Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism, vol. 2: America and the Wider World by William N. Parker

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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 805 Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic EUstory of Western Capitalism, vol. 2: America and the Wider World. By William N. Parker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 372; tables, notes, appendixes, index. $59.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). William N. Parker is the Phillip Golden Bartlett Professor Emeritus of Economics and Economic History at Yale University. This is the second and final volume of his collected essays; the first bore the subtitle Europe and the World Economy. Parker is unusual among eco­ nomic historians in that he has done research in primary sources in both Europe and the United States. His early work, accomplished mainly in the 1950s, dealt with the mining and metallurgical industries of Western Europe (see, e.g., Coal and Steel in Western Europe [1957], coauthored with N. J. G. Pounds) and is well represented in the first volume of these essays. Parker is even more famous, however, for his research in American history, especially agricultural history, and most of the essays in this volume come from that phase of his career. As a student of A. P. Usher, whose publications are well known to readers of this journal, Parker emphasizes the interrelations of technology, resources, and institutions. Parker is also a literary econ­ omist, in the best sense of that term. Not that he shuns quantitative data—quite the contrary—but he writes clearly and well, and at times humorously, sprinkling his text with literary allusions and occasional quotations. He also employs diagrams—not the usual supply-anddemand or production-function graphs of economists (well, some­ times those, too), but spatial diagrams intended to indicate the relation of everything to everything else, including body, brain, mind, memory, values, and attitudes (see, e.g., p. 349). He indicates that he began every graduate course with such a diagram. I do not know how his students reacted to them, but I must confess that I have yet to understand a single one of them. The book is organized in five parts, plus two “annexes” (appen­ dixes?). Part 1 consists of a single chapter, “American Civilization: The Impulse from Europe.” It was presented as a paper to a Japanese seminar on American studies and was presumably intended to explain to the Japanese auditors/readers the influence of Europe on Ameri­ can institutions and behavior. Part 2, “The South in Slavery and Freedom,” contains five chapters devoted primarily to southern agriculture. The heart of the book lies in parts 3 and 4, entitled respectively “Capitalist Dynamics of the Rural North” (four chapters) and “The North: Dynamics of an Industrial Culture” (nominally two chapters, but actually seven). These two parts also contain the only chapters concerned explicitly with technology, although the subject is, of course, dealt with elsewhere in its relations with other factors. Chapter 9, “Technological Knowledge: Reproduction, Diffusion, Im­ 806 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE provement,” is strongly reminiscent of Usher’s treatment of the same subject. Chapter 12, “The Industrial Civilization of the Midwest,” is in six parts, the first of which is devoted to resources and technology. Part 5, “American Values in a Capitalist World,” has three chapters and for the first time casts a glance at the “wider world” promised in the subtitle. Actually, however, they are also mainly concerned with the United States. Chapter 13, “Political Controls on a National Economy,” was originally entitled “American Attitudes toward Busi­ ness.” Parker suggests in his preface that the two final chapters, “Nationhood in a Common Market” and “European Industrialization in an American Mirror,” somehow pertain to recent events in Europe, but of course they were written before the dramatic events of 1989 and later. The former does not even mention the European Commu­ nity, and the latter, prepared for a conference assessing the impact of the work of Alexander Gerschenkron, is an obvious reference to his Europe in a Russian Mirror (1970). The two “annexes”—“A Look Backward. Quantification and the Counterfactual in American Agricultural History, 1850—1910: A Re-examination” and “A Look Forward. Understanding Productivity: The Ways of Economics and History”—are able examples of the economic historian’s craft, but have little...