Assignments

Weekly Responses

Each week students will write a very brief (at most 2 paragraphs but could be just bullet points) response to the readings. These might offer comparisons between readings, a summary of the main arguments as you understand them, a series of questions the reading left you with, or if warranted the occasional rant about a particular reading.

The weekly responses will be worth 25% of the final grade.

Book Review Assignments

The first two writing assignments for this course are to select two of the books we are reading in class and complete a 3–4 page review of them. If there is another book you wish to review, this is fine as long as you seek permission in advance. Such a review should accomplish three things:

It should summarize the author’s main argument.
It should place the work in question in its broader historiographical context.
It should provide a critical assessment of the suitability of the employed methodology to advance the author’s argument.

One excellent way to learn how to write a strong review is to read a variety of book reviews in the relevant historical journals. This is also a good way to develop a broad sense of a literature at the same time that you become more familiar with the genre.

Sample book reviews by Professor Anne McCants:

Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 by Oscar Gelderblom.

The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe by Laurence Fontaine.

The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (PDF) by Francesco Boldizzoni.

Shaping Medieval Markets: The Organization of Commodity Markets in Holland, C. 1200 – C. 1450 by Jessica Dijkman.

The book reviews will be worth 30% of the final grade.

Historiographical Essay

For the historiographical essay, you may select your own topic (and within that a framing question) from among those considered in the course. Undergraduate students should write an 8–10 page paper (graduate students should aim for 20). All students should also develop a useful bibliography on the topic. The expectation is that you will encompass a major literature while demonstrating the ability to think critically about the theories and methods engaged by other historians to answer the question you have posed. You should organize the paper around this question, giving careful consideration to why different historians sometimes answer important questions in such different ways.

An excellent guide for writing an annotated bibliography is available from the Williams College Libraries.

The essay will be worth 30% of the final grade.

Student Examples

These examples appear courtesy of MIT students and are anonymous upon request.

Book Reviews

Energy and the English Industrial Revolution by Edward Anthony Wrigley.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz.

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr.

Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris.

Historiographical Essays

“Built for Success: Organizational Structure and the Great Divergence.” (PDF)

“Cultures, Coal, Colonies, Computation: The Causes and Perpetuators of the Great Divergence.” (PDF)

Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650

Review by Anne EC McCants

The immediate goal of Oscar Gelderblom’s historically rich study of the medieval and early modern mercantile practices of Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam (1250–1650) is to document and then explain the development of “more inclusive, open access institutions” that, he argues, lowered the transaction costs faced by the mercantile community (local and foreign) and facilitated the growth of European trade (p. 208). Behind this stated goal lies a much more ambitious project: One central to all of the long-run economic history being written today, namely to explain why Europe triumphed over the rest in the great game of economic development? Gelderblom offers us an interesting blend of two streams in this vast literature, one more recent (the so-called, but no longer really ’new’ institutional economic history) and the other (Smithian commercial expansion as the primary engine of growth) dominant among a previous generation of historians.

The current vogue in long-run explanations is to see ‘institutions’ as the key to success or failure in the jump from a cyclically-bounded preindustrial economy to one enjoying the great enrichment that has been the concomitant of modern economic growth. Those places that managed to cultivate propitious institutions (i.e. a roughly equal application of the law to all, secure property rights, the consistent and timely adjudication of disputes, curbs against rent-seeking behavior, etc.) moved ahead. Those that remained mired in autocratic institutions of privilege or were otherwise subjected to the depravations of violence and wholesale theft enjoyed no such opportunity. Of course, as Gelderblom’s project nicely demonstrates, it is not unreasonable to combine a concern with the development of good institutions with an appreciation of the economic power of commercial expansion. Appropriately both commerce and institutions make it into his title.

But how does a society win the institutional jackpot in the first place. Two schools of thought on this question dominate the literature. The first, most closely linked with Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (Violence and the Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, 2009) and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 2005), privileges the development of strong states able to protect trade and enforce the rule of law. The second, best represented by Avner Greif (Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, 2006) looks instead to the private-order arrangements of guilds or kin networks to curb violence and protect property. But as Gelderblom rightly points out, strong states can be rapacious and tight-knit groups are notoriously subject to rent-seeking and regulatory capture. He argues instead that Europe was spared the tyranny of the too-strong ruler and the self-dealing of a mercantile oligarchy by the very “political and legal fragmentation” that might in fact have been its undoing; that is, “competition between urban governments that tried to attract trade through the continuous adaptation of their legal, commercial, and financial institutions” led to the rise of a public good shared by all (p. 3).

After a very clear introductory chapter that outlines the broad historiography alluded to above, it is the long middle sections of the book where Gelderblom details the various processes of adaptation as the center of commercial primacy slowly migrated from, first Bruges in the high Middle Ages, to Antwerp in the later Middle Ages, and finally to Amsterdam in the early modern period. For business historians in particular, this detail will be of especial interest as it documents so richly the specific commercial practices, legal and logistical, that kept the system producing the economic surpluses that spurred the competitive forces he says drove the further development of virtuous institutions. As he puts it, “their main achievement was the continuous adaptation of the commercial infrastructure to changes in international trade, even if this required the dismantlement of existing practices, or the relegation of intermediaries to a humbler position” (p. 78). Yet, all the while the agricultural and proto-industrial hinterland that provided the fuel for this commerce remained essentially the same. It was the capacity for the commercial center to move that allowed the system as a whole to keep growing even when one city’s prospects came to be blocked in one way or another.

