Published by EH.NET (March 2010)

Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2009. xiv + 416 pp. $29 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-56663-747-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Melinda Miller, Department of Economics, U.S. Naval Academy.

Gene Dattel, an independent scholar with a background in the finance industry, weaves together cotton and race into a sweeping narrative of racial oppression and its role in the economic growth of the United States. His central premise is that economic self-interest, and not moral or ethical imperatives, has driven much of American history. Although most of the facts in this book will be familiar, Dattel nicely draws together the literature on the cotton South, financial markets, and northern racism to make the compelling argument that the South?s desire for cotton and northern complicity irrevocably altered American racial history. The book?s narrative is divided into six parts.

In Part One, Dattel uses the Constitutional Convention to illustrate how ?the desire for economic development trumped … almost all else? (p. 5). He persuasively argues that freedom for slaves was sacrificed to commercial interests, order, and security.

Part Two explores cotton?s role in American economic growth from 1787 until 1861. It begins with an analysis of factors influencing the tremendous increase in the supply of and demand for cotton at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The remainder of this part explores the burgeoning cotton industry?s influence on the United States and its expansion throughout the South. Dattel carefully chronicles the business and finance of cotton while demonstrating that, through cotton, slavery touched the world: New York City profited from cotton finance; Britain, France, and New England depended on raw cotton; and the federal government depended on the tariff revenues made possible by cotton’s favorable effect on the balance of trade.

Part Three documents the conditions of blacks in the North before the Civil War. While the northern states had outlawed slavery, their citizens were not welcoming to African-Americans and wished to rid themselves of their black populations. Chapters 8 and 9 provide a detailed analysis of northern laws and document the hostile and racist atmosphere for blacks in the North. Chapter 8 focuses on the original northern colonies, while Chapter 9 discusses the western states. These two chapters can serve as a concise, freestanding compilation of racist laws and attitudes in the North. They could very nicely be incorporated into an economic history class to dispel any misperceptions students have about the history of racial (in)equality in the North.

Part Four focuses on the role of cotton in the Civil War and argues, ?none of this destruction would have occurred if not for cotton? (p. 166). Cotton served as both a bargaining tool and a means of credit for the South. These dual roles were possible largely because Great Britain?s textile industry relied on southern cotton. Chapter 13 delves deeply into the role of cotton in war financing. The Confederacy developed complicated financing schemes, including the famous Erlanger bond, which Dattel praises as both ?prescient and brilliant? (p. 188). Overall, however, the Confederacy bungled financing. The origins of its fundraising problems can be found, Dattel suggests, in the South?s choice to use cotton as a bargaining chip, and not just a fundraiser. Entertaining tales of blockade-runners who moved cotton out of the South and brought guns and supplies to the Confederates dominate chapter 14. There was also a large illicit flow of cotton within the United States. In another example of shameful and prejudiced northern behavior, General Grant blamed the Jewish population of Tennessee for this trade and expelled them from parts of the state. Part Four concludes with a discussion of the future of the freed slaves. For the North, there was a simple answer: containment of the freedmen in the South and in the cotton fields.

Part Five examines the lives of blacks and carpetbaggers from 1860 to 1930. The central argument of this section is that ?the possibilities for black acceptance in these years (1865-1876) have been grossly exaggerated in our history.? During Reconstruction, the lives of freedmen were largely shaped by two forces: the northern hatred of blacks, and the southern desire for cotton. Together, they led to Federal and state government policies that served to firmly anchor blacks to the cotton fields. These included the decision to restrict land acquisition by freedmen, the failure of most civil rights legislation, Supreme Court decisions that reinforced racist policies, and a lack of adequate schooling for freed slaves and their children. While this era also saw an increase in racial violence in the South, the life of northern blacks was so poor that southern blacks were essentially trapped.

Part Six takes on the issue of cotton production after the war, particularly the expansion of cotton and the rise of sharecropping. The state of postwar southern financial markets and the unique financing needs of cotton together served to severely constrain the economic advancement of freedmen. Dattel presents sharecropping as inevitable: ?With cotton production as the goal, sharecropping was a predictable outcome? (p. 331). He presents the tale of Mound Bayou, an all black town in Mississippi, to illustrate this point. Mound Bayou was both owned and controlled by blacks. Despite some initial success, it eventually succumbed to the vagaries of King Cotton and a lack of financial infrastructure and provides us with an ?abject lesson in the futility of black economic hopes after the Civil War? (p. 341). Both part six and cotton?s hold on African-Americans concluded with the rise of the mechanical cotton picker. This technology ended the need for black labor in the cotton fields.

Dattel?s choice to conclude with a technological innovation fits well with one of his underlying themes: history is largely shaped by technology and finance. As Dattel argues in the introduction, ?the slaveholder and the slave before the Civil War, and the plantation owner and the sharecropper afterwards, were all ? each in his own way –pawns in the hands of finance? (p. xi). Shortly thereafter he returns to this general theme when arguing that, ?the cotton boom was a perfect example of how machines and technology control human destiny? (p. 30). Dattel tends to treat both finance and technology as exogenous, and then argues that fates of both African-Americans and the South were ?foreordained? (p. 312) given the financial system and state of technological progress. Although insight can be gained from this approach, I think this ultimately fatalistic viewpoint of the past introduces two weaknesses into Dattel?s analysis. First, despite the repeated emphasis on finance and technology, an important set of questions remains unaddressed. Why did the financial system and technology evolve as they did? Were they, too, foreordained given some initial conditions? Or could government policy have influenced their organization and, ultimately, the status of African-Americans? A second, related issue concerns public policy. Dattel seems to leave little role for government programs, legislation, or institutions to influence the economic status of former slaves and their descendents. Despite a brief mention of current issues facing African-Americans on the closing pages, the potential role of government policy today remains unclear. Could anything mitigate racial disparities today? Or does finance and technology still trump all?

