Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America 1600–1860 by Roger G. Kennedy

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 695 Carter-Edwards’s assertations (and some evidence) that Sun Alliance itself had been friendly to Cornwall, but company histories are often uncritical of their subjects. J. D. Poulter’s book has more edge to it, partly because it is chron­ ologically restricted to the creation of a public electricity supply in the Yorkshire city of Leeds at the end of the 19th century, partly because his sources tell a story of what he calls “amazing efficiency by a private company and amusing incompetence by the City Council” (p. ix). He shows how technical problems, legal uncertainties, financial misfor­ tune, but particularly protracted municipal debate and vacillation hindered the provision of general electricity supply, so that one of Britain’s largest industrial centers was only the fifty-sixth town in the country to receive service. This was despite the city council’s early installation of electric light in its own buildings. Supply was finally provided in 1893 (more than hve years after Cornwall, Ontario) by a private company, but a combination of financial and ideological ar­ guments led to the city’s purchase of the undertaking in 1898. Leeds and Cornwall had sharp contrasts in experience, but common concerns too. Early municipal ownership guaranteed Leeds, among other things, against takeover by a large private company, and the council decided against installing a three-phase AC system in 1902 so as not to depend solely on Westinghouse for equipment. These two books suggest, therefore, that debates over ownership of utilities con­ cerned not only the “public/private” distinction, but “local” versus “regional” or “national” control also. Carter-Edwards’s study ends with the upbeat suggestion that Corn­ wall’s future lies in public ownership. In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, we cannot be so confident. Privatization of electricity supply, now on the Conservative government’s agenda, would create precisely the situation both Cornwall and Leeds acted to avoid—dependence on large private utility corporations. Poulter, an engineer with the York­ shire Electricity Board, makes no general comment on the issue of ownership but does make clear that Leeds’s early problems were not universal. The city’s great rival, Bradford, successfully established the first British municipal electricity supply in 1889, while Poulter’s ex­ cellent appendix shows that by 1907 almost three-fifths of the supply systems in Britain were municipally owned. Christopher Clark Dr. Clark is lecturer in history at the University of York. His research interests are 18th- and 19th-century American social history and modern Western culture, society, and economic change. Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America 1600—1860. By Roger G. Kennedy. New York: Random House, 1985. Pp. xvi + 526; illustra­ tion, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. 696 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE This large, handsomely produced volume is a welcome addition to the growing list of publications that deal with the social history of American architecture. Roger Kennedy, director of the National Mu­ seum of American History, is by profession a banker and thus is particularly well equipped to discuss the economic ramifications of his subject. In a sense the book is a response to an injunction to Kennedy from the late William Gray Purcell, whom I remember with affection, to write a history of American architecture that would ex­ clude issues of style and take up the effect of the client’s economic circumstances on the architect’s response to the program. We are therefore presented with a book in which there is almost as much about American economic development as there is about architecture. Briefly, Kennedy adopts the position, now fashionable among many historians, that it was the slave-based plantation agriculture of the West Indies and the American South that supplied the driving force for the expansion of the American economy during the colonial and federal periods and the first half of the 19th century. The villa designs of Andrea Palladio, he argues, were perfectly adapted to the require­ ments of the sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton magnates of the New World. This approach leads him to focus on the great plantation houses of the Old South to a great extent and on structures similar in social function...