Industrialisierung und Europäische Wirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: ein Tagungsbericht ; [Arbeitstagung vom 21.- 22. Juni 1973 in Berlin-Dahlem]

Table of contents :
Einführung der Herausgeber
Verzeichnis der Teilnehmer
ERSTER TAG. 1. Hälfte. Thema. Industrialization and Integration of the European Economy
REFERAT
BEITRÄGE UND KOMMENTARE
R. Max Hartwell
Brinley Thomas
Alan S. Milward
William Parker
Eric J. Hobsbawm
Wilhelm Treue
Peter Lundgreen
Alice Teichova
Yehuda Don
François Crouzet
Wolfgang Köllmann
Jürgen Kocka
Hans Pohl
Thomas Nipperdey
Wolfram Fischer
SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion
ERSTER TAG. 2. Halfte. Thema. The Standard of Living during the Industrial Revolution
REFERAT
BEITRÄGE UND KOMMENTARE
Susan Fairlie
Wolfgang Köllmann
Yehuda Don
Alan S. Milward
Eric J. Hobsbawm
Wilhelm Treue
R. Max Hartwell
Sidney Pollard
SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion
ZWEITER TAG. Thema. Economic Theory of the Growth of Western Europe
REFERAT
KOMMENTARE
Wolfram Fischer
David S. Landes
Jürgen Kocka
William Parker
Yehuda Don
R. Max Hartwell
Alan S. Milward
François Crouzet
Henryk Skrzypczak
Alice Teichova
Sidney Pollard
SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion
GRUSSWORTE zum Abschluß der Tagung

Citation preview

VERÖFFENTLICHUNGEN HISTORISCHEN

DER

K O M M I S S I O N ZU

BERLIN

BAND 46

PUBLIKATIONEN DER

ZUR

GESCHICHTE

INDUSTRIALISIERUNG

BAND

β

w DE

G

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1976

INDUSTRIALISIERUNG UND E U R O P Ä I S C H E WIRTSCHAFT" IM 19. J A H R H U N D E R T EIN TAGUNGSBERICHT

Bearbeitet und herausgegeben von

OTTO BÜSCH · WOLFRAM FISCHER • HANS HERZFELD in Verbindung mit

STEFI JERSCH-WENZEL · HERMANN J. RUPIEPER · MONIKA WÖLK WOLFGANG WÖLK mit Beiträgen von

FRANÇOIS CROUZET · YEHUDA DON · SUSAN FAIRLIE WOLFRAM FISCHER · R. MAX HARTWELL · ERIC J. HOBSBAWM JÜRGEN KOCKA · WOLFGANG KÖLLMANN · DAVID LANDES PETER LUNDGREEN · ALAN S. MILWARD · THOMAS NIPPERDEY DOUGLASS C. NORTH · WILLIAM N. PARKER · HANS POHL SIDNEY POLLARD · HENRYK SKRZYPCZAK · ALICE TEICHOVA BRINLEY THOMAS · WILHELM TREUE

w DE

G Walter de Gruyter

· Berlin · New 1976

York

Die Arbeitstagung „Industrialisierung und .Europäische Wirtschaft'" vom 21.122. Juni 1973 wurde mit finanzieller Unterstützung der Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, Hannover, durchgeführt. Die Herausgabe der vorliegenden Tagungspapiere hat mit Befürwortung des Senators für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Berlin, die Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin finanziert

Lektorat der Schriftenreihe: CHRISTIAN SCHÄDLICH

CIP-Kurztitelaufnähme der Deutschen Bibliothek Industrialisierung und „europäische Wirtschaft" im 19. (neunzehnten) Jahrhundert: e. Tagungsbericht bearb. u. hrsg. von Otto Büsch . . . in Verbindung mit Stefi Jersch-Wenzel . . . mit Beitr. von François Crouzet... Die Arbeitstagung „Industrialisierung u. Europ. Wirtschaft" vom 21.122. Juni 1973. — Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1976. (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin; Bd. 46: Pubi, zur Geschichte d. Industrialisierung; Bd. 5) ISBN 3-11-006521-5 NE: Büsch, Otto (Hrsg.); Crouzet, François (Mitarb.); Arbeitstagung Industrialisierung und Europäische Wirtschaft (1973, Berlin, West)

© Copyright 1976 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., vormals G. J. Göschen'sche Verlagshandlung J. Guttentag, Verlagsbuchhandlung · Georg Reimer · Karl J. Trübner · Veit & Comp., Berlin 30 Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, vorbehalten. Ohne ausdrückliche Genehmigung des Verlages ist es auch nidit gestattet, dieses Buch oder Teile daraus auf photomechanischem Wege (Photokopie, Mikrokopie) zu vervielfältigen. Satz und Drude: Walter Pieper, Würzburg Bindearbeiten: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin

EINFÜHRUNG Der vorliegende Tagungsbericht enthält Referate, Beiträge und Kommentare, die am 21. und 22. Juni 1973 in Berlin-Dahlem zu drei zusammenhängenden Problemen von Industrialisierung und Wirtschaftswachstum europäischer Länder vornehmlich im 19. Jahrhundert von den Teilnehmern eines international besetzten Symposions vorgetragen wurden. Diese im Rahmen des Internationalen Konsultations- und Austauschprogramms der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin in Verbindung mit der Abteilung für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte des Zentralinstituts 6 der Freien Universität Berlin durchgeführte Arbeitstagung wurde zunächst aus Anlaß und zum Zweck der Diskussion von Forschungsthesen einberufen, die Professor Sidney Pollard, der sich im Jahr 1972 als Gast des Konsultationsprogramms in Berlin aufhielt, zum Thema der Herausbildung einer „Europäischen Wirtschaft" als Einheit im Industrialisierungsprozeß des 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelt hatte. 1 Die Tagung, deren erster Teil diesem Thema gewidmet wurde, hat deshalb insgesamt von daher ihren Namen erhalten. Sodann gelang es aber, neben Professor Pollard als weitere Hauptreferenten Professor David S. Landes zu einer nochmaligen Durchleuchtung der Diskussion über den Lebensstandard in der Zeit der Industriellen Revolution und Professor Douglass C. North für einen Beitrag über seine ökonomische Theorie des Wirtschaftswachstums in Westeuropa zu gewinnen. Diese Themenstellungen trugen zur Ergänzung des Hauptthemas bei und bestimmten die weiteren Teile der Tagung. Die Planung und Organisation des Symposions lag in ständiger Absprache mit den hauptbeteiligten Kollegen — vor allem mit Professor Pollard — in den Händen des Unterzeichneten als Beauftragtem für das Konsultationsprogramm und seinen Mitarbeitern im Konsultationsbüro der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin; die Tagungsleitung wurde von Professor Hans Herzfeld, dem Kommissionsvorsitzenden und Leiter des Konsultationsprogramms, im Einvernehmen mit allen Teilnehmern an ι Vgl. den Bericht von Sidney Pollard, Industrialization and the European Economy, in: Tbe Economic History Review, 2nd ser., Vol. XXVI, No. 4 (Nov. 1973), pp. 636—648 (siehe dort S. 636, Amn. 1).

VI

Einführung

Professor Wolfram Fischer, den Vorsitzenden des Zentralinstituts 6 der Freien Universität Berlin, übergeben. Unter den rund 40 Teilnehmern — Referenten, Gästen, Beobachtern, Veranstaltern und ihren Mitarbeitern — stellten neben den Berlinern die Kolleginnen und Kollegen aus England die stärkste Gruppe; außerdem waren Historiker und Ökonomen aus den USA, Frankreich, Israel und von Universitäten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland anwesend. Es lag nahe, Deutsch und Englisch als gleich willkommene Konferenzsprachen zuzulassen, von denen die Mehrheit der aktiven Teilnehmer, viele schon von ihrer Muttersprache her, die englische Sprache bevorzugten, und es geschieht aus diesem Grunde auch, daß der vorliegende Band in einem deutschsprachigen Rahmen und mit einem deutschsprachigen Kommentierungsapparat überwiegend englischsprachige Beiträge enthält. Die Autoren der nachstehend abgedruckten Referate, Korreferate und Kommentare erhielten Gelegenheit, ihre teils vorbereiteten, teils improvisierten und in jedem Falle auf Tonband aufgenommenen Beiträge unter dem Eindruck der gehabten Diskussion zu überarbeiten und mit begleitenden und stützenden Anmerkungen zu versehen. Die in der Diskussion gebrauchten Anredeformeln wurden in der Regel nicht wiedergegeben. Die Herausgeber sahen ihre Aufgabe darin, die bunte Fülle der vorbereiteten Berichte sowie der improvisierten Reden und Gegenreden in eine Ordnung zu bringen, die es gestattet, die Stellungnahmen eines jeden aktiven Teilnehmers zu einem der drei zentralen Themen des Symposions in geschlossener Form und in einer Reihenfolge aufzunehmen, die den Erkenntnisprozeß im Tagungsverlauf optimal wiedergibt. Im Falle des Referates von Professor North haben wir im Einverständnis mit dem Autor lediglich eine Zusammenfassung seines Vortrages abgedruckt, weil er seine Gedanken zwischenzeitlich ausführlicher in seinem Buch über The Rise of the Western World veröffentlicht hat.2 Jeder Hauptreferent hat die Gelegenheit zu einem Schlußwort erhalten, dem in der vorliegenden Druckfassung aus den oben angegebenen Gründen um der Konzentration willen auch die Antworten beigefügt sind, die der Referent während der Diskussion in unmittelbarer Replik gegeben hatte. Es ist angebracht, an dieser Stelle denjenigen Helfern bei der Herstellung der von den Tonbändern übertragenen Manuskripte, Frau Gudrun Gill und Fräulein Monika Warmuth im Konsultationsbüro der Historischen Kommission, zu danken, die in mühevoller, wieder und wieder besorgter Abschrift die technischen 2 Douglass C. North / Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World. Neu; Economic History, Cambridge/Mass. 1973.

