By S. G.

Checkland
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

The Economic Evolution of the

Modern World: A Review Article
c Professor Checkland reviews the conceptualization, accomplishments,
and challenges of volume VI of the Cambridge Economic History of
Europe.

The most recent volume of The Cambridge Economic History

of Europe is the kind of work which, not so long ago, would have
marked an epoch.1 It is edited by two of the most eminent of eco-
nomic historians. It musters, if not all the talents, a significant pro-
portion of them. It might well have stood as a reference point for
at least a generation of serious students, an essential part of the
thinking background of undergraduates and teachers.
Will it do so today? Even a Cambridge History, drawing upon
great resources, is now a strictly transient thing. In modern eco-
nomic history this is especially so, for it has developed not only a
booming monographic scholarship, but also two great yearnings.
The first is for close relevance to a hectically evolving world. The
second is for truly systematic thought that is comprehensive, free of
circularity, and capable of reduction to self-sustaining models.
The need to do all of these things has never before confronted
historians. In the case of the earlier volumes in the present series,
dealing with the Middle Ages, this triple challenge did not arise.
For lack of data, and because of the slow responses of the system,
the absence of aggregates, and the rudimentary state of the market,
it was possible to assimilate the much less numerous monographs
to fairly conventional themes, to treat of change as being cumulative
only in a very loose way, to ignore the logical problems of construct-
ing a closed system, and to feel no compulsion to explain and guide
the future course of human experience. For the modern period this
will not do.
Problems of method are now forcing themselves upon economic
historians with increasing insistence. Many of such scholars, in
Business History Review, Vol. XL, No. 3 (Autumn, 1966). © The President and Fellows
of Harvard College.
' H , J. Habakkuk and M. M. Postan (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of
Europe, VI, The Industrial Revolution and After: Incomes, Population, and Technological
Change (2 parts, pp. xii + 1,040. $19.50. Cambridge University Press, 1965).
widening their aspirations, have tried to inform their writings by
drawing not only upon economics, but sociology and social psychol-
ogy, together with geography, mathematics and logic, and the natu-
ral sciences as they bear upon invention and innovation. In so do-
ing some have made themselves vulnerable to criticism or dismissal
by specialists. There are sociologists who cannot abide the economic
historian, either because of his minimizing of social factors or his
fumbling attempts to deal with them. There are geographers whose
thinking is so bound by the natural context that it becomes alto-
gether compelling. There are mathematicians and logicians who
smile at the unsophisticated reasoning of historians. There are
natural scientists who insist upon such a grasp of their methods that
the historian is made to feel a complete duffer. But there are schol-
ars in all these disciplines who sympathize and even admire the
efforts of historians to move away from the subjective. There are
even a few who have tried their hands at history, placing a reciprocal
strain on the forbearance of historians. One of the most fascinat-
ing tests that can be applied to the view offered by Editors Habak-
kuk and Postan of the evolution of the modern world is the impres-
sion it gives of the state of these relationships.
The present volume of the work, though appearing first, is in a
sense peripheral. There are two more to come. We are yet to have
the economists' economic history: Volume II will deal with "the
factors of production, the entrepreneurial and managerial functions
and related topics," while Volume III will discuss "economic and
fiscal policies" and perhaps also "the social changes involved in the
economic development of the modern world." Final judgment must,
therefore, await the treatment of these important themes.
Meanwhile, we have in this volume the matters from which the
economist largely abstracts, treating them as data, viz. population,
territorial expansion, transport, agriculture, and, as the great center-
piece, technological change. In addition, there are chapters taking
a general view of industrialization in Russia, the United States, and
in the Far East. That is to say, the volume begins by being the-
matic and then passes, via the discussion of technological change in
Western Europe, to the evolution of certain particular economies
within which the themes previously treated are enacted, but in the
peculiar interaction of observed experience.
It is an interesting exercise to compare the Cambridge Economic
History of Europe with the New Cambridge Modern History,2
2
David Thomson (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, XII, The Era of Violence,
1898-1945 (Cambridge, 1960), chap. V.
