The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective ed. by Joel Mokyr

Abstract

180 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Edited by Joel Mokyr. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 362; tables, notes, bibliography. $55.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). In a sense this is an oddly balanced book. It is remarkable to find a work of some 300 pages with an editor’s introduction that takes up 131 of them. However, the introduction is really a short book in itself, a survey of the state of debate about the British Industrial Revolution, with its focus on the impact of the “new” economic history—that is, the highly quantitative, theoretical, econometric treatment that has dominated writing for about two decades. This is very well done, there is an enormous amount of reading behind it, and it is an ex­ tremely thorough and well-balanced account. Reassuringly, Joel Mokyr starts by deciding that, whatever the limi­ tations which have to be attached to the term, the Industrial Revolu­ tion was a real phenomenon, an entity that calls for continued study in its own right. There are, however, in his discussion of technology and resources, instances where Mokyr perpetuates views I consider mistaken. How the whole range of British technological development in the 18th century can be surveyed and the conclusion arrived at that the British had no superiority in macro-inventions is quite baf­ fling. Why historians keep dragging up the ridiculous 1766 statement by a solitary Swiss calico printer that for “a thing to be perfect it had to be invented in France and worked out in England” is incomprehen­ sible. Of course some important French inventions came to England, like cast-plate glass, chlorine bleaching (if originating in Swedish sci­ ence), and Leblanc soda (p. 33). Somehow large-scale sulfuric acid production, an invention on which the future heavy chemical indus­ try was enormously dependent, rarely seems to be put in the balance on the British side. The new economic historians never seem to ask why the French were continually investigating British industry by both legitimate means and espionage, while it is hard to find evidence of British investigations. Even the most fleeting perusals of the mas­ sive French archives of the 18th century will show that contemporary Frenchmen had no doubts whatever. On resources, there is the usual playing down of the importance of the coal endowment and the fanci­ ful idea that Britain could have imported coal if necessary. Where from, one may ask, in the classic Industrial Revolution period? How­ ever, these criticisms do not apply in general; for instance, Mokyr’s discussion of the relation between science and technology in the In­ dustrial Revolution is excellent. The other contributions are dominated by David Landes’s “The Fable of the Dead Horse: Or, the Industrial Revolution Revisited.” The phrase “dead horse” derives from the work of Eric Jones, who recently contrasted the older view of the Industrial Revolution as in some sense revolutionary with the new economic historians’ view that there was slow growth, no discontinuity, and no startling intervention TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 181 of new technology, and that any attempt to revive the older view was “a dead horse that is not altogether willing to lie down.” Full justice to Landes’s stylish and combative piece cannot be done here. But he points out that most of the worthwhile older approaches stressed the long period of preparation and development before more rapid technological change occurred from the mid-18th century, so that new economic historians are often erecting skittles only to bowl them down again. He emphasizes that, whatever the recent attempts to take a flat iron to the Industrial Revolution, there had been decisive change and that was in technology; he rejects Jones’s strange state­ ment that “the nexus between technology and economic growth is not particularly strong,” as he does C. Knick Harley’s that “Britain probably also benefited from a lucky draw in the random process of invention.” Landes criticizes the self-congratulatory rectitude of the new economic historians in eight telling points (pp. 167—69), the first being: “This is one more example of the kind of cynical revisionism that characterizes all the social...