Melinda Miller is an assistant professor of economics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her research focuses on slavery, emancipation, and racial inequality. She can be reached at mmiller@usna.edu.

Copyright (c) 2010 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (March 2010). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Published by EH.NET (January 2010)

James Ballowe, A Man of Salt and Trees: The Life of Joy Morton. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. xv + 302 pp. $29 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-87580-398-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Howard R. Stanger, Department of Management and Marketing, Canisius College

The life of entrepreneur Joy Morton (1855-1934) was bookended by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Great Depression, a span of time during which the United States became a large urban and industrial nation fraught with social, cultural, political, and economic conflicts. Author James Ballowe (Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, Bradley University) reveals Morton?s personal life to be equally tumultuous. Notwithstanding the many challenges he faced in his life, Morton?s intellect, inner drive, and social connections enabled to him build a diverse business empire.

Born in Detroit to educated and solidly middle-class parents, Julius Sterling Morton and Caroline Joy French, infant Joy was raised in the pioneering town of Nebraska City, Nebraska, where Julius sought journalistic and political opportunities and to make his fortune. During his frequent work-related absences from home, Julius left Caroline to manage the family farm, later called Arbor Lodge. Julius was exacting and expected his four sons to achieve wealth. Although he never realized his own ambitious goals, he left a few important legacies: he founded Arbor Day in 1872 and imbued in Joy a strong work ethic and a love of trees.

Joy had a variety of school and work experiences (farming, working on a railroad survey crew, hauling freight, and clerking in a bank) before he was fifteen. Just shy of sixteen, he enrolled in his great uncle?s school ? Mayhew?s Business College, in Detroit ? where the three-month course gave him ?an idea of business methods and of the value of system in recording business transactions? (p. 34). But family obligations and illness prevented him from starting a business. He also watched the management careers of his younger brothers, Paul (1857-1911) and Mark (1858-1951), take off quickly on the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad. Paul secured for Joy an office position on the railroad in Aurora, Illinois, in 1878, the same year he became engaged to Carrie Lake, a judge?s daughter from Omaha. Two years later, Joy experienced two watershed moments: He got married and entered into partnership with Ezra Wheeler, an established Chicago salt distributor for the Michigan Salt Association, the dominant Midwestern distributor.

After inspecting Wheeler?s books and recognizing opportunities from a growing city and industry (the demand for salt was rising with the nation?s population and the needs of the meatpacking industry), Morton accepted Wheeler?s offer. Joy and Carrie moved to Chicago (next door to Paul and his new wife), but he toggled between Chicago and Nebraska taking care of the family farm, his father?s and his business interests, and keeping the family together after his mother died. Joy also contended with a generally unhappy wife whose degrading physical and mental conditions taxed him until she passed away in 1915, at age 58.

Wheeler?s frequent business trips left Joy in charge of day-to-day operations and enabled him to hone his business skills. In 1885, Wheeler died, leaving Joy in partnership with Mrs. Wheeler for a year after which time he assumed majority ownership in Joy Morton & Co. Joy distributed smaller ownership shares to family members, a common practice in the Morton family. In his early thirties, Morton finally achieved business independence.

Morton built a new home outside Chicago for Carrie and his two children, daughter Jean (1883-1953) and son Sterling (1885-1961), and expanded his salt business, which seemed impervious to business cycles. Financially secure by 1900, Morton consolidated his businesses for both efficiency and family reasons, and began to divest his Nebraska businesses, including the sale of his starch company (run by his brother Carl (1865-1901)) to a larger combine. In 1901 he created the International Salt Company and later, in 1910, owing to the public?s backlash against trusts, changed its name to The Morton Salt Company, whose table salt became one of the nation?s leading consumer brands. He extended minority ownership beyond family, notably to Daniel Peterkin, a trusted executive whom Morton groomed, along with other men from his residential neighborhood.

Now settled in Chicago (he built a country estate twenty-five miles away from Chicago in 1910), Morton eagerly got involved in civic affairs, collaborating with the renowned local architect Daniel Burnham to build a modern office building (1903-04) downtown near Lake Michigan (and built another one in the 1920s with Burnham?s successor.) and to create the famous Plan of Chicago in 1906. His longtime interest in internal improvements led him to serve on federal and state water transportation boards during World War I. He remained active in civic affairs and planning over the next few decades, including helping to select the design of the iconic Tribune Building and the locations for the Chicago Daily News building and the fortress-like Merchandise Mart, both of which became the first buildings to front the Chicago River. During this time he maintained ties to Arbor Lodge, now their country estate, until he deeded it to the state in 1923. At that time the property contained a botanical gardens and natural history museum.

Morton?s personal hardships (early deaths of close family members) were eased in 1917 with the birth of his first grandchild and his marriage to Margaret Gray, his trusted estate manager and partner in creating an arboretum. Since his father introduced him to Frederick Law Olmstead in 1873, Joy had built relationships with well-known landscape architects, botanists, and other experts from which he hired an excellent staff to create and run the Morton Arboretum, a 400-acre preserve (now 1,700), that opened in 1923. Illness and ailments slowed Morton down in the late 1920s and a sudden heart attack felled him on May 10, 1934. Morton?s philanthropy was generous but the arboretum was his carefully planned legacy and tribute to his father, who would have been pleased with Joy?s overall achievements.