356 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW

i
especially Volume XII of the latter. It begins with the economic map
of the modern world and the transformation of social life. Only
toward the end are these themes resumed in a consideration of
economic interdependence and planned economies. Throughout
most of the work economic development in one aspect or another
is inadequate. The comparison between Douglas McKie, on science
and technology in the Modern History, with the chapter by David
Landes in the Economic History, is most striking. McKie shows
scientific mastery, but he stops far short of drawing out the implica-
tions for society of his fascinating tale of discoveries; it is for the
reader to do what he can in integrating science and technology with
his general understanding of society. Landes, on the other hand, has
scorned this easy escape, bringing together discovery and industry
in the mutual interaction brought about by the entrepreneurship of
Western Europe.
One cannot help wondering how far the editorial treatment of this
volume was the outcome of a search for methodological principles
and how far it imposed itself, not least by the cast of mind of the
distinguished contributors, who have not had forced upon them a
common point of view.
The book begins with two essays in quantification: Cole and
Deane survey the growth of national incomes, and Glass and Greb-
nik do the same for world population. Both say what can, at pres-
ent, be said of these two sets of aggregates. Both explain with care
the limitations of the data; both, though stressing the difficulties of
precision, especially in moving backward in time, report changes on
a highly dramatic scale. It is clear that incomes and population have
both exploded, but the former have done so in only part of the
world. In pre-industrial societies (p. 2) it was the rate of popula-
tion growth that governed long-term productivity per man; that is
to say, in a traditional society with constant technology, diminish-
ing or increasing returns to effort depended mainly upon increasing
or decreasing numbers. The discussion of incomes, especially of
differential performance between societies, leads to brief incursions
into this society or that, indicating in very general terms the differ-
ences in circumstances and their relationships to output. These
thumbnail sketches, with their references to the growth of indus-
trial sectors and the diminution of agriculture, prepare the reader for
later chapters; they also establish the comparative chronology of
growth between economies.
The population discussion is strictly demographic. It runs in terms
of mortality rates and fertility, leaving incomes and their effects on
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 357
population alone. The presentation should be very helpful to his-
torians and others in gaining an understanding of demographic me-
chanics. Western countries have mastered environmental death and
now are confronted by a new range of causes that have no obvious
relation to physical situation.
These first two chapters are an attempt to quantify the elements
of the Malthusian dichotomy, the two primary aggregates of which
economic history consists, output and population. Together they
provide the objective framework within which all other explanations
must fit. It is the task of other contributors to indicate how they
relate to one another within particular economies over time. Be-
cause of the plan of the book this is done only very partially and
almost incidentally, as one author or another encounters national
income or population in his discussion. But Deane and Cole have
alerted us with a historical generalization (p. 44): "Associated with
the rise in real incomes per head for those countries which achieve
sustained economic growth was a series of well defined changes in
economic structures." As is apparent from the other contributors,
these changes are only well defined if we keep our thinking at a
high level of generality.
It is a relief to turn from the effort to produce quantitative preci-
sion from intransigent and incomplete data to the occupation by
Europeans of empty lands. Youngson carries out his task well. He
provides an account of the exploitation of new territories by western
Europeans in the Americas and in the Antipodes. It might have
added a good deal to the account if trade and settlement eastward
by Russia over the Asiatic land mass had been included, but the
story of the occupation of vast territories of new continents is suffi-
ciently dramatic.
The discussion is basically simple, for it runs in terms of the im-
pact of exogenous factors upon societies so feeble that the relation-
ship is in fact between Europeans and newly accessible natural re-
sources. Here in the empty lands, where natural conditions are so
important, the danger of circularity of reasoning is at a minimum.
There is little serious discussion of the complications that arose be-
cause of conflicts between groups of incomers as they formed them-
selves into new societies; it is European man and his technology
versus virgin nature all the way.
In these "filling up" situations, the income and population aggre-
gates, though useful, have only limited value. It is "process" that
matters. Those hoping for guidance upon conservation programs
will not find it here: the apparent waste of natural resources, con-
358 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW
 sidered in retrospect, does not inspire condemnation in Youngson,
but merely the remark that "the issue essentially involves the secular
time preference of a community, and this is in principle insoluble.
There are too many unknowns" (p. 210).
