Published by EH.NET (May 2009)

Vincent Barnett and Joachim Zweynert, editors, Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. xviii + 198 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-6149-8

Reviewed for EH.NET by Warren J. Samuels, Department of Economics, Michigan State University.

This collection of neatly-defined and well-structured interpretive essays illustrates how written histories of economic thought can vary depending on several distinctions. One distinction concerns whose thought a historian includes. One can concentrate, following Mark Blaug, on what is understood to be economic theory, pursued by largely academic, professional economists, or, following Joseph Dorfman, also include non-academic, non-professional people. A second distinction concerns the mutual impacts of the two mentalities on each other. A third distinction has to do with the homogeneity or heterogeneity of each mentality. A fourth distinction concerns the relation of the economic system, with its distinctive economic practice and system of social control, to the two mentalities. No one of the resulting stories is necessarily correct, but one interpretation can be more accurate than another, though more than one interpretation can often relate to a particular situation.

Accordingly, Russian economic thought of Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries oscillated between the doctrines of mercantilism and those of the Middle Ages. The ideas of some authors remained subordinated to religious, legal and political discourses, especially the vast fusion of state and church which tended to strictly limit the range of independent thinking. Nonetheless, the principal topics were the system of land ownership, money and trade ? with written texts dominated by religious discourse and political practice influenced by mercantilist concepts.

The eighteenth century manifested the conflict between the radical economic reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine II, on the one hand, and the continuing medieval social structure, on the other. Liberal rhetoric was silenced by autocratic claims for enforcement of absolute power. Later thinkers and statesmen helped to develop the system of finance and banking, unintentionally, one supposes, establishing some of the institutional foundations of the initial Russian industrial economy of the late nineteenth century. Writers combined liberal ideas with a Hamiltonian state promoting economic modernization. The targets were given by practice and the government.

Academic research and teaching was initially institutionalized in the early nineteenth century. The teaching of political economy commenced in 1804; the first textbook in political economy published in Russia (written in French, six volumes, a compilation of Smith, Turgot, Say, et alia) appeared in 1815; and the first chair was established in 1819. Some later academicians sought to articulate the ethical foundations of economics, some of them arriving at socialism, including Christian socialism. Several essays serve to suggest that economics cannot be formulated independently of the concrete conditions of time and space, though that does not prevent differences of interpretation and formulation by scholars in any given time and place. The point obviously applies to normative economics but also to positive economics. But the story is more complex and lengthier. Selig Perlman lectured that Marxism was (more or less surreptitiously) taught in the schools before 1917. One school of interpreters argued that until the 1890s Russian economists largely followed, even imitated, Western economists. Socialist ideas gained popularity first and foremost not economists among but the educated public. In 1917 the October Revolution replaced one system of social control of belief and practice with another. In 1927 the Communist Party line ostensibly changed from world revolution to socialism in one country coupled with praise for those early economists who had been close to Marxism and denigrated the Western non-Marxist imitators. Within three years, the Soviet Union adopted collectivization, planning and industrialization. After 1991, Soviet economics was denigrated in favor of both pre-Soviet and especially, eventually, Western mainstream economics. More recently, criticism of both the handling of transition to a market economy and the increasing influence of Western mainstream economics (imitation or transfer?) has emerged, along with discussion of a ?Russian school of economics.?

That is the overall account which emerges from the thirteen chapters written by twelve authors. Each essay attempts to interpret the work of key individuals, issues or concepts of particular periods.

Chapter 1, authored by the co-editors, is a nice six-page introduction and summary. It is preceded by a very useful four-page ?timeline? of the major events of Russian history.

Chapter 2, written by Danila Raskov, examines economic thought in Muscovy.

Chapter 3 discusses the Russian version of the Enlightenment (Leonid Shirokorad).

Chapter 4 examines the ideas and contributions to institutional innovation of three reformers of the monetary system in the early nineteenth century (Alla Sheptun).

Chapter 5 interprets what amounts to conflicts between different assertions of a ?natural order,? between rationalism and empiricism, between one or more conceptual models of the economy and one or more efforts at identifying the ?actual? economy, between German idealism and French rationalism, and between liberalism, socialism, the ideas of Friedrich List, German historicism, and conservative romanticism (Joachim Zweynert).

Chapter 6 takes up the pursuit of an ?ethical? basis for political economy, namely, socialism, by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, and Christian socialism, by Sergei Bulgakov (Natalia Makasheva).

Noting that the co-editors distinguish at this point between the pre- and post-1917 periods and the corresponding chapters, I move on to chapter 7, which deals with the ideas and status of A. V. Chayanov, but which also misses the opportunity to compare and contrast Chayanov and N. D. Kondratiev as agricultural economists (William Coleman and Anna Taitslin).

Chapter 8 examines Russian ?migr? economists in the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. It helps explain the predominance of mathematical and statistical approaches to economics taken by those who escaped Hitler and Stalin which, along with the ideas and formulations of Austrian-school economists, eventually had a marked transformative impact on the mainstream of U.S. economics. Among the Austrian-School ?migr?s were Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Gottfried Haberler, and Fritz Machlup. Among the Russian ?migr?s were Simon Kuznets, Jacob Marschak, and W. W. Leontief (Vincent Barnett).

Chapter 9 presents the lives and work of two Russian economists exiled in 1922, Boris Brutzkus and Sergei Prokopovich, the former a Russian Jew and economic liberal, the latter from a noble family but transformed by his investigation of West Siberian villages during the great famines of 1891-92. The two men were later among the first students of the Soviet economy although having different careers and ideas as well as origins (Shuichi Kojima).

Chapter 10 is on the debate in the U.S.S.R. during 1941-53 on the law of value, interpreted by the chapter?s author, Michael Kaser, to have been a serious blow to economics in the U.S.S.R., one administered by Stalin. During 1956-1958, however, it began to be clear that ?a significant stage in the transition of Soviet economics from Marx to Marshall was complete? (p. 154). The emergence of a relativist value theory (demand and supply theory of price) and the eclipse of an absolutist single-valued value theory (labor theory or marginal utility theory of value) came about for both political and economic reasons in both worlds. In Europe and the United States, price theory came to be seen as both more empirically meaningful and more ideologically, i.e., politically, useful; in Russia during the period covered by Kaser, labor (the labor theory of value) was increasingly seen among economists as inadequate for planning purposes and was increasingly adversely but, writes Kaser (p. 151), not arbitrarily affected by political context.

Chapter 11 identifies the years after Stalin?s death as, in effect, an amalgam of elements (Pekka Sutela). It was a period of scientism, of varieties of Soviet economics, and of stages of economic reform. The stages were: decentralization, market pricing, and incomplete transition to commodity and labor markets. The central topics of reform discussions were on enterprise self-management, and impersonal owners such as pension funds. Not surprisingly, the authorities continued to be sensitive to anything resembling private property.

In the two-page chapter 12 the co-editors observe, first, ?that the progress of economic ideas in Russia was (and still is) inextricably connected to matters of economic policy and also to issues of governmental control? (p. 187). They also urge recognition that ?recent developments in Russia … [include] a tendency [as in the past] toward the ?state capture? of key branches of the economy, increasing restrictions on political liberty, and a low conviction rate regarding serious crimes against persons critical of the Russian government such as journalists. Even if no cases, so far, have been reported of economists being subject to direct political pressure, it does not take much imagination to conceive of such a case in the near future? (pp. 187-188). The co-editors conclude with two points: they do not believe that the mix of Western and native Russian ideas constitutes ?the existence of a ?Russian school? of economic thinking? (p. 188) in the same sense as is meant by such terms as ?Austrian school,? ?Cambridge school,? or ?Chicago school.? Second, they call attention to how little the economics of Marx, Engels and Lenin have been mentioned within this volume. ?Russian economics had a long and distinguished history before 1917? and ?[Marx] was by no means a dominant figure in pre-revolutionary Russian political economy? (p. 188).

Economics in Russia can be recommended as a nicely designed and executed collection of essays which provides insight into a history of economic thought in some respects different from that of the West and in other respects rather similar.

The co-editors correctly point to the centrality of the issue of ?precisely what developmental path the country should take.? They also note ?the extensive presence of ideology in the history of Russian economic thought? and (correctly) reject the argument that it is due to the features of a ?Russian character.? They suggest that in Russia the issue of development path has been heatedly controversial since the time of Peter the Great and claim that that ?might explain (in part) why economics was more strongly politicized [in Russia] than it was in many Western countries? (p. 2).

The view that controversy over development path explains the greater politicization of economics would likely be shared by many, perhaps most, historians of economic thought. The matter of development path is indeed a central issue of economic policy. It did not, however, arise in Russia with Peter the Great. The controversy between mercantilism and medievalism, in which mercantilism was the initial stage of capitalism, was about development path and preceded Peter the Great.

The key question, however, is whether differences in degree of politicization have existed, to be explained by controversy over development path. I do not want to overdo the point but the question of degree of politicization is not only important in itself but it casts light on how decision making on and interpretation of economic policy should be handled by the historian of economic thought.

There has been no conclusive difference in degree of politicization; any such perception is a function of one?s normative selective prior assumptions. The question of development path has not been unique to Russia. It has been, for example, central to policy debate in the United States. I cite the conflict between Pilgrim religious fundamentalism and money-making (trade) as rival ways of life that arose in (more accurately, was brought from England to) the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early- and mid-seventeenth century. The conflict continues to this day, in more complex forms and in different circumstances, most notably in presidential elections and the on-going formation of and conflict between secularism and religious fundamentalism. One was not more politicized than the other. Even if one or the other supporting group claims more than they actually want, expect or are willing to settle for, the approach to development path is at least expressed in terms of different discourses, each of which is political, whatever their content .

My view is based on several considerations, including: (1) Acceptance of the underlying fact and importance of the legal foundations of the economy, and through it the normative elements in economic policy and the choice of the incidents of the development path. Such acceptance only minimally relies on evidence founded on ideological doctrine. It especially reflects my perception of universal pragmatic practice. (2) Such pragmatism not only accurately describes the United States (and, of course, elsewhere) but has been facilitated, protected, encouraged and, more subtly, taught by the First Amendment?s rejection of an establishment of religion and its protection of the freedom of speech and of the press, and the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, as well as through the use of various other clauses of the Constitution in the ?protection of property.? (I use that trope even though in other circumstances I would insist that property is property because it is protected and not that property is protected because it is property.) Pragmatism also accurately describes the jurisprudential processes through which the meaning of the Constitutional clauses and concepts themselves, e.g., property, are worked out. (3) The relatively greater heavy-handedness of the state in Russia has been either more salient or more selectively perceived than in the United States, which may reflect either ?reality? or the greater effectiveness of relatively light-handed social control in the latter country or the relatively small percentages of its population which thinks seriously of the federal government, state government, local government, indeed all government, as fundamentally infringing on their freedom. (By ?seriously,? I intend to be understood to mean something different from electoral and comparable rhetoric, but not necessarily requiring the ?litmus test? of an immediate willingness if not desire to resort to armed force in open rebellion.) (4) The multiple meanings of ?politicization? is another factor. It has been used to signify the introduction of politics (itself multiply defined) into areas of life in which it hitherto has been absent, to refer to institutions that are political (meaning having to do with decision making, or the exercise of power) by their very nature and/or to suggest that a decision has not been made on the respective merits of the relevant alternatives but in order to insinuate considerations of political-party advantage into the process. (5) Another factor is the eclipse or obfuscation of other possible paths by the success of the path actually ?chosen? and followed, perhaps as if that path was inevitable, say, due to the absolute nature of things.

It has been only (!) two to three hundred years since the eighteenth century, in which the values and policies of the Enlightenment first prospered, in which naturalism made major explicit inroads on supernaturalism, and in which society and its institutions were relatively widely seen to be a matter of policy and neither the natural nor the supernatural order of things. Ideological and normative propositions, typically having a complex relation to power, are operative in the making and conduct of policy and the social reproduction or alteration of socioeconomic structure. As for politicization, I know of no conclusive way in which a medieval or feudal structure and its world view can be conclusively shown to be more, or less, politicized than a mercantilist, capitalist or socialist/communist system. A change in power structure may (or may not) lead to a change of ideology that is typically more important than a change in power structure generated by a change in ideology. My key point is that no one ideology is more politicized than another.