A

Einführung

VII

Voraussetzungen für die redaktionelle Arbeit des Unterzeichneten und seiner Mitarbeiter, Dr. Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Dr. Hermann J. Rupieper, Monika Wölk und Wolfgang Wölk, schufen. In diesem Zusammenhang sei auch dem Lektor der Historischen Kommission, Herrn Christian Schädlich, für die Betreuung des Manuskripts in der Phase der Drucklegung gedankt. In ihren Begrüßungsansprachen konnten Professor Herzfeld und der Unterzeichnete bereits ihren Dank dafür aussprechen, daß die Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, Hannover, nicht nur die Kosten für die Durchführung der Tagung voll übernommen, sondern in Herrn Dirk Klose, Μ. Α., auch einen Beobachter zu diesem Symposion entsandt hatte. Herrn Staatsarchivdirektor Dr. Gerhard Zimmermann konnten die Veranstalter ihren Dank dafür zum Ausdrude bringen, daß das Geh. Staatsarchiv, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem, freundlicherweise seine Räume zur Abhaltung der Tagung zur Verfügung gestellt hatte. Prof. Hans Herzfeld und Prof. Wolfram Fischer sprachen ferner ihre Genugtuung darüber aus, daß diese Konferenz, die nach Themenstellung und Zusammensetzung ihres Teilnehmerkreises schon ihrer Intention nach weit über die deutschen Grenzen hinauszielte, am Ort Berlin arrangiert werden konnte, der sich unter anderem auch durch seine Vertreter von Geschichts-, Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften als ein Zentrum des internationalen wissenschaftlichen und kulturellen Austauschs versteht, dem auch diese Tagung wieder dienen sollte. Es bleibt an dieser Stelle nachzutragen, daß die Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin auf Befürwortung des Senators für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Berlin, zu unserer großen Dankbarkeit den für die Herausgabe dieser Tagungspapiere notwendigen Druckzuschuß zur Verfügung gestellt hat. Aus den folgenden Seiten dieses Tagungsberichtes3 sollte für alle an industrialisierungsgeschichtlichen Problemen interessierten Vertreter der an ihrer Erforschung beteiligten Disziplinen hervorgehen, daß die Diskussion über die auf diesem Symposion vorgetragenen Thesen — ob es sich nun um den Vorschlag handelte, die Industrialisierung Europas als einheitlichen Vorgang zu betrachten, anstatt der herkömmlichen Einteilung in eine Reihe von nationalen „industriellen Revolutionen" zu folgen, oder 3 Eine übersichtliche Kurzfassung ist an anderer Stelle veröflentlicht (siehe Otto Büsch, Industrialisierung und „Europäische Wirtschaft". Internationale Arbeitstagung der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin in Verbindung mit der Abteilung für Wirtschaft s- und Sozialgeschichte des Zentralinstituts 6 der Freien Universität Berlin, in: AHF. Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung, Jg. 1974, S.85ff.).

Vili

Einführung

um ein neues Überdenken der Frage nach zuverlässigen Indikatoren zur Messung der Realität des Lebensstandards während der Industriellen Revolution in verarmenden Gebieten einerseits und prosperierenden Räumen andererseits oder um den Versuch, einen Gesamtrahmen für die Analyse der ökonomischen Entwicklung Europas auf der Basis eines neuen, unorthodoxen Drei-Sektoren-Modells abzustecken — bei weitem noch immer nicht abgeschlossen ist. In Paraphrasierung des Rojofj^ysdien Wortes von dem „Take-oS into Sustained Controversy" könnte man versucht sein zu meinen, daß die ständige Neubehandlung der genannten Probleme allmählich obsolet zu werden verspreche. Die Ergebnisse des nachfolgend aufgezeichneten Symposions werden indessen vielleicht gerade wegen der vielen kontrovers gebliebenen Fragen die Notwendigkeit zur weitergehenden Besinnimg über ihr Gewicht erweisen. Im Namen der Z. Zt. Stanford/Kalifornien, im Dezember 1974

Herausgeber

Prof. Dr. Otto Büsch Beauftragter f ü r das Konsultationsprogramm der Historisdien Kommission z u Berlin

INHALT EINFÜHRUNG

der Herausgeber

V

VERZEICHNIS DER TEILNEHMER

XI

ERSTER TAG 1. Hälfte

Thema Industrialization and Integration of the European Economy REFERAT SIDNEY POLLARD

3

BEITRÄGE UND KOMMENTARE R. Max Hartwell Brinley Thomas Alan S. Milward William Parker Eric J. Hobsbawm Wilhelm Treue Peter Lundgreen Alice Teichova Yehuda Don François Crouzet Wolfgang Köllmann Jürgen Kocka Hans Pohl Thomas Ntpperdey Wolfram Fischer SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion

17 20 22 25 29 33 34 40 43 48 52 54 55 57 57

SIDNEY POLLARD

58

ERSTER TAG 2. Hälfte

Thema The Standard of Living during the Industrial Revolution REFERAT DAVID

S.LANDES

65

Inhalt

χ BEITRÄGE UND KOMMENTARE Susan Fairlie Wolfgang Köllmann Yehuda Don Man S.Milward Eric J. Hobsbawm Wilhelm Treue R. Max Hartwell Sidney Pollard SCHLUSSWORT

zur

83 98 100 102 103 107 110 111

Diskussion

DAVID S. LANDES

113

ZWEITER TAG Thema

Economic Theory of the Growth of Western Europe REFERAT DOUGLASS C. NORTH (Summary)

KOMMENTARE Wolfram Fischer David S. Landes Jürgen Kocka William Parker Yehuda Don R.Max Hartwell Alan S. Milward François Crouzet Henryk Skrzypczak Alice Teichova Sidney Pollard SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion DOUGLASS C. NORTH

119

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

124 125 126 129 129 131 131 132 132 133 134 136

GRUSSWORTE zum Absdiluß der Tagung WILLIAM

PARKER und OTTO BÜSCH

148

V E R Z E I C H N I S DER T E I L N E H M E R Otto (geb. 1928), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1952), O. Prof. für Neuere Geschichte und Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte an der PH Berlin, Privatdozent an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preußen (1962); Industrialisierung und Geschichtswissenschaft (1969); Industrialisierung und Gewerbe im Raum Berlin-Brandenburg (1971). CROUZET, François (geb. 1922), Dr. phil. (Paris, 1956), o. Prof. für Nordeuropäische Geschichte an der Universität Paris/Sorbonne. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: L'économie britannique et le blocus continental (1958); Capital Formation in the Industrial

BÜSCH,

Revolution (1972).

DON, Yehuda (geb. 1930), Ph.D. (London, 1961), Prof, of Economics, Bar-Han University/Israel. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Analysis of Agricultural Cooperation (1960); Economic History of the Hungarian Jewry in the 20th Century (1976). FAIRLIE, Susan (geb. 1950), Ph.D. (London, 1959). Veröffentlichungen u.a.: The 19th Century Corn Laws reconsidered, in: Economic History Review, vol. 18, No.3 (1965); The Corn Laws and British Wheat Production 1829—1876, in: ibid., vol.22, No. 1 (1969). FISCHER, Wolfram (geb. 1928), Dr. phil. (Tübingen, 1951), Dr. rer. pol. (FU Berlin, 1954), o. Prof. für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Der Staat und die Anfänge der Industrialisierung in Baden (1962); Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (1972). GROSSKREUTZ, Helmuth (geb. 1942), Dipl.-Volkswirt (FU Berlin, 1967). Wiss. Assistent an der FU Berlin. HARTWELL, R.Max (geb. 1921), Ph.D. (Oxford, 1956), Reader in Recent Social and Economic History, University of Oxford. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Economic Change in England and Europe, in: The Cambridge Modern History 9 (1965); The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (1971). HAUSEN, Karin, Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1969), Ass. Prof. für Neuere Geschichte an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Deutsche Kolonialherrschaft in Afrika (1970). HEINRICH, Gerd (geb. 1931), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1959), o. Prof. für Historische Landeskunde an der PH Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Die Grafen von Arnstein (1961); Historische Stätten Deutschlands: Berlin und Brandenburg (1973). HERZFELD, Hans (geb. 1892), Dr. phil. (Halle, 1921), Dr. h. c., o. Prof. em. für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte an der FU Berlin. Vorsitzender der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Johannes von Miquel (1938f.); Die moderne Welt 1789—1945 (21960); Ausgewählte Aufsätze (1962); Der Erste Weltkrieg (1968); Berlin in der Weltpolitik (1973). HOBSBAWM, Eric J. (geb. 1917), Ph.D. (Cambridge, 1950), o. Prof. für Wirtschaftsund Sozialgeschichte, University of London. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Primitive Rebeis (1959); Industry and Empire (1968); mit G. Rude, Captain Swing (1975).

Verzeichnis der Teilnehmer

XII

JERSCH-WENZEL, Stefi (geb. 1937), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1964), Privatdozentin für Neuere Geschichte an der TU Berlin, Wiss. Referentin an der Historischen Kommission 2u Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Jüdische Bürger und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in preußischen Städten (1967); Der Einfluß zugewanderter Minoritäten als Wirtschaftsgruppen auf die Berliner Wirtschaft in vor- und frühindustrieller Zeit, in: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der frühen Industrialisierung vornehmlich im Wirtschaftsraum Berlin-Brandenburg (1971). KLOSE, Dirk, Μ. Α., Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, Hannover. KOCKA, Jürgen (geb. 1941), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1968), o. Prof. für Allg. Geschichte unter bes. Berücksichtigung der Sozialgeschichte an der Universität Bielefeld. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft 1847—1914

(1969);

Klassengesellschaft

im Krieg

1914—1918

(1973);

Unter-

nehmer in der deutschen Industrialisierung (1975). KÖLLMANN, Wolfgang (geb. 1925), Dr. phil. (Göttingen, 1950), o. Prof. für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte und Demographie an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Barmen (1960); Friedrich Harkort, Bd. 1 (1964); Bevölkerungs-Ploetz, Bd. 4 ( 3 1965); Bevölkerung in der industriellen Revolution ( 1 9 7 4 ) .

KOTOWSKI, Georg (geb. 1920), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1951), o. Prof. für die Wissenschaft von der Politik an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Friedrich Ebert (1963).

LANDES, David S. (geb. 1924), Ph.D. (Harvard University, 1953), Dr. h. c., o. Prof. für französische Geschichte an der Harvard University. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Bankers and Pashas (1957); The Unbound Prometheus (1969); History as Political Science ( 1 9 7 1 ) .

LUNDGREEN, Peter (geb. 1936), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1968), Privatdozent für Neuere Geschichte und Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Assistent am Universitätsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsforschung der Universität Bielefeld. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Bildung und Wirtschaftswachstum im Industrialisierungsprozeß des 19. Jahrhunderts (1973); Techniker in Preußen während der frühen Industrialisierung (1975). MATZERATH, Horst (geb. 1937), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1969), Ass. Prof. für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Nationalsozialismus und kommunale Selbstverwaltung (1970). MELLER, Helen (geb. 1941), Ph.D. (Bristol, 1968), Lecturer in Economic and Social History, University of Nottingham. Veröffentlichung: Leisure and the Changing City 1 8 7 0 — 1 9 1 4 ( 1 9 7 5 ) .

MIECK, Ilja (geb. 1932), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1957), Prof. für Neuere Geschichte an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Preußische Gewerbepolitik in Berlin (1965); Europäische Geschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit (1970). MILWARD, Alan S. (geb. 1935), Ph. D. (London, 1960), Prof. of European Studies, University of Manchester. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Die deutsche Kriegswirtschaft (1967); The New Order and the French Economy (1970); An Economic History of Continental Europe (1973). NIPPERDEY, Thomas (geb. 1927), Dr. phil. (Göttingen, 1953), o. Prof. für Geschichte an der Universität München. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (1961); Reformation, Revolution, Utopie (1974); Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie (1974).