In Ballowe?s hands, Morton is a highly sympathetic figure who, despite personal hardships, remained dedicated to his family and business affairs. Sometimes, however, Ballowe makes claims with little supporting evidence. For example, he may be right that Morton ?became recognized as a central figure in the movement that helped transform a nineteenth-century individualist economy into a corporate industrial economy? (p. 148), but he does not explain his role in this process. During the labor unrest and anti-radical hysteria that consumed Chicago in 1886 Morton settled a short strike at his warehouse by granting workers an eight-hour day at a reduced wage. Morton commented on the outcome: ?What fools these mortals be, especially strikers.? Aside from the belittling comment, why did Morton concede shorter hours when most employers did not? And during the 1894 Pullman strike Morton averted labor troubles by ?paying attention to (workers?) … welfare? (p. 124). How so? As was de rigueur, he invited his office staff and their families to his estate for company outings, but not the blue-collar workers. Why not? Did class matter to Morton? Finally, Ballowe mentions the significance of Morton Salt as a brand, but provides little discussion on how it came to be so popular.

These minor limitations, largely attributable to the genre, the author?s background, and the lack of business records, do not detract from this fine biography that Ballowe constructed from a careful study mainly of Morton?s personal and family papers. A man of salt and trees? Yes, and much more.

Howard R. Stanger is Professor of Management and History in the Organizational Studies Area, Department of Management and Marketing, Wehle School of Business, Canisius College. His forthcoming articles include a study on the decline of the Larkin Company (1918-1942) and the labor practices of the Columbus Ohio master printers? association (1887-1987).

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.

Copyright (c) 2009 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (May 2009). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

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Published by EH.NET (November 2008)

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. vii + 488 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-02867-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter H. Lindert, Department of Economics, University of California ? Davis.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have produced a definitive economic history of American education. This reviewer?s high hopes for their book project have not been disappointed. The final product is tightly reasoned and easy to grasp by anyone who cares about the country?s educational history. Even those who are shy of mathematics can simply slip past the occasional show of regressions and equations, guided by the authors? trouble-free prose. Those of you who have seen several Goldin-Katz papers from this project are assured that the whole is greater than the sum of those parts.

Two featured insights tie the whole book together, with the first of these leading logically to the second. The first insight: It?s home grown education that has mattered, not technology or immigration. That is, contrasting historical movements in American wage inequality are explained mainly by revolutions in education, not by shifts in technology or by waves of immigration. Goldin and Katz make this argument persuasive by wisely choosing to focus on the task of explaining contrasts in wage movements between long periods. Wage inequality, by occupation or by educational level, rose in the late nineteenth century, fell dramatically in the first half of the twentieth, and then rose in most decades of the second half (though not in the 1970s). In any one period, all three of those forces ? home grown education, technology, and immigration ? shared in determining the width of the pay gaps. Similarly, trends in all three shared in the task of explaining trends in the pay gaps. Yet the key insight emerges from contrasting those long trends, a temporal contrast analogous to economists? ?differences in differences? analysis. What made periods of rising inequality different from periods of falling inequality is that the rate of advance in education was stronger in the latter periods. In the title roles, technology has been the steady tortoise, while education has raced like the erratic hare. At times it ran ahead, at times it fell asleep, and now it races to catch up.

The first featured insight introduces their search for the second. How did America achieve those revolutions in education, and what explains their timing? The second insight is that American education had a unique set of egalitarian virtues, which weakened or were subverted later. The six original virtues were public funding, public provision, the separation of church and state, fiscal decentralization, forgiveness of youthful errors, and gender neutrality. Some of these virtues waxed and waned, though not because of any unifying dynamic. Three of them ? public funding, public provision, and secularization ? rose across the middle and late nineteenth century and never retreated, for better and for worse. Two others – forgiveness and gender equality ? have been permanent American strengths, with a couple of wrinkles in the mid-twentieth century. Fiscal decentralization has the most complicated dynamic of all.

The opening part of the book (Introduction and Chapters 1-3) previews everything, especially the first key insight about the technology-education race. Its factual summaries deserve to be worked into our reading lists and lectures. For an overview of the distinctive history of American educational progress across the data-rich twentieth century, see Chapter 1. Chapter 2 fixes our attention on earnings inequality, the dependent variable that dominates the book. Reading lists could well combine this chapter?s summary of wage inequality in the twentieth century with the Piketty-Saez overview of what happened up at the very top of the distribution. Chapter 3 on skill-biased technological change debunks the notion that the computer era is a radical departure, and drives home the point that skills bias has advanced more evenly over the decades than most people think. It ends with the key pivot point that ?It?s not technology,? which turns us toward the second key insight, namely that fluctuations in educational progress play the leading role in explaining inequality movements.

The second part of the book dwells on the unevenness of that progress. This country went through three great waves. In the nineteenth century America?s (and Canada?s) public primary schooling became the envy of the world. Chapter 4 on the ?origins of the virtues? sketches this wave, with definitive coverage of the six egalitarian virtues. Chapters 5 and 6 explain the second great wave, in which America became the world pioneer in public high schools with its own egalitarian emphasis on a wide menu of courses for all. Goldin and Katz show that several economic forces explain why the timing of this grass-roots movement differed across regions. Their quantitative accounting downplays compulsory school laws and child labor laws, which they find had only small, though statistically significant, effects. Rather, the analysis hints at a political economy in which some regions developed high schools faster than others because their political structures were more egalitarian. In the high school wave, as in the earlier primary school wave, the willingness to raise taxes for school unquestionably raised total schooling, and did not just crowd out private schooling.