Some authors can treat of some themes without the need to pro-
duce a thesis. This is so with Youngson, who, aware of the enormous
variety of terrain occupied in the nineteenth century, and of the
complexities thus posed, makes no attempt at synthesis. But we
learn that whatever the pattern that evolved, the elements that com-
posed it were substantially the same: the principles on which the
land was allocated over time, the creation of a viable agriculture
through the application of available technology, the creation of a
transport system, the incentives operating upon pioneer incomers,
and the availability of market outlets, all of which may be subject
to the arbitrary impact of mining. There is no variant of a general-
ized "staple" theory; Turner's frontier theory is not mentioned.
In dealing with transport, Girard wishes to draw the picture to-
gether, so that the historian's treatment can approximate to that of
the economist so as to be capable of being made into a pattern with
at least some degree of universality. "Invention and innovation in
transport," we are told (p. 213), "has a rhythm and internal logic of
its own." A new means of transport appears, using steam power by
land and sea. It will be adopted first to make those connections
which, in its primitive state, are profitable. In this phase it will be
merely ancillary to the existing dominant form of carriage. It will
be adapted to needs so that its economic relevance is extended.
Each such improvement will arise in a particular context: its spread
to other situations will depend upon its relevance, both physical and
economic. A stage will be reached in one situation after another at
which a "threshold" appears, making possible the enormous econ-
omies of through carriage as the elements become a system. The
new transport ceases to be ancillary, and itself becomes dominant,
reducing the former media to the role of its feeders. Competition,
by now often wasteful and destructive, gives place to integration
and coordination; competition is ended. The entire set of relation-
ships between factor costs has been altered, both by the reduction
in the cost of carriage and by the consequential structural altera-
tions in industry.
Thus we are given a study of transport (in which railways domi-
nate the picture) that is really concerned with a particular case of
the theme of technology and development. The discussion is well
informed and comprehensive, but it is startling to read (p. 231)
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 359
as an introduction to railway building in the United States that "the
Americans realised at once that only the railway could enable them
to organise their continent." What some Americans realized pretty
quickly was the first stage of the transport sequence, that profits
might be made by forming specific enterprises to reap the gains of
the most obvious projects; by so doing such men started the de-
velopment process from which all else followed. It is disturbing
also after so much concern with the complex relationships between
the economically and the technically feasible, to read (p. 272) that
after 1914, "in future the problem of improving transport was to be
purely a financial question: all technical obstacles had been re-
moved." Even more serious, the discussion is pre-Fogel; it ante-
dates the close logical and quantitative scrutiny of the new eco-
nomic history.3
What can we deduce from Girard's discussion of the case for or
against a program of road or railway building in a given underde-
veloped country? Certain general effects and certain particular re-
lationships can be anticipated and perhaps certain errors avoided.
But the principal lesson from Girard is that of particularity and in-
terdependence: the developers must treat transport as part of a
"whole" situation: they cannot rely upon distillations from history
of "rhythm and internal logic."
Standing out from the rest of the work, distinguished by both its
length and treatment, is Landes' chapter, "Technological Change
and Development in Western Europe, 1750-1914." Here is an at-
tempt to solve the problem of the "start" — how it all began in Brit-
ain, the first society to industrialize, how by emulation others fol-
lowed the same course, and how toward the end of the nineteenth
century, later starters had assumed the lead. A lesser man than
Landes, asked to deal with this subject, might well have been
tempted to proceed with caution, outlining the leading discoveries
and adaptations, demonstrating their logical relationships with each
other, and indicating their proximate effects. This would not do for
Landes. He seeks to describe the renovation of societies through
the implementation and extension of post-Newtonian science; it is
here that the real wrestling with concomitance and causality occurs.
But these problems are notoriously difficult to handle; it is for this
reason that economic theorists have found it impossible to assimilate
invention to their theorems.
Landes sought a perspective that would allow him to go as far
3
Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric
History (Baltimore, 1964).