Verzeichnis der Teilnehmer

XIII

NORTH, Douglass C., Ph.D. (Berkeley, 1952), Prof. of Economics, University of Washington. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: The Economic Growth of the United States 1790—1860 (21965); The Rise of the Western World. A New Economic History (1973). PARKER, William N. (geb. 1919), Ph.D. (Harvard University, 1951), Prof, of Economics, Yale University. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Trends in the American Economy in the 19th Century (1958); American Economic Growth (1972). POHL, Hans (geb. 1935), Dr. phil. (Köln, 1961), o. Prof. für Verfassungs-, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte an der Universität Bonn. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Die Beziehungen Hamburgs zu Spanien und dem spanischen Amerika in der Zeit von 1740 bis 1806 (1963); Die Hansestädte und Lateinamerika um 1800 (1965); Grundzüge der industriellen Entwicklung Mexicos im 19. Jahrhundert, in: VSWG 61 (1974); Wirtschaftsgeschichte Kölns im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert (1975). POLLARD, Sidney (geb. 1925), Ph. D. (London, 1951), Prof. of Economic History, University of Sheffield. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: The Genesis of Modern Management (1965); The Development of the British Economy 1914—1967 (1969); Documents of European Economic History (1968 ff.); European Economic Integration 1815—1970 (1974). PFAFFENBERGER, Roswitha (geb. 1942), Forschungsbeauftragte an der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin (bis 1973). RADTKE, Wolfgang (geb. 1942), Dr. phil. (Hamburg, 1968), Prof. für Mittlere Geschichte an der PH Berlin. Veröffentlichung: Herrschaft und Bauern in Territorien des Bischofs von Lübeck (1968). RÜRUP, Reinhard (geb. 1934), Dr. phil. (Göttingen, 1962), o. Prof. für Neuere Geschichte und Technikgeschichte an der TU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: J.J.Moser (1965); Probleme der Revolution in Deutschland 1918/19 (1968); Technikgeschichte (1975). RUMINSKI, Hilmar (geb. 1946), Wiss. Assistent an der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin. SCHRAEPLER, Ernst (geb. 1912), Dr. phil. (Berlin, 1947), Prof. für Neuere Geschichte an der TU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Handwerkerbünde und Arbeitervereine 1830—1853 ( 1 9 7 2 ) .

SCHULIN, Ernst (geb. 1929), Dr.phil. (Göttingen, 1956), o. Prof. für Neuere Geschichte an der Universität Freiburg. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Handelsstaat England ( 1 9 6 9 ) .

SKRZYPCZAK, Henryk (geb. 1926), Dr. phil. (FU Berlin, 1956), Leiter der Abteilung für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung an der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Marx-Engels-Revolution (1968). TEICHOVA, Alice (geb. 1920), P h . D . (Prag, 1952), D r . habil. (Prag, 1964), Prof. of

Economic History, University of East Anglia/Norwich. Veröffentlichung: An Economic Background to Munich (1974). THOMAS, Brinley (geb. 1906), Ph.D. (London, 1931), Prof, of Economics, University College/Cardiff. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: International Migration and Economic Development (1962); Migration and Economic Growth (1973). TREUE, Wilhelm (geb. 1909), Dr. phil. (Berlin, 1935), o. Prof. em. für Geschichte

XIV

Verzeichnis der

Teilnehmer

an der TU Hannover und Honorarprofessor an der Universität Göttingen. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: Deutsche Geschichte (21970); Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Neuzeit (31973). VOLKMANN, Heinrich (geb. 1938), Dr.phil. (FU Berlin, 1967), Ass. Prof. für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der FU Berlin. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Die Arbeiterfrage im preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus (1968). WÖLK, Monika (geb. 1946), Wiss. Assistentin an der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin. WÖLK, Wolfgang (geb. 1944), Wiss. Referent im Konsultationsbüro an der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin.

ERSTER T A G 1. Hälfte

Thema

Industrialization and Integration of the European Economy

Diskussionsleitung W O L F R A M FISCHER

REFERAT von SIDNEY POLLARD*

Sheffield

I Traditionally, the industrialization of the continent of Europe has been seen as a set of separate developments within each of the countries of Europe in turn. We have thus become accustomed to think of the "industrial revolutions" of Germany or France or Sweden and to treat these as fairly self-contained developments played out within the country's social and political framework and derived from its preceding economic history, but affected at best only marginally by developments in the rest of Europe. In this view, the logic of each country's industrial revolution is thus basically an internal logic, and it is this which dictates its shape and the timetable out of its own internal necessities.1 This approach not only parallels that of the political historian, it also fits into the pattern of contemporaneous debate which generally had as its objective some measure of economic policy, such as a tariff, a subsidy system or currency reform and was therefore wholly oriented towards the political state as the unit of significance. Moreover, it is evident that many of the operative parameters of the variables affecting the progress of industrialization, such as company law and patent law, the social status of entrepreneurs, the education system, or the currency and banking system were in fact determined by the State and its political and legislative decisions and the State seems therefore wholly appropriate as the authority to be considered from the present-day economic historian's point of view. This approach has the further advantages that it uses the framework within which most statistics were collected, and that it permits inter-

* Die vom Verfasser zur Druckfassung seines hier vorliegenden Referates über Industrialization and Integration of the European Economy beigegebenen Anmerkungen befinden sich am Ende dieses Beitrages.

4

Erster Tag ·

I.Hälfte

State comparison, and thus a comparative study of industrialization. It can be admitted without hesitation that this approach has contributed substantially in recent years to advance the study of industrialization. Yet serious doubts remain whether it does reflect accurately the actual progress of industrialization on the continent of Europe and whether it provides the best set of concepts within which to study it. I propose in this paper to challenge both assumptions, and to argue that the industrialization of Europe is better represented as a single process in which frontiers played a subordinate role, and that the viewing of it in this way is likely to yield new insights into the process of industrialization as such which cannot be obtained by the traditional methods. Let me at the outset make two disclaimers. First, I do not wish to claim that the national approach is false, nor that it has been useless. It has played a large part in furthering our understanding of these subjects in the past and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. However, I believe that it now yields diminishing returns, and that the other approach is potentially more fruitful. Further, if I shall seem at times to denigrate the role of the political power in the industrialization process, it is not because I think it is non-existent, but because it has been unduly exaggerated, and I wish to right the balance. Secondly, I am well aware that the treatment of Europe as a single unit is itself still incomplete, and that a full understanding of the mechanism of change and growth represented by the industrial revolution must include the complex but vital relationships with the overseas territories which provided markets, raw materials, accumulations of wealth and targets for emigration. However, each discussion must have a limit, and it could also be argued in my defence that the relationships of the industrializing continent with the rest of the world has received some attention recently, so that it is less urgent to stress it again here. We must, however, be clear that the story I attempt to tell here is still only a partial story. II I am greatly tempted to devote most of my allotted time to proving my hypothesis, since it is likely to need a major mental effort to accept a point of view which runs counter to so many hidden assumptions. However, since I have set out my arguments elsewhere, 2 1 shall be very brief in my attempt to prove that the hypothesis is true and spend most of my paper in trying to prove instead that it may be useful.

Referat von Sidney Pollard

5

I f we look at Europe at any given time, say in 1815, or 1830, or 1850, we shall find the industrialized zones to be comparatively limited, much smaller in size than existing States, and surrounded by under-developed regions still dominated by traditional economic relationships. On the earliest of these dates, in 1815, for example, these industrialized regions would include parts of Belgium, northern France, the Rhineland, Alsace and parts of Switzerland; farther east there would be another belt, including areas of Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia. As if to mock the vanity of politics, these areas straddle frontiers rather than conform to political configurations. In time, as further development occurred, industrialization spread outwards from these centres, as well as jumped intervening regions into new areas, such as Catalonia, northern Italy or the area around Vienna. But large provinces within the leading countries would be left untouched and, in spite of massive legislation, protection, encouragement and other governmental action, designed to mark off their own country from its neighbours, the industrial areas bore, throughout, much greater resemblance to other advanced areas abroad, than to the remainder of their own country. Indeed (it is a point to which we shall return) the industrialization of one area was often followed by the de-industrialization of neighbouring areas, as, for example, urban mills killed off the domestic spinning in the villages, and as formerly mixed industrial-agricultural districts were turned into providers merely of food and raw materials for the centres which had developed first. If the developed areas are represented by dots on the map, they will be seen to have spread across the face of Europe like an epidemic, ignoring frontiers and alighting on areas susceptible to the disease, but taking no apparent notice of governmental encouragement. I f political action played any part, it appears to have been a negative rather than a positive one: industrialization was often encouraged by the repeal of obstructive and repressive legislation, granting freedom of occupation perhaps, or internal free trade, but seldom by the enactment of intentionally helpful measures.3 As far as the provision of capital in the period c. 1 8 1 5 — 1 8 6 5 was concerned, it is today scarcely necessary to stress that to all intents and purposes, the whole of Europe — or at least that part of it which was susceptible to industrialization — formed a single capital market. Recent work by David Landes, Rondo Cameron, Bertrand Gille and Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, among others has shown up the freedom with which the larger banks ranged over Europe in placing their own loans and those of their clients, as well as the fortunate historical coincidence of a period of

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peace following a costly war which forced the banks, geared to financing the deficits of belligerent governments, to look for more fruitful employment for their investments. As most of the leading bankers were recent immigrants themselves in centres sudi as Paris or London, it was precisely their international connections which enabled them to play an important part in financing the infrastructure, and at times even the industries, of the European continent. Similarly, the work of W . O. Henderson, of Rondo Cameron, and of others has left us in no doubt about the freedom of entrepreneurs and technicians, and of skilled craftsmen to cross frontiers in their search for lucrative employment. Scientific ideas spread through the printed transactions of the learned societies established in the eighteenth century, and technical know-how needed but a few individuals to be transmitted into other centres. The role of this flow of outside capital, labour and ideas has sometimes been misunderstood, because of its small dimensions in the early decades. But the early continental imitators of Lancashire, Yorkshire or the Blade Country needed only a small stimulus, a trigger rather than a hoist, for not only was the technology of 1815 or 1825 simple and cheap, as Alexander Gerschenkron has pointed out, but the early imitators in Belgium, France or Silesia were well advanced on the same road as the British, the preconditions for industrialization were plainly there, and no major social upheaval was needed to accept the new economic system. Later on, when the technological gap widened, when threshold costs rose and, above all, when industrialism spread into ever less prepared territories, the outside influence took the form of massive flows of capital, entrepreneurship and skill, such as for example those which were necessary to develop the Russian railways, Donetz iron or Trans-Caucasian oil. At every stage, therefore, the appropriate inflow was available and accessible. In spite of such continuing flows from the more advanced to the less advanced regions of Europe and of other continents, a distinct change in the patterns of economic inter-relationship began around 1870 and by 1914 had reached a stage where the State, rather than the country's place within the European economy, was becoming the predominant influence on the progress of industrialization. The transition was slow and halting, and since it was accompanied by the countervailing tendency of increasing international interdependence given by the developments in technology and economies of size and symbolised by such examples as railway timetables, the Universal Postal Union, epidemic control and an effective world gold standard, it was still possible to hope right up to the outbreak of