Chapter 7 on the evolution and current state of America?s private and public colleges and universities is jam-packed with useful information. It belongs on everybody?s reading list in education economics. The main theme here is triumph: The Americans did a better job than any other country at financing higher education, and at making its institutions compete against each other. Only at the end of the twentieth century have other countries caught up in high-education enrollments, though the United States continues to dominate in research.

Two subplots in the twentieth-century advance of higher education relate to gender and to regions. The gender story exposes one of the main wrinkles in the triumph of gender equality in American education. With higher education, as with careers in teaching, women lost ground at one point in the twentieth century, though they overtook males later. Their college education fell behind a bit in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and especially in the postwar quarter-century when the GI Bill did so much for males? higher education. This wrinkle was ironed out in the 1970s, when male graduation rates stagnated and females soon became the majority of college graduates, as they continue to be in this and several other countries.

The regional story includes some reverse crowding out: The Northeast has remained behind in its tax support for higher education because it has always been so well endowed with private universities. That might not have been so remarkable if the overall attendance rate had been higher in the Northeast. Yet Goldin and Katz show us the opposite: Overall attendance remains higher in the vast North and West from Minnesota to the Pacific. In other words, something about the presence of excellent private universities actually lowered college attendance in the Northeast, other things equal. Might this quantity difference have outweighed the quality advantage of private institutions in the Northeast? Did influential ivy alums in northeastern states suppress public higher education enough to hold back regional growth?

In the final part of the book Goldin and Katz return to the race between technology and education in explaining twentieth-century movements in earnings inequality, this time with Chapter 8?s tidy quantitative analysis. The early wage compression and the later wage widening were driven by the supply and demand for the skills tied to educational attainment, with a little help from institutional movements in the power of unions and wartime wage controls. As we were warned in Part 1?s preview, the wage movements were dominated more by swings in the supply of education-related skills than in the demand for them. And on that supply side, the swings in home grown educational attainment were more important than the swings in immigration.

In Chapter 9?s finale on ?How American Can Win the Race for Tomorrow,? the authors tread warily in the minefields of current policy debates. They do not take clear sides in the war over whether extra money will improve education, despite citing Krueger?s evidence that paying for smaller class sizes does seem to help. They also refrain from judging No Child Left Behind, though they note that testing and accountability is an important issue. On local school choice mechanisms, such as vouchers and charter schools, they take a cautious position shared by this reviewer: the evidence is mixed, but school choice ?could improve the situation? for low-income families. The idea of school choice is also supported, of course, by its success in raising the productivity of higher education, covered back in Chapter 7. They also seem to accept the evidence that the country has underinvested in infant education.

Where next for research in the economic history of American education? This is the perfect time to ask, now that Goldin and Katz have achieved closure on so many questions. The view from their shoulders reveals two key areas to explore.

First, who was it that under-invested in education? Did private individuals pass up money lying on the sidewalk, or was it the political process failing to realize high social rates of return that took into account both fiscal effects and knowledge externalities? For the purposes of their book, Goldin and Katz are able to finesse these tough questions. By focusing on contrasts between American epochs, they successfully explain the contrasts in ?returns? in terms of movements in wage ratios that were dramatic enough to drive movements in all definitions of the rate of return on education. Yet we still need to explore the separate levels of the private versus ?social? (private and fiscal only) versus overall rates of return, the last being the one that draws on the recent literature on externalities. Only then can we distinguish private irrationality, or private capital constraints, from a failure of policymakers to capture high societal returns to extra years of education. The new research will have to proceed on different levels for different time periods. For the present day debate, scholars will have to jump the higher econometric hurdles imposed by Heckman, Lochner, and Todd in their rejection of the convenient Mincer return analysis. For earlier periods, it should suffice to make rougher contrasts between the likely private and fiscal returns for different eras and different places.

A related frontier is the political economy of education finance. Who voted for or against taxes for schools, in which states, and why? Goldin and Katz have advanced the political economy agenda with econometric evidence on the determinants of high school and college attendance, and the funding for public state universities. Yet there is much more to be done.

On both these research frontiers, our progress will be accelerated because Goldin and Katz have paved the way.

Peter H. Lindert is Research Professor of Economics at the University of California – Davis. His latest book is Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century, two volumes, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Published by EH.NET (August 2008)

Gilles Dostaler, Keynes and His Battles. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007. vi + 374 pp. $160 (cloth), ISBN: 978-1-85898-266-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by M. G. Hayes, Homerton College, University of Cambridge.

This book sets out to be a study of Keynes militant, neither a full biography nor a study of his thought alone, let alone merely his economics. Gilles Dostaler (Professor of Economics at Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montreal) argues that the ?common thread throughout Keynes?s kaleidoscopic activities? is a permanent struggle to convince others of the need for radical transformation to preserve a fragile and threatened civilization. He is in no doubt that the study of this extraordinary man has continuing relevance, not only to the historian, but for our own times.

The book addresses Keynes?s war of words along four dimensions: philosophical, political, economic and aesthetic. Keynes?s struggles are identified as respectively against Victorian morality, the imposition of unpayable reparations on Germany, unemployment and the Gold Standard, and to establish the arts as an essential pursuit of a civilized society.