Is this enough, though, to explain the commercial dominance of Europe on the global stage of the eighteenth and later centuries? Or indeed to explain its (possibly?) unique capacity to foster the beneficent institutions so prized in the current economic growth literature? Has Gelderblom identified a necessary condition, i.e. urban competition, for the European growth outcome? Or is it even a sufficient condition, as he more or less suggests in his conclusion when he argues that “urban competition leads to the creation of inclusive institutions” (emphasis mine), without adding a qualifier such as “might” to soften the claim (p. 198)? His historical narrative—which more or less takes the form of: First success, then stalemate; move, and repeat—is certainly suggestive of a just-so story, rather than the quantitative analytic mode that is predominant in the literature on economic growth. I don’t lodge this observation as a hostile critique however. Much excellent history takes the form of just-so stories, and like the Goldilocks of lore, the medieval and early modern Low Countries might indeed have been positioned “just right” between centralization and fragmentation to promote institutions of reliable justice and ultimately profound prosperity.

Anne McCants is professor of history and director of the Concourse Freshman Learning Community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (1997) and numerous articles on historical demography and material culture.

Shaping Medieval Markets: The Organization of Commodity Markets in Holland, C. 1200 – C. 1450

Review by Anne EC McCants, MIT, August 2013

In a growing body of scholarship that explores the medieval origins of the early modern Dutch economy, many economic historians now expound the thesis that the prosperity of the ‘golden age’ was presaged, or even made possible, by the fortuitous resource allocations and resulting market conditions that date back to the early settlement of the reclaimed marshy land that would in time become Holland. Much of the detailed archival work that stands behind this literature has been published in Dutch, but increasingly works of broader synthesis are appearing in English. Jessica Dijkman’s new contribution to this literature fits squarely within this basic framework.

Her study adds to the tradition of regional inquiry, however, by offering up a serious engagement with another currently fashionable project, that is the documentation of the so-called ‘institutional origins’ of a given economic outcome, in this case a highly successful one. Dijkman defines the terms of her study from the outset as a response to the oft-cited work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001), but with the explicit acknowledgement that we must actually explain where the much-touted ‘good institutions’ came from, and how they are situated in time. That is, she sets for herself the explicitly historical task of explaining origins and change, and not just the social scientific task of identifying and categorizing states of being. To do this, she borrows from A-J-R, what she calls the ‘social conflict view’ (p. 18). Institutions arise, she argues, not just (or perhaps not even usually) as the most efficient response to a set of circumstances, but as the most advantageous to those who wield the political power necessary to enforce them. Unlike A-J-R though she places a greater emphasis on exogenous forces that shape that political process rather than relying so overwhelmingly on endogenous factors alone (p. 20).

Dijkman’s argument draws on one other older theoretical tradition, namely that immortalized by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations — the idea that commercialization (the widening and deepening of markets for commodities in particular, but with spin-off effects in markets for labor and land) can be found at the root of what we now think of as modern economic growth. As she puts it at the outset of her study, her “aim is to discover whether favourable commodity market institutions rooted in Holland’s specific social and political structure contributed to the remarkable economic development Holland experienced in the late Middle Ages” (p. 15). From the literature on institutions she defines the relevant markets as “sets of institutions: Rules, customs, and practices that structure the exchange of goods” (ibid). But her question, and her method of probing it, are fundamentally historical in nature, namely to ascertain if the specific timing of Holland’s geographical emergence from previously uninhabited swampland was critical to the formation of one set of institutions and not another; and to execute that investigation by means of a comparative analysis with Flanders and England, both places that shared a range of important characteristics with Holland, but also differed from Holland in critical, and easily distinguishable, ways.

A major strength of the book is the detailed historical work that is both carried out directly and distilled from the research of others. The first part of the book, titled “The Institutional Framework: Trade Venues” (begins p. 33) reviews the actual places where trade took place: Fairs, rural markets, urban attempts to control rural trade, and successful small urban staple markets. Here the main advantage enjoyed by Holland relative to either Flanders or England appears to have been the absence of a feudal past. Because of the relatively late start date for land reclamation in the northern Low Countries, feudalism never had time to put down sturdy roots in this region. Neither did any one urban place manage to exert strong control over rural production as had been the case with the major Flemish cloth towns to her south, bolstered as they were by large scale urban industry as well as noble power.

Part II, “The Institutional Framework: Rules and Practices” (begins p. 191) shifts gears to examine the actual practices that facilitated trade. Here the emphasis is on the emergence of agreed-upon weights and measures which were not as standardized as they were officially in England, but neither were they so loose as to stifle trade since both Dutch towns and the counts exercised more effective control than it might appear on a first glance at the evidence. Moreover, the early development of international trade demanded a fair degree of conformity in any event (p. 235). Similarly, the other great test for the Institutional explanation for economic success, reliable contract enforcement, again finds Holland lagging behind England (with her royal courts) and Flanders (with her few large and dominating cities). Here Dijkman suggests that the enduring strength of local courts in every town and village was the “Achilles’ Heel of Holland’s system of debt litigation” p. 267. Yet once again, this factor proves not to have been “decisive”—because in “medieval Holland a solid foundation for a locally-based system of contract enforcement grounded on individual responsibility was laid at an early stage” (p. 271).