Consider, for example, the interpretations of the United States made in the 1930s and in 2009. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes were seen by many as socialists and antagonistic to capitalism whereas others saw the innovations of the New Deal as saving capitalism for the capitalists, or whomever. The amply evident present-day situation pits President Barack Obama against the Republicans of the House of Representatives. I suggest the following as a possibility ? the Republicans understand that the President?s program is geared to support business (investment) in part through bail-outs, etc., helping selected types of business rather than supporting households, especially lower- and middle-class families. The flow of spending can work, or not work, in different ways. Consider that consumption spending, even if financed by home bailouts of some sort, may lead to an increase in the expected rate of profit of businesses and a fall in liquidity preference by various groups, including those engaged in real or portfolio investment, or increase the distraction of the working class from recognizing or even speculating that it is capitalism that President Obama is saving while more or less increasing the possibility of upward mobility by the children and grandchildren of the masses, which is what President Obama seems at least to desire. (The reader will recall that in their concluding chapter, Barnett and Zweynert note a tendency in Russia ?toward the ?state capture? of key branches of the economy? (p. 187). It would be ironic if the bailout and stimulus packages (notice the play of metaphors) (and, to a lesser but not insignificant degree, the imposition of moral and/or legal constraints on the remuneration of corporate executives) that have become (as of April 2009) the centerpiece of the Obama administration?s anti-depression policy represented an area of Galbraithian (or other) convergence between U.S. capitalism and Russian post-Soviet organization; and possibly even more ironic if the packages represented the capture of business(es) by government in place of or in addition to business capture of government agencies and branches.)

Assume the foregoing is a meaningful account. Joseph Schumpeter pointed out the irony of a European labor party successful at the polls yet, instead of being able to introduce socialism (whatever that might have meant to them), they became the managers of a continuing, if somewhat revised, capitalism. In the dialectic of politics it is sometimes, perhaps often, the continuing task of each party both to abet and to limit the other, for example, in Moscovy. Performing that task transcends the vagaries of ideological perception.

If investment increases (say. due to an increase in the expected rate of profit generated by a newly optimistic psychology), income will tend to increase, as will also consumption. The reverse will also likely happen, i.e., a story of shocks coupled with either positive or negative multipliers. One point is the multiplier account. Another point is that, ceteris paribus, income can change as a result of a policy-induced change in either consumption (working, through the expected rate of profit, on investment) or investment (working, through the marginal propensity to save, on consumption). Each sequence is accompanied by its heroic account. One group of voters applauds one; another resonates with the other. Those who invoke a one-sided view of the two processes narrow the possibilities permitted by economic theory. But neither view is more ideological or more politicized than the other. The same applies to tax versus subsidy externality policies.

Religious people who are successful in life in their own mind, may tend to dispose of their discretionary income in a trade-expanding way; similarly, people engaged in trade who are successful may act in a religion-enhancing way. Neither practice is more ideological or more politicized than the other.

Apropos, therefore, of this and other books, on the Russia of Moscovy, policy might have reflected Eastern Orthodoxy or mercantilism or both, but be interpreted as the opposite. I submit, first, that any story told about the different pieces of Russian history, like that of the U.S., could stress one side or the other, yet the evidence remain incapable of conclusive affirmation of either side. I submit, second, that neither Eastern Orthodoxy nor mercantilism is more ideological or more politicized than the other. I submit, third, that any one-sided choice of a story is a function of sentiment or ideological position coupled with a desire to have a seemingly absolute account whose value is more important for influencing present-day policy than for interpreting the past. I should not be understood as attributing such to the motives of either the editors or the other authors, but to the logical situation of interpretation. There is no one complete, true history; there are interpretations.

One reader of a draft of this review suggested that by the time that the questions of politicization and of controversy over development path were largely and practically ?solved? in the Western countries, they were still on the agenda in Russia. I believe that they have neither ever been solved nor off the agenda in the Western countries. To that reader politicization means the entry of policy and ideology into practical solution policies and into economic theory; that it is impossible to either estimate the degree of politicization or eliminate it; and that its degree and meaning depend on political and legal arrangements, hierarchical system of power and so on. This reader also feels that no history of economic thought can be the ?true? story, only a story bearing signs of their time, place and the views of the people who were engaged in doing economics. This reader also believes that intellectual history cannot be reduced to one or two problems, however important they might be: intellectual history is a multi-stream process.

Another reader of the draft identifies as a missing issue differences in state attempts to control intellectual discourse. The actions can take different forms: the termination or intimidation of professors who challenge the dominant political ?line? or ?consensus,? government funding of economic research with a pronounced bias favoring ?mainstream? research where ?mainstream? reflects both professional orthodoxy and the economic system around which orthodoxy and the national economy is built, and so on.

All of which suggests that the work of contemporary historians of economic thought is richer and less presumptuous than the work of earlier generations. The history of economic thought is itself a vast interpretive field with numerous opportunities for interpretation.

Warren J. Samuels is Professor of Economics, Emeritus at Michigan State University. He is the founding editor of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. His book of essays on the use of the concept of the invisible hand is in the initial stage of the production process.

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Published by EH.NET (May 2009)

Raymond L. Cohn, Mass Migration under Sail: European Immigration to the Antebellum United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiii + 254 pp. $85 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-51322-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Scott A. Carson, Department of Economics, University of Texas ? Permian Basin.

Before the 1960s, most analysts concluded that willing and able nineteenth-century European immigrants could easily stake their claim and take advantage of a dynamic labor market in the United States. Research by Stephen Thernstrom, Dean Esslinger and Sally and Clyde Griffen called this optimistic view into question, finding that upward occupation mobility was fairly limited for first generation migrants. This revisionist view itself has come into question more recently. Joseph Ferrie, for example, presents evidence that the mid-nineteenth century U.S. was, rather, a place of considerable upward occupational mobility. Raymond Cohn weighs in on this important question in his latest contribution to the economic history of American immigration. However, where others devote considerable attention to conditions awaiting immigrants, Cohn evaluates conditions in the Old World ? Britain, Germany, and Ireland ? before mid-nineteenth-century migration, conditions during transit, and conditions after immigrant arrival. In the end, Cohn supports the optimistic view that the U.S. was, indeed, a place of opportunity for those willing and able to make the passage.

Organized into nine chapters, Mass Migration under Sail has three broad sections. Chapters two through five address immigrant origins, their pre-migration occupations, and factors motivating immigration. A second narrative that distinguishes Mass Migration from other like works is chapter six, in which Cohn considers migrant conditions during transit. The remainder of the book, chapters seven and eight, consider immigrant status after arrival, and like other research in this recent vein of the migration literature, considers how immigrants influenced nineteenth-century U.S. economic growth. Thus, readers are given a comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century Northern European immigration, a migration wave that radically transformed U.S. culture and labor markets.

Of interest to economic and immigration historians is the way in which Cohn places the immigration decision into push and pull factors and how these interacted with European economic conditions. European push factors included overpopulation and the Napoleonic Wars. Pull factors included U.S. economic growth and kin effects. However, other non-push and pull factors played an important role. Shipping costs fell; ship capacity and the number of passenger ships increased. Between 1815 and 1860, approximately 5.2 million Northern Europeans immigrated to the U.S. The increased flow of immigrants is frequently attributed to the onset of the Irish potato famine. Cohn, however, demonstrates the increase in mass migration began as early as 1815; immigration increased rapidly between the 1820s and 1830s, well before the outbreak of the potato famine. While Britain was a primary source of colonial era migration, Germany and Ireland sent comparatively more immigrants during the antebellum period. Two German and Irish geographic regions were responsible for pre-1840s migration: Southwest Germany and Northern Ireland.

Immigrants took a variety of pre-migration routes and transportation means before they embarked for the U.S. British and Irish immigrants embarked from London and Liverpool; Germans left from Le Havre, Bremen, and Hamburg. While high mortality rates were prominent on specific passages, the in-transit death rate was relatively low, around 1.56 percent of total migrants. Of the small share of immigrants who died during transit, the primary mortalities were typhus and cholera. Major ports of arrival were New Orleans, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston; however, New York became the primary U.S. port of arrival. In response to diseases carried by immigrants on ships, the New York State government sent immigrants with contagious diseases to the Marine Hospital and Wards Island. In response to port runners, in-transit disease, and post-arrival health costs imposed on 1840s and 1850s U.S. populations and on local governments, government reforms on both sides of the Atlantic were enacted, which reduced many of the problems facing immigrants.

The final two chapters of Mass Migration under Sail offer additional evidence that the nineteenth-century U.S. was, indeed, a place where immigrants could stake their claims for a new life. After arrival, German and Irish immigrants settled regionally by nativity within the U.S. The Irish accounted for 68 percent of all immigrants to the Northeast; Germans accounted for 47 percent of all immigrants to the Midwest; British immigrants accounted for 19 percent of immigrants to the Northeast and 20 percent of immigrants to the Midwest. After arrival, the British, German, and Irish achieved success in U.S. labor markets, and the British and German immigrants found opportunity in skilled occupations. Irish immigrants did not fare as well as the other two groups, but still fared better than had they remained in Ireland. Moreover, all three cohorts improved their average skills in the U.S. after arrival.

The last issue Cohn addresses is possibly the most relevant to modern economics. Does immigration help or hurt native labor and will migration lead to long run economic growth? The answers, of course, vary widely, but if current migration is like the mid-nineteenth century, immigration will probably increase the long-run rate of economic growth. During the nineteenth century, immigration extended the U.S. product market and allowed labor in manufacturing and agriculture to specialize. Larger pools of unskilled labor after 1845 put downward pressure on wages. However, over time, labor markets adjusted, migrants assimilated, and the economy moved forward. In this sense, Mass Migration under Sail is a valuable contribution to economic and migration history and gives perspective on current migration issues.

Scott A. Carson?s recent publications include ?Indentured Migration in America’s Great Basin,? Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2002) and ?The Effect of Geography and Vitamin D on African-American Stature in the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from Prison Records,? Journal of Economic History (2008).

Published by EH.NET (June 2008)

Janet Greenlees, Female Labour Power: Women Workers’ Influence on Business Practices in the British and American Cotton Industries, 1780-1860. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. xx + 244 pp. ?55/$100 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-7546-4050-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Pamela J. Nickless, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina-Asheville.

Janet Greenlees’ goal in this very fine study is to provide a more complicated and nuanced view of the role of women workers in industry. In particular she seeks to highlight “women’s agency as operatives and workers in the process of industrialization and developing perceptions of women’s work.” Her comparative approach emphasizes the unifying theme of that gender mattered but so did firm location and size. In particular, technological choice was influenced by local variations in transport, natural resources, and cultural as well as economic considerations. The influence of women workers on conditions of work and their experiences as workers varied by locality as well as by country. Although Greenlees does not put it quite this way, it seems to this reader that the variation within country was greater than the variation among “best practice” firms in Britain and the United States.

Chapters 2 through 5 are an analysis of the development of the cotton industry and how women’s roles developed over time. Chapters 6 and 7 look at women’s responses to industrialization and their role in the negotiation of the gendered nature of work. Greenlees uses a variety of sources and types of analysis ? indeed one of the strengths of this book is the variety of secondary sources used in her summary of the work on women and industrialization. So often the work economic historians or social historians is missing or inaccurately represented in the work of the other, but Greenlees has done a wonderful job integrating the analysis of economists and historians in her historiography and throughout the study.

The best and most valuable chapters are those on the choice of business organization and technology by firms. Most readers of this review will be familiar with the development of Lowell’s integrated mills and the interactive role of the availability of female labor and choice of technology. Greenlees uses firm-level data from a variety of firms located throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic area to argue persuasively that this is far too simple a story. Location, firm size and culture and tradition mattered as well. The “gender” of a job varied based on location and firm size as well as over time in both Britain and the United States. Greenlees emphasizes the role of labor market constraints and culture in the assignment of jobs by gender and in the proportions of men and women working in the mills. As might be expected, where men had more lucrative opportunities, women had more job choices available. Yet, local restrictions on women’s work, by trade union rules and/or by manufacturers’ adoption of gendered notions of work and skill, could reduce the numbers of women and the jobs they performed. Local economic and social conditions were key in the choice of organization and technology. Greenlees also emphasizes that firms had different goals ? while all might fit the “profit-maximizing” model from Econ 100 not all firms had the same time-horizon in mind and all were embedded in communities. Over time, as the notion of factory labor was developed and as transportation networks changed, firms’ choices of organization and technique changed. Students of technological change in textiles will find much to chew over in Greenlees’ analysis.