Ethics is the theme of Chapter 2, which includes by way of ?interlude? a detailed account of Bloomsbury. The ?Bloomsberries? are said to have seen themselves as ?architects of a new civilized, rational society, one liberated from moral constraints and devoted to the quest for beauty and truth.? Dostaler sees Keynes in revolt against the Victorian morality of his childhood, under the influence of the liberal moralists Bentham, J. S. Mill and Sidgwick who sought to establish a morality without religion, seizing upon the philosophy of G. E. Moore as a religion without morality, and finally in his mature years coming to recognize the power of tradition and convention in the maintenance of civilization against the forces of unreason.

Continuing the philosophical theme, Chapter 3 reviews Keynes?s struggle in the field of epistemology, tracing his revolt against his father?s positivism, through A Treatise on Probability and his response to Ramsey and Wittgenstein, to his critique of the inappropriate use of statistics and insistence that economics is necessarily a moral, not a natural, science.

Chapter 4 moves from ethics to Keynes?s political vision, emphasizing the significance of an undergraduate prize-winning essay on Burke. Keynes?s complex political position, which defies pigeon-holing but lies somewhere between radical liberalism and moderate socialism, avoids both reaction and revolution in favor of non-violent reform by judicious expedients, towards an ultimate ideal that engages the big questions, what is the economy for and how should we exercise the freedom that results from prosperity? The chapter closes with a second historical interlude to provide the context for Keynes?s own government and political activities. Chapter 5 considers Keynes?s early views on imperialism and pacifism, before reviewing his practical role at the heart of the British government?s external financial negotiations, especially with the United States during World War I and at the reparations conference. The chapter ends by recording the extent to which history bore out Keynes?s analysis in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the book that made his name.

Chapters 6 through 8 turn to Keynes?s economics and his long campaign to transform both theory and policy. Chapter 6 identifies the central importance of money in Keynes?s thought, including his struggle against the Quantity Theory and to convince Classical economists of the significance of the differences between a real-exchange and a monetary economy, between saving and finance, and between real wages and money-wages. The progression of Keynes?s thought from The Tract to The General Theory reflects a sustained attempt to give expression to the insights of Aristotle, Aquinas and (perhaps) Freud, ultimately in the formal language of liquidity-preference. Chapter 7 considers his related efforts to articulate a theory of employment based on effective demand rather than the cost of labor. The genesis of The General Theory is depicted as a rationalization of long-held intuitions and of policies that were not by any means uniquely Keynes?s, such as public works. Chapter 8 links money and employment by recounting Keynes?s life-long battle, once again in great part with the United States, to civilize the international monetary system.

Chapter 9 reviews some of Keynes?s early philosophical reflections about the nature of beauty before turning to his role as consumer and patron of the arts. Dostaler conveys well Keynes?s Periclean vision of a civilization where art is valued for its own sake, and not as a means. Chapter 10 draws together this portrait of Keynes as a figure of immense stature, greatly respected but only partly understood by friend and foe alike, often wrongly given both credit and blame for the course of subsequent economic history, passionately committed to bringing about a better world by ?judicious expedients,? if sometimes overly sanguine about the relative power of ideas and vested interests.

There are some textual slips (e.g. the eighteenth century doctrine of Aquinas, p. 177; and the reference to GT Book V as Book IV, p. 197). The translation by Niall B. Mann is of high quality and I was seldom conscious that the original (2005) was written in French, despite one or two awkward phrases, although some chapters are more fluent than others. A particular feature is the interweaving of historical events and theoretical development. The bibliography and notes are comprehensive and erudite, and the timetable useful.

It is not clear to me that Bloomsbury entirely fits Dostaler?s thesis, at least in the field of ethics as opposed to aesthetics: he was its patron, to some extent its publisher, and it was part of his private life. To say as much does not detract from its influence on Keynes?s motivation and interests, particularly as an experiment in the Good Life. Yet as a field of public campaign for sexual liberation, etc? ? I am not convinced.

The General Theory is my particular field of interest and I question one or two of Dostaler?s claims. Nevertheless, he wisely sets out to avoid detailed theoretical controversy (p. 5) and on the whole he succeeds. It is unfortunate that he seems to support the idea that The General Theory is (merely) a literary work, as opposed to a scholarly treatise (pp. 196-97); by these criteria, Marshall?s Principles falls into the same category. In my opinion, Dostaler underestimates the continuity between the thought of Marshall and Keynes, both in style and substance.

Compared with Skidelsky?s chronological biography (2003), Dostaler achieves both reasonable depth and concision by following a particular thread, Keynes?s struggle against conventional wisdom, across the various fields of interest (or battle). The result is a satisfying and highly readable book, especially for non-economists and non-British readers approaching Keynes from a wider perspective, and compares favorably with Hession (1984), whose less successful unifying thesis was the relationship between Keynes?s creativity and sexuality. Dostaler?s book is also quite accessible and should be of interest to undergraduates as well as the more specialized reader. I do not detect much new primary material ? not surprising in this well-ploughed field ? but the interpretative exposition is meticulously researched, original and lucid.

References:

Gilles Dostaler, 2005. Keynes et ses combats, Paris: Albin Michel.

Charles H. Hession, 1984. John Maynard Keynes. New York and London: Macmillan.

Robert Skidelsky, 2003. John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. London: Pan Macmillan.

M. G. (Mark) Hayes is Senior Research Fellow in Economics at Homerton College in the University of Cambridge. His major work on Keynes is The Economics of Keynes: A New Guide to The General Theory, Edward Elgar, 2006. http://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/teaching/fellows/mark_hayes

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 (March 2008)

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii + 420 pp. $30 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-12135-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Robert A. Margo, Department of Economics, Boston University.