Referat von Sidney Vollard

7

war in 1914 that the pervading economic integration of Europe had made wars impossible. Yet the portents were clear, in rising tariffs and tariff wars, in obstruction to labour mobility, in reserving certain areas of investment for home capital, in making foreign investment subservient to political pressure from the Central Government, and in general in a growing interventionism by Governments which gave the frontiers economic as well as political meaning. This re-assertion of political power over economic logic from about 1870 on was by no means accidental. The rise of the modern State on the basis of nationalism was part of the same, deeper social process of change which also brought forth industrial capitalism. In its early phases, it was favourable to the rise of modern capitalistic industry, by widening home markets,4 by creating commercial and occupational freedom, by removing the privileges of a non-productive nobility and the legal protection of the classes to be proletarianised. But as the areas of advanced industry were extended, and the limits of the areas open to penetration by them became clearer, the tensions and rivalries inherent in any social situation became focussed on the State. Europe became an armed camp of rival powers and alliances in what has come to be called the age of "Imperialism", and the competitive struggle between them spilled over into a war which was fought, in effect, with alternating military and economic means from 1914 to 1945. The economic inter-dependence of Europe, which was appropriate to its phase of industrialization, and allows us to speak of it as a single process, was thus a unique experience, belonging to a particular stage in social, economic and technical evolution. It was followed by a phase of opposite tendency, which now appears to have given way to a return towards a more integrated economy at a much higher level of incomes and technology. Ill As my approach is to be defended by its utility rather than its accuracy as an historical account, it is time to turn to a consideration of the ways in which it can help us in our search to study and explain the industrialization of Europe. I propose to examine four aspects in which we may expect to be offered novel and potentially fruitful insights. The first benefit of abolishing the tyranny of the political framework is that it allows us to focus on the regions, and in particular the regions which industrialized first. On the one hand, such an approach forces us to look more closely at our definition of "industrialization". How do we

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recognise that it has begun, how do we define it? And from our point of view more usefully, why did it take root in some areas and not in others? Why Flanders and not Holland or Picardy? Why Silesia and not Pomerania? Why Bohemia and not Moravia? Why Zurich and not the Tyrol? We are looking for preconditions, but we are thereby to some extent also looking for causes. As long as the discussion took place in terms of countries, the search tended to concentrate on legislation that might be favourable or unfavourable to industrialization, on specific policies of taxation or subsidization, or on the social climate which might favour or hamper the entrepreneur. But the realisation that the same laws and tax systems, and the same social climate could produce within the same country, some areas which were industrialized by 1815 whereas others might still be mainly traditional by 1914, throws suspicion on them as explanatory factors and leads the emphasis elsewhere, to elements in which there were regional differences (but similarities with comparable areas abroad). Such elements would include location in relation to the transport network, local capital, a tradition of industrial work and/or commercial capitalism, and natural resources, particularly coal.5 It would be wrong to go too far in the opposite direction and derive industrialization wholly from resource and location factors to the neglect of social structure and political-legal superstructure, but it may be that the time has indeed come to give greater prominence once more, as nineteenth-century observers tended to do, to the natural endowments. On the other hand, our re-examination may well lead also to a greater emphasis on the local differences in social structure, and, before industrialization, on the regional limits of "society" as studied by sociologists. In any case, our approach is likely to emphasise the complexity and the interrelation of the several operative causes and permissive conditions which lay behind industrialization. My second point concerns the position of each region, and for that matter each country, within the sequence of European industrialization.6 With the exception of the pioneer regions in Britain, each group of entrepreneurs and industrialists had to operate against a background of more advanced and more efficient producers on the one hand, while in turn having available to them less advanced areas open to the penetration of their own more cheaply made manufactures. Contemporaries had an inkling of these relationships, though they tended to simplify them or to see only one at a time. This was particularly so in their arguments favouring protection against the imports of

Referat

von Sidney

Pollard

9

manufacturers from the advanced world, or favouring free trade in order to sell their manufactures to the less advanced regions, or their food and raw materials to the more developed ones. In reality, these relationships were highly complex. Thus for an industrializing economy, say the western provinces of Prussia in 1815—1870, the advanced economy of Britain represented not only a rival: it also represented a supplier of machinery of the most up-to-date kind, as well as of cheap semi-manufactures which could be worked up into finished products in Prussia and sold at home or even exported. Given that British wages were higher, because of the overall higher productivity of British labour, and given also that within each economy, wages had to keep fairly in step, while according to the evidence raw material prices were not too dissimilar in both countries, it followed that British manufacturers had the edge where their more upto-date or complex machinery had not yet been installed in Prussia, but the Prussians had the edge where they used similar machinery with lowerpriced labour. The relationship depended, it will be noted, on a high degree of manual skill in the "inferior" country, Prussia; it could not be repeated when there was no pool of similarly skilled labour in the areas which were next in line for industrialization in later phases of European development, or for that matter today. But in Britain-Prussia, there was in the critical decades an organic link between British spinning and Prussian (or Saxon) weaving, British pig or bar iron and continental metal products,7 as there was between American cotton and Lancashire mills. Later, when Prussian mills became sufficiently well equipped to compete in some lines, they still tended to go for more complex or high quality goods having a high labour content, leaving the most advanced mass-production export to the British. In turn, complementing the need of Prussian industrial districts to requite their imports from Britain, Prussian grain needed British markets. But Prussian manufactures also found open to them the more "backward" markets of Austria, Russia-Poland, or other German States, in which native industry was killed off and which thus helped to provide the dynamic expanding demand required for Prussian industrialization. These markets were not all dominated by the more efficient British, partly because the world was too large for Britain to cover by herself, and partly because the Germans had locational advantages of distance, and of the possibility of smuggling manufactures across frontiers which were formally closed by prohibitions or prohibitive tariffs. The intermediary role of Belgium in this phase of European industrialization, importing technology from Britain and then passing it on to the

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rest of the continent has long been recognised, but in fact the same role was played by France, Prussia, Saxony, Switzerland and some later industrialize« in their turn. They all, it will be found, imported manufactures and exported them, had raw materials among their imports and their exports, though the exact type of commodity varied with the direction of the trade.8 Nor is this intermediary position accidental: it was of the very essence of the process of industrialization in those regions, helping to explain both its exact course and its relative ease. Not least, it also helps to explain much of the economic and trading policies of the main countries concerned. The pattern, however, could not be repeated indefinitely against an absolute time scale. The world's markets were increasingly limited, as ever new territories were exposed to the infection and began their first steps towards industrialization. The technological gap widened. The competition from the industrial heartland got tougher, the number of advanced competitors rose, as the still available adjacent markets shrank. The earliest industrializers, Britain above all, burdened by higher wages as the technological gap narrowed, were thereby forced far outward covering previously untouched areas with their manufactures, as they left more and more of Europe to the vigorous newcomers. Also, while it was one of the essentials of the mechanism in the north-western half of Europe (and the north-eastern U.S.A.) that the social structure should have formed a receptive and fertile soil for the new industrialism, to the extent that it might perhaps be considered almost accidental which of the riper areas of Europe actually "took off" first, the farther the movement advanced outward to the periphery of Europe, the less sympathetic the environment became. Serfdom, communal property in land, aristocratic privilege, unfair or corrupt taxation and other social hindrances were added to the economic burdens of industrializing in countries without investible surpluses, without transport infrastructure, trained artizans or literate clerks. There was thus a boundary to the expansion, a "watershed". This will be examined below. Here it remains only to stress the economic difference between the conditions found among the early imitators with their dual linkages forward and backward, and the industrializers of today. Thirdly, our approach will lead us to pay greater attention to the importance of the contemporaneousness of major economic influences within a European continent, the constituent parts of which were affected by them at very different stages of their own development. Thus the traumatic effect of the influx of British manufactures after 1815 led to very different reactions in areas which were strong enough to stand up to them,

Referat von Sidney Pollard

11

either in home markets or in third markets, areas like the Belgian coalfield, the Rhineland and Saxony, and which soon after pursued a vigorous expansionary and relatively open policy, compared with regions like the Austrian textile districts, which were driven back to a stagnating protectionism. Similarly, it is hardly necessary to stress the significance of the differences of the impact of Socialism, an idea which reached most parts of Europe between 1825 and 1860, according to the prevailing state of economic development. Socialist thought and organization took on an entirely different aspect in countries like Britain (and the U.S.A.), where it arrived after industrialization and established trade unionism, from its effects on France or Germany where it arrived with them, and Russia where it arrived well ahead of them. Other developments which appeared outwardly similar all over Europe, but had in reality an entirely different significance because they hit countries at very different stages in their progress towards industrialization were the arrival of mass armies and the scramble for overseas colonies; but from our point of view the two most interesting examples of this effect are perhaps the railways and the influx of cheap grain in the 1870's. In Britain, the railways arrived at the end of the industrialization process, linking established industrial centres and using existing capital and ironmaking and engineering facilities. In Germany and France they were part of that process, helping to create ironmaking and engineering capacity; in Russia they antedated it, leading not so much to the creation of native capacity or capital, but to the economic colonization of the country by the advanced capitalistic nations. If anything, the building of railways, docks and canals was even more destructive to the economic potential of the Turkish empire, leading to a continuous drain of capital exports, out of the backward country which could ill spare it, to the advanced capitalist parts of Europe. It should be noted, incidentally, that these differences of the role of railways may also be found within countries: some areas are propelled forward by them, by the creation of blast furnaces, engineering works, and a general rise in incomes; others are driven back by indebtedness, by having their local industries wiped out by cheap manufactures, and by being drained of labour. We have here an example in which the model building of industrial revolutions, based on traditional national lines, will be particularly dangerous if it seeks to incorporate the role of the railways as such, without considering the place of each system in the sequence of European industrialization. The cheap grain of the 1870's was welcomed in Britain by continued free imports, permitting not only a lowering of food costs for the working

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population, but the expansion of market gardening and dairy and meat production on the basis of proximity to large urban markets. Other agrarian economies, also near prosperous urban consumers, like Denmark, Holland and Switzerland, used the cheap grain as feeding stuff for their intensive animal-based agriculture. France, having to carry the burden of her less advanced farming, reacted by protection; while Russia and Hungary, more backward still, actually joined the suppliers, forcing their agriculture into a grain exporting mould and thereby arguably helping materially to retard their own industrialization. The reaction of Germany was perhaps the most interesting. Industrial Germany, the Germany west of the river Elbe, would have benefited by cheap foreign grain, but as political power lay with the agrarians of the East who produced grain which Germans did not wish to consume and which foreigners did not want to buy there was imposed on the country not only a heavy import duty on the necessary imports of some grains which kept home food costs well above world prices, but also complex subsidies to allow the Junkers to export rye from Germany. The superficial similarities between the British Corn Laws of 1815 and Bismarck's tariff of 1879 thus hide quite fundamental differences deriving from their different position along the European timescale of industrialization. The time lag, in each country, between the declining economic role of agriculture and its reflection in the political power of the landed classes was itself of considerable significance in the history of European industrialization. Its nature also depended very largely on its position in the absolute timescale. Thus while the ending of serfdom in England and France derived from internal social change by economic forces which used their new freedom for a forward movement, its abolition in Russia was imposed not so much by the internal logic but by the pressure of events abroad, on an economy which was neither ready for nor able to make use of the resulting freedom. Finally, I believe that the point of view put forward here can yield fruitful results in a fourth area of enquiry. This is the area hinted at earlier, the "watershed" or geographical limits to which the industrial revolution was carried on the continent. For as the industrial system was pushed outward from the heartland to the periphery, it was able to infect and transform only a part of Europe. Then it was halted, sometimes for 50 or 100 years, and in some cases even until today, along a line which, it should be noted, had little relevance to frontiers. This line or watershed ran across European Russia, bisected the old Austria-Hungary, and sepa-