Part III (begins p. 273) “Market Performance: Quantitative Tests” is where the rubber really hits the road as it were. It is in Dijkman’s quantitative tests of both price convergence and market density that Holland really begins to outshine its neighbors across the Channel or south of the great rivers. Holland demonstrates a remarkably well-integrated price system (for wheat) vis-a-vis international markets from a very early stage. This does not mean that prices were not volatile; but they did track developments on the international trade circuit very closely. Dijkman attributes this to the very poor land quality for wheat agriculture in the north, leaving no hope of sustaining the local population. This forced Holland into international grain markets with an unusual precocity. England by contrast had a relatively self-contained grain market so prices varied much more by distance than in Holland (pp. 306–7). But dependence on imports still left Holland vulnerable in times of dearth as “export restrictions in the producing regions could cause acute problems in Holland” (p. 311).

Finally, her most remarkable finding is the incredibly high level of market orientation in Holland from a relatively early date, with already 60–66% of the population involved in the market for their sustenance by the mid-14^th century. rising to around 90% by 1500 (p. 325). Market participation in Flanders had been somewhat higher (at approximately 70% of the population in the early 14^th century) but it had been entirely eclipsed by 1500 (p. 332). Meanwhile, market density in England never even came close. In the early 14^th century its population involved in the marketplace ranged around 50% and that number had only edged up towards 65% by 1500 (p. 338).

How can we account for these incredibly high levels of market penetration already in the years prior to the Black Death? or for that matter, for the perhaps even more amazing feat of increasing market saturation in the period of population collapse following? Dijkman has this to say: “Returning to Holland, we can conclude that the strong growth of market orientation between 1350 and 1500 would not have been possible without the support of an efficient organization of commodity markets (p. 342).” Nonetheless, she goes on to argue that Holland’s favourable institutions did not generate high levels of commercialization of their own accord: The process was ultimately triggered by non-institutional forces. But the contribution of the institutional framework was still essential: It facilitated and supported flexible adaptation to changing circumstances.

So where does this leave her readers interested in testing the theoretical usefulness of the institutional approach? This reader remains somewhat uncertain. In the final analysis Dijkman gives us a well-nuanced ‘just-so story:’ Her strongest explanation is “the absence of a truly feudal past”—in the formulation of De Vries and Van der Woude (1997), coupled with “the near absence of urban coercion over the countryside” (p. 374). Or as she argues elsewhere “the weakness of both vertical ties (constraints ensuing from the exertion of lordly power) and horizontal ties (constraints ensuing from collectivities such as guilds)” account for Holland’s unique experience (p. 351). But of course, for anyone wanting to use the Dutch case as a guide for best practice, this conclusion is not terribly helpful.

Nonetheless, I am not satisfied to end this review on that critical note. Just-so stories are often actually very good history—even if they don’t meet the abstractness criterion of best-practice social science. The historian’s primary task is, of course, to explain how things came to be, not how to alter the future. In our future-besotted present this may not seem worth much. But understanding how things came to be is a worthy enterprise in its own right. There is yet much to learn from the ever-more-clearly delineated medieval origins of the early modern Dutch economy. Prosperity often has long roots—understanding that can indeed help us make wiser assessments in the present, and hopefully, offer more people better opportunities for the future.

Citations

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, et al. “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001): 1369–401.

van der, Woude, Ad, and Jan de Vries. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe

Review by Anne EC McCants

Laurence Fontaine begins her (newly translated into English) book, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe—a magisterial overview of the social context of money-lending and poverty before the industrial age—squarely in the present. Her opening question is to wonder if there is “an alternative to this new form of savagery that economic liberalism has become” (p. 1)? And in partial answer she invokes the ’new’ enthusiasm for micro-credit schemes to address the failure of capital markets in the developing world. In particular, she argues that: “Microcredit today is endowed with the virtues of a moral economy, for it creates solidarity” (p. 2). The persistence of poverty around the globe despite the dramatic increase in both production and productivity in the 19^th and 20^th centuries—that is in the period after her object of study—coupled with the specific brutality of the sub-prime and home mortgage crash of 2008 and the painfully slow global recovery from it, make this an ideal time to revisit the morality of an economic system that preceded our own. Does history have something to teach us about a more ethical way of structuring our economic life, or are we simply misled by nostalgia when we look backwards and see what appears to have been greater social solidarity? These questions are critical, both for our understanding of the past as well as our prospects for the present. Fortunately, Fontaine is equipped with an impressive breadth of historical compass and the sharp clarity of thought necessary to sift the wheat from the chaff, leaving us with answers that are as intellectually compelling as they are humane.

