure as the basis for most economic models of labor. Carter and Cullenberg reinforce what I perceive as the essential elements of this book: economic models are tools, nothing more, but they are useful tools because they may highlight relationships that might otherwise not have been obvious; these tools, as well as the tools of historical analysis, need to be used in context.

The fourth chapter, written by Donald McCloskey, focuses on the basic model of neoclassical economics and its emphasis on choice. Because economists emphasize resource scarcity, they look at human behavior in the context of individuals making choices facing a set of alternatives. McCloskey argues that (neoclassical, but I would argue all) economists “would urge the historian not to jump hastily to a diagnosis that peasants follow their plows by custom alone or that traders trust each other on grounds of solidarity alone…. Neoclassical economics, in other words, completes sociology and anthropology, because it studies a motivation unattractive to those fields: choice under constraint” (p. 123). Choice transcends markets and permeates nonmarket institutions, as Cohen’s chapter suggested. McCloskey’s articulation of the choice basis of economics also enables him to address a common misperception of economics–economics is not about money alone. Choices made and profits garnered need not be pecuniary. This focus on choice complements other historical approaches emphasizing, for example, culture.

Richard Sutch’s chapter provides a concise survey of macroeconomics, peppered with historical examples that highlight some benefits of aggregate economic analysis. He concludes that thinking in terms of a macroeconomic approach could be useful to the historian, even if he or she is not using aggregate economic data. Sutch clears up another problem area for non-economists–what exactly are inflation and unemployment, and how can we tell if they are present in our historical situation? Sutch also addresses the potential pitfalls of aggregation, fruitfully discussing the benefits of, for example, micro studies of real wages in 1830s Britain by region and by occupation, but reminding the reader not to commit the fallacy of composition. Just because handloom weavers in Lancashire suffered large declines in their incomes does not mean that all British workers fared poorly during the 1830s. Sutch also uses the tools of macroeconomic analysis to understand wartime destruction and postwar economic activity after the Civil War and World War II.

Next Hugh Rockoff tackles the thorny topic of money, banking and inflation. He structures his discussion as the tale of the development of money in a hypothetical economy, using examples from history to illustrate issues that arise as an economy becomes more commercial. He starts in medieval times with a gold-based money, moving on to explain how new discoveries of gold caused inflation. His subsequent explanation of the quantity theory of money and Hume’s price-specie flow mechanism is valuable to non-monetary economists as well as to historians interested in monetary history. Rockoff then discusses the rise of banking, usually starting with individuals “depositing” gold coins with their local goldsmith for safekeeping. As goldsmiths discovered that not everyone wanted all of their money back at the same time, they found that they could make money by lending out some of the deposits they held: thus the birth of fractional reserve banking. This development also meant that the goldsmith had an incentive to pay the depositor interest on his deposit, thereby creating a dimension on which goldsmiths compete for business. Rockoff also explores banking panics, fiat money and central banking, which require more sophisticated economic models and some attention to institutional detail.

The final chapter, by Peter Lindert, highlights the role of international economics in understanding the evolution of trade relationships through history. In the context of discussing international relations, Lindert emphasizes one of the basic tenets of economics–trade creates value, and both parties benefit. But that value is not distributed equally among the trading partners, and Lindert addresses the implications of that fact in terms of the development of trade restrictions (tariffs and quotas) and the evolution of trading relationships. In the final section of his chapter Lindert provides a discussion of the determination of exchange rates that I found extremely valuable, and much clearer than any other I’ve seen on the subject.

Every chapter in this collection provides valuable insights on the use of economic logic and modeling in explaining historical phenomena. I sensed no condescension from the authors toward the methodology of the historians among their readers; I sensed only respect and appreciation for good economic methodology, and an interest in sharing that enthusiasm with historian colleagues.

Lynne Kiesling Department of Economics College of William and Mary

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