Referat von Sidney Pollard

13

rated northern Italy from southern, Catalonia from Spain and Britain from Ireland. Why did the progress of industrialization stop here, sometimes for generations? Why, to pose the question slightly differently, given very similar circumstances in great poverty and pQor communications, but rich natural resources and massive capital imports, were the Scandinavian countries industrialized so successfully from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onward, while the Iberian countries continued to stagnate? 9 What gave the outer territories immunity against the new economic system? I do not pretend to know a complete answer to this question. I would, however, like to suggest tentatively some lines along which an answer may be looked for. I believe that for an area to find itself coming within the orbit of an advancing and industrializing economy, either because it is adjacent or because easy lines of communication exist or are being opened up towards it, has positive as well as negative consequences. Most of us have long been aware of the positive effects: the spill-over of ideas, know-how, technologies and skills; the imports of capital, entrepreneurship, machinery or cheap semi-manufactures and components; the stimulus of example and of a rich market. Provided the ground is prepared, the resources exist, and the socio-political structure permits, the affected area could begin to imitate. But there are also substantial dangers arising from finding oneself in the orbit of advanced economies. The most important of these is that one's economy may become colonized in the economic sense. This includes the atrophy of pre-existing manufacturing or even tertiary industries, and a diversion towards primary production. In turn this may lead to economic dependence, both in the sense of depending on the advanced countries for markets, and in the sense of specialising in a cash crop so that the retarded economy becomes dependent on others even for some of its own food and raw materials. Capital may be attracted, but it only flows into the enclave and soon may lead to interest and amortization payments equalling or exceeding the investment inflow — i. e. the creation of negative capital imports. Skilled technicians and managers may arrive, but only for the enclave, while the best or most adaptable labour is attracted away. Even railways or docks may serve only to drain off raw materials and manpower without stimulating development. In the dynamic situation of the nineteenth century phase of industrial capitalism, every successful industrial revolution leads to some de-industrialization elsewhere, either in the im-

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mediate vicinity or somewhere else, within the same orbit of influence. We are, essentially, asking the kind of question which has occupied the recent discussions on the failure of the under-developed economies to grow at the same rate as the advanced ones, in other words, on the problem of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.10 Once a region is moving backward rather than forward, there are various re-inforcing agencies to keep it in that direction. Thus Government protection of manufactures will benefit only the regions already advanced, and may hamper the others by encouraging their food production and their role as labour reservoirs. Foreign capital or expenditure in the infrastructure will favour the advanced areas, while the tax burden to sustain them is more widely spread. The region has to carry the trappings of a more expensive State than it could have justified for itself without sufficient means of doing so. The question is not solved by this approach, but its inner complexity is made clearer. Instead of looking for a simple mechanism to explain the consequences for a backward region of its contact with the advanced economies of Europe, we can recognise here that there are forces propelling the region forward, and others which are driving it bade, and what we are seeking are the causes to determine where the balance lies. In finding this balance, it is hard to believe that, in addition to the inner structure and preparedness of the society in question, which must enter our calculations, we shall not also turn to its place in the European sequence, its position on the absolute time scale, for an explanation. Before concluding, in order to let discussion take its course, I would like to emphasise again that I have deliberately restrained my natural impulse to attempt to prove that the view now put forward is in some sense more correct than the traditional one. Both are illuminating in their own way. What I have tried to show is that, at the present state of our knowledge, it may be more fruitful to adopt the view that over the critical period, say 1790—1870 and decreasingly thereafter, the industrialization of the continent of Europe was a single, but complex, process.

ι For recent examples, see Elias H. Tuma, European Economic History. Tenth Century to the Present. Theory and History of Economic Change, N e w York etc. 1971, pp. 263 fi.; The Fontana Economic History of Europe, ed. by Carlo M. Cipolla, Vol. IV, The Emergence of Industrial Societies, London 1973; First International Conference of Economic History. Contributions, Section A: Industrialization as a Factor in Economic Growth after 1700. Stockholm, August 1960 (Congrès et Colloques 1), Paris, La Haye 1960.

Referat von Sidney Pollard

15

2 Industrialization and the European Economy, in: The Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., Vol. XXVI, No. 4 (November 1973), pp. 636—648, which also contains source references for many of the statements made here baldly and dogmatically. 3 I leave aside the complex and inconclusive debate how far Governments dominated by agrarian interests, like those of Prussia, Austria or Russia in fact wanted to further industrialization within their dominions or merely paid lipservice to "progress". 4 Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and Spread, New Haven 1966, p. 472. 5 "Since industrialization is by its nature a geographically uneven process there are some anomalies involved in considering the national state as the growth unit", observed Tom Kemp in Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Harlow 1969, pp. 9—10. "For example, there were regions of France, which showed quite early in the nineteenth century the symptoms of industrial advance and enterprise which made them leading sectors of the European economy, a position which they retained. However, national averages were dragged down by the backwardness and stagnation which ruled in other parts of the country. Indeed, in some ways it would be more logical to look at European industrialization on a continent-wide basis regardless of national frontiers. What would stand out then would be the importance of physical factors, mainly location and resource endowment, in determining the extent and rate of industrialization. The advanced areas of nineteenth-century Europe had as their core the coalfield of northern France, Belgium and western Germany; from there the influence of industrialization fanned out along convenient lines of communication, including the sea, to other parts of these countries, with some outposts still further to the south and east, including administrative centres, sea and river ports and mineral deposits as the main nodal points. Thus the division between the advancing industrial and mainly agrarian regions cut across state frontiers and, once established, retained considerable influence down to the present day." Having made this point, however, the author then proceeded to treat Europe in the traditional, country by country manner. 6 There is more than a hint of this in Simon Kuznets, Notes on the Take-off, in: Walt W.Rostow (ed.), The Economics of Take-off into Sustained Growth. Proceedings of a Conference Held by the International Economic Association, London etc. 1963, p. 38. 7 This argument is developed further by Richard H. Tilly, Los von England·. Probleme des Nationalismus in der deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in: Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Vol. 124 (1968), pp. 179—196. In addition to the advantage of obtaining cheap industrial imports, like woolen and cotton yarn, Germany also benefited from the British connection, according to Tilly, by having her own internal markets opened up to industrial goods through the skill of British salesmanship that would never have been accessible to German manufacturers; by having standards of products set andfindingchannels of trade opened up that could be imitated; and by obtaining short-term credits from Britain at a time when circulating capital formed a large share of the total necessary capital resources. 8 A remarkably similar pattern of trade in the twentieth century for Austria, as an intermediary between advanced Germany and the backward south-east of Europe, has been described in a most perceptive paper by Dörte Dœring, Deutsch-österreichische Außenhandelsverflechtung während der Weltwirtschaftskrise, in: Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik. Verhandlungen des Internatio-

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nalen Symposions in Bochum vom 12. —17. Juni 1973, hrsg. von Hans Mommsen u. a., Düsseldorf 1974, pp. 514—530. 9 Compare the chapter on The Nordic Countries, 1850—1914 by Lennart Jorberg and on Spain, 1830—1914 by Jordi Nadal, in Vol. 4 of The Fontana Economic History of Europe, London 1973, pp. 375—485 and pp. 532—626. 10 E. g. Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions, London 1957, pp. 5—6. — Also, C. H. Lee, Regional Economic Growth in the United Kingdom since the 1880s (European Economics Series), London etc. 1971, pp. 3—4.

B E I T R Ä G E UND K O M M E N T A R E *

R . MAX HARTWELL

/ Oxford**

1. Two problems must be clearly distinguished: (a) Industrialization as a 'universal' phenomenon, a process of economic change which can be analysed on a comparative basis for its general characteristics (as in the theory of economic growth); study of this problem has led to the identification and weighting of variables of growth and their relationship in the process of growth. (b) National differences in industrialization and growth as shown by differences in the timing and pattern of structural transformation and in the growth of GNP. Clearly whatever general features there are about the process of economic growth, comparative statistics today show remarkable differences between economies, even between European economies, in (i) the level of per capita GNP; (ii) the rate of growth of GNP (absolute and per capita); (iii) the structure of the economy (in terms of sectoral differences); (iv) employment and commodity specialization; (v) dependence on international trade. Thus it is the difference between economies which today is striking, rather than their similarity; and these differences can be matched with social, cultural and political differences. 2. Differences between economies are not new, but are deeply embedded in history. For this reason national economies are the proper units of investigation for historians. Indeed it is only at the national level that differences in performance can be explained. Again the historian has to explain why a process of increasing integration between economies occurred and what pressures (push or pull) induced increasing economic integration. * Soweit die Referenten der folgenden Diskussionsbeiträge für die Druckfassung ihrer Beiträge Anmerkungen beigegeben haben, sind diese jeweils am Schluß der Ausführungen des jeweiligen Verfassers zu finden. ** Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Industrialization and the European Economy. Comment on S. Pollard.

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To explain European industrialization it is necessary to look at least at the following national characteristics in the early 18th century: (a) The degree of political homogeneity (which was lacking, for example, in Germany and Italy and had to be achieved as a prerequisite of growth). (b) The degree of effective administrative control. (c) The degree of cultural homogeneity (for example language). (d) The degree of economic unity (for example in currency, legal framework, tariffs and excise etc.). An investigation of these factors would explain the continuing differences in the economies in Europe; it is obvious that differences between European economies were great in the 18 th century before industrialization and that there were marked differences in the pattern of industrialization when it occurred. 3. Each nation's historians have seen its history in terms of particular national problems rather than in terms of European industrialization; for example, the preoccupation of the Italian historians with the dual economy and the preoccupation of the French historians with the slow rate of growth of population in the 19th century. Again when economic historians discuss industrialization in general terms they tend to use national histories not so much as examples of growth, but as examples of particular characteristics of growth (for example, the degree of government intervention). For this reason there has been a tendency amongst historians to over-emphasize the role of a few key variables in the process of growth — especially capital accumulation, technological change and population growth — to the exclusion of other factors which are equally important, but which differ markedly between economies (for example resource endowment, political and social structure, education, etc.). 4. There are three important questions about the origins of industrialization which again centre on national economies rather than on the European economy. (i) Why did industrialization begin in particular areas? (ii) Was the spread of industrialization through a process of evolution or diffusion? (ill) If it was diffusion, what was the mechanism of diffusion? To an important extent these questions can also be posed in another way — Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in England? Was industrialization an English phenomenon which spread? Was industrialization, rather, in the matrix of European civilization? Some broad generalizations can be made. The theory of location can be used, along with particular historical reasons, to explain the siting of particular industries. Indeed a

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broad generalization can be made that the map of European industrialization was the map of Europe's coalfields. But particular industrial growths cannot be explained without considering the growth of national economies: growth was a process of balance, and linkages and interdependence within particular economies must be recognised and analysed to explain growth. Industrial growth initially was national rather than international, and the increasing export of goods, men and capital produced increasing international integration and an international economy, a process which proceeded apace after 1870. 5. Was Europe ever a single economy? It is impossible to argue that Europe was ever any more a single economy than South America, or Asia or Africa. At no time in the 18th or 19th centuries was there a degree of integration which could make the concept of Europe as a single economy viable. European industrialization is best seen in terms of (a) 'the great specialization', specialization through comparative national advantage, of which Great Britain was the outstanding example; (b) relatively free trade; (c) general acceptance of the Gold Standard; and (d) factor and knowledge mobility. On any measures of integration and interdependence Europe was more integrated in 1850 than in 1800, and more in 1900 than in 1850, and more in 1914 than in 1900. If there is a characteristic feature of European economy in the 19th century it is increasing interdependence and integration after 1870. After 1870 the growth of international trade, a truly remarkable mobility of factors, an agreed means of settling international indebtedness and relative peace were bringing the economies of Europe closer together. World War I can be seen, indeed, as a remarkable political aberration not as a logical outcome of some higher stage of capitalism and imperialism. 6. As England was an 'engine of growth' in Europe from the beginning of the 19th century, so Europe was an 'engine of growth' for the world economy from the mid-century and especially after 1870. Without European trade, European labour and capital, European technology and administrative know-how, and European political systems, most of the world would have remained in a state of illiterate subsistence. This is the difference between Europe and the rest of the world. Industrialization was in the matrix of European civilization; it had to be imported into nonEuropean economies. Thus England did not cause European industrialization, but Europe did cause world industrialization. 7. Can the slower growth of peripheral economies (within Europe and overseas) be explained in terms of an imperialist dependence model? Were other economies exploited? Or was the relationship between economies

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mutually advantageous? Any model of growth depending on imperialism ignores the successful growth of the Scandinavian countries, U.S.A., Argentine, Australia and New Zealand. The highest per capita incomes in the world today are in economies which never had colonies, or in which colonies were very unimportant. Again, some colonies have prospered, others have not. Again, some countries without colonies have prospered and others have not. 8. It is difficult to see 1870 as 'the end of an epoch' as Pollard alleges, except in the direction of increasing growth and integration, both European and world. There was no destruction of 'national economic unity' about this date; on the contrary there were increasing trade and factor mobility and increasing integration.