Before she can tackle her framing questions however, Fontaine provides her reader with the best of what history has to offer: A geographically and thematically comprehensive survey of what has been learned over the last half century of social historical research about credit (with “belief, faith, and authority” as its semantic origins, p. 11), gift-giving, indebtedness, poverty, and trust. She examines these socially complex and interrelated phenomena from a diverse range of relevant perspectives: That of peasants, the landed aristocracy, urban financiers, the emerging bourgeoisie, the royal court, and women generally given their peculiar financial and legal disabilities. She also surveys the life of these concepts as played out in the early modern theatre and as employed by the pawnshop movement, the changing meanings of the words themselves as they appear in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and personal correspondence, and the clerical and legal prohibitions against usury. Her sources range from Central Europe to the Iberian Peninsula, to the North Sea Littoral, with not surprisingly her most extensive material drawn from England, France and Italy. The book is deeply informed by her own pioneering work on peddlers and household survival strategies, but it also broadly researched in the large secondary literature over which Fontaine holds an impressive command. Indeed, this would be a book well worth reading for its distillation of the vast bibliography alone.

Her most important historical claim is that in the early modern period creditor / debtor obligations lay at the heart of all social relationships, and were essential to their maintenance. Paying off loans completely actually had negative social repercussions, at least before the later 18^th century. with the emergence of a bourgeois preference for arms-length, fixed-term credit arrangements that were strictly contractual in nature. Older aristocratic notions of friendship and honor had demanded that credit be extended to any claimant in one’s circle even if at their peril. The pawnshop offered one solution to a world whose values were in transition by providing those suffering from weak social links to the market credit that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Nonetheless, the intractable problem with the pawnshop then, and now for that matter, is whether it should be understood as an institution of credit or charity.

The marketplace, an ancient space to be sure, was also dependent on personal knowledge informed by correspondence or proximity in which both the quality and quantity of goods might be uncertain. It was not yet the market of neo-liberal economics with ‘perfect information’ based on price clearing fundamentals. Given the power of bargaining in the early modern context then, Fontaine warns us then to be clear-eyed about the social solidarities of the past. For those richly endowed with friends and information, the social network could indeed overcome temporary hardship or a foolish decision. For those not so endowed—that is those who failed to nurture friendships or cultivate a credit-worthy persona or even just the appearance of one—they were forced into all variety of informal finance. But then, as now, informal finance was expensive, indeed, usurious (p. 302).

The moral voice she turns to finally is that of Amartya Sen, placing her hopes on equal access for all to a full participation in public discourse, the “circulation and sharing of information as a common good,” and the nurturance of institutions that assure everyone of the basic necessities of life. If our political economy could yield these things we would not need to pine for a utopian vision of a ‘world lost’ of the kind that Karl Polanyi offered up in 1944. We could instead pursue the “more ambitious goal” of helping everyone to “live the life he or she wants” (p. 320). After a long career spent uncovering the hardships of early modern poverty and the development of social institutions tasked with their remedy, this ambitious goal for our own society is one that Fontaine can speak to with authority and persuasiveness. Her book should be on the reading list of everyone who wants to move beyond nostalgia for a seemingly simpler past, or to address the complex issues of poverty in our own day.

Energy and the English Industrial Revolution

Wrigley begins Energy and the English Industrial Revolution with the metaphor of Pandora’s jar; “nothing in their past experience had prepared people at the time [of the Industrial Revolution] for what was to follow” (Wrigley, 1). And yet, the central problem for the concept of Industrial Revolution, as Wrigley identifies it, is that the pace of change was nonetheless gradual. The “revolution” did not appear revolutionary until at least the 1800s: Marx, Jevons, and Toynbee, Wrigley argues, were among the first to recognize the character of the new economy (Wrigley, 247). It was not clear, during the ascribed period of revolution itself, that anything fundamental had changed, or that growth would continue unabated. But Wrigley, though he identifies a number of causal factors, is less concerned with the question of why and how economic acceleration began, but on the question, of continuing contemporary significance, of why it did not come to an end. Why did not the same arrester mechanism that had always stopped previous growth stop this expansion?

The classical theories of Malthus and Ricardo tell that the return of capital and labor must fall as population rises, because economic productivity is dependent on the limits of land. An overabundance of people acts as a strain on the essentially fixed resources of geography, driving down the wages of labor, and forcing the cultivation of less-than-ideal land in order to provide sufficient sustenance. In this regime, which Wrigley identifies as the “organic economy,” subsistence dominates, and long-term growth rates are limited around 0.5% per year (Wrigley, 10–11). This amount of economic growth is easily absorbed by population growth. There will be no surplus in the economy; there is no demand for luxury goods to drive a differentiated market. As long as economic productivity is dependent on the supply of land, therefore, sustained and accelerating growth is impossible. Equilibrium will prevail.