360 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW
 as possible in the direction of self-sustained explanation. With even
greater hardihood he attempts, in his Conclusion, to evaluate what
he has done both in terms of historical explanation and as guidance
for policy. He is aware that "it is impossible in the present state of
our knowledge to evaluate the parameters of economic develop-
ment." Yet, "an end calls for conclusions," and we should be grate-
ful for his temerity in attempting them. He contrasts "limited
inductive analyses" (of the kind offered in other parts of the work)
with "ambitious universal abstractions" and tells us that the latter,
though dangerous and premature, are essential to the progress of
historical thinking as providing analytical patterns of wide scope
against which lesser structures may be assessed. In this he is quite
right.
We are then offered a number of "middle range conclusions"
which suggest the need to modify quite radically some of the pre-
vailing generalizations about the course of economic development.
He ends with a rueful remark. Having observed that nations are
largely impervious to the lessons that might be drawn from the
work of thinkers like himself, he draws solace from the observation
that this "should not discourage the scholar — for history is still its
own justification." One would guess that Landes' Conclusion cost
him much travail as he sought to discharge his dual duties as a
Professor of History and Economics.
At his very starting-point Landes is in trouble of a kind inevitable
when thinking on such a scale. Two drastic simplifications are re-
quired in order to begin: the links with the past must be truncated,
and some form of generalized dynamic must be postulated. We be-
gin briskly in the mid-1750's with the political settlement of Britain
(the basis of Macaulay's thinking) achieved, with the new commer-
cialism well advanced, the plantation economy (providing new
wage-goods to Europeans) at its height, and with the attitudes and
values of a society, in varying degree Protestant, established. None
of these important pre-industrial preliminaries are mentioned.
In order to explain the dynamics of industrialization, a strong
antithesis between Britain and Europe is postulated. Differences
are heightened and the common experiences minimized; Britain
tends to become an isolated phenomenon to be considered almost
exclusively in her own terms. Those experiences, skills, and insights
that were European rather than British are minimized, including
the long tradition of cloth making in its many stages and its inter-
national division of labor, metal working, shipbuilding, the con-
structions of the millwright, military engineering, the European
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 361
 weaponry, the provisioning of great cities, the sophistication of
banking facilities and the means of payment, and the evolution of
business law. Differences between class relationships as they existed
in Britain and on the Continent are much stressed: Arthur Young is
taken at his face value in describing English noblemen as having the
regular habit of sharing their dinner tables with local farmers. There
is much emphasis on the rise in Britain of "cost mindedness," "seen
as part of a larger rationality with an ideological force of its own."
It is surprising to find economic man so typical in Britain so early,
the characteristic figure (p. 298) in "a people fascinated by wealth
and commerce, collectively and individually." The notion of the
late eighteenth century rationalist maximizing in the market seems
inconsistent with stress on the degree of speculation required in
business: there is the statement (p. 304) that "to appreciate the force
of this drive for wealth one must remember that these men were
risking their fortunes at each throw of the entrepreneurial dice."
The longer view of Europe's past reminds us of how much West-
ern Europe had in common, and how strong the contrast was be-
tween it and the rest of the world: the matrix out of which industrial-
ization came was European, not British. Of course, Landes is aware
of this. He writes elsewhere "the countries of Europe had already
proceeded a long way toward a breakthrough when the British
achievement thrust upon them the necessity of abridging the proc-
ess." 4
Yet though there is over-sharpening, there is substance in most of
these points: the danger is that, in the effort to arrive at the secret
(or secrets) of the extraordinary conjuncture in Britain out of which
economic acceleration came, antithesis may be overdone.
Having stressed the uniqueness of Britain in experience, structure,
and initiative, the second phase of Landes' story must, necessarily,
be an account of Continental emulation, as France, Belgium, and
Germany sought to catch up. The industrial revolution was im-
ported from Britain piecemeal, in the form of ideas, men, and ma-
chines. But it did not assume a self-sustaining and socially renovat-
ing character until, in the case of France, the second "industrialising"
nation, the 1830's. Revolution and war were experiences that de-
layed adaptation rather than accelerated it, between 1789 and 1830.
Why did Britain fail to keep the lead in productivity in the later
nineteenth century? Landes confined his comparison to Germany,
leaving the implications of the American case unexplored. Dismiss-
4
William W. Lockwood (ed.), The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton,
196S), chap. Ill: David S. Landes, "Japan and Europe: Contrasts in Industrialization."