Of interest to students of wage change over time is Chapter 4, “Millwork: Pay, Work and Equity.” Greenlees finds the wage patterns and comparative performance defy easy generalization. Local circumstances loom large in determining men’s and women’s wages and productivity quite overshadowing the international differences. Greenlees finds that firm-level data on wages often contradicts or complicates national wage date from the U.S. Censuses, British Parliamentary Reports or other contemporary observers. Greenlees is careful to point out that, even at the firm level, you cannot always distinguish between women and children, introducing all sorts of problems with data comparisons. This chapter adds detail and nuance to Greenlees previously published work in this field.

The closing chapters on women’s response to industrial work are less satisfying, in part because direct testimony of women workers is scarce. Nevertheless, the same broad theme is well-supported ? local conditions and traditions mattered. Greenlees calls for a broader framework for analyzing the actions of women workers rather than trying to place them only in the context of a women’s labor movement. I found the analysis of the United States less unconvincing, resting as it does on an interpretation of differences between British and American work culture that are overstated.

This is a valuable addition to the literature on the cotton industry, but I fear it will not attract the wider audience it deserves. Too much knowledge of the industry is assumed to make the work appeal to a non-specialist. Some of this could be solved with more detailed explanatory notes for some of the tables. The text also suffers from some bibliographical glitches and typos in footnotes. Since one of the book’s real pluses is Greenlees’ excellent and intriguing historiography, this may make the bibliography less useful. I should add that I might have missed these errors but for the luxury of footnotes at the bottom of the page. In conclusion, I think this is must read for cotton textile scholars and scholars of women’s role in early industry. They will find much to admire and, probably, much with which to argue.

Pamela J. Nickless recently published “Scarlett’s Sisters: Spinsters, Widows, Wives, and Free-Traders in Nineteenth Century North Carolina,” in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Harris (Ashgate, 2005) and has recently started a study on nineteenth-century female proprietors in Charleston, SC.

Published by EH.NET (June 2008)

Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks and Paul R. Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, c. 1230-1327. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii + 205 pp. $99 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-521-85941-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by James M. Murray, Department of History, Western Michigan University.

English wool was a medieval commodity whose production, acquisition, exchange, and manufacture launched countless ships, occupied many merchants, and kept the looms of Flanders, England, and Italy humming. Some (but by no means all) of this wool was simply the world’s finest raw material for the production of high quality cloth, one of medieval Europe’s most successful exports. And it was in chronically short supply in the period covered by this study, really the reigns of the three Edwards, kings whose efforts to tax wool exports are also part of the story.

The cooperative research project by scholars from two UK institutions (University of Reading and King’s College, London) that led to this book and three related publications is a model of efficiency and usefulness, although the articulation among its various parts is unclear. The first product was an edition and translation of 203 wool contracts published in 2006 by the National Archives, Kew (formerly Public Record Office), summaries of which are also available in an online version at www.data-archive.ac.uk, study number 5325.[1] The series from The National Archives used were: Close Rolls (C54); Exchequer Miscellanea (E101); Memoranda Rolls (E159 and E368); Plea Rolls (E13); Ancient Deeds (E210, E236, E237); and Special Correspondence (SC1). Appendix 3 of the book gives a spreadsheet overview of each contract including its chronological order, reference, list of buyer(s) and seller(s), and summary of contract contents. This database alone puts an enormous quantity of new primary source material within easy reach of scholars.

On this evidentiary basis, the coauthors have published two journal articles besides the present monograph, the first, in the Journal of Medieval History the second in Journal of Banking and Finance. The former is a more or less straightforward version of the monograph’s chapter 3, and the latter is a significantly different version of the book’s chapter 4. The salient difference between the journal and book versions is the inclusion of a more extensive apparatus mathematicus in the JBF article including formulae and an additional table showing “regression results of tests for market efficiency.”[2] The intent here was obviously to tailor the presentation of the data analysis to the more or less numerate among interested scholars, but what is curious is that the book contains no reference to the article nor any mention that chapter 4 contains the same text but a pared-down presentation of the mathematics.[3]

The subject of the English wool trade could hardly be more important in the economic history of medieval England in particular and medieval Europe in general. As previous research has shown, from the eleventh to mid-fifteenth century wool was England’s dominant export ? at its height amounting to some ninety percent of revenues, and even in the subsequent period of decline from c. 1450 to 1650, wool in the form of English cloth was an equally dominant export in terms of trade value.[4] Yet the authors point out that the bifurcation of research into the subject by economic historians on the one hand and historians of the local and monastic economy on the other has obscured “important details” due to the neglect of “any concerted attempt to explore the fuller extent of the source base.” In other words, this is an innovative study of these particular contracts using the methodology of modern finance theory, not a general history or even a replacement of the seminal works by Eileen Power, T. H. Lloyd, and John H. Munro.

Nonetheless, the authors succeed in presenting conclusions that if not revelatory do make a solid contribution to the literature and make a persuasive claim for the financial acumen of late medieval merchants and woolgrowers. Their conclusion that “not only options, but instruments akin to forward contracts were in widespread use throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” adds to the list of innovations whose origins must be pushed back to the late Middle Ages rather than more modern periods. Future historians will also be in the authors’ debt for the richly nuanced picture of a market under stress, where competing parties engaged in “cutthroat” competition for position as buyers in the market, while producers pitted potential customers against each other in an attempt to repair and restore shaky internal finances.

Chapter 3 gives a micro-study of these market dynamics by presenting the case of Pipewell, a Cistercian abbey of middling importance in Northamptonshire, whose history is richly illustrative of the storm and stress in the wool market from c. 1270 to 1325, the period of the greatest number of forward contracts. The majority of these contracts were made between Italian merchants and monastic institutions, most, like Pipewell, were Cistercian houses. Pipewell, however, occupied a particular niche as a small, super high quality producer whose product commanded top market prices. The decades-long travails and virtual bankruptcy of the abbey provide both a cautionary tale and window into the economic forces that shaped the wool market.

Pipewell was atypical in that its chief creditors were a firm of Cahorsin merchants instead of the more common Lucchese and Florentine firms, but it was all too typical of many English Cistercian houses in selling for ready money promises of wool delivered at a set price in the future. This seemed a good bargain for both parties, as Pipewell Abbey needed to complete building programs and the Cahorsins were eagerly seeking wool supply ahead of their Italian competitors. Innocent in the 1270s, such debt for wool swaps proved disastrous for monasteries across England by 1300, as animal disease decimated sheep herds reducing the wool clip and thereby the abbeys’ ability to meet their contracts. This kindled “those fires of indebtedness which gutted English Cistercian houses late in that [thirteenth] century.” Exacerbating problems of supply were new taxes levied by the English crown, disruptions in the market caused by war, and numerous protracted law cases. Pipewell was forced to refinance contracts, accept sheep from its creditors in order to build herds, and appeal for royal protection. Even these efforts at retrenchment could not withstand the terrible famine and murrain of 1315-1322, which even contemporaries called the “magna caristia,” and the abbey was temporarily dispersed. Thus ended a struggle to stay afloat extending over some forty years.

Chapter 4, “Modern Finance in the Middle Ages? Financial Aspects of the Advance Contracts for the Sale of Wool” is the most innovative in its use of “valuation techniques from ‘modern’ finance theory to analyze the large number of advance contracts” in order to ascertain the implied interest rate of the transactions and to assess the efficiency of the wool market. As stated above, a mathematically more complete version of this chapter was published in a specialized journal, but most historians will find enough of the quantitative underpinnings to assess the argument. After a disclaimer clause about the difficulties of applying financial analysis to such a small evidence base, the authors conclude that the forward agreements with money accepted for delivery of future wool sacks include an implicit interest rate of 20 to 27 percent given the discount over the spot price of wool promised in the contracts. Variations between the extremes can be accounted for by the creditworthiness of the abbey and strength of demand by the merchants. This rate accords well with interest rates of other loans across a wide variety of church and urban economies.

Market efficiency is judged by how closely the forward price predicts the subsequent spot price of wool. The authors seek to test this for the medieval wool market by isolating data from the first year of a forward contract leaving sixty-three observations. The influence of additional variables ? such as the length of the contract, the size of the contract, and even which monastic order was involved ? on the discount rate is also taken into account. Given these, and a comparison with modern wool trading in formal exchanges, the authors conclude that “the medieval wool forward market was remarkably well functioning and orderly” (p. 144).

In chapter 5, the conclusion, the authors recapitulate their findings and seek to answer some nagging questions. The finding that “modern finance is perhaps not so modern after all” reminds us of the remarkable ability of merchants of all times and places to solve practical problems in order to do business. The fact that the forward contract disappeared in the face of changing market conditions shortly after 1325 shows us as well the anachronism in measuring the medieval past by the standards of modern finance. The genius of medieval merchants was in adapting and adopting tools to cope with and circumvent the very difficult conditions of late medieval Europe, not in inventing modern finance. The search for modernity has been a besetting sin of past economic history, though using the tools of modern mathematical economics, as is done in this study, can lead to useful insights about the economies of past times.

Notes: 1. The book does not make clear that the full text of these contracts will only be available online by Autumn 2009 at the earliest due to copyright considerations. A. Bell, C. Brooks and P. Dryburgh, Advance Contracts for the Sale of Wool, c. 1200-1330 [computer file], Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], March 2006. SN: 5325 and eidem, Advance Contracts for the Sale of Wool c. 1200-1327 (List and Index Society, 315 London, 2006.

2. “Interest Rates and Efficiency in Medieval Wool Forward Contracts,” Journal of Banking and Finance 31 (2007) 361-80.

3. “Leger est aprendre mes fort est arendre: Wool, Debt, and the Dispersal of Pipewell Abbey (1280-1330),” Journal of Medieval History 32 (2006) 187-211. The JMH article mentions in footnote 7 the existence of the JBF article. There is a third not readily available article mentioned in footnote 7 as well.

4. See on this John H. Munro’s review of the edition of the contracts in Agricultural History Review 55 (2007) 311-12.

James M. Murray is director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has published on the history of medieval business and the urban economy of Bruges in the late Middle Ages. He can be reached at james.murray@wmich.edu.

Published by EH.NET (November 2007)

Cormac ? Gr?da, Richard Paping, and Eric Vanhaute, editors, When the Potato Failed: Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. 342 pp. ?66 (paper), ISBN: 978-2-503-51985-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Raymond L. Cohn, Department of Economics, Illinois State University.

This book consists of fifteen essays, fourteen of which were originally given at a conference held in Dublin in December 2003. The final essay (actually the first in the volume) is written by the editors and provides a comparative perspective of the conference findings. The idea of the conference was to encourage research on the effects of the potato famine in other European countries, and to compare the results to the latest work on the famine in Ireland. The editors (located at University College (Dublin), Groningen, and Ghent, respectively) claim: “This book is the first to offer a truly comprehensive perspective on the causes and the effects of what is sometimes considered as the ‘last’ European subsistence crisis” (17). Three of the essays (by ? Gr?da, Mary Daly, and Peter Gray) examine aspects of the famine in Ireland and another (by Peter Solar) looks at prices throughout Europe at the time. The other ten essays examine the famine period in other parts of Europe.

The essays on Ireland and the one by Solar do not break much new ground, but they do present a handy review of the latest work by experts on the Irish famine. ? Gr?da’s article provides an overview of the famine in Ireland, and briefly discusses public action, the demographic consequences, and post-famine adjustment. Daly’s contribution examines the government’s and landlords’ roles and describes efforts at the local level in providing famine relief. Gray summarizes the (very interesting) debates that occurred in Britain concerning whether and how the government should respond. Solar presents series on yearly, monthly, and weekly prices and concludes, “high prices alone do not make a crisis” (90).