BRINLEY THOMAS

/ Cardiff

Professor Pollard's approach entails the application of the concept of the Atlantic economy to the study of the growth of the European economy. When I wrote my Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy, one of my major sources of inspiration was Schumpeter's great work, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. Schumpeter stressed that " . . . such a process as the railroadÌ2ation or the electrification of the world transcends the boundaries of individual countries in such a way as to be more truly described as one world-wide process than as the sum of distinct national ones. Capitalism itself is, both in the economic and the sociological sense, essentially one process, with the whole earth as its stage."1 However, his analysis was subject to an important constraint. He regarded international movements of population as exogenous and did not take them into account; he pointed out that "the cyclical aspects of international relations cannot receive due attention within this book". 2 He realized the importance of this omission, for he added that " . . . of all the limitations imposed by the purpose and plan of this book, this is the most serious one". 3 In my study I treated the countries of the Alantic community as regions within an entity which I called the Atlantic economy, and thus the international movements of population and capital were necessarily endogenous. I analyzed the evolution of capitalism (as Schumpeter said we ought to) as a process transcending national boundaries. Moreover, I dropped

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Schumpeter's three-cycle scheme and concentrated attention on the Kuznets cycle. I found that secular growth necessitated internal shifts within the aggregate via international factor movements: the expansion of the whole system expressed itself through disharmonious rates of growth in the parts. There was an inverse relation between long swings in investment, productivity and real income in the United Kingdom, on the one hand, and in countries of new settlement on the other.4 Schumpeter's finding that the rhythm of growth was simultaneous in Britain, the United States and Germany in the nineteenth century rested on the fact that his model ignored international factor movements. If one is interested in the international economy beyond the continent of Europe in the period 1840—1913, it is right to concentrate on British rather than continental capital exports. At first sight there might seem to be an objection to this, since the gross creditor position of France and Germany in 1913 was as much as $ 13,800 million as against Britain's # 18,000 million. However, the lending activities of France and Germany were strongly under the influence of governmental policies centered on Europe, whereas British capital exports were market-oriented and directed to the whole world. The former had a relatively small effect on the growth of the wider international economy.5 In an important sense the capital flows originating in France and Germany were mainly part of the process of growth in the European economy, including Russia, rather than the world economy. Similarly the matrix of international trade for continental countries in the second half of the nineteenth century was predominantly Europe-oriented. For these reasons, among others, there is justification for interpreting the industrialization of Europe from a "European" rather than a "national" point of view. The approach which has proved fruitful in the case of the Adantic economy could be equally rewarding for the European economy.

ι Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles. A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, New York, London 1939, Vol. II, p. 666. 2 Ibid, (my italic). 3 Ibid. * Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1973, Chapters XIII—XV. 5 See Brinley Thomas, Migration and Urban Development: A Reappraisal of British and American Long Cycles, London 1972, Chapter 3.

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Alan S. Milward / Manchester Although Professor Pollard's thesis is a very attractive one to all economic historians and one which would certainly make our field of study a simpler one if it could be accepted there are a certain number of considerations which tell heavily against it. These considerations are especially strong in dealing with the history of industrialization in Germany. In the first place the timing of that industrialization does not fit with Pollard's thesis. Not until the 1830s was industrialization in Germany in any sense comparable to its development in Britain or France. In the second place the pace of industrialization, once it had begun, was also very different from preceding historical examples. Both the timing and the pace of industrialization were strongly affected by national considerations in one particular way. In Germany the problem of economic development in the early nineteenth century was not so mudi to raise the level of per capita incomes and economic development to the point where development would become self-sustaining but to remove the obstacles to this development and by and large this had to be achieved by government action. Such changes were easier to effect than the raising of incomes, the abolition of gross illiteracy, the provision of capital and all the other obstacles which beset present-day underdeveloped countries. Government changes which made little difference in many countries produced extraordinary results in Germany because the more fundamental economic obstacles to industrialization were absent. These government actions could be embraced in the two terms, unification and simplification. Political action was necessary for ultimate unification but the prior creation of the Zollverein was a deliberate attempt to create an accessible market sufficiently large to raise output to the level where mechanisation of production would achieve the same momentum as it had previously in Britain and France. The implications of nationality were very present in these actions. The choices of economic action within Germany as constituted in 1815 were even more acutely political choices than is normally the case. The conception of economic 'backwardness' was, quite correctly, held to stem in Germany from political conditions. 'Backwardness' could only be removed by the conception and creation of a German economy whose boundaries remained to be defined, and to this creation the forces of both patriotism and nationalism were necessarily allied. The economic development of Germany was therefore inevitably a part of the creation of a great nation-state in the European heartland.

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All these elements can be seen in the creation of the Zollverein. In the first place it was the attempt to restore the larger market of the so-called 'continental system' as a response to the definition of national frontiers elsewhere. The French tariffs of 1816 and 1818 cut off Berg from its most profitable export markets, the Dutch tariff cut off coal exports down the Rhine producing a catastrophic slump in mining, the British corn laws cut off Prussian grain.1 Only with the French tariff of 1822 did the central states abandon the idea of a customs alignment with France 2 and from that date the one practical solution was in fact a German tariff. In the second place the Zollverein was an act in the modernization of the Prussian state, the erection of a national unified external tariff to replace the separate local markets of eighteenth-century Prussia.3 Thirdly, Prussian tariff and communications policy implied a network of national communications through which there would be an internal exchange of goods in Prussia, and in so doing it simplified what would have been serious problems in railway construction in the following decade. In this process government was necessary at every step; Stinnes's first steamship company operating to Holland was always supplied in periods of financial crisis with a ready stock of Prussian government contracts.4 Fourthly, the Zollverein had to be created by a series of political acts and represented a compelling political reason for action because the harmony of economic interests which it was supposed to represent was in fact very often lacking; there were for example, very convincing economic reasons for Saxony to remain outside the union.5 Finally, the importance of government legislative action in changing the structure of agricultural society in Germany has to be remembered. That government in changing the 'feudal' and ancien regime nexus of society was embarked on a task of social reconstruction with enormous implications for the future is not only recognised by historians now but was at times clearly perceived then, especially during the debates in Prussia as to the proper scope and purpose of the reforms. That the government could and should exercise some control over what sort of society emerged was clearly understood by both Stein and Hardenberg.6 The different choices made in the different German states had a considerable impact on the pattern of industrialization within Germany itself. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to claim that the only really international factors in the industrialization of Germany were the migration of human capital, the flow of liquid capital (although that was certainly less important) and the international export and copying of technology. *

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Another remark: The question of whether we are dealing with a domestic market or an external market is not only to be analysed simply in terms of what share of goods goes to which market. I think, in terms of economic development it is in the more difficult market that selling is the most important, because it is the difficult market which leads to a greater level of technological advance. In fact this difficult market in the early stages of the Zollverein was the USA where German woolen cloth producers began to extend their sales in the 1830s, at the expense of British exports. This corresponds with a level of technological development in the woollen industry which, given the technology available in each case, was in advance of that in the cotton industry. If one speaks about the German coal and iron and steel industries in this period one is driven to the fact that the market situation in Germany, on which these industries depended, was less demanding.

ι Guy Thuillier, La métallurgie rhénane de 1800 à 1830, in: Annales, 16,2 (1961), pp. 877—907; ibid., Vour une histoire de l'économie rhénane de 1800 à 1830: Les houillières de la Ruhr, in: Annales, 15,2 (1960), pp. 882—897. 2 Pierre Benaerts, Les origines de la grande industrie allemande, Paris 1933, p. 18. 3 Wolfram Fischer, The German Zollverein·. A Case Study in Customs Union, in: Kyklos, 13 (1960), pp. 65—89; William Otto Henderson, The State and the Industrial Revolution in Prussia, 1740—1870, Liverpool 1958. * Heinz Wutzmer, Oie Herkunft der industriellen Bourgeoisie Preußens in den vierziger fahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Mottek/Blumberg/Wutzmer/Becker, Studien zur Geschichte der industriellen Revolution in Deutschland ( = Veröffentlichungen des Instituts f ü r Wirtschaftsgeschichte an der Hochschule f ü r Ökonomie Berlin-Karlshorst 1), Berlin [Ost] 1 1960. 5 Horst Blumberg, Die deutsche Textilindustrie in der industriellen Revolution ( = Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Wirtschaftsgeschichte an der Hochsdiule für Ökonomie Berlin-Karlshorst 3), Berlin [Ost] 1965, passim; Herbert Pönicke, Sachsens Entwicklung zum Industriestaate (1830—1871), Dresden 1934. 6 Werner Conze, Quellen zur Geschichte der deutschen Bauernbefreiung ( = Quellensammlung zur Kulturgeschichte, Nr. 12), Göttingen-Berlin-Frankfurt 1957.