362 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW
 ing the possibility (perhaps a little too readily) that Germany's
factor endowment was more favorable to the current technology, he
goes straight for another explanation: "the reasons for German suc-
cess in the competition with Britain were not material but rather
social and institutional" (p. 561). British industries now required
renovating initiative different in scale and kind from that appro-
priate to the first stage of industrialization: to this second entrepre-
neurial challenge the "third generation" could not respond with the
necessary vigor. British men of business "basked complacently in
the sunset of economic hegemony" (p. 563). The German entre-
preneur had all the reverse qualities — vigor, freedom from precon-
ception, specialized training, tenacity and plausibility in selling, and
eagerness in the application of venture capital.
There are those who think that this contrast, based upon fairly
generalized literary sources, is exaggerated: indeed it is difficult to
understand how, in the light of the enormous range of changes in
technology Landes describes, British business could have survived
at all, let alone occupy its 1914 position. In many sectors British
products were selling well at home and abroad: it seems gratuitous
retrospective wisdom to indict British businessmen for "failure" to
discard a remunerative set of arrangements for new ones, based on
the practice of German newcomers who had no alternative and
whose success took time to prove.
Yet any reasonable interpretation of the evidence available does
confirm the idea that British and German entrepreneurship were
different. Landes deduces the contrast largely from the comparative
business experience of the two sets of men. But equally, if not more
important, were differences between British and German historical
experience that go beyond entrepreneurialism narrowly conceived.
German success rested upon an ethos generated by the interplay
between business and a matrix of connections that was entirely
absent in Britain: an aggressively nationalist state, a powerful mili-
tary establishment, an emerging educational system largely based
not upon humanist classicism but upon technical accomplishment,
and a banking system that itself sponsored and supervized industrial
development. All these were bound together into a single set of
relationships.
The contrast with Britain is striking. In the British tradition each
of these elements had its separate and distinct identity. It was part
of the liberal society, a necessary condition for Britain's pioneer in-
dustrialization, that this should have been so. Moreover, in Britain,
in spite of economic revolution, there was great social and political
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 363
 continuity. The British mind was shot through with attitudes that
pre-dated the beginning of the Landes story: the atomistic ideas of
the Enlightenment, the view that the state had no business with
business, the notion that true education was not connected with
learning how to generate wealth (much less be subordinate to it),
the belief that banking must rest upon automatic principles governed
by short-term liquidity.
Our economic history must broaden out to take account of na-
tional aspirations (or rather the aspirations of the governing elite),
and the way these, when implemented, created an entirely new
climate in which older attitudes are starkly archaic. British indus-
trialization was not really revolutionary in the broader sense of re-
making the British outlook: that of Germany had to be. The British
way of doing things might well have survived even longer than it
did, had not the two economies gone to war. Or it might have
undergone sudden revolutionary change had Britain been defeated.
Congratulations to Landes are in order, both on the scope of his
knowledge and the verve of his presentation. If there is a tendency
to over-dramatize the picture this, as well as being stimulating, is
the necessary price we must pay when such an author is commis-
sioned to bring order out of the chaos of modern technology and its
impact. One wonders what kind of book we would have had if
Landes had written it all.
In a sense Dovring, in writing of European agriculture and its
transformation, shares Landes' theme of technology and innovation.
A primary distinction, basic to the treatment, is made between
monoculture and mixed farming. Over the last two centuries diver-
sity has "marked the path of progress in European agriculture" (p.
668). Such intensive rotation farming has produced a higher yield
and greater specialization.
Yet progress has been, in a sense, self-limiting. Mixed farming,
in spite of using much more labor than did monoculture, also sup-
ported more: the result was chronic labor surplus, a powerful dis-
incentive to the introduction of capital-using methods. Mixed
farming, though it could make possible a significant increase in
population under pre-industrial conditions, could not bring, of its
own, a higher standard of living. A new crop increasing the yield
to effort, like the potato, only confirmed this situation. The stimulus
for the further improvement to agriculture had to come from out-
side. Expanding industries and towns, raising food prices and di-
minishing rural population, were required: once begun, their effect
on agriculture could be rapidly cumulative: the mixed farming so-
364 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW
 ciety, in short, was in increasingly unstable equilibrium, ever more
susceptible to new factors.