The real contribution of this book is the ten essays relating to the other parts of Europe. The famine period is investigated in Highland Scotland (by Tim Devine), Flanders (by Vanhaute), the Netherlands (by Paping and Vincent Tassenaar), Prussia (by Hans Bass), South Germany (by Gunter Mahlerwein), France (two essays, one by Nadine Vivier and the other by Jean-Michel Chevet and ? Gr?da), Spain (by Pedro D?az Mar?n), Denmark (by Ingrid Henriksen), and Sweden (by Carl-Johan Gadd).

While one might expect the non-Irish essays to be of uneven quality, as usually results from such an endeavor, that is not the case here. According to the editors, all of the essays have been “significantly revised” since the conference (13). The result is that every paper generally addresses the same set of issues. Most importantly, the extent and type of crop failure is examined and done so at the regional level within each country or area. Thus, the reader is introduced to the wide variation in the onset and consequences of the crop failures not only between countries but also within each country. The papers also examine the demographic consequences, the government policy response, and connections to social unrest. In general, all of the former issues are more completely investigated than the final one. Though a few of the papers examine (and generally refute) possible connections between the crop failures and the unrest of 1848, the issue is not addressed in many of the other entries.

By the end of the set of essays, it is clear that events in Ireland followed a fundamentally different course than elsewhere in Europe. Outside of Ireland, extreme famine conditions existed in only a few local areas in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Though the famine caused about one million deaths in Ireland, only a few hundred thousand (at most) died in the much larger population in the rest of Europe. One gets the impression ? a point emphasized by a number of the authors ? that the period of the potato famine outside of Ireland was not very different from any number of other periods of bad harvests. Not pleasant by any means, but nowhere near as bad as in Ireland. So the issue becomes (with apologies to Joel Mokyr): “Why Ireland starved but not many other areas of Europe did.”[1] The answer is not surprising ? the Irish consumed more potatoes, planted potatoes on a larger portion of their available agricultural land, suffered crop failures over a longer period of time, and received little assistance from the English government. However, the data presented in the essays on the other countries make very clear how large the differences were between Ireland and the rest of Europe in the 1840s.

One factor that will make the essays on the continental countries potentially useful for some readers is that each summarizes in English a large body of work that has only been published in the local language. Since few economic historians speak the language of every country covered, these essays provide an excellent summary of the current state of research on the period of the 1840s. In covering such a restricted time period, however, many of these essays will appeal mainly to specialists. For others, an overview of the ideas presented in the book can be obtained by reading the excellent summary essay by the editors. This essay deserves to read by anyone interested in the latest work on the period of the potato famine.

Note: 1. Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1780 1850. London: George Allen and Unwin, paperback edition, 1985.

Raymond L. Cohn is Professor of Economics at Illinois State University. He has written extensively on immigration from Europe to the United States during the antebellum period and is currently finishing a book manuscript on the subject. rlcohn@ilstu.edu.

Published by EH.NET (October 2007)

Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich, and Will Steffen, editors, Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. xvi + 495 pp. $38 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-262-03366-4.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Philip R. P. Coelho, Department of Economics, Ball State University.

This book consists of an introduction and twenty-two essays and reports with an overall focus on an “Integrated History and Future of People on Earth” (IHOPE). The authors are primarily sociologists and environmentalists with representation from earth sciences (climatology, geology) and history. In spite of its pretentious title and acronym there are some worthwhile essays. In history, a very good chapter is John R McNeill’s essay on the twentieth century, “Social, Economic, and Political Forces in Environmental Change: Decadal Scale (1900 to 2000).” While I have some quibbles with it (the discussion of decolonialization is fuzzy at best), there are insights that make it worth reading and repeating. McNeill correctly states that the economic growth that occurred in the last half of the twentieth century “… is the most unusual in the history of economic growth, although many people, having experienced nothing else, now imagine it is as normal” (315). This is emphatically true; the human race has never experienced such a widespread and rapid rate of economic growth encompassing the majority of the globe’s inhabitants. If it continues through the mid twenty-first century the world will have been transformed in a myriad of ways, some predictable others unpredictable. A possible prediction can be derived from McNeill’s discussion of urbanization. McNeill states that: “[The low birth rate in cities] if it persists, means that cities are resuming their historic role as demographic black holes. Before 1880 they consumed population because their death rates were so high; after an interval of growth by natural increase they began to consume population because their birth rates were so low. London today, as in 1750, would shrink without in-migration.” This essay is worth reading and assigning to undergraduates/graduates.

There are other good, more specialized essays in this volume. Timothy F. Flanney has a brief but comprehensive chapter (“The Trajectory of Human Evolution in Australia: 10,000 B.P. to the Present”) on (the lack) of human evolution in Australia. Richard H. Grove’s chapter (“Revolutionary Weather: The Climate and Economic Crisis of 1785-1795 and the Discovery of El Nino”) correlating crop failures, famines and revolutions with shifting ocean currents is an intriguing hypothesis. His hypothesis is that the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the turbulence associated with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be traced back to crop failures and weather patterns attributable to changes in El Nino, the Pacific Ocean current. He marshals evidence well and he is persuasive, but I reserve acceptance until I see the hypothesis more widely debated and examined. Nevertheless Grove’s chapter is well worth reading for an imaginative, well-researched and intriguing hypothesis.

In contrast to an essay with a novel hypothesis, is Nathan J. Mantua’s data driven essay (“A Decadal Chronology of Twentieth Century Changes in Earth’s Natural Systems”). He emphasizes and presents data throughout his paper, saving speculations for presentation in his summary. Mantua details the various consensus estimates for data series ranging from temperatures to nitrous oxide, to the North Atlantic Oscillation. Whether the juxtaposition of these series makes sense is a question for climatologists/meteorologists. However he does seem to attribute too much to natural forces, while ignoring economic forces. He credits (293) the, “[r]apid declines in large predators” in the oceans of the world to changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans. However cod fishery of the Grand Banks did not collapse because of climatological/oceanographic changes, but because of over-fishing. The over fishing was a predictable result of the lack of property rights in the Grand Banks cod fishery. Climatic change may have been occurring, but the Grand Banks cod fishery collapse could have been easily avoided by rigidly enforcing catch limits and/or assigning property rights to the fishery.

Another relatively good essay that could be improved by introducing economic analysis is that of Christian Pfister (“Little Ice Age-type Impacts and the Mitigation of Social Vulnerability to Climate in the Swiss Canton of Bern prior to 1800”). The essay is marred by the misuse of economic data. He uses eighteenth century data to calculate the percentage change in prices within localities and to assess relative scarcity among localities. For example, if the price of grain rose by 60 percent in London and 300 percent in Lwow, the difference is indicative of greater scarcity in Lwow relative to London. But if Lwow is an inland area (true) with high-transport costs (true) then it could be indicative of either scarcity in Lwow or scarcity elsewhere. Imagine that the price of transport is so high that in normal times Lwow is not an exporter of grain even though its prices are very low compared to the export markets of London and Amsterdam; the low prices are not sufficiently low enough to compensate for the high transport costs given the “normal” price of grain in the export markets. If the price of grain outside of Lwow rises sufficiently beyond the threshold where it becomes profitable to export grain (the additional price compensating the high transport costs) from Lwow, the price in Lwow will rise penny for penny with the market (non-Lwow) price. Whether this was the case, I do not know; however if it is not true, then were there grain imports into Lwow? If there were no grain imports into Lwow, what is the explanation? Regardless Pfister should be wary of criticizing Robert Fogel for “questionable statistical manipulation” (204) and completely rejecting the claims that famines are man-made catastrophes. Appealing to authority is not a strong argument, but when Nobel Laureates and other eminent economists claim (with evidence) that famines are typically not the result of natural phenomena, it would be wise to tread cautiously. Pfister has one citation (204) to buttress his case against Fogel, and Karl Gunnar Persson (and by extension Amartya Sen). More modesty in the presentation of his hypothesis and less hubris in his claims would avoid potential embarrassments.

The essays I have mentioned are outliers because they are acceptable scholarly exercises; the other essays are not. The worst that this book has to offer is that by Dennis L. Meadows (“Evaluating Past Forecasts: Reflections on One Critique of The Limits to Growth“). This essay is an extended attack on a book review of The Limits to Growth that appeared in the New York Times on April 2, 1972. What can we say about an author placing in a collected volume an essay that is devoted to attacking reviewers thirty-five years after the review? Well self-indulgent, monomaniacal and bizarre are some adjectives that come to mind. Meadows’ main complaint of the review is that the authors (P. Passel et al.) did not read his book. To ascertain the truth of his complaint I dutifully read the original review, and then checked out The Limits to Growth. I cannot say whether Meadows’ claim is correct, but I believe it may be because the book is truly unreadable. In Meadows’s (et al.) book there are charts of time series that have multiple simultaneous outcomes, impenetrable flow diagrams, numerous unquantified feed back effects, and, all-in all, the diagrams and prose are impenetrable. The passage of time has not been kind to The Limits to Growth ? literally, empirically, and figuratively. In the distant future, given past behavior, there is a non-trivial probability that Meadows will savage me for these comments; so be it.

I will stop my comments on the individual essays following parental injunctions about not saying anything if unable to say anything nice. The basic problem with the remainder of the essays and the book itself is captured in its title: “Sustainability or Collapse?” The hubris evident in the title infects the remaining essays. They are typically self-indulgent, jargon-ridden, confused and confusing, replete with self-citations, and dogma. The dichotomy in the title is false; it is supported by neither science nor history. Entropy is continually reducing complexity to uniformity. To maintain civilization (complexity) humans have to utilize dense packets of energy to offset entropy. What is “sustainable” is a function of how effectively humanity can discover and manipulate the resources available to combat entropy. What is “sustainable” now, was not sustainable two centuries ago. There is a possibility that humanity’s ability to find new and more productive ways to manipulate the material world will cease in the near future, but that possibility is dwarfed by the chance that the Earth will be negatively affected by an asteroid, and that is a remote, albeit real, possibility. Inherent in any prediction of “collapse” are necessary corollary predictions on the basic limits to human knowledge. There will be no fusion, fission energy will remain costly and politically difficult, nanotechnology will be fruitless, genetic engineering will never produce organisms that reduce the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, and so on, and on. I suspect that most predictions that today’s futurologists make about future technology will prove to have been overly modest given what we have seen happen to humanity’s knowledge and control of the material world over the past quarter century. So, when we talk about “sustainability,” what level of technology are we specifying and what margin of error is “reasonable” for that specification? These questions are not considered.

With the exceptions noted, the essays in the volume are also innocent of economic principles. Considerations of costs and benefits are tertiary; what discount rate to apply to future cost/benefits is of no concern. Critics of catastrophic environmentalism are completely ignored. The majority of the essays contained in this volume are simply normative exercises in du jour environmentalism. If you are a believer and want to reinforce the faith, read it; but if you want a serious discussion of the issues, by and large, it is to be avoided.

Philip R. P. Coelho is Professor of Economics at Ball State University. His current research is on the effects of morbid diseases on economic productivity, and economic methodology and ethics.

Published by EH.NET (June 2007)

Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. xi + 471 pp. $50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-262-08342-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Drew Keeling, Department of History, University of Zurich.

For decades, scholars of modern cross-border migration and its history have noted the desirability of broad comparative perspectives, as frameworks for more numerous studies of particular locales and ethnicities. In recent years, economists have led development of a “big picture” approach to the history of international migration, and Jeffrey Williamson and Timothy Hatton have been at the forefront of those economists.

Global Migration and the World Economy, the latest and most exhaustive joint study of this duo, builds on their prior work together and independently, but also breaks important new ground. For instance, most of this new book is not duplicated either in their Age of Mass Migration (1998) or in Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke’s collaboration, Globalization and History (1999).

The book is divided into four sections by time period: the nineteenth century rise of global migration, the early twentieth century fall, the late twentieth century “rise again,” and a final section examining contemporary migration trends and future alternatives. Ten of eighteen chapters concern the period since 1914, and among the book’s strengths are its many insightful comparisons between the post World War II period and the “first global century” that ended with World War I.