That which provided an escape from this constrained subsistence existence, the “laborious poverty” of most of history, was the exploitation of a new source of energy: Coal (Wrigley, 38, 239). To Wrigley, energy is key. While wood as fuel requires substantial land area that could otherwise be used for agriculture, coal is a punctiform rather than areal quantity, and provides huge amounts of energy for a fixed, and relatively small, investment in land (Wrigley, 103). This decouples energy production from the Malthusian / Ricardian arrester mechanism of land demand. This shift in energy sources is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, precondition for a revolution that also involves numerous other factors: Cultivation of oats to power more efficient horses; the growth of transit networks; changes in occupational structure, income, and migration patterns; shifts in nuptiality and fertility. All of these are part of Wrigley’s explanations, and together they tell a compelling history. But his fundamental claim is relatively simple: “The discovery of a way of meeting the energy needs of an economy from a single source which was not subject to the limitations associated with dependence on the annual round of plant photosynthesis, was the decisive step in ensuring that growth would not be halted by the changes induced by its earlier success” (Wrigley, 100).

Wrigley puts forward what is essentially a demand-led theory. The economic acceleration he describes, however energetic its ultimate causes, is proximately caused by a rising demand for varied goods made possible by an escape from an agrarian economy. It is consumer demand, fed by the higher wages of secondary employment in factories, that provides the opportunity for an expanding market. And it is in part differences in consumer demand that seem to separate the Netherlands from England, in Wrigley’s telling (Wrigley, 224). Problematically, however, this puts the onus on the unfashionable side of the supply-demand equation. And Wrigley’s sole concession to supply-side economics is the recognition that coal provided the possibility of more cheaply producing a wide variety of goods, from dyed fabric to iron (Wrigley, 99–100). His point, however, is simple enough that it seems to stand regardless: Clearly, in order to buy the products of an Industrial Revolution, the English populace needed to have the money to do so. Whether this supply of excess wages was itself sufficient to spur the supply of goods is a reasonable question that falls outside the scope of Wrigley’s argument; Wrigley has not proposed a mechanism to directly connect the new sources of energy to a proliferating market of industrial goods.

Wrigley also appears to court direct contradictions in the discussion of the Netherlands as a counterexample. The Netherlands was modernized before England, but took longer to industrialize. The Netherlands did have a fuel source somewhat comparable to English coal: Peat. Wrigley argues that a lack of peat supply was not the problem; there was plenty more peat to be had (Wrigley, 223). But nevertheless, the Netherlands did not keep up with England’s industrialization. Wrigley offers as a possible explanation the claim that the presence of a new capital store of energy was the requirement for industrialization: “Only by gaining access to a vast store rather than a limited flow of energy” could the problem of energy, and therefore accelerated growth, be solved (Wrigley, 235). But this reads against the previous claim that the Netherlands had reserves of energy, and the ability to import coal from England. Wrigley had initially called upon De Vries and van der Woude to argue that it was demand instead that was lacking, and which could therefore not overcome high production costs (Wrigley, 223–24). However, he never explains why production costs or demand differed in these two places in ways in which energy was unable to overcome. These statements may not precisely contradict each other, but they do leave the reader in a bit of a muddle as to why England was able to industrialize sooner than the Netherlands. Either the energy sources were different (a store rather than a flow), or the discussion of peat is a distraction; but either way gaps remain in the argument.

It is also noteworthy that Wrigley does not talk at all about external markets or overseas trade. The only market for goods that is discussed is the domestic market of English laborers. But this inward-looking decision is not defended, and goes entirely without comment. It seems important to consider the impacts that foreign markets and sources of goods, both import and export, had on the industrialization of England, and the energetic uncoupling of the English economy—De Vries likewise critiques the books self-contained argument, which deals neither with trade relations nor even the greater British Isles, let alone Britain’s empire (De Vries, 1386). But it may be that Wrigley’s energy argument is capable of standing alone, even if England is considered to be a closed system.

What Wrigley has achieved in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution is to provide a thorough description of the circumstances that lifted the inverse relationship between population and wage in England between 1600 and 1800. The description depends fundamentally on the nature of a new energy source, but is not so plainly determinist as to suggest that energy could act alone. Instead, energy is at the center of a network of societal changes that made possible the growth of a market-consuming laboring class provided for, in essence, by the energy borrowed from the deep geological past. This borrowing has sustained us ever since. Though a competent history in its own right, Wrigley’s book looks to the future: If it was a vast store of energy that made sustained growth possible, and converted our economy from one with a fungible basis to a consumptible one, how do we continue to secure such stores of energy to maintain growth into the future, without making the world an unlivable place? Our markets have grown on the borrowed time of consumptible energy, and we are coming to a juncture in which we will have to renegotiate our sources of energy, and shift back toward the fungible. As energy production threatens to return to an areal nature (via solar and wind power), albeit at greater efficiency than photosynthesis, Wrigley’s book calls us to ask: Will Ricardo yet have his revenge? That Wrigley’s book provides historical grounding for this discussion alone makes it valuable reading for the historian or layperson alike.

References

De Vries, Jan. “Energy, and the English Industrial Revolution.” Economic History Review 64, no. 4 (2011): 1386–7.

Wrigley, Edward Anthony. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Part of White’s approach in Medieval Technology and Social Change was to write accessibly, and in the course of writing this review, I found myself having to explain the book to two hapless co-passengers on an airplane. Lynn White’s foundational history of technology text is so sorely abused in STS circles today that it is difficult to be too positive about it, even with laypeople. But that it remains such a classic fifty years after its publication authorizes another look at what it provides to a modern scholar of science and technology, if not the general reader. And that is, I argue, an example of what powerful work a relatively conservative take on technology studies can accomplish, and also a parable for the negotiation of closures in our own field. Like any work that attracts too much attention, however, Medieval Technology and Social Change has a troubled history.

