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 sciences. The best way to attract atten tion, get a Ph.D., get a good job, get promoted is to stand things on their head.” Harley contributes a reassessment of the work of some of the more notable new historians on the Industrial Revolution, with particular attention to Crafts, with whom he has collaborated. Gregory Clark looks at “Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution,” attempting to minimize the agricultural revolution as his quantitative colleagues have minimized the industrial one. He does not pay much attention to contemporary writers, apart from Young. Nor does he give more than passing credit to Kerridge, who has argued for a reperiodization of the agricultural revolution for a generation. Finally, David Mitch looks at the roles of human capital in the first Industrial Revolution in what is largely a reworking of material about education and literacy, though without a real examination of skills as a whole, surely the critical issue in surveying human capital in that period. J. R. Harris Dr. Harris is emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham and the author ofEssays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992). Planning the French Canals: Bureaucracy, Politics, and Enterprise under the Restoration. By Reed G. Geiger. Newark, Del., and Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware and Associated University Presses, 1994. Pp. 338; maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $43.50. It was the politics of great expectations. In 1820, while London outpaced Paris in the race toward industrialization, a French bureau crat boldly promised to anglicize transport planning by allowing pri vate investors to profit from public canals. The bureaucrat was Fran çois Becquey, and his promise was made in the seventy-five-page 182 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE “Report to the King” that became a blueprint for industrial growth. But the canals never turned a profit, and, ever since, historians have fixated on two ideas: first, that the Becquey program was a fiscal fiasco; second, that statism undermined capitalism and prevented France from realizing its potential as an industrial power. Reed Geiger offers another perspective. In Planning the French Ca nals, the first full treatment of the financing of the Becquey pro gram, Geiger explains that the powerful men who dominated canal planning preferred to follow an English path toward freewheeling capitalism. State enterprise, these planners believed, was inherently inefficient. They hoped to tear France away from bureaucratic centralization, but the private sector refused to invest without govern ment aid. Planners came to regard state financing as a necessary evil. Convinced that canals were essential to modernization, they em braced statism as a last resort. The result, Geiger maintains, was an uneasy partnership between government and the private sector, a compromise that allowed France to build “the largest public works program ever launched in France to that time . . . the first national program for an internal waterway network ever adopted in the west ern world” (p. 15). The canal program, contrary to conventional wis dom, was not a financial disaster. Carrying, at their peak, nearly onefourth of all freight traffic...
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Apr 1, 1999
Gerhard Fahsold + 2
Open Access