Using an impressive combination of original theory, statistics, and logic, and incorporating a broad array of findings from other scholars, the authors dissect the economic fundamentals underlying international mass migration. They deploy their multi-pronged analysis across the vicissitudes of the modern migratory age: through shifts in origin countries, the transformation from industry to services in destination country economies, the growing importance of asylum-seeking and illegal migration, and the emergence of policy regimes that have become more restrictive, more sophisticated, and more difficult to effectively administer. A solid historical perspective informs a thorough examination of contemporary issues: from the importance and limitations of immigration regulations in shaping the magnitudes and character of migration, to democratic disconnections between public opinion and public policies on migration, to the complex offsets and feedbacks between education and mobility, skilled and unskilled labor, and the “brain drain” and remittances. Global Migration and the World Economy is chock full of precise and salient questions, and takes at least a stab at most of them, although it is often a challenge for the reader to keep track of which among a shifting multitude of open issues is being addressed, or where it has already been addressed.

A tour de force summation of economic history literature on migration will make this an excellent reference source for future researchers. The coverage is particularly thorough on recent publications, through about 2004, which lends this volume an impressive “cutting edge” character, but also makes its conclusions tentative in a number of places. This suggests the possibility of an eventual second edition, which would also provide an opportunity to correct ambiguities in a few of the otherwise generally helpful “supply and demand” graphs or “box diagrams” and to redress overstatements such as “the labor market effect of immigration has always been the key focus in debate over immigration policy.” That remark, on page 289, is difficult to reconcile with the finding, on page 359, that “prejudice against those of a different race and culture is the most important influence on attitudes towards immigrants.”

The topical coverage is very wide, although less so than the title might suggest. Migration’s overlaps with international trade are treated more extensively, for instance, than its impacts on economic growth or its interactions with demographic and environmental factors. A more functionally descriptive title might be “the economic causes and consequences of global migration since 1815,” and in that important category this significant book has few peers, if any.

While an impressive work overall, some parts of Global Migration are problematic. The authors appropriately stress the importance of labor markets, which have been underappreciated in most of the migration historiography, but apply an incomplete corrective. They say little about labor demand, stressing labor supply instead, and attributing even more significance to factors exogenous to labor markets (such as travel costs, famines, wars, and government policies). At the core of their historical explanation for “what drove migration” is a model in which potential migrants in poorer countries are stuck in a “poverty trap” until they can find a way to “escape” it, with the help of higher wages, government subsidies, foreign remittances or lower ticket prices. Undoubtedly, relocation costs have always been a consideration in long-distance cross-border migration decisions, and were, in general, a more serious constraint the further back in time one looks, but the Hatton and Williamson model imputes to them a centrality beyond that established by their data. Rising wages across the nineteenth-century Atlantic basin lowered the real costs of travel, new travel technologies reduced travel times, the sources of Europe’s overseas emigrants shifted southward and eastward to regions more remote from New World destinations, and there was a long term secular shift towards lower average labor market “skills” amongst transatlantic migrants. All of this is consistent with a declining cost barrier to migration. But how big a role did that barrier play to begin with, at the outset of the “first global century,” e. g. circa 1830? The truth is, no one seems to really know for sure yet, including Hatton and Williamson. There is no model here explicitly assessing the relative importance of factors, including travel affordability, which distinguished stayers from leavers, there is no clear distinction between wanting to migrate and being able to migrate, and the cost data presented are quite incomplete.

The authors’ claim that “during the great transition from trickle to flood, it was the decline in steerage rates and in the time in passage that mattered most,” but there are at least two problems with this theory as they present it. Firstly, most nineteenth century overseas migrants left from Europe, most of those European emigrants moved to the United States, and the all-time peak in U.S. immigration relative to population was in the early 1850s, a time when very few migrants yet reached America on the steamships which cut oceanic travel times by two thirds or more. Steamships did not take more steerage passengers to the U.S. than sailing ships until 1865. Secondly, the supporting passage cost data presented in Global Migration do not include most available sources of such figures, such as the fares compiled by Kristian Hvidt (1971) or Arnold Kludas (1986) showing an increase in North Atlantic transit fares after 1900 that coincides with an even sharper rise to the second highest all-time peak in the U.S. immigration rate.

Hatton and Williamson deal authoritatively with the expected net benefits of migration, but have little to say about how the variance and uncertainties of such net benefits also have been important to voluntary international migrants. Uncertainties and fears ? of mass amnesty, or of millions forced to live outside the law ? have played a role in recent U.S. immigration policy debates. Long-distance transnational migration itself has long and rightly been regarded as a great gamble. Smuggled migrants crossing Arizona’s deserts or the waters between Africa and Europe clearly confront substantial risks. Risk considerations have been convincingly suggested as contributing factors to past mass migration trends, such as the record high rate of Irish emigration in the early 1850s, for example, or the strong and persistent drop in German emigration after 1890. The causal role of pitfalls and anxieties, about leaving or staying or both, receive little attention in this book, however.

The discussion on pre-World War I economic “convergence” between immigrant-sending and immigrant-receiving countries is not entirely clear-cut. Williamson’s path-breaking international real wage comparison data set, gathered in the early 1990s and focused on 1870-1913, apparently still lacks coverage of two immigrant source countries which were major contributors to the massive migration “peak” of 1900-1913, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Many of the convergence examples actually cited, moreover, are comparisons within Europe rather than between Europe and the New World. This important distinction is often blurred.

The authors nonetheless do make a persuasive case (for the nineteenth century and today) that chain migration, demographic transitions, travel costs relative to source incomes, and government policies are more significant than wage gaps in “driving” migration, but that international labor market migration, if sufficiently massive, has generally reduced global economic inequality between poor and rich countries. This migration-induced convergence has tended to come at the cost of rising inequality within richer destination countries, however. Subject to some notable distinctions and qualifications, the authors also reach similar conclusions regarding “south-to-south” migration, e.g. movement between less-developed countries.

The chapter on the early twentieth century “backlash” against immigration suffers from a conflation of attitudes and intentions (on the one hand) with effective policies (on the other). Based on a model quantifying “policy stance” rather than “policy impact,” Global Migration plausibly indicates that “labor market fundamentals,” e.g. the negative effect of immigration on wages of the native-born were, after all, more important than xenophobia or racism in producing a gradual shift in favor of restricting European migration to the New World by the early twentieth century. Contrary to the assertions in this chapter, however, (although not the immediately following chapter on the impacts of the” backlash”) the decade 1915-24 saw dramatic changes in the policies actually adopted in the U.S., the destination of most transatlantic migrants in the century before World War I.

On the eve of that war, gradually increasing exclusion of limited categories of arriving Europeans had raised the debarment rate at U.S. entry ports to a still near negligible 2%. During the war, in contrast, U.S. immigration dropped by over 75%. The 1920s quota laws which soon followed were explicitly and successfully designed to eliminate most of the influx from Southern and Eastern Europe which had accounted for a large majority of the 15 million American immigrants of 1894-1914. As the authors rightly observe, American immigration quotas were largely redundant during the Great Depression and World War II, but nonetheless did have major restrictive effects in the 1920s and 1950s. The shifting constellations of political party strategies and interest groups which enabled significant fulfillment of growing popular sentiment against immigration to the U.S. by the 1920s, but not before, was chronicled in John Higham’s Strangers in the Land half a century ago. It remains a useful study still today, but is not mentioned in Global Migration. The counterfactual question of whether ? absent the world wars, the 1930s depression, and the U.S. quotas ? immigration from Europe might have dwindled anyway after 1920, is one of many examples of provocative and interesting issues raised by the book, but not resolved, due to unavoidable space limitations.

Hatton and Williamson do not, however, duck complicated and controversial concerns about labor migration negatively affecting native employment and wage levels. In several different historical contexts, they unravel the often indirect ways this occurs (such as inflows of foreigners helping to stimulate regional relocations of natives). Nonetheless, the authors also make a convincing case that the net overall effect of cross-border migration has tended to be economically beneficial: not just for migrants but also for the countries they move out of and into.

The potential receptivity of contemporary policymakers and opinion-shapers to these judicious conclusions is another matter. The authors’ stated desire to reach that set of audiences might have been more effectively served had there been a bit more attention devoted to how labor migrants import language, culture, ideas, and so forth, along with their job skills. Migrants come for work, but then often also become neighbors, taxpayers, users of public services, parents of school children, citizens and voters, and these developments, in turn, have economic impacts well beyond the fiscal impacts (which are treated authoritatively here). The cogent final section, on contemporary policy issues, has much to recommend it, but it is questionable how much of the preceding 340 pages policy formulators might read en route to it. Complex historical insights and practical politics do not mix easily in any case, however.

A more avoidable shortcoming is the relative absence of questions addressed by migration historians. This book is loaded with material casting doubt upon non-economic historians’ often implicit assumptions that narrow slices of the migration picture suffice to illuminate the whole. But, the argument for the big picture rather than the narrow case study is never quite engaged.

Scholarship from outside of economic history but addressing migration history broadly is also given little weight. One cannot expect a book of this scope to cover all bases, but not mentioning Markus Hansen, Philip Taylor or Daniel Tichenor, for example, somewhere in four hundred pages suggests a lost opportunity. Dirk Hoerder’s nine hundred page Cultures in Contact, published in 2002, has several references to Wallerstein, but none to Williamson, or Hatton. Global Migration and the World Economy talks at some length about Heckscher, but makes no mention of Hoerder. This divergence of History and Economics is undoubtedly yielding gains from specialization, but also implies unrealized potential gains from trade. A better appreciation of the inherently interdisciplinary and historical nature of this deeply personal and interpersonal, psychological, cultural, and even biological phenomenon would enrich models and analyses built around economic aggregates. A firmer and more nuanced understanding of migration’s economic fundamentals, and a greater awareness of their central role, would enhance historians’ investigations of international human relocation.

Historians should read Global Migration and the World Economy, because sooner or later, they are likely to be called upon to more directly confront some of the crucial issues it raises. An interconnected world of demographic challenges, resource limitations and increasing climate disruptions, for example, is going to be a world where cross-border mass migration will be about much more than ethnic identities, culturally diffusing diasporas, or even elegantly contingent narratives. Even if ? as Hatton and Williamson realistically conclude ? the historical record offers no “easy solutions to the world migration problems” of the near future, it seems a reasonably safe bet that coming global migration challenges, whatever else they do, will also stoke desires for geographically broad historical insights.

Notwithstanding its unevenness, and sometimes overstated conclusions, the sweep and incisive power of this book make it likely to remain a point of reference for years to come. It will probably receive more attention within the fields of economics and economic history than outside of them, but the long run prospects for interdisciplinary “convergence” on the causes and effects of global migration are improved by this ambitious and far-reaching scholarly contribution.

Drew Keeling received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and is now an instructor in the History Department at the University of Zurich. His dissertation, “The Business of Transatlantic Migration between Europe and the USA, 1900-1914” was awarded the 2005 Gerschenkron Prize of the Economic History Association. Two related publications are forthcoming later this year: “Costs, Risks, and Migration Networks between Europe and the United States, 1900-1914,” in Research in Maritime History, and “Transport Capacity Management and Transatlantic Migration, 1900-1914,” in Research in Economic History.

Published by EH.NET (March 2007)

Edith Sparks, Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 329 pp. $20 (paperback), ISBN: 0-8078-5775-0.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Pamela J. Nickless, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina-Asheville.

In all likelihood, everyone reading this book review is the customer of a small proprietor. Particularly in largish cities, small proprietors abound ? coffee carts, lunch carts, neighborhood groceries, alteration shops, nail shops, hairdressers and barbers. Edith Sparks’ Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors on San Francisco, 1850-1920 begins her story by reminding us of the small businesses serving our daily needs. As she points out, when we notice the women, men and families who run these small, often tiny, businesses it is as human interest stories not as businesspeople. It is her contention that female proprietors in San Francisco’s past were also quite common and overlooked.

Sparks’ work joins a growing body of literature on nineteenth and early twentieth century businesswomen. Like Gamber, Lewis and others [1], she uses the R. G. Dun and Company records, city directories, the published census and newspapers to seek out information on women running businesses. She has also laboriously collected information from the Bankruptcy Case Files for northern California for 96 businesswomen who declared bankruptcy. The information from these records includes a wealth of details including information about creditors, inventories, amount of debt and occasionally testimony from court cases. Anyone who has worked with archival data that is not indexed will appreciate the amount of time and frustration involved. Consequently, the best part of this work is the chapters on women as financial managers and women whose businesses failed.

