Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell.

Ronald Max Hartwell, who once described himself as a "professional Australian," achieved academic prominence as a Professorial Fellow (and wine steward) of Oxford's Nuffield College, and subsequently in the United States at the universities of Virginia and Chicago. He has been accorded the unusual distinction of being offered not one, but two Festschriften. The first, The Industrial Revolution and British Society, edited by Patrick O'Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), was authored by eleven former students, British and Antipodean. The other is the subject of this review. It has fifteen authors for thirteen chapters and the introduction, mainly but not exclusively from the United States.

Hartwell is known primarily for his publications on the so-called industrial revolution in Great Britain, to which, following T. S. Ashton, he gave a radically different - optimistic - interpretation from that originally advanced by the posthumous publication of Arnold Toynbee, (uncle of the more famous Arnold Toynbee of A Study of History), Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1884). The British Festschrift emphasized that aspect of Hartwell's influence, but the American, without ignoring it altogether, emphasizes other and more fruitful strands of Hartwell's work.

There is some overlap between the two. For example, Eric Jones (La Trobe University), who does not share Hartwell's views on the industrial revolution, contributed not a substantive chapter to the British volume but an affectionate postscript, "Appreciation of Max Hartwell" as a teacher and friend. In the American volume, on the other hand, he authored the first chapter, "Patterns of Growth in History." It is filled with pregnant insights but, unfortunately, they will be almost incomprehensible to all but a few economic historians who are familiar with Jones's other works, and totally so to other readers. Thomas W. Laqueur, British-born but now teaching at UC-Berkeley, offered off-beat chapters in each volume: "Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution" in the British, which is merely silly, but a more substantial one in the American, "Cemeteries, Religion, and the Culture of Capitalism," which traces the commercialization of the burial business in nineteenth-century Britain.

Several of the contributions deal with themes other than the industrial revolution that also interested Hartwell. Mark Thomas, another Australian now teaching the University of Virginia, wrote on "Frontier Societies and the Diffusion of Growth;" Stephen Innes, a professor of history at Virginia, on "Puritanism and Capitalism in Early Massachusetts." David Galenson (Chicago), in "The Rise of Free Labor: Economic Change and the Enforcement of Service Contracts in England, 1351-1875," gives an impressive account of the gradual relaxation of criminal penalties for workers who left employment without permission; Galenson is aware that the laws were not always enforced, but many will be surprised at how long they were on the books. Jeffrey Williamson (Harvard) argues that rural-urban migration did not occur as quickly as it "should have" (according to economic theory) in British (and other) industrializations. N.F.R. Crafts (Warwick) presents a very competent critical survey of the literature on human capital and productivity in advanced (O.E.C.D.) economies. Joel Mokyr (Northwestern), in "Progress and Inertia in Technological Change," offers a sophisticated argument in intellectual as well as economic history - no cliometrics at all - about the relative strengths of market and nonmarket forces in permitting or encouraging technological change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as contrasted with their discouragements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Douglass North (Washington University, St. Louis), in "The Evolution of Efficient Markets in History," briefly recapitulates arguments that he has made elsewhere stressing the importance of "credible commitment" as necessary for reducing transactions costs and increasing the size of markets. In "Government Growth, Income Growth, and Economic Growth," John J. Wallis (Maryland) attempts to determine if government growth does or does not foster economic growth; his conclusions are, to say the least, inconclusive.

Two of the chapters deal with American experience exclusively. Lance Davis (Cal Tech) and Robert Gallman (UNC-Chapel Hill), in "Savings, Investment, and Economic Growth: The United States in the Nineteenth Century," return to a topic that they have dealt with twice in the past. They review and rebut criticisms of their results, and conclude that they were right all along. Gary Libecap (Arizona) presents a case study of the General Revision Act [of land law in the United States] of 1891 as an example of the "political economy of institutional and economic change." That act reversed a long term policy of placing land in private hands in favor of government ownership of land.

Only one chapter, by Stanley Engerman (Rochester), "Reflections on 'The Standard of Living Debate': New Arguments and New Evidence," deals explicitly with an "industrial revolution" topic, although several others allude to it or "to the period of the industrial revolution." Since they are mostly Hartwellian disciples, none of the authors bothers to attempt to define or date the misnamed industrial revolution; they simply assume it. It is significant, nevertheless, that the expression did not even exist in the English language until 1848, and did not gain currency until several decades thereafter. In short, the industrial revolution was not a historical reality, but an abstraction - indeed, a fiction - dreamed up by historians long after the events that purportedly constituted it. (See my article, "The Industrial Revolution: Fact or Fiction?," Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science, 10 [Fall 1994], pp, 163-88.) That Hartwell has been able to build a scholarly reputation by writing about a non-event says a great deal about his skill as a polemicist and debater - and also about the gullibility of economic historians.

Rondo Cameron Emory University