White positioned his argument as part of a revolutionary new wave in historical study which, to borrow terminology anachronistically from a later movement in sociology of technology, was attempting to surface the “missing masses” of history. His aims seem no less lofty: History cannot be properly understood, he argues, unless we move beyond a focus on written texts. Against a backdrop of socio-political and “great-man” histories based on written records, White writes in his preface of the value of the new “resources of archaeology, iconography, and etymology to find answers when no answers can be discovered in contemporary writings” (White, vii). This is particularly important for studying the “unlettered portions of the past,” anything outside of the point of view of those “specialized segments of our race which have had the habit of scribbling”; but more specifically, it is an attempt to bring technology into the lens of history as a first-rate actor in its own right. And indeed White managed to do this, perhaps, his critics would suggest, too well.

White’s short and lucid book, an extension of a series of lectures given at the University of Virginia, presents three case studies in medieval technology: First, a re-thinking of the origins of feudalism that focuses on the impact of the stirrup (the most famous and notorious of the three); second, a new look at the three-field crop rotation system as a sort of agricultural revolution; and third, an investigation of an early explosion of relatively complex machine design to harness the powers of nature that greatly predates the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th Century. In brief, White surveys the classic theories about the emergence of feudalism and the confiscations of Church lands, focusing particularly on Brunner’s notion that tactical failures of Martel’s infantry at the Battle of Poitiers, against the Saracens, were the catalyst for a new social order built around the furnishing of mounted warriors (White, 5). But White casts doubt on the threat posed by the Muslim invasions as sufficient to cause a whole societal reorganization at great risk to Church support, and focuses instead on the introduction of the stirrup to Western Europe, which he traces in detail through available archaeological evidence and dates to the time of Charles Martel (White, 27). The stirrup then, was the catalyst for the development of feudalism. Though when put in so few words this argument sounds absurd, it is beautifully worked-out in the text as the only remaining logical solution White could discover.

Likewise, White’s second chapter presents a detailed tracing of the use of the heavy plough, the horse as draft animal, and the emergence of the three-field system in Northern Europe in an attempt to explain the foundations for the “startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise in industrial production” that “enlivened” the Middle ages from the tenth century (White, 76). Though this chapter, unlike the first, has no strong conventional narrative it opposes, White’s point is that this new agricultural dimension is largely invisible in the written record. This chapter stands as a test case then in how different forms of historical evidence can produce new views on the past. The third chapter is interested in examining a “new exploratory attitude towards the forces of nature,” evidenced in the proliferation of windmills and water mills in what White characterizes as a “medieval industrial revolution” (White, 89). Again, White uses amassed archaeological evidence to set the timeline for this new attitude, and weaves in histories of clocks and cannons as related objects that further evidence medieval technicians’ capacities for metallurgy and machine design. This chapter is more a survey of the available evidence than a pointed argument about the revolutionizing capacity of a single invention, and seems to do a careful job tracing the emergence of various types of mills and machines in the historical record.

Each chapter tells a wonderful story, and exposes new technological dimensions of an era too easily assumed to be technologically backward. However, are White’s stories simply too good? Many reviews and refutations claim just that. Bachrach’s attack on the first chapter, largely on the basis that the stirrup was little-used by Martel’s armies, has been particularly destructive for the particulars of that argument. And Hilton’s refutation of White’s narrative of agricultural revolution is similarly effective at challenging the putative facts presented in the second chapter. White also suffers, as Roland notes in his 2003 review, a technological determinist problem. Being read as espousant of a now-outmoded view on technological impacts is as damaging to the character of White’s arguments as further research has been to its particulars. But if it is determinist, then Medieval Technology and Social Change may well be the subtlest, and one of best and most careful technologically determinist argument ever made. With this, Roland seems to agree, coming to the conclusion that the places in which White has been particularly critiqued for his technological determinism have been largely misread, the carefully worded circumscriptions missed or dismissed.

I would join Roland in arguing that White’s time has not yet passed. There is room for its rehabilitation yet. Part of what White manages to show, both as celebration and cautionary tale, is the power that technological arguments have for the explication of history. Newer research has uncovered errors in White’s assumptions and readings of evidence. But, for good or ill, his chapters remain convincing stories that capture important lessons about technology and history. Technologies have effects. They shape and enable, constrain and support, even if they do not determine. And they have important material properties that matter for, and perhaps beyond, what they are taken by societies to do. White’s general principle, that archaeological evidence of technologies opens the door to radically new studies of history, is not undercut by any findings that his specific facts were in error. To study realms where written accounts do not adequately reach—and to check such accounts against material history—archaeological evidence of technology is a very convincing source. And this point remains true also for White’s value to laypeople, for whom technology history is itself rather esoteric.