Sparks frames her analysis with the assertion that women proprietors had “capital intentions.” By this she means that while females in business were usually providing services that were within the domestic sphere, they had made a commercial decision in choosing what services or goods to offer. They intended to profit and they intended to provide a marketable commodity. For most women, this was a good or service that was “domestic” in nature. San Francisco in the early days suffered a lack of women. Indeed, the gender imbalance in population was pronounced for most of this period. (The male/female ratio was 158/100 in 1860, declining to 117/100 in 1900.) This gave women an edge in the hospitality industry where a woman providing food or shelter was often seen as superior. Women in San Francisco would continue to work in this sector in proportions larger than other U. S. cities.

The text is organized thematically. The first chapter is an overview of San Francisco female proprietors. Using census data from six other U.S. cities, Sparks argues that San Francisco was unique in some respects such as the ethnic make-up of women proprietors. In other respects, such as the concentration of women in jobs considered feminine, the city was similar. Like other cities, the number of female (and male) small proprietors declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sparks finds that in San Francisco the new opportunities for women in clerical work as well as the competition from name-brands and large retailers explain this decline.

Each succeeding chapter looks at an element of women’s businesses: why women went into business, how women went into business, how they attracted customers and finally, women as financial managers and women who failed. The thematic approach is at first distracting, each chapter seems to repeat gold rush stories, but the last three chapters are quite good and make use of a small database effectively.

In particular, Sparks has collected information from the R. G. Dun and Company records on a comparable group of San Francisco businessmen and is able to compare women and men. She finds that the experiences of men and women who ran small businesses were not all that different. Her discussion is interesting and nuanced bringing into sharp relief what is one of the core problems in studying women (or men) who run small enterprises.[2] To put it simply, what do we mean by being “in business?” Is the owner of a tiny enterprise using entirely her own labor and her own money “in business?” What is the distinction between self-employment and running a business? Are both terms too grand for women who are working every waking hour at sewing (or baking or cleaning or performing any of the myriad tasks of their business)? Many of the women and men Sparks examines were in business because it was the only way they could earn a living. Particularly for women with domestic responsibilities, a small business that could be run at home (or in the case of a boarding house is home) had obvious attractions. Without other opportunities and access to education and training, a business may be a last resort.

The bankruptcy records, where Sparks’s data are for women only, also highlight the problems for small business owners where illness, fire, recession or earthquake could bring down the house of cards. The bankruptcy records cover the years 1872-1920 (not inclusive) and the experience of the female proprietors seems to echo that of their male counterparts. Nothing is as certain as failure for small businesses. When combined with the Dun records, it seems clear that both men and women who failed often tried again. Sparks argues that some persevered out of gumption or tenacity; others simply had no alternative but to try again. The bankruptcy records also highlight the challenges women faced as the financial management of a business became more complex. It is likely that with the exception of some ethnic groups women were less educated than men in financial matters.

This is a fine study and a nice addition to the continuing work on female proprietors. The bankruptcy records provide the first substantive information on women as financial managers and Sparks’s use of the Dun records to study both women and men in San Francisco is intriguing. I wish she had collected a more inclusive sample of San Francisco businessmen but time is short and the Dun records do not readily lend themselves to scientific sampling. I also found myself wondering if we could learn about the typical by studying the atypical bankrupt business. But with female proprietors the variety is so great; it is hard to know what is typical. In short, those who are interested in the history of small business in the U.S. should read this book.

Notes:

1. See Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1997) and Susan Ingalls Lewis, “Women in the Market Place: Female Entrepreneurship, Business Patterns, and Working Families in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885,” Ph.D dissertation, SUNY Binghamton, 2002.

2. On this point see Susan Ingalls Lewis, “Business or Labor? Blurred Boundaries in the Careers of Self-Employed Needlewomen in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany” in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Harris, (Ashgate, 2005).

Pamela J. Nickless recently published “Scarlett’s Sisters: Spinsters, Widows, Wives, and Free-Traders in Nineteenth Century North Carolina,” Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Beth Harris (Ashgate, 2005) and has recently started a study on nineteenth-century female proprietors in Charleston, SC.

Published by EH.NET (March 2007)

James P. Huzel, The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. xv + 266 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-7546-5427-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by David M. Levy, Department of Economics, George Mason University and Sandra J. Peart, Department of Economics, Baldwin-Wallace College.

Introduction

James Huzel characterizes his research reported in this marvelous book as a continuation of that found in two reevaluations of T. R. Malthus’s ideas, Donald Winch’s Poverty and Riches (1996) and Samuel Hollander’s The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (1997). While Winch locates Malthus’s arguments in the larger intellectual discussion and Hollander tackles of question of Malthus’s coherence as an economic theorist, Huzel explores the popular controversy over Malthus and that most malthusian act of legislation, the 1834 New Poor Law which conditioned poor relief with sumptuary controls.

Huzel argues that Malthus is the moving spirit in replacing the “moral economy” with the market economy. If the Old Poor Law, which conferred a right to public assistance in cases of distress, is the paradigm of the moral economy, then the New Poor Law is one of policy visualized as exchange (Levy and Peart, 2005). Huzel, conscious of the need to guard against interested misrepresentations, as well as some of Malthus’s self-inflicted infelicities ? is moral restraint possible? ? begins by providing an overview of Malthus’s thought and influence. He pays a good deal of attention to Malthus’s development over the editions of Population and Political Economy. The chapter titles suggest what each of them contains: Harriet Martineau: The Female Malthusian?; Cobbett against the Parson; The Radical Working Class Press against the Malthusian Crew. Pages 197-218 of the “Radical Working Class” chapter focus on the pro-contraceptive movement, in particular, Francis Place and John Stuart Mill.

Huzel’s book will help the reader shake off the bane of all careful Malthusian scholarship ? the interpretation that reads “natural selection” back into Malthus by taking choice out of the marriage decision (Peart and Levy 2005a; Levy and Peart, 2006). Huzel calls attention (pp. 212-13) to a revealing paragraph that Malthus added to the 1817 edition in which he considers how the system of equality proposed by Robert Owen would affect the age of marriage. In a system of equality, everyone’s children are supported by everyone else. When people realize, as they will, that this creates an unsupportable increase in population they will come to realize that the assignment of individual responsibility is preferable. We quote the entire paragraph:

Let us suppose that in a system of equality, in spite of the best exertions to procure more food, the population is pressing hard against the limits of subsistence, and all are becoming very poor. It is evidently necessary under these circumstances, in order to prevent the society from starving, that the rate at which the population increases should be retarded. But who are the persons that are to exercise the restraint thus called for, and either to marry late or not at all? It does not seem to be a necessary consequence of a system of equality that all the human passions should be at once extinguished by it; but if not, those who might wish to marry would feel it hard that they should be among the number forced to restrain their inclinations. As all would be equal, and in similar circumstances, there would be no reason whatever why one individual should think himself obliged to practise the duty of restraint more than another. The thing however must be done, with any hope of avoiding universal misery; and in a state of equality, the necessary restraint could only be effected by some general law. But how is this law to be supported, and how are the violations of it to be punished? Is the man who marries early to be pointed at with the finger of scorn? is he to be whipped at the cart’s tail? is he to be confined for years in a prison? is he to have his children exposed? Are not all direct punishments for an offence of this kind shocking and unnatural to the last degree? And yet, if it be absolutely necessary, in order to prevent the most overwhelming wretchedness, that there should be some restraint on the tendency to early marriages, when the resources of the country are only sufficient to support a slow rate of increase, can the most fertile imagination conceive one at once so natural, so just, so consonant to the laws of God and to the best laws framed by the most enlightened men, as that each individual should be responsible for the maintenance of his own children; that is, that he should be subjected to the natural inconveniences and difficulties arising from the indulgence of his inclinations, and to no other whatever? (1826, III III ? 16 One of the nicest features of Huzel’s book is that he emphasizes the extraordinarily personal nature of the attacks on those who followed Malthus. For instance, Harriet Martineau’s contemporary critics made her out to be masculine (pp. 78-89). Huzel asks: why her and not Jane Marcet, a Malthusian of a decade earlier? His answer is that Martineau’s deep radicalism, her support of the New Poor Law, her anti-slavery, her anti-monopoly positions all threatened many dimensions of hierarchy. Three decades later, another opponent of hierarchy, John Stuart Mill (who plays a minor role in Huzel’s account) was shown in feminine attire by his opponents (Peart and Levy, 2007).

Market Economics v. Moral Economy

Huzel’s prefatory comments about the replacement of the moral economy by the market economy deserve further exploration. As economists we know a good deal about the market economy. Consider marriage. In the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith explains how higher wages in America encourage earlier marriage in American than in Europe (1776, I 8 ? 23). In the next sentence he remarks that: “A young widow with four or five young children, who, among the middling or inferior ranks of people in Europe, would have so little chance for a second husband, is there frequently courted as a sort of fortune.” Early marriages leads to large families and to a population growing at a rate which doubles every twenty-years (1776, I 8 ? 23). What makes Smith’s economics of population so remarkable is that it is purely a matter of contracting agents who accept the responsibility for supporting their children.

A moral economy seems to be linked instead by non-contractual obligations. This is certainly how the moral economy is defended by William Cobbett (Huzel, pp. 126-49). The imperative that Smith evades but Malthus confronts is that marriage supports chastity, i.e., sexual relationship inside and only inside marriage (Levy, 1978 and 1999). Individuals who follow moral imperatives in spite of material interest, e.g., marrying early to preserve chastity, create an obligation on the part of society for support in case of distress.

We propose to focus on the attacks on two of Huzel’s subjects, Martineau and Place, published in the 1830s in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country. Fraser’s is remembered both as the first important Victorian periodical to publish portraits of literary celebrities (Bates 1874, 1883; Houghton 1972, p. 305; Fisher, 2006) and as the periodical most associated with the literary, “progressive conservative,” opposition to political economy (Thrall, 1934, pp. 147-58). “Progressive conservatism” catches the fact that the debate between market economy and moral economy is not carried out along a single dimension. The greatest of “progressive conservative” thinkers, Thomas Carlyle, who had been associated with Fraser’s from its first issue in February 1830, chose to publish his defense of slavery, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” in the December 1849 issue. Carlyle exemplified the tendency to slide between justifying following moral imperatives and justifying following the commands of superiors (Peart and Levy, 2005).

Fraser’s does not get much attention in Huzel’s book. He discusses the Fraser’s review of Martineau’s Malthusian novel briefly (p. 76), but passes over the Daniel Maclise portrait of Martineau accompanied by William Maginn’s abuse at Martineau (Maginn and Maclise, 1833; Bates, 1874, pp. 114-16; Bates, 1883, pp. 206-12). Consider a controversy between market economists and moral economists, those who hold exchange as central against those who take obligation to as central. How will the dispute be conducted? From the point of view of the market economists, the moralist economists are not doing their calculations incorrectly. Controversy is largely a matter of reworking arguments in different words. From the point of view of the moral economists, because the market economists are denying all but contractual obligations, there is something wrong with them. Bad calculations on one side; bad people on the other side. Considerations of scarcity are critical in the Malthusian debates (Waterman, 1991). Scarcity is a fact for market economists, it is a failing for the moral economists because it is seen as evidence that someone wants what they should not want.

How do you show that people are bad? Gossip, caricature. That brings us back to Fraser’s. Malthus’s recommendation to deal with scarcity by delaying marriage until one could reasonably expect to support the consequent children, the “preventive check,” was the center of things. The 1832 review of Harriet Martineau’s novels, attributed to Fraser’s editor William Maginn, reflected the radicalism of the proposal to delay marriage:

Morality and marriage must ever subsist in a state in correlative proportions. To decrease the prevalence of marriage is to increase the prevalence of immorality. This the whole experience of mankind informs us. …. But we will allow the existence, to a limited extent, of this falsely-called “moral restraint,” in London; ? and there we immediately find its necessary concomitant; to wit, about 30,000 prostitutes (1832, p. 413).

The review closed scandalized by the fact that a young woman wrote against marriage.

A Maclise portrait of Martineau appeared the next year. Words attributed to Maginn which accompany Maclise’s portrait claim that by looking at her picture, one can see why she is a Malthusian.

doubtless, one of the first works the literary antiquary of future centuries will consult must be Fraser’s Magazine, by the delineation of her countenance, figure, posture, and occupation, which will be found on the opposite plate. He will readily agree with us, after proper inspection, that it no great wonder that the lady should be pro-Malthusian; and that not even the Irish beau, suggested to her by a Tory songster, is likely to attempt the seduction of the fair philosopher from the doctrines of no-population (Maginn and Maclise, 1833, p.576; Bates, 1874, p. 114).