“Big Think” refers to the genre of economic history that asks The Big Question. Why England and not China? Do institutions “matter” or is it something else, or many things? Why is the United States rich and Bolivia poor?

Reviewers should be upfront about their ex ante biases. Here is one of mine: I do not care for Big Think. The Big Question per se is not the problem ? in economics, there is nothing more important. For me, the problem with Big Think is that it is inherently Too Big. One cannot hope to answer The Big Question by tackling it head on. One must break The Big Question into a great many very tiny precisely posed questions, and get the answers to them right. In economic history we are still very far from completing this task even for a country whose economic history is as well-worn as the United States. Big Think is a Big Distraction from our true purpose in life.

Personal tastes notwithstanding, I do teach (or at least try to teach) Big Think to my graduate students. I do so because I teach to the market, not what I like or dislike. Each part of the economics world needs a reason to live and the market seems to be saying that it wants economic historians, at least some of the time, to Think Big. To some extent the market is a reflection of supply. As economic historians age, they need something to work on other than university promotion and tenure committees. Big Think is attractive as it seems, well, Big and, most importantly, can be practiced successfully without paying much attention to the latest advances in formal theory or econometrics, or for that matter, any theory or econometrics. This is not a life-cycle career path open to, say, labor economists doing structural estimation or freshwater macroeconomists. Economic history may also self-select individuals who derive utility from talking about the fate of man and assorted related conundrums. However, demand also plays its part. Some of this demand comes from pundits who are angry because they feel that today’s economics is too mathematical or not focused enough on the “real world.” Other interest in Big Think is genuine in the sense that it derives from a public that routinely sees physicists contemplate the Big Bang or biologists the Mystery of Life (Evolution) and would like economists to behave similarly. Surely economic history has something to tell us about The Big Question ? which brings me to the task at hand.

One day last summer I got up very early, played the lute for a while, made breakfast, and then read the New York Times online. There, in the “Science” section, was a big article on Greg Clark’s new book.

At the time I was, and still am, genuinely pleased for Greg. Economic historians are underserved by the popular media, and we should cheer when one of our own is so celebrated. Greg is disciplined, hard working and highly productive, not afraid of big data sets or getting his hands dirty. Many of his articles appear on graduate reading lists, one barometer of their net worth. He is an excellent citizen of the profession and of his university. (Clark is Professor of Economics (and Chair) at the University of California, Davis.) Not long ago I attended a seminar of Clark’s at the Harvard Economic History Workshop. The paper was about total factor productivity growth in England during the Industrial Revolution His talk bogged down early as several in the assembled multitude asked Greg many Big Questions. I sat in the back of the room, dozing off periodically (a hazard on Friday afternoons) but woke up sufficiently in time to raise my hand at an appropriate juncture. I pointed out that the total factor productivity (TFP) series in Clark’s paper, if taken seriously, would appear to render irrelevant much previous work on the Industrial Revolution, including work by some of the people in the room. The conversation, therefore, should be about whether my reading was correct and, if so, we should believe his new series, the key issue being that it is based on the dual (prices) rather than quantities. For the next few minutes the conversation did grapple a bit with this issue but soon returned to Big and I went back to day-dreaming. I think, however, it was the right conversation to have at the time, and still do (see below).

So, what’s in the book and how do I feel having read it? First things first, I dislike the title. It’s the sort of title that draws groans from the humanists for good reason. I wish Princeton’s editor has exercised more discretion, not the only time I felt this way (see below).

A Farewell to Alms is divided into eighteen chapters organized in three Parts, a technical appendix that reviews the basics of growth accounting, and a bibliography. The Introduction provocatively begins with Figure 1.1, “World economic history in one picture: Incomes rose sharply in many countries after 1800 but declined in others”, self-explanatory. This will be a book about the (very) long run persistence of the Malthusian economy before its abrupt demise, in some countries, with the Industrial Revolution (IR), followed by ever-widening gaps in living standards between rich and poor. It will also be a book (p. 8), however, about how the long “pre-industrial era was shaping people, at least culturally and perhaps also genetically,” by which Clark means the development in the West of key behaviors, especially patience. The Great Divergence happened because the post-revolutionary industrial technologies of the West are designed to be complementary with hard work; appearances perhaps to the contrary, Clark believes that people in poor countries don’t really work very hard. In the final analysis, though, none of this matters because, as Richard Easterlin has told us many times, money doesn’t buy (absolute) happiness.

Part I of the book consists of seven chapters that comprise a long meditation on Malthus. The basics of the Malthusian model are set forth in Figures 2.1 through 2.5. Land is fixed in supply and subject to diminishing returns. The problem is not that there were no improvements in technology prior to the IR. The problem is that such improvements were just too sporadic and limited. Consequently, as the saying goes, life was nasty, brutish, and short. And if we were to imagine a sudden pre-IR improvement in institutions, this wouldn’t matter either ? in fact, welfare would decline, if good institutions somehow promoted higher population growth. To get sustained economic growth we need sustained TFP growth. The remaining chapters elaborate on these themes, focusing on living standards (chapter three), fertility behavior (chapter four), mortality (chapter five), technology (chapter seven), and institutions (chapter eight). The most interesting material is in chapters six and nine. Chapter six presents evidence drawn from wills that shows a positive correlation between reproductive success (how many children men fathered) and wealth at death. To the extent that the wealth itself was created though patience and hard work ? “middle class’ values ? the behaviors could be (and Clark believes were) passed on from one generation to the next, just waiting to take advantage of sustained improvements in technology if such ever arrived. Chapter nine presents disparate evidence on the “rise” of “modern man”: long-term reductions in real interest rates, greater awareness of “time” because of increases in literacy and understanding of numbers, and an increased willingness to work more intensely and for longer hours.