Usually it was the landlords who gave the lead in the response
to market opportunity, reorganizing production, investing capital,
and disposing of labor. The owner-occupiers, on the other hand,
concerned with the continuity and employment of the family, lagged.
Beyond a certain point, however, the demonstrably more efficient al-
ternative became irresistible. Three typical phases of change are
outlined: in the first, as urban industries appear, the rural popula-
tion actually increases, for the new employments cannot yet absorb
the demographic increment but rather increases the agrarian excess;
then comes a phase of relative stability of the agricultural population
as rural excess is more or less taken up by the towns; thirdly, num-
bers engaged in agriculture decline absolutely. Though this is the
general course of experience, it is subject to significant differences
due to natural conditions. Four main types are distinguished:
France as a unique case, the rest of western Europe, eastern
Europe, and the Mediterranean countries.
Though, on Dovring's account of European agriculture, the in-
creased productivity due to mixed farming could not itself induce
a trend toward industrialization, there apparently was not, within
the peasant societies he considers, any serious obstacle to change,
once market opportunities made this possible. Or if there was, Dov-
ring lays no great stress upon it; he is more concerned with land use
than with land tenure.
Gerschenkron's discussion of Russian agriculture and its relation
to industrialization presents a fundamentally different picture. No
great renovation of Russia could occur until the State had itself
acted to break the closed circle of landlordism and serfdom, or suc-
cumbed to its revolutionary destruction. The possibility of an
urban-industrial economy in Russia depended upon the liquidation
of the fundamental relationships of the countryside. The problem
for the Czarist government was: how to escape from a traditional
situation without provoking a revolutionary one. For emancipation
also involved land reform so that the legally free peasantry might
be economically viable; at the same time the landed gentry, the
cohesive element in society, must not be deprived of control over
land and men to the point at which they became ineffectual.
The contrast with Youngson's situation of empty disposable land
to be allocated to free men, and Gerschenkron's of the remaking of
a developed traditional agrarian society, is striking. There is no
human experiment of the kind to approach it in scale and complex-
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 365
 ity. Gerschenkron's discussion, often by its very minuteness, demon-
strates that this was a problem at once vast, involved, and delicate.
The attempt at modernization without revolution failed: there was
renewed peasant unrest in the early 1900's. The peasantry, liberated
but not pacified, was kept in order by a vigorous whipping cam-
paign. Stolypin tried to accelerate the formation of a class of small
proprietors motivated by economic individualism: to do so he
weakened the village communes. He sought and failed to find the
conditions under which the basic agrarian institution of "order,"
the commune, could both remain intact, and provide the new class
of peasant-owners, from whom would stem new individualist ini-
tiatives.
Gerschenkron, like Landes, has written an original monograph;
Portal, like North and Allen, produces a summary that nowhere ap-
proaches a personal thesis. Capable as the work of the latter three
authors certainly is, it contains little sense of struggle and involve-
ment on the part of the authors.
Russia, in Portal's account, was still in the artisan stage down to
the emancipation. Then followed a phase in which there was sig-
nificant economic growth without industrial expansion. This arose
from accelerated population increase, together with the bringing of
"the peasant mass into the currents of trade" (p. 811). Thus a form
of economic growth was possible, following an alteration in social
and tenurial arrangements, with no concomitant change in artisan
production methods. This, in turn, had further demographic effects;
it also provoked the beginning of true industrial sectors. Whether
this pattern of growth merely increased output absolutely, or pro-
duced the much more difficult result of an increase in output per
head, is not ascertainable.
In the period from 1890 to 1900 the State took a hand, this time,
especially under Witte, to provide the conditions for real industrial
growth. Tariffs, loans, a sound currency, a railway building pro-
gram with a consequent stimulus to heavy industry, produced "bril-
liant" results.
In the third phase, 1900-1914, though the State did not withdraw
from the economy, its influence had become secondary to that of
the now established mass consumers' market. Thus, by 1914 there
had been considerable advance along the path of industrialization,
with State sponsorship a diminishing element. Then came war and
revolution, and the need for comprehensive state planning.
