Comment by De Vries

Abstract

For several years now co-conveners of the dissertation sessions who have been interested in non-United States topics have complained of the paucity of dissertations. Questions have been raised about our ability to apply the New Economic History to non-American topics. This year's crop of dissertations will not put such worries to rest, but they do indicate among our graduate students a lively interest in, and a considerable capacity for, research in the economic history of foreign countries, including their histories before 1800. While these dissertations demonstrate that the study of foreign economic history is alive and well in this country, they do not demonstrate the existence of an style, let alone an American School. On the contrary, the questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the types of sources exploited vary enormously. We have under review a traditional historical study of an industry and its workers, an innovative, statistical study of fifteenth-century demography, a Marxian analysis of agrarian development, and a theoretical and comparative study of early industrialization that is the only one consciously written in the tradition of the New Economic History. These dissertations are evenly divided between departments of history and economics, and without a scorecard I doubt if many members of this Association could correctly categorize them all. Who would have predicted, even ten years ago, that a dissertation in medieval history would employ a computer to process the data of nearly 15,000 documents. On the other hand, who would have predicted that a student of Jeffrey Williamson would produce a dissertation rejecting neoclassical economics and relying almost exclusively on institutional and descriptive analysis? Schmiechen's dissertation is as much a study of the labor movement as of industrial organization. It fits neatly into a long tradition of British scholarship on working class attitudes and the origins of labor legislation. His main economic thesis, that the innovations in the form of the sewing machine and the cloth cutting machine stimulated the growth of outwork in the London clothing trades, is a clear-cut verification of the fact that industrialization was not an inexorable march toward centralized largescale production. Despite the enormous amount of evidence in support of this generalization, it still needs to be reasserted. Schmiechen's main social thesis is that unskilled workers, particularly the women workers, could not be organized until outworking was eliminated. This is not very convincing to me. Although the statement is inherently plausible, Schmiechen too readily generalizes from experience. Organization was unsuccessful in the sweatshops of the London clothing trades, but the reasons for that lack of success are perhaps not as obvious as he supposes. Something more could be expected here because in the