Part II, made up of five chapters, is about the Industrial Revolution proper. Chapter ten argues the IR represented a fundamental break with the past in terms of TFP growth not capital accumulation. Chapter eleven briefly considers, and rejects, various theories as to why the discontinuity in TFP growth occurred: institutions, multiple equilibrium (the pre-IR was caught up in a bad one), scale economies or endogenous growth. Chapter twelve suggests that the discontinuity may be more apparent than real, the confluence of a much longer process of innovation (with long lags in the effects of innovations on the real economy) coupled with (according to Clark) unrelated population growth. Chapter thirteen asks why England and not China (or India or Japan). Clark answers by saying that China et al had even faster population growth (more Malthus) and less reproductive success among the wealthy, hence less diffusion of the behaviors that Clarks sees as the key to modern economic growth.

Part III, the shortest, is made up of three chapters. Chapter fourteen restates the well-known (to economic historians and development economists at least) fact that per capita incomes have diverged since at least the dawning of the industrial revolution. Of course whether they will continue to do so in the next two centuries remains to be seen; my guess is “not.” Chapter fifteen asks why the IR didn’t spread everywhere. Clark’s answer is that in poor countries lots of workers get assigned to foreign machines with little or no gain in efficiency. Chapter sixteen burrows into the reason for the inefficiency: the capital (and technology) that was (and is) imported into poor places is complementary to the sort of behaviors ? “industriousness” ? that took a long time to develop in the West and which are in short supply elsewhere. Chapter eighteen concludes with a few zingers levied at the alleged irrelevance of modern economics along with musings about the failure of the IR to spread happiness around the globe and on the West’s “biological” inheritance from the IR ? perpetual discontent.

A Farewell to Alms is a mixed bag. Like peacocks Big Thinkers are expected to strut their stuff and without question Clark has stuff to strut. His knowledge of the economic history and related social science literature is encyclopedic ? in particular, I learned a considerable amount about what anthropologists have been doing of potential relevance to economic history. The writing style is engaging, moves along at a brisk pace, and when occasion demands, suitably humorous. The book truly does summarize into a coherent whole a gargantuan, disparate and influential opus. As such, it is an effective window on Clark’s world, especially for those who lack the time (or knowledge) to dissect his many working papers and journal articles. As previously noted, these working papers and articles are based on seriously hard work over a long period of time with primary sources and are worthy of the highest professional respect.

Taken as a whole, however, A Farewell to Alms doesn’t do it for me. One key reason is the tone: it is too argumentative. Clark goes out of his way, and then some, to differentiate his product and attack his rivals (see, for example, the first full paragraph on p. 147 and the corresponding footnote on Avner Greif). He is particularly scornful of those who would attribute long-run economic success to secure rights to private property, arguing that all the relevant institutions were in place in England long before the IR. The second paragraph on p. 372 declares that, in today’s world, the “deluge of economics journal articles … serves more to obscure than to illuminate” and “booming demand … has driven up the salaries of even academic economists to unprecedented levels” ? except, according to footnote 2 on the same page, at “the University of California, Davis” which “seems to be the sole exception to this salary inflation.” For my entire working life (and I am sure, longer than that) there has been an undercurrent of hostility in the economic history world towards formal economics. The hostility is based on its alleged irrelevance to history, but its real source is probably envy. I am sorry to see Clark give in to this tendency (to be charitable, perhaps this is part of his marketing plan).

I recently had occasion to re-read Robert Fogel’s presidential address to the Economic History Association, which was a response to his many and varied critics on the social savings of the railroad. Even when his critics were at their nastiest Fogel was always gracious in battle, praising the criticisms as empirically or theoretically valuable even while he was hard at work demolishing them. Personally, I think it very unlikely that any single story can explain the wealth of nations. It is much more likely, it seems to me, that Acemoglu, Engerman, Epstein, Galor, Goldstone, Greif, Jones, Kremer, Lucas, McCloskey, Mokyr, North, Pomeranz, Sokoloff, Thomas and many others, along with Clark, are all correct, to some extent. From the other angle, I find it strange to think that any economic historian would dispute seriously the notion that the sort of behaviors Clark emphasizes ? or more generally, “culture” ? were present as causal factors in the IR. The real question, as always, is how much.

As for the real question, I think Clark enjoys going where no man has gone before and, therefore, beyond ? sometimes well beyond ? what the evidence may actually support. Chapter six, as noted, gives us some data from wills linking wealth positively to reproductive success. Even taken on face value, should I trust these data? Why or why not? Even if I believe the data to be trustworthy, how do I know I am observing a causal link between “good” behaviors (for example, patience) that, in the best of circumstances (and these are far from the best) are barely, if at all, observable to the econometrician? What, precisely, are the mechanisms that allow good behaviors to be transmitted across generations? Don’t institutions of one type or other play a role? Well, you could say to me, read the paper. Except I did happen to go to a seminar not too long ago on this work ? and I didn’t think the questions were answered satisfactorily there, either. I’m not cherry-picking; almost every chapter has something like this.

So, in the end, should you read A Farewell to Alms? If you are into Big Think as a consumer or producer, the answer is a definite “yes” ? especially if you are a producer (trust me, you will need to prepare a response to Clark, if you haven’t already). Even if, in the end, you are like me ? you don’t care for Big Think but you have graduate students to worry about ? the answer is still “yes”. Just make sure that your students realize that the scholarly behaviors they should be emulating are the virtues ? patience, hard work and discipline ? that produced the articles underlying this book in the first place.