For no apparently sound reason Professor North's chapter on in-
dustrialization in the United States precedes the discussion of Russia:
366 BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW
it would better come at the end of the volume, together with G. C.
Allen's treatment of the Far East, for both these discussions are
stripped to bare essentials. Perhaps this is because they are extra-
European and hence marginal. Perhaps it is because the authors do
not inflate their briefs.
It may be that in Professor North's case the presentation, which
compared with the Gerschenkron-Portal discussion of Russia seems
almost perfunctory, reflects the approach to economic history made
by a member of the new school of Cliometrics, resting upon a reduc-
tion to "essentials." North sets out the reasons why the United States
overtook Britain (a discussion complementary to that of Landes in
comparing Britain and Germany).
The factors at work were: a reservoir of scientific and technical
development created in Europe, the size of the American market,
labor productivity raised by training and education, and the adop-
tion of indigenous labor-saving innovations. These, limited in their
impact until the 1830's, asserted themselves and worked in ever
more powerful mutual reinforcement from the 1860's onward. The
people of the United States are presented as reacting chiefly to
their new physical environment: in Germany, though this relation-
ship was certainly powerful, it was reinforced by a response to the
social, political, and philosophical state of the nation.
The course of economic development in the United States in the
nineteenth century owed much to the fact that it took place in a
land that was empty, largely self-isolated after 1782 from the his-
torical forces of mutual interaction between states in Europe, yet
was the recipient of successive waves of labor from European coun-
tries, each of which in its turn, though earning more than might
have been possible at home, provided new sources of labor in the
United States that were cheap relative to those already there. Among
the immigrants were many who, freed from the restraints of the
Old World, assailed the opportunities of the New World without
inhibiting preconceptions: this is the kind of attitudinal point that
Landes might have picked up. It is a little surprising that in a
History of Europe these "Atlantic" elements do not receive more
attention, though we are indeed told that immigration from the
1860's onward was a major contribution to the growth of American
population and labor force.
The extraordinary story of Japanese industrialization is briskly
told by Professor Allen: it affords a sharp contrast to his even shorter
discussions of China, India, and South-East Asia. For in Japan all
was policy and action, producing within a generation a society still
MODERN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 367
ruled by traditional values. In China the old values were defended
by the opposite policy: a resistance to the new way of life, based
partly upon conviction, and partly upon inertia and impotence. The
very vastness of China (to be explained by forces at work long be-
fore Allen's story begins) produced an administrative system wholly
incapable of carrying out developmental plans, but it also saved her
from final partition by the Western Powers. In India the paramount
world power was in possession. The will to renovate was greatly
checked by the Mutiny. The ability to do so was always severely
limited, for the program of capital works based chiefly on railways,
though politically the least difficult and dangerous of development
policies, was not a sufficient condition for rising output per head.
For the British in India there could be no question of an attempt, of
the kind described by Gerschenkron in Russia, to carry out any
fundamental operation on social and tenurial relationships.
China and India must surely have a larger place in some later
Cambridge volume when the European emphasis can be finally
abandoned and the world significance of these two nations properly
recognized. The present emphasis arises from the fact that the
attitudes of the editors is in a sense old-fashioned, being still mainly
concerned with the rise of industrial-urban society seen from Europe.
It is all very well to study the impact of the new forces upon old
societies, but this should not be done at the expense of an under-
standing of the old, with their differential resistances and reactions
to change. To the historian the problems of non-growth should be as
important as those of growth.
How much obsolescence is built into this book? It is comprised
of many partial syntheses, which are not always wholly consistent
with one another; it admirably demonstrates the merits of eclecti-
cism. Historicism finds no support at all, except in terms of frag-
mentary borrowings of vocabulary and of concepts. Simply because
it is a magazine in hard covers it will not all be superseded at once.
One would guess that the contributions of Landes and Gerschen-
kron, whatever effects they may have on the symmetry of the book,
will last longest: the former because of the difficulty, in the present
state of knowledge, of giving a better account of the central mystery
of invention and innovation, and the latter because it is an original
monograph straight from the heart of its author's interests. As a
general approach to the modern world the book, in spite of great
merit, should not be allowed to stand in the way of another attempt
within a decade.

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