It is amusing to note how much of White’s actual methodology seems to have been taken up by the field of history—for example by Hills in Power From the Wind, and in more contemporary environs by the likes of Hughes, Nye, and even Yates—now tempered by appropriate bowing to the risks of technologically determinist narratives. For White’s pathbreaking work, however, there would have been no need for such an explicit disclaimer. If anything, the mechanisms of closure in history of technology have spoken, taking up his principles while attacking the particulars of their application here. So White’s book remains well-written, thought provoking, methodologically interesting, and wrong. Its wrongness means it should be presented with a disclaimer, but there are no books that will not be found to be, somehow, in error. And there are few which were so revolutionary and which have had such lasting impacts on the field of the history of technology.

References

Bachrach, Bernard S. “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970): 49–75.

Roland, Alex. “Once More into the Stirrups: Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change.” Technology and Culture 44, no. 3 (2003): 574–85.

Sawyer, P. H., and R. H. Hilton. “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough.” Past and Present, no. 24 (1963): 90–100.

White, Jr. Lynn. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future

Very few authors are audacious enough to attempt to explain the entire history of the world in one book, but Morris does so with great gusto, and a surprising amount of success. Not only does the book maintain a coherent narrative and logic, but also remains informative and interesting to the historian and amateur alike.

In thirteen chapters and just under six hundred pages, Morris takes the reader on a seven million year journey to understand the history of the human (and pre-human) species. Beginning with Neanderthals and Peking Man, Morris traces the human journey out of Africa, through to Europe and the New World in the West, and past the Yangzi Valley through to China and Japan in the East. Along the way, he dismisses previously erroneous views of racism, culture and “great men” as the reasons for the West’s current lead and argues that geography itself is the reason for its current position. With this narrative in mind, he deftly traces migration patterns, climate change and technological innovation to demonstrate how each region developed over time. To measure these advancements, Morris introduces a insightful social development index that provides a quantitative indication of the relative level of development of the East and West at any given point. Using his index, Morris constructs an account consistent with much of the recent work of economic historians, suggesting the neither the West or the East saw terribly much in the way of growth until the Industrial Revolution. After this juncture, the West took off in the 18^th century and the East followed nearer the 20^th century. Morris ends the book suggesting that the East is catching up and likely to surpass the West, but that climate change poses an existential threat to both groups.

Particularly striking in the book is the attention paid to differences in the West and East before the Common Era. Morris belies his archeological roots in beginning, quite literally, before the dawn of time to demonstrate the physical and genetic equality of those in the West and East. Weaving evidence together from numerous archeological findings, Morris claims that the West initially started in the lead, as agricultural fertility inclined the West to eschew hunting-and-gathering sooner than in the East, giving it a slight head start. This advantage became more pronounced, however, with the rise of the Roman Empire. During Rome’s reign, the West achieved a social development score neither region would earn again until the Industrial Revolution. Overall, this detailed focus on humanity’s early period is particularly welcome, as it is too often under-covered by economic historians studying the Great Divergence who are eager to jump to periods where quantitative data becomes large enough for statistical analysis.

This is not to say that Morris is anything less than thorough in his coverage of the Modern Era. Picking up after the fall of Rome, the East overtakes the West with the rise of the Sui Dynasty and development of a strong waterway system. This continues until the Industrial Revolution in which Britain and Europe over take the East and set the world on a new Trajectory. Morris somewhat side-steps the academically fraught question of why the Revolution started in Britain, suggesting that it was not “locked-in”, but was due to cumulative technological advantage that came from years of trading, less restrictive legal structure and larger supply of finance and coal. From here, Morris is on more familiar ground, articulating the impact of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological growth, as well as the rise of Japan and later China. He ends the book rather boldly, not just noting that the East is growing but extrapolating his index to claim that the East may well claim the lead for a new era, though a number of variables, not least of which is climate change, make the world quite unpredictable.

Beyond the successful completion of such a mammoth task as explaining the history of the world, there are three particularly strong points of the book that are worth highlighting. First, Morris succeeds in creating a social development index that is generally quite helpful, in particular because he does not attach a moral or social value of the index, but merely tries to explain societies improvement in terms of living standards and technology. His transparency regarding his methods (including an additional book), as well as honesty about the index’s limitations serve to make the index quite useful in comparing the regions relative to each other and relative to their future selves. Second, far from being a stream of facts, Morris lays out a theoretically interesting claim that “lazy people”, and not “great men” are what move history. This theory provides depth to the book by allowing the reader to feel she is reading not just about history, but also about how to understand history. Finally, Morris successfully navigates the difficult balance between injecting contemporary political issues into history unnecessarily, and not whitewashing history so as not to suggest any modern motifs (particularly around climate change). Though written with popular audiences in mind, Morris avoids adding grist to anyone’s mill and instead focuses on the intellectual question of East and West, as the book claimed to do at the onset. Each of these achievements is no small feat, and speak highly of Morris’s ability as a scholar.