Robert A. Margo is Professor of Economics and of African-American Studies at Boston University and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the editor of Explorations in Economic History (until July 2008).

Copyright (c) 2008 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (March 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

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 (May 2007)

Marla R. Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xiv + 302 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 1-55849-545-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gloria L. Main, Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder.

The title, The Needle’s Eye, may make some readers think of camels and rich men, but the book concerns women who worked as tailors and dressmakers in rural New England in the years before mass production. Labor historians have showered attention on urban craftsmen in early America, celebrating their autonomy and patriotism in the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras, but whose skills and independence were gradually eclipsed by factories and machines. The replacement of skilled artisans by unskilled wage workers has been a major declensionist theme in labor history, but that narrative is too simple and omits significant segments of the population. Artisans who farmed were one such group, female tailors and dressmakers made up another. These highly-skilled specialists served a surprisingly broad range of early American households. Their stories form the particular focus of The Needle’s Eye.

Female tailors? Yes. One of the major discoveries in historical research of the past dozen years is the permeability of borders separating the occupations of men and women. As early as the sixteenth century, European women began moving into trades that had traditionally been dominated by men; meanwhile, men moved into certain women’s crafts, such as brewing and dairying. Weaving was traditionally reserved for men in England, and that continued to be the case in the British colonies in North America, but women in New England began to take it up early in the eighteenth century. Teaching is another calling that started out dominated by men but in New England opened increasingly to women as towns were increasingly compelled to offer elementary schooling to all. This secular re-ordering of the division of labor between the sexes is particularly striking in the production of textiles and clothing. The mechanization of cotton spinning in late eighteenth-century England and early nineteenth-century New England not only sped up the supply of yarn to female weavers in the putting-out system but made cotton the most important domestically grown and manufactured fiber in the United States. It quickly vanquished linen and gradually relegated commercial woolen manufacture chiefly to flannels and carpets. Americans continued to buy higher-quality textiles from Britain and to copy British clothing fashions. Turning bolts of expensive cloth into individually-fitted gowns and suits for a status-conscious clientele was the task of tailors and gown/mantua makers and continued to be so for decades to come.

Marla Miller, associate professor of history and director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, uses the rich collections of diaries, letters, and account books in Connecticut Valley repositories to reconstruct a particular community of customers and clothing makers in Hadley, Massachusetts and environs. At the center of this economic and social network of neighbors stood Elizabeth Putnam Phelps, daughter of local gentry. It is through her diary and correspondence that we first meet Rebecca Dickenson, a single woman ten years her senior, who supported herself and her mother by making, fitting, and mending women’s clothes. Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, Catherine Phelps Parsons was a tailor and the daughter of a gown maker. A neighbor of Elizabeth’s, Easter Newton, was a tailoress who became an innkeeper after her husband died. (In this region, tailors could be either male or female. Both possessed more skills than a “tailoress.”) Easter’s daughter, Tryphena contributed to her parents’ income by taking in sewing for multiple households, including Elizabeth’s. Tabitha Smith was another gown maker in Elizabeth’s network. Carrying the story forward in time from Elizabeth’s circle, Miller describes how Polly L’Hommedieu Lathrop, a gown maker, switched from private custom work in 1800 to making seamen’s shirts in a putting-out system that rewarded speed over quality. Polly found she could earn more that way because the merchant’s agent took all she could make. Meanwhile, other young women artisans began setting up shops in Hartford and New Haven, competing with each other and with male rivals through advertisements placed in local newspapers.

Miller’s great accomplishment is to place these individual stories in the larger context of New England’s social and economic development. She is able to compare and contrast their experiences as artisans with those of their male cohorts and do so in ways which expand our understanding of both. The female apprentice to a tailor or gown maker, for instance, signed up in her mid-to-late teens for a year or eighteen months. In exchange for a fee and her service, she expected to acquire a specific set of skills, such as learning how to take useful bodily measurements, how to cut the pieces from the cloth without wasting any, and fitting those pieces to the body.

The Needle’s Eye has twin goals: to put skilled female craft workers into the story of American artisans in a changing economy; and secondly, to unravel the structures and hierarchies of working women and their customers. Although Miller’s primary focus is on gown-makers and tailors, for whom the period 1760-1830 was a kind of golden age of economic opportunity, she does not overlook the less-specialized, less-skilled, and lower-paid seamstresses, many of whom welcomed the chance for steady work offered by the putting-out system. The female economy, alas, was itself not free of class divisions and exploitation.

It is an axiom among reviewers that no book, no matter how good, can be perfect. Marla Miller’s The Needle’s Eye, however, comes remarkably close. She writes fluently and well, digesting a vast and varied literature to make sense of a rich set of sources. The result is an engaging prosopography of female needle-workers in the Connecticut Valley in an era of great innovation and change. The book is introduced by a masterful survey of the literature and concludes with a superb essay on the diverging paths of men’s and women’s clothing production. The expansion of textile production at first created opportunities for female entrepreneurs, but continuing technological development eventually closed them down again as the sewing machine, paper patterns, and Sears’ catalogs brought good cheap clothing within reach of all.

The Needle’s Eye is a major contribution to both labor history and women’s history. It neatly melds the two in its depiction of a group of women as self-employed, highly-skilled artisans coping with shifting tastes and technology in a rapidly changing world.

Gloria Main is recently retired from the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently at work on a study of child labor in New England, 1750-1830.

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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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