Beiträge und Kommentare

W I L L I A M PARKER

25

/ New Haven *

The Industrial Revolution is an idea with which every economic historian must come to terms. We must all at some point in our careers make a personal profession of faith — or of agnosticism concerning it. Personally, I believe in an Industrial Revolution, conceived in a union of capitalism and technology, seeing light first at half a dozen points on the map of Northwestern Europe in the later decades of the eigtheenth century. I do not believe it was an exclusively English phenomenon, which then spread to other countries, though that way of looking at it takes one quite far toward an understanding of its relation to peculiarly nation-specific features of the variants of it appearing in the body of different nation-states. It does appear to have hit certain industries first — the metals and textiles — and to have moved on through the structure of production. I am indifferent whether one wishes to say that the Industrial Revolution came to an end with the completion of a certain phase of technological change, with, say, the first Kondratieff, or whether one prefers the idea of continuous revolution with the market extentions, technical diffusion and technical change continuing from the late eighteenth century to today. Certainly industrial change did not end with the discontinuity in the techniques of textiles and iron and power generation that appeared in Northwest Europe about 200 years ago. My faith in an industrial revolution is based partly on my impression of the evidence, though what I know of this is mostly English. The other textile regions, where domestic manufacture and putting out had flourished in the eighteenth century — in Flanders, the Rhineland, Alsace, Bohemia — shifted to power spinning in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The metal-working regions in eastern France, Belgium, and the Rhineland and adjacent ore-bearing regions in Germany also improved their casting, puddling, and forging techniques. More compelling than the scanty evidence do I find the logic of an Industrial Revolution. Essentially it was an eco-technic process born into the culture of Western capitalism with the Industrial Revolution, a joining of the systems of economic change and technical progress which had been previously pursuing somewhat separate paths. The behavior patterns and the social and legal rules and practices that go by the name of capitalism were not new to the eighteenth century. We know that they had appeared many times before in history — * Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Comments on the Revolution in Europe.

Industrial

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in the trade of the Mediterranean from ancient times, in the late flowering of medieval trade and commerce in the Italian, Flemish, and German towns and city states of the thirteenth century, in the furious and continuous expansion of trade, feeding on geographical discovery as well as on technical changes in shipping and navigation, and the political arrangements of the mercantilisms of the seventeenth century. Private property, money and the forms of credit and foreign exchange, profit minded entrepreneurs, accumulation and reinvestment — these phenomena were common enough to justify the attention given by J. R. Hicks to the citystate in his Theory of Economic History. Such enclaves had leavened the vast lump of an agrarian, landbound economy periodically since trading centers and cities were first invented. Similarly throughout history, technical change had occurred spasmodically, in isolated sequences at restricted points. It appears indeed like the thought processes of a very absentminded man whose attention is not quite on his job. Ideas are taken up, carried a little way and forgotten. A device is applied in one use, but never much analyzed or improved nor was its use extended to other obvious purposes. What is unique in the eighteenth century in Northwestern Europe is the conjoining of these two processes in the history. An economic expansion, with attendant population growth and agricultural improvement, is carried out in the presence of a system of technology which had begun to change and whose changes could be directed and stimulated by economic opportunities. So it is that invention comes to show two characteristics important for the economic growth derived largely from it: first, immediate economic needs become more important as focussing devices for the attention and efforts of inventors; second, inventions themselves feed into, influence, and facilitate one another, producing a system of technology in which progress in materials and equipment at one point affects the materials and atmosphere in which others could be made. It became then possible for supply constraints encountered by the economy in its expansion to be broken, not by factor movement from another portion of the economy itself, as static equilibrium theory envisages, nor by adjustments in the relative supplies of labor or savings, as a dynamic theory might suggest, but by specific technical solutions, sought and found by inventors. This is the essence of Mantoux's famous argument about the textile inventions, or the interrelations of coal, pumps, iron and steel and machinery improvements. A set of interconnected technical inventions is initiated and set in motion by a pocket of monopoly rent in the economy,

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and breaking that bottleneck, it continues by a momentum of its own to produce further economic consequences. This conception of technical change, encompassing first the activity of mechanics and tinkerers, then encompassing the more rational calculations of semi-trained engineers, and at length sweeping more or less pure scientists into its orbit, is capable of much further study and detailed elaboration. Its sequences as they relate to the 'needs' of the growing capitalist trading economy form, in their interplay with the economy, the backbone of the economic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But why is it necessary to suppose that such a process comes into being through an Industrial Revolution, rather than through a slow progression of knowledge? The need for a revolution is, I think, intimately connected with the notion of scale. This is of course a familiar notion to economists who fit production functions, and in the wider social context it is as old as Adam Smith. It is possible to distinguish three (and possibly many more) senses in which the notion is relevant to an understanding of wealth formation in the early modern period. First, there are the ordinary scale economies, present at plant level wherever a piece of equipment or a highly trained work force or a genius of an entrepreneur exist to be spread over a variable output, with falling unit costs up to capacity utilization of such a fixed factor. In the social context this phenomenon is evident in the spreading of fixed costs of a few very largescale pieces of social capital — a transportation system, the improvement of rivers and harbors, the provision of urban services. At the time of formation of the larger scale national states from feudal baronies, the services of such states, whether desired by its citizens or not, included defence, a system of royal justice, some beginnings of a system of education, a national currency, and — most important for trade, a navy — all large-scale enterprises and all at first larger than the needs of the economy. Trade and industrial growth under mercantilist policies could occur spreading the costs of these elements of social overhead. But the application of the concept does not stop here, and detailed examination of the production functions of government services might show that their provision was indeed capable of division to fit the market, and that often demand outran supply. A further element of fixed capital in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the accumulation of geographical and technical knowledge. The knowledge gained from foreign wars, raids, and explorations was not cheaply won when the risks and losses incident to its acquisition are taken into account. But once acquired and disseminated,

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its further use was free and a large trade or manufacture could spread out from the knowledge derived in slender beginnings. The second sense in which scale and productivity growth were allied, even in the absence of technical change lay in the famous division of labor and the superior work organization and work habits which it permitted. On this it is impossible to say anything new, although its importance has recently been denied by the American radical economist, S. Marglin. Empirically, one would like to know more about the early factories and the productivity gains achieved in them even in the absence of machinery. It also seems hard to assess the value of Smith's observation that subdivided labor lent itself more readily to mechanization. The third and, for the present purpose, crucial aspect of scale was its relation to the rate of innovation. A moment's reflection will show, I think, what this means. If invention is a random process, it — as has often been pointed out — proceeds the more actively the larger the number of people who engage in it. But the functional relationship is a little more complicated than this. Inventors do not work in isolation, like a number of men firing pellets from different positions at the same target. There is a division of labor among inventors too, and each needs to know about and to use many elements in the inventions of others. These linkages are not only intellectual — though much invention is indeed transposing an idea or a process into a novel context. They are also physical, both in the experimentation and the engineering of the final product. Invention is frequently divided along three lines; materials (involving largely chemical processes), power transmission (involving mechanical or electrical means), and power generation (involving chemical and physical phenomena). But it is perfectly apparent that inventions go ahead faster when progress is being realized simultaneously along all three lines. At some point in the growth of technology out of the scattered inventions of the Renaissance, the scale of the activity grew large enough to produce streams of interrelated and mutually supporting inventions at many points in the technology. When this occurred, moreover, inventors encountered both the economic and technical bottlenecks which focussed their attention on series of specific problems. An implicit organization arose in the activity as inventors responded not only to market signals on the demand side for inventions but also to signals about bottlenecks and risks, signals about where to look for novelty implicit in the internal logic of the game of working with natural substances and forces. As these streams of ideas and devices and materials interrelated with the growing scale of the activity, an Industrial Revolution could, from the side of technique occur, could indeed hardly

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have been avoided. The analogy, made by others, is to the achievement of a critical mass and the accompanying atomic explosion. It lies in the nature of things then that an Industrial Revolution is to be expected wherever communication links are close enough and capitalists and inventors thick-sown enough to produce the cumulative interaction between economic expansion and technical change. How then can we trace this slow growth of a modern industrial culture as it creeps down the rivers, along the coasts and across the plains of Northern Europe? The statistical evidence is scarce, and all too often crammed into the mould of the national income accounts which it does not well fit. The statistics themselves can tell what is to be explained, the timing and loci of change, but not what happened that led up to changes, or why — in terms of the human actions and interconnections involved — things occurred as they did. For that we do need the close examination of biographies, laws, ways of thought — and the inventions themselves. We need a close study of technical change and diffusion, as they stem from the economy and the thought patterns of the society. At some point it is suitable to introduce national culture-characteristics into the examination, but only in the sense that they impede or hasten the expression and fruition of the basic cultural change associated with the invention and spread of modern industry among the pre-existing cultural formations of the entire region.

ERIC J . HOBSBAWM

/ London

I really don't have arguments so much as a series of questions, which are not necessarily critical of Sidney Pollard. Also, I have a possible suggestion. The questions, which arose while I was reading and listening to the paper are the following: First, I observe that Pollard's thesis does not seem to fit the case of the USA, and it is by no means clear that it applies to Great Britain. Perhaps his thesis is too narrowly organised in a European framework. It would be nice to see how the industrialization of the USA could be fitted into it. Second, about this phenomenon of regional nuclei. Such development by regional nuclei is normal even within individual states. We don't find even industrial development anywhere. It seems to me that we can ignore this pattern of uneven development as such, both in industry and in agriculture where it is also usual. The question before us is rather when

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and under what circumstances such regional nuclei remain essentially enclave economies, and when they begin to form part of or to transform the larger economies in which they lie. I leave open the question of the political implications of such regionalization. There are examples, such as Catalonia, where the regional nucleus does not in fact either transform or dominate the national economy and autonomism develops. There are also the cases where development takes place simultaneously in several nuclei. The next query I have is about frontiers. No doubt their situation is determined by accident, and subject to much change. Yet one of the accidental things about them may be the location of industrial nuclei in their vicinity. Catalonia is once again a case in point. That it is the hinterland of Barcelona may be much more important than that it is located close to the French frontier. If the cross-frontier effect which Sidney Pollard seems to suggest or imply is real, we ought to be able to show that developments on either side of the frontier were essentially similar in nature, timing, technological and business structure etc.; e.g. developments on the Saxon and Bohemian side of the Sudeten. I am not saying that this cannot be shown. I am quite ignorant about this example as I am about other cases along the Rhine-Benelux axis. However, as I look at this curious distribution of the advanced areas of Europe I am struck by the fact that it correlates with other things as well as frontiers, e.g. with invasions and wars. Saxony, the Low Countries and the Rhine valley were wellknown "cockpits of Europe". I don't claim any causal relation, only that before we start correlating industrial development with any one factor we had better define exactly what it is we are trying to prove. It is possible that industrialization is not particularly dependent on what happens within a specific state area, but if we are to argue this case, we have to prove that something that occurs inside a state but near its frontier is in some sense less "national" than something that occurs further towards the state centre. That also requires demonstration. But these are not in themselves critical points, merely uncertainties which arise out of the question what role the state plays in industrialization. I will refer to this below. The next query I have is about the question of markets. Sidney Pollard's argument appears to imply that the process of diffusion depends on export rather than on home markets. Perhaps this is so. Certainly I believe this to be the case for Britain, though I gather from Alan Milward that it can probably not be shown to be the case for Germany. Of course, there are cases where contraband exports play a major role, e.g. across the Russian frontier, but we need to know a great deal more about such obscure phenomena. If the entire market (home and foreign) is the crucial