The one criticism I would make of the book, however, is that it seems to go to great lengths at times to avoid controversy. While one certainly understands that Morris did not wish to write a book on the history of the world and stake a position on every tussle between academics, by avoiding any confrontation at all, Morris’s explanations can become quite tenuous. In discussing the Greeks, for example, Morris claims the West’s classical thinkers did not increase its social development, but rather, that they stemmed from its previous growth. While one can understand his not wishing to weigh the philosophical traditions between West and East, to claim that thinkers such as Pythagoras offered nothing to the West’ development seems a stretch, as it would be to say Confucius, for example, was completely superfluous to the East’s development. This occurs again in the question of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution. Here, the narrative attempts a middle ground between “lock-in” theorists, who see the West on firmer footing long before Revolution’s start and “short-termers” who see the West as only surpassing the Industrial Revolution due to immediate factors. One can’t help but feel Morris is being a bit coy, however, as he argues that Britain was not “locked-in” to experience the Industrial Revolution, but that it stemmed from “technological accumulation” through decades of better trade policies and investment. One understands that he wishes to avoid claiming that the Industrial Revolution was predestined to be in Britain (and rightly so), but addressing this outright would have been more convincing than bending to avoid controversy. This point notwithstanding, Morris’s Why the West Rules is an excellent book that deserves the accolades it has received.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Few books have had quite the impact on the field of economic history as Kenneth Pomeranz’s “Great Divergence”, and rightly so. The book re-orientates historian’s thinking on the divergence of the East and West by presenting a much clearer understanding of the East. In so doing, it becomes evident that the two were not nearly as far apart as historians supposed. And, as a result, he suggests new and compelling reasons that Europe industrialized first. While Pomeranz’s arguments are stronger in some areas than others, altogether the book is welcome contribution to the field.

Pomeranz begins his work with a methodological dispute, claiming that current historical work on the developments of the West and East is not using like-for-like measurements. When historians are speaking of the “West”, they typically mean simply “Britain”, or perhaps “Northern Europe” at most. Alternatively, when referencing the “East”, historians typically mean broad swaths of rural China and Japan, rather than Asia’s most promising regions such as the Yangzi Delta. Thus, by not comparing the best of both sides, historians have developed an inaccurate picture of the differences between the two.

The first key contribution comes from the book’s comparison of Britain and China in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which reveals the two to be very similar in terms of economic development during the period. In terms of life expectancy, Britain only surpassed age 40 in 1750, while Japanese and Chinese laborers were already equal to or ahead of that, to say nothing of the aristocracy. Next after a (very) brief review, the book claims that there is little evidence for greater capital accumulation, productivity or technological advantages in Europe by the early 18^th century. While Pomeranz grants that England enjoyed power-creating machines, he argues that this was on par with China’s phenomenal irrigation system and superior stove technology. Additionally, he finds that Britain was not meaningfully more market orientated than China, and in fact, suggests that China could be seen as nearer Adam Smith’s ideal. Ultimately, Pomeranz paints a clear picture of Britain and China as very different, but roughly equally advanced as far up as the mid-18^th century.

But this creates a puzzle: If Britain and China were equally developed just before the Industrial Revolution, why did Britain experience industrialization so much sooner? Despite his claims that China and Britain were on par even until 1750, Pomeranz does not dispute that China took until nearly the 20^th century to begin industrializing. But, by demonstrating that the two countries were nearly level on virtually all of the key factors that economic historians have previously used to explain the Industrial Revolution, Pomeranz is effectively forced to develop a new explanation for its occurrence.

To resolve this, Pomeranz makes his second great contribution in this book by introducing two new mechanisms for the Industrial Revolution: The proximity to coal, and the “fruits” of the New World. Rather than seeing the Industrial Revolution as laborsaving, Pomeranz argues that it was instead land-saving. In this view, economic progress prior to the Industrial Revolution was closely coupled with the use of additional land. The creation of engines allowed for far more power than wood on a per acre basis, thus freeing Britain from this “land-dependence”. Britain enjoyed this first because its coal was nearer economically developed cities, making it highly likely inventors and scientists would learn to use it first. Additionally, Europe generally benefitted greatly from colonization. This greatly expanded the land it could exploit, and allowed it to do so without paying for labor (in the form of slavery). Effectively then, Pomeranz argues for a completely new view of the cause of the Industrial Revolution, seeing it as the results of proximity to coal and the colonization of the New World, rather than market institutions, technology, or capital accumulation.

Though the book certainly has its flaws, it is difficult to overstate its impact and importance. In terms of weaknesses, one cannot help but feel that Pomeranz was far more interested in discussing his new reasons for the start of the Industrial Revolution than in demonstrating why new reasons were needed. Little new evidence is put forward to support his claims that China and Britain were on equal levels of technology, productivity, and technological accumulation. And, as Pomeranz agrees that the creation of clocks and gun-powder were important stepping stones to steam power, its hard to understand why one should not conclude that Britain with its watches and cannons was not technologically ahead of China and its well-watered crops. Nonetheless, Pomeranz’s identification of problems in the literature, introduction of new historical evidence, and new premises for the Industrial Revolution had deeply added to our historical understanding and been extremely fruitful in generating new work.

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Technology and the Global Economy, 1000-2000

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Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650

Shaping Medieval Markets: The Organization of Commodity Markets in Holland, C. 1200 – C. 1450

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The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe

Energy and the English Industrial Revolution

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Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

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