Scholars who have studied the Maclise image suggest that Martineau is rendered masculine in the picture (Fisher, 2006, pp. 120-23). Other evidence of a masculinization of Martineau is given by Huzel (pp. 74-78).

See: http://eh.net/graphics/bookreviews/harriet.martineau.png

The attack on Martineau is so ugly that it puzzles latter-day friends of Fraser’s. Thrall (1934, p. 311) calls this “one of the most contemptible attacks in the magazine.” Earlier, Bates (1883, p. 211) uses “ungallant” defending Fraser’s only relative to the Quarterly’s “coarse and ungenerous” allegation that Martineau proposed contraception. That is a lie (Huzel, p. 75).

Ugly needs to seen in context. Malthus and Martineau accepted the religious universe which carried the imperatives that underlay the moral economy. Francis Place did not. This is how Maginn’s commentary in Fraser’s on the Maclise portrait of Place begins:

The hero was found, we believe, in a dust-pan, upon the steps of a house in St. James’s Place, about sixty years back, by an honest Charlie. Who forthwith conveyed him to the next workhouse, where (for those were unenlightened times) the little stranger was kindly take care of. He was christened Francis, that being the surname of his wet-nurse; while, in lieu of patronymie, they gave him Place, as a memorial of the locality where he had been discovered. Such were the bulrushes out of which Westminster drew the future Moses of the Preventive Check, — a philosophical decalogue well worthy to supersede the first, which it so boldly contracts in the absurd article about murder.

The Mount Sinai of the new lawgiver …. Place has erected his grand Mill-dam, for the salutary purpose of asserting this same tide … (Maginn 1836, p. 427).

See: http://eh.net/graphics/bookreviews/francis.place.png

Houghton’s judgment in the Wellesley Index is that save for the clever contraceptive reference to a certain J (J.S.?) Mill, this is a tissue of lies (Houghton, 1972, p. 306). He is puzzled ? “an anti-Semitic slur?” ? since the references to the Hebrew Scriptures are rather unsubtle but Place was not Jewish.

Huzel (p. 87) asks why the gender attacks on Martineau and not on Jane Marcet? One answer is that the New Poor Law was a viable threat to the moral economy. If Malthus is the arch-enemy of the moral economy, then it is important that the idea behind the New Poor Law can be found in the first edition of Malthus’s Population:

Lastly, for cases of extreme distress, county workhouses might be established, supported by rates upon the whole kingdom, and free for persons of all counties, and indeed of all nations. The fare should be hard, and those that were able obliged to work. It would be desirable that they should not be considered as comfortable asylums in all difficulties; but merely as places where severe distress might find some alleviation. A part of these houses might be separated, or others built for a most beneficial purpose, which has not been infrequently taken notice of, that of providing a place, where any person, whether native or foreigner, might do a day’s work at all times and receive the market price for it. Many cases would undoubtedly be left for the exertion of individual benevolence (1798, 5 ? 25).

Nassau Senior’s study of international experience verified this early intuition.

But in all the countries which we have been considering, except the Canton de Berne and perhaps Denmark, the great object of pauper legislation, that of rendering the situation of the pauper less agreeable than that of the independent labourer, has been effectually attained (Senior, 1835, 88).

Conclusion

Huzel’s valuable study brings to light with enormous care the early nineteenth century disputes between adherents of the moral economy and the market economy. When we reflect upon the present debates about the global economy, markets and culture, we may ask whether we have ever settled the issues. We suspect not.

References:

Bates, William. [1874]. A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters (1830-1838) Drawn by the Late Daniel Maclise, R.A. and Accompanied by Notices Chiefly by the Late William Maginn, LL.D. London: Chatto and Windus.

Bates, William. 1883. The Maclise Portrait-Gallery of “Illustrious Literary Characters” with Memoirs Biographical, Critical, Bibliographical & Anecdotal Illustrative of the Literature of the Former Half of the Present Century. London: Chatto and Windus.

Fisher, Judith L. 2006. “‘In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial’: Fraser’s ‘Portraits’ and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, ‘Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age.'” Victorian Periodicals Review 39: 97-135.

Houghton, Walter E. 1972. “Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country: 1830-1882.” The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 303-521.

Levy, David M. 1978. “Some Normative Aspects of the Malthusian Controversy.” History of Political Economy 10: 271-85.

Levy, David M. 1999. “Christianity or Malthusianism: The Invisibility of a Successful Radicalism.” Historical Reflections/R?flexions Historiques 25: 61-93.

Levy, David M. and Sandra J. Peart. 2005 “The Theory of Economic Policy in British Classical Political Economy: A Sympathetic Reading.” History of Political Economy 37 Supplement: The Role of Government in the History of Economic Thought (2005): 120-42.

Levy, David M. and Sandra J. Peart. 2006. “Charles Kingsley and the Theological Interpretation of Natural Selection.” Journal of Bioeconomics. 8: 197-218.

Malthus, T. R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson. http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html

Malthus, T. R. 1826. An Essay on the Principle of Population: A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which It Occasions. London: John Murray. Sixth edition. http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html

[Maginn, William.] 1832. “National Economy. No. III. Miss Martineau’s Cousin Marshall ? The Preventive Check.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 6: 403-13.

[Maginn, William and Daniel Maclise] 1833. “Gallery of Literary Character. No. 42. Miss Harriet Martineau.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 8: 576.

[Maginn, William and Daniel Maclise.] 1836. “Gallery of Literary Character. No. 71. Mr. Francis Place, Esq.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 13:427.

Peart, Sandra J. and David M. Levy. 2005a. “Happiness, Progress and ‘the Vanity of the Philosopher.” http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/PeartLevymalthus.html

Peart, Sandra J. and David M. Levy. 2005b. The “Vanity of the Philosopher”: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Peart, Sandra J. and David M. Levy. 2007. “Economics in Cartoons.” Presented at the History of Economics Society / Allied Social Sciences Association. Chicago.

Senior, Nassau W. 1835. Statement of the Provision of the Poor. London: B. Fellows.

Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., ed. Edwin Cannan, 1904. Fifth edition. http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

Thrall, Miriam M. H. 1934. Rebellious Fraser’s, Nol Yorkes Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackeray and Carlyle. New York: Columbia University Press.

Waterman, A. M. C. 1991. Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy 1798-1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sandra Peart is Professor of Economics at Baldwin-Wallace College, President-Elect of the History of Economics Society and Co-Director of the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought. In August, she will become Dean of the Jepson School of Leadership at the University of Richmond.

David Levy is Professor of Economics and Research Associate of the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. He is Co-Director of the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought and a member of the History of Economics Society Executive.

Their “Vanity of the Philosopher”: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title this January. Their next book will be on the Economist in Cartoons.

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Published by EH.NET (May 2009)

Vincent Barnett and Joachim Zweynert, editors, Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. xviii + 198 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-6149-8

Reviewed for EH.NET by Warren J. Samuels, Department of Economics, Michigan State University.

?

This collection of neatly-defined and well-structured interpretive essays illustrates how written histories of economic thought can vary depending on several distinctions.? One distinction concerns whose thought a historian includes.? One can concentrate, following Mark Blaug, on what is understood to be economic theory, pursued by largely academic, professional economists, or, following Joseph Dorfman, also include non-academic, non-professional people.? A second distinction concerns the mutual impacts of the two mentalities on each other.? A third distinction has to do with the homogeneity or heterogeneity of each mentality.? A fourth distinction concerns the relation of the economic system, with its distinctive economic practice and system of social control, to the two mentalities.? No one of the resulting stories is necessarily correct, but one interpretation can be more accurate than another, though more than one interpretation can often relate to a particular situation.?

Accordingly, Russian economic thought of Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries oscillated between the doctrines of mercantilism and those of the Middle Ages.?? The ideas of some authors remained subordinated to religious, legal and political discourses, especially the vast fusion of state and church which tended to strictly limit the range of independent thinking.? Nonetheless, the principal topics were the system of land ownership, money and trade — with written texts dominated by religious discourse and political practice influenced by mercantilist concepts.

The eighteenth century manifested the conflict between the radical economic reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine II, on the one hand, and the continuing medieval social structure, on the other.? Liberal rhetoric was silenced by autocratic claims for enforcement of absolute power.? Later thinkers and statesmen helped to develop the system of finance and banking, unintentionally, one supposes, establishing some of the institutional foundations of the initial Russian industrial economy of the late nineteenth century.? Writers combined liberal ideas with a Hamiltonian state promoting economic modernization.? The targets were given by practice and the government.

Academic research and teaching was initially institutionalized in the early nineteenth century.? The teaching of political economy commenced in 1804; the first textbook in political economy published in Russia (written in French, six volumes, a compilation of Smith, Turgot, Say, et alia) appeared in 1815; and the first chair was established in 1819.? Some later academicians sought to articulate the ethical foundations of economics, some of them arriving at socialism, including Christian socialism.? Several essays serve to suggest that economics cannot be formulated independently of the concrete conditions of time and space, though that does not prevent differences of interpretation and formulation by scholars in any given time and place.? The point obviously applies to normative economics but also to positive economics.? But the story is more complex and lengthier.? Selig Perlman lectured that Marxism was (more or less surreptitiously) taught in the schools before 1917.? One school of interpreters argued that until the 1890s Russian economists largely followed, even imitated, Western economists.? Socialist ideas gained popularity first and foremost not economists among but the educated public.? In 1917 the October Revolution replaced one system of social control of belief and practice with another.? In 1927 the Communist Party line ostensibly changed from world revolution to socialism in one country coupled with praise for those early economists who had been close to Marxism and denigrated the Western non-Marxist imitators.? Within three years, the Soviet Union adopted collectivization, planning and industrialization. After 1991, Soviet economics was denigrated in favor of both pre-Soviet and especially, eventually, Western mainstream economics.? More recently, criticism of both the handling of transition to a market economy and the increasing influence of Western mainstream economics (imitation or transfer?) has emerged, along with discussion of a ?Russian school of economics.??

That is the overall account which emerges from the thirteen chapters written by twelve authors.? Each essay attempts to interpret the work of key individuals, issues or concepts of particular periods.?

Chapter 1, authored by the co-editors, is a nice six-page introduction and summary.? It is preceded by a very useful four-page ?timeline? of the major events of Russian history.?

Chapter 2, written by Danila Raskov, examines economic thought in Muscovy.?

Chapter 3 discusses the Russian version of the Enlightenment (Leonid Shirokorad).

Chapter 4 examines the ideas and contributions to institutional innovation of three reformers of the monetary system in the early nineteenth century (Alla Sheptun).?

Chapter 5 interprets what amounts to conflicts between different assertions of a ?natural order,? between rationalism and empiricism, between one or more conceptual models of the economy and one or more efforts at identifying the ?actual? economy, between German idealism and French rationalism, and between liberalism, socialism, the ideas of Friedrich List, German historicism, and conservative romanticism (Joachim Zweynert).?

Chapter 6 takes up the pursuit of an ?ethical? basis for political economy, namely, socialism, by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, and Christian socialism, by Sergei Bulgakov (Natalia Makasheva).?

Noting that the co-editors distinguish at this point between the pre- and post-1917 periods and the corresponding chapters, I move on to chapter 7, which deals with the ideas and status of A. V. Chayanov, but which also misses the opportunity to compare and contrast Chayanov and N. D. Kondratiev as agricultural economists (William Coleman and Anna Taitslin).?

Chapter 8 examines Russian ?migr? economists in the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, in Europe.? It helps explain the predominance of mathematical and statistical approaches to economics taken by those who escaped Hitler and Stalin which, along with the ideas and formulations of Austrian-school economists, eventually had a marked transformative impact on the mainstream of U.S. economics.? Among the Austrian-School ?migr?s were Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Gottfried Haberler, and Fritz Machlup.? Among the Russian ?migr?s were Simon Kuznets, Jacob Marschak, and W. W. Leontief (Vincent Barnett).?

Chapter 9 presents the lives and work of two Russian economists exiled in 1922, Boris Brutzkus and Sergei Prokopovich, the former a Russian Jew and economic liberal, the latter from a noble family but transformed by his investigation of West Siberian villages during the great famines of 1891-92.? The two men were later among the first students of the Soviet economy although having different careers and ideas as well as origins (Shuichi Kojima).?

Chapter 10 is on the debate in the U.S.S.R. during 1941-53 on the law of value, interpreted by the chapter?s author, Michael Kaser, to have been a serious blow to economics in the U.S.S.R., one administered by Stalin.? During 1956-1958, however, it began to be clear that ?a significant stage in the transition of Soviet economics from Marx to Marshall was complete? (p. 154).? The emergence of a relativist value theory (demand and supply theory of price) and the eclipse of an absolutist single-valued value theory (labor theory or marginal utility theory of value) came about for both political and economic reasons in both worlds.? In Europe and the United States, price theory came to be seen as both more empirically meaningful and more ideologically, i.e., politically, useful; in Russia during the period covered by Kaser, labor (the labor theory of value) was increasingly seen among economists as inadequate for planning purposes and was increasingly adversely but, writes Kaser (p. 151), not arbitrarily affected by political context.?

Chapter 11 identifies the years after Stalin?s death as, in effect, an amalgam of elements (Pekka Sutela).? It was a period of scientism, of varieties of Soviet economics, and of stages of economic reform.? The stages were: decentralization, market pricing, and incomplete transition to commodity and labor markets. The central topics of reform discussions were on enterprise self-management, and impersonal owners such as pension funds.? Not surprisingly, the authorities continued to be sensitive to anything resembling private property.

In the two-page chapter 12 the co-editors observe, first, ?that the progress of economic ideas in Russia was (and still is) inextricably connected to matters of economic policy and also to issues of governmental control? (p. 187).? They also urge recognition that ?recent developments in Russia … [include] a tendency [as in the past] toward the ?state capture? of key branches of the economy, increasing restrictions on political liberty, and a low conviction rate regarding serious crimes against persons critical of the Russian government such as journalists.? Even if no cases, so far, have been reported of economists being subject to direct political pressure, it does not take much imagination to conceive of such a case in the near future? (pp. 187-188).? The co-editors conclude with two points:? they do not believe that the mix of Western and native Russian ideas constitutes ?the existence of a ?Russian school? of economic thinking? (p. 188) in the same sense as is meant by such terms as ?Austrian school,?? ?Cambridge school,? or ?Chicago school.?? Second, they call attention to how little the economics of Marx, Engels and Lenin have been mentioned within this volume.? ?Russian economics had a long and distinguished history before 1917? and ?[Marx] was by no means a dominant figure in pre-revolutionary Russian political economy? (p. 188).

?_Economics in Russia_ can be recommended as a nicely designed and executed collection of essays which provides insight into a history of economic thought in some respects different from that of the West and in other respects rather similar.

The co-editors correctly point to the centrality of the issue of ?precisely what developmental path the country should take.?? They also note ?the extensive presence of ideology in the history of Russian economic thought? and (correctly) reject the argument that it is due to the features of a ?Russian character.? They suggest that in Russia the issue of development path has been heatedly controversial since the time of Peter the Great and claim that that ?might explain (in part) why economics was more strongly politicized [in Russia] than it was in many Western countries? (p. 2).??

The view that controversy over development path explains the greater politicization of economics would likely be shared by many, perhaps most, historians of economic thought.? The matter of development path is indeed a central issue of economic policy.? It did not, however, arise in Russia with Peter the Great.? The controversy between mercantilism and medievalism, in which mercantilism was the initial stage of capitalism, was about development path and preceded Peter the Great.

The key question, however, is whether differences in degree of politicization have existed, to be explained by controversy over development path.? I do not want to overdo the point but the question of degree of politicization is not only important in itself but it casts light on how decision making on and interpretation of economic policy should be handled by the historian of economic thought.

There has been no conclusive difference in degree of politicization; any such perception is a function of one?s normative selective prior assumptions. The question of development path has not been unique to Russia.? It has been, for example, central to policy debate in the United States.? I cite the conflict between Pilgrim religious fundamentalism and money-making (trade) as rival ways of life that arose in (more accurately, was brought from England to) the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early- and mid-seventeenth century.? The conflict continues to this day, in more complex forms and in different circumstances, most notably in presidential elections and the on-going formation of and conflict between secularism and religious fundamentalism.? One was not more politicized than the other.? Even if one or the other supporting group claims more than they actually want, expect or are willing to settle for, the approach to development path is at least expressed in terms of different discourses, each of which is political, whatever their content .

My view is based on several considerations, including:? (1) Acceptance of the underlying fact and importance of the legal foundations of the economy, and through it the normative elements in economic policy and the choice of the incidents of the development path.? Such acceptance only minimally relies on evidence founded on ideological doctrine.? It especially reflects my perception of universal pragmatic practice. (2) Such pragmatism not only accurately describes the United States (and, of course, elsewhere) but has been facilitated, protected, encouraged and, more subtly, taught by the First Amendment?s rejection of an establishment of religion and its protection of the freedom of speech and of the press, and the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, as well as through the use of various other clauses of the Constitution in the ?protection of property.? (I use that trope even though in other circumstances I would insist that property is property because it is protected and not that property is protected because it is property.) Pragmatism also accurately describes the jurisprudential processes through which the meaning of the Constitutional clauses and concepts themselves, e.g., property, are worked out.? (3) The relatively greater heavy-handedness of the state in Russia has been either more salient or more selectively perceived than in the United States, which may reflect either ?reality? or the greater effectiveness of relatively light-handed social control in the latter country or the relatively small percentages of its population which thinks seriously of the federal government, state government, local government, indeed all government, as fundamentally infringing on their freedom.? (By ?seriously,? I intend to be understood to mean something different from electoral and comparable rhetoric, but not necessarily requiring the ?litmus test? of an immediate willingness if not desire to resort to armed force in open rebellion.)? (4) The multiple meanings of ?politicization? is another factor.? It has been used to signify the introduction of politics (itself multiply defined) into areas of life in which it hitherto has been absent, to refer to institutions that are political (meaning having to do with decision making, or the exercise of power) by their very nature and/or to suggest that a decision has not been made on the respective merits of the relevant alternatives but in order to insinuate considerations of political-party advantage into the process. (5) Another factor is the eclipse or obfuscation of other possible paths by the success of the path actually ?chosen? and followed, perhaps as if that path was inevitable, say, due to the absolute nature of things.

It has been only (!) two to three hundred years since the eighteenth century, in which the values and policies of the Enlightenment first prospered, in which naturalism made major explicit inroads on supernaturalism, and in which society and its institutions were relatively widely seen to be a matter of policy and neither the natural nor the supernatural order of things.? Ideological and normative propositions, typically having a complex relation to power, are operative in the making and conduct of policy and the social reproduction or alteration of socioeconomic structure.? As for politicization, I know of no conclusive way in which a mediaeval or feudal structure and its world view can be conclusively shown to be more, or less, politicized than a mercantilist, capitalist or socialist/communist system. A change in power structure may (or may not) lead to a change of ideology that is typically more important than a change in power structure generated by a change in ideology.? My key point is that no one ideology is more politicized than another.

Consider, for example, the interpretations of the United States made in the 1930s and in 2009.? Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes were seen by many as socialists and antagonistic to capitalism whereas others saw the innovations of the New Deal as saving capitalism for the capitalists, or whomever.? The amply evident present-day situation pits President Barack Obama against the Republicans of the House of Representatives.? I suggest the following as a possibility — the Republicans understand that the President?s program is geared to support business (investment) in part through bail-outs, etc., helping selected types of business rather than supporting households, especially lower- and middle-class families.? The flow of spending can work, or not work, in different ways.? Consider that consumption spending, even if financed by home bailouts of some sort, may lead to an increase in the expected rate of profit of businesses and a fall in liquidity preference by various groups, including those engaged in real or portfolio investment, or increase the distraction of the working class from recognizing or even speculating that it is capitalism that President Obama is saving while more or less increasing the possibility of upward mobility by the children and grandchildren of the masses, which is what President Obama seems at least to desire. (The reader will recall that in their concluding chapter, Barnett and Zweynert note a tendency in Russia ?toward the ?state capture? of key branches of the economy? (p. 187). It would be ironic if the bailout and stimulus packages (notice the play of metaphors) (and, to a lesser but not insignificant degree, the imposition of moral and/or legal constraints on the remuneration of corporate executives) that have become (as of April 2009) the centerpiece of the Obama administration?s anti-depression policy represented an area of Galbraithian (or other) convergence between U.S. capitalism and Russian post-Soviet organization; and possibly even more ironic if the packages represented the capture of business(es) by government in place of or in addition to business capture of government agencies and branches.)

Assume the foregoing is a meaningful account.? Joseph Schumpeter pointed out the irony of a European labor party successful at the polls yet, instead of being able to introduce socialism (whatever that might have meant to them), they became the managers of a continuing, if somewhat revised, capitalism.? In the dialectic of politics it is sometimes, perhaps often, the continuing task of each party both to abet and to limit the other, for example, in Moscovy. Performing that task transcends the vagaries of ideological perception.

If investment increases (say. due to an increase in the expected rate of profit generated by a newly optimistic psychology), income will tend to increase, as will also consumption.? The reverse will also likely happen, i.e., a story of shocks coupled with either positive or negative multipliers.? One point is the multiplier account.? Another point is that, ceteris paribus, income can change as a result of a policy-induced change in either consumption (working, through the expected rate of profit, on investment) or investment (working, through the marginal propensity to save, on consumption). Each sequence is accompanied by its heroic account.? One group of voters applauds one; another resonates with the other. Those who invoke a one-sided view of the two processes narrow the possibilities permitted by economic theory.? But neither view is more ideological or more politicized than the other.? The same applies to tax versus subsidy externality policies.

Religious people who are successful in life in their own mind, may tend to dispose of their discretionary income in a trade-expanding way; similarly, people engaged in trade who are successful may act in a religion-enhancing way.? Neither practice is more ideological or more politicized than the other.

Apropos, therefore, of this and other books, on the Russia of Moscovy, policy might have reflected Eastern Orthodoxy or mercantilism or both, but be interpreted as the opposite.? I submit, first, that any story told about the different pieces of Russian history, like that of the U.S., could stress one side or the other, yet the evidence remain incapable of conclusive affirmation of either side.? I submit, second, that neither Eastern Orthodoxy nor mercantilism is more ideological or more politicized than the other.? I submit, third, that any one-sided choice of a story is a function of sentiment or ideological position coupled with a desire to have a seemingly absolute account whose value is more important for influencing present-day policy than for interpreting the past.? I should not be understood as attributing such to the motives of either the editors or the other authors, but to the logical situation of interpretation.? There is no one complete, true history; there are interpretations.

One reader of a draft of this review suggested that by the time that the questions of politicization and of controversy over development path were largely and practically ?solved? in the Western countries, they were still on the agenda in Russia.? I believe that they have neither ever been solved nor off the agenda in the Western countries.? To that reader politicization means the entry of policy and ideology into practical solution policies and into economic theory; that it is impossible to either estimate the degree of politicization or eliminate it; and that its degree and meaning depend on political and legal arrangements, hierarchical system of power and so on.? This reader also feels that no history of economic thought can be the ?true? story, only a story bearing signs of their time, place and the views of the people who were engaged in doing economics.? This reader also believes that intellectual history cannot be reduced to one or two problems, however important they might be: intellectual history is a multi-stream process.

Another reader of the draft identifies as a missing issue differences in state attempts to control intellectual discourse.? The actions can take different forms:? the termination or intimidation of professors who challenge the dominant political ?line? or ?consensus,? government funding of economic research with a pronounced bias favoring ?mainstream? research where ?mainstream? reflects both professional orthodoxy and the economic system around which orthodoxy and the national economy is built, and so on.

All of which suggests that the work of contemporary historians of economic thought is richer and less presumptuous than the work of earlier generations.? The history of economic thought is itself a vast interpretive field with numerous opportunities for interpretation.?

?

Warren J. Samuels is Professor of Economics, Emeritus at Michigan State University.? He is the founding editor of _Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology_. His book of essays on the use of the concept of the invisible hand is in the initial stage of the production process.

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