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element, the frontier or the seller's membership of a particular state, national or otherwise, has some significance. This may be so even for export markets alone. For instance, Catalonia resisted the liquidation of the Spanish Empire most bitterly, because most of its textiles went to Cuba. Here there was clearly a political element. Finally, there is the query about a phenomenon which is much discussed in connection with the Third World, namely what has been called "the development of underdevelopment", the fact that the development of industry in one zone produces the contrary effects in other zones. This growing division of labour between essentially primary producing areas and the dominant industrial areas would certainly imply taking continents or even the globe as the basic area of our analysis. This phenomenon throws light on the last point Sidney raised, namely on the limits of the process of industrial diffusion; if there is such a limit. I want to conclude with a suggestion rather than a series of disconnected queries. It is really a question, because it is based on the peculiar dialectic between the national and international aspects of capitalism. I agree with Sidney Pollard that the development of capitalism is an international phenomenon and is to be measured by the expansion of the world market, the entire area within which the various flows of resources and factors of production can take place. But, whatever the importance may be of political units such as states, there is simply no denying that the development of capitalism is also the development of national, statebased economies. There is a world capitalist economy but within it also a not entirely artificial British capitalism or American capitalism. There is also a German economy, though we may debate at what date we can begin to talk of it. At the same time, if we should try to eliminate one aspect or the other entirely, our analysis is distorted. Both play their part; and yet both seem to play different parts at different phases of capitalist development. Clearly at certain stages, say in the i8th century and perhaps up to the middle of the 19th century, a lot of people thought that national policy, whether for positive or negative purposes, was indispensable for development. This was the view not only of ideologists, but of civil servants, economists, and even businessmen. It was their belief that by and large a middlinglarge state was somehow or other — the question was not carefully defined — essential for the development of an industrialized economy. It is a curious fact that in terms of economics, policy and ideology virtually all the nationalist movements of the 19th century were not so much "independence" movements as movements for national unification. Not until the 20th century does this element of creating larger state units

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appear to take a back seat. It is really only President Wilson who reverses the trend. There is the curious example of Mazzini, the great apostle of nationalism, whose map of the "Europe of Nations" did not consist of nation-states at all by modern national criteria (except for Italy), but of a dozen or so supra-national federations, simply because he could not believe that places like Luxembourg or Switzerland were big enough to be viable economies. I think there is no doubt that at a certain stage, on which Sidney rightly fixes his attention — perhaps it should be from the 1840s to the 1870s rather than from 1815 to 1870 — this was not so important. Indeed at this time the pay-off from the international free movements of capital, technology, trade etc. was enormously large; or to put it the other way around, the capacity of government policies to affect economic development by positive action was unusually small. I agree with him against Max Hartwell that from 1870 on, with the growth of a number of comparatively equal industrial economies such as Britain, Germany and the USA, the role of the state once again became enormously important, and capitalist competition became increasingly inter-state competition backed by state power in all manner of ways. This was so even while "internationalism" increased in certain respects, e.g. the capital market from 1870 to 1914. And yet, may we not see over a long period of history, an alternation between periods when capitalist development proceeds through and with the use of state policy as it did in the 18th century, followed by periods when the state is less important, and back again to periods of state-based development? May the present moment not be once again an interim phase, during which national states or political frontiers are no longer as basic a definition or factor affecting economic development as they were between, say, the 1870s and 1950s? I am thinking of the development of new units of the economy such as transnational corporations, which operate in such a way that the classic methods of state policy find it very difficult to affect them; just as in its way state policy was relatively important in the 1850s and 1860s faced with the forces of economic development. In the long run I think we might bear in mind this dialectical interplay between phases where economic development proceeds with and through "national" units, or big "building blocks" (the British economy, the German economy etc.), and others, where it proceeds in other ways across national frontiers. But I doubt whether one could permanently demote either one aspect of capitalist development or the other to a minor role.

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WILHELM TREUE / Göttingen

In dem Diskussionsbeitrag, den unser Kollege Hartwell gegeben hat, ist schon vieles von dem gesagt worden, was ich sagen wollte. Ich möchte nur ein paar Variationen dazu liefern. Erstens, seit 1700, um einen Zeitpunkt zu nennen, hat es ja doch schon eine Wanderung in Europa gegeben; ob sie nun von England her angeregt worden ist oder nicht, dürfte eine nicht so wichtige Rolle spielen. Ich erinnere nur an die West-Ost-Wanderung in bezug auf das Theater, auf die Literatur, auf die Kunstgewerbe, auf die Keramik insbesondere, und da kann man zu Wedgewood zurückkehren und daran erinnern, daß die ganzen Kenntnisse, die Wedgewood von England aus vermittelt hat, seit etwa 1790 bis in die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts über den Kontinent gewandert sind. Es hat eben schon immer eine West-Ost-Wanderung mit einem zeitlichen Verzug gegeben. Wenn wir hier einen Medizinhistoriker hätten, dann würde ich ihn fragen, ob nicht vielleicht die Franzosen schon 3 % Zucker gehabt haben (da ja die Zuckerkrankheit eine Zivilisationskrankheit ist), als die Königsberger, die Polen und die Russen noch auf den Bäumen gesessen haben. Das ist also eine alte Bewegung, und dazu kommt nun diese Anregung, die wir hier bekommen haben. Ich könnte mir durchaus denken, wenn wir sorgfältige Detailstudien betreiben, kann diese Anregung so wichtig werden, wie Frederick Jackson Turners Buch über The frontier in American History. Es ist im Grunde ein sehr ähnliches Problem, wobei wir immer nur fragen müssen, ob wir dabei mehr gewinnen als verlieren. Verlieren tun wir dabei natürlich die Individualität der Regionen, der Gebiete, der Nationen. Wir verlieren die Individualität der spezifischen hohen Beamtenschaften etwa in Schlesien und in Berlin. Wir verlieren das Spezifische des Unternehmertums an der Ruhr und in Schlesien. Wir verlieren die nationale Patentgesetzgebung, die nationale Aktiengesellschaft und ähnliche Entwicklungen, wenn wir allzusehr von einer allgemein-europäischen Entwicklung sprechen. Ganz schwierig wird die Sache sofort, wenn wir uns mit einzelnen technischen Problemen beschäftigen. Herr Milward hat vorhin die Dinnendahls im Zusammenhang mit der Dampfmaschine erwähnt. Die sitzen nun ja schon praktisch in der Mitte der Geschichte der Dampfmaschine. Wenn wir aber vom Anfang herkommen, von dem Augenblick, von dem die Dampfmaschine unter Überspringung von Frankreich und der Niederlande nach Preußen gekommen ist, dann sind wir gleich in Schlesien: Die Dampfmaschine wird also in Deutschland sozusagen rückwärts, der Grenze entgegen, von Schlesien aus über Berlin und Halle in das Ruhrgebiet gebracht und dann natürlich dort weiterentwickelt; erst dann wandert sie

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wieder von dort aus nach dem Osten. Aber zunächst einmal ist es eine solche Gegenentwicklung. Das gleiche gilt für die Eisenbahn- und Schienenerzeugung. Das alles ist also, sowie man ins Detail geht, sehr kompliziert: glücklicherweise schafft es dadurch eben die individuelle Vielfalt der Geschichte. Ich möchte nodi auf einen letzten Punkt ganz kurz zu sprechen kommen. Wo nun, glaube ich, von einem englischen Einfluß überhaupt keine Rede sein kann, das ist der Bereich der technischen Schulbildung und Hochschulbildung. Soweit ich sehe, kommt dieser ganze Bereich nicht aus England, sondern er kommt eben aus Frankreich, von der Ecole Polytechnique, und er geht von da aus nach Prag, und von Prag aus nach Wien und von Wien nach Karlsruhe und über ganz Deutschland — also wieder, aber nun sogar nur innerhalb des Kontinents, ein Sprung vom Westen relativ weit in den Osten, dann wieder ein Rückmarsch in die westlichen deutschen Gebiete hinein und erneut vorwärts nach Osten: Dresden, Breslau, Danzig usw. Sie können das gleiche noch einmal regional beobachten von Berlin, von Beuths „Verein für den Gewerbfleiß" und von dem Gewerbeinstitut, die ja schließlich beide von entscheidender Bedeutung gewesen sind für die Entwicklung des landwirtschaftlichen und technischen Bildungswesens in Preußen. Wenn ich das von den Einzelheiten her bedenke — mir ist klar, daß ich Einzelheiten gegenüber einem Gesamtaspekt anspreche, und damit also nur einen Teil des Gesamtaspekts erreiche —, stellt sich für mich die Frage, hat man von einer solchen Betrachtung einen größeren Verlust oder einen größeren Gewinn? Wenn man zu sehr europäisch generalisiert und zu sehr eine gemeinsame Grenze im Auge hat, dann verliert man eben die nationale und die regionale Individualisierung. Außerdem möchte ich vorschlagen, daß man, Herr Pollard, nicht so sehr von einer gemeinsamen europäischen Grenze, als von einer Springprozession der Industrialisierung spricht.

P E T E R LUNDGREEN

/ Berlin *

If we agree that 19th-century Europe is a single economy in that it conveys a shifting balance between the more advanced and the less advanced areas, the latter being highly influenced by the former ones; and * Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Industrialization and the Formation of Technical Manpower: National and International Aspects of an Institutional Pattern.

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if there was "the trauma of British competition in manufacture after 1815 " ; 1 there is at least one problem which had to be solved in order to overcome this trauma but which did not get solved by way of imitating or emulating the most advanced of all industrial areas, the English forerunner. This problem consisted of the supply of technically trained manpower necessary to copy known technologies or to develop new ones. To be sure the European market did not only exist for capital and, if only illegally, for machinery, but also for skilled labour and entrepreneur ship. This international "brain drain" was bound to be of a limited importance, however, since the individual states were not willing to rely on this source of recruitment but rather engaged, on both political and economic reasons, in establishing national industries for the production of technical manpower. The facts are fairly well-known and may be summerized as follows. Whereas in Britain the famous amateur with his method of "trial and error" prevailed, continental states set up institutions which virtually monopolized technical education. There is but one common though negative feature uniting Britain and Europe: nowhere did the universities play a remarkable role in housing the so-called scientific revolution of the 17th century and its furtherance afterwards. Britain answered this deplorable narrowmindedness by creating an array of informal contacts via private and semi-public societies, academies, and circles. France as the Continent's model state excelled in creating technical colleges for military and civil public servants. The French example of the 18th century was highly influential for other countries which copied the institutional set-up when they felt they needed artillerists, military engineers, mining officials or civil engineers. These people were often organized into technical corps; they rendered services to the emerging industrialized economy mainly by creating and improving the infrastructure. However, the introduction of new technologies into the producing industries demanded another type of technician who did not strive to become a prestigious official but a venturesome craftsman, eventually an entrepreneur, most typically yet an innovative and leading technical employee in a promising enterprise. The school-bound creation of this type of technician was pioneered in Prussia whose medium-level Polytechnic Institute (Gewerbe-Institut) gave birth to the industrial technicians as a functionally and socially distinct group. This time France followed the Prussian example; even more remarkable it seems to me, that we find the same dichotomy between technicians for public service or private industry in other countries such as Russia and Japan. Thus we

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may speak of an institutional pattern with fairly great similarities, or internationally common traits. The explanation of this institutional development means to ask for its determining forces. We may introduce this section by quoting a famous letter. In 1867, Dr. Lyon Playfair reported from the Paris World Exhibition that England was losing ground as compared to its European competitors. One of the causes for this shift in relative position was, according to the views of English manufacturers and engineers, "that France, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland possess good systems of industrial education for the masters and managers of factories and workshops, and that England possesses none." And Playfair gives an example by citing Jean Baptiste Dumas who had assured him "that technical education had given a great impulse to the industry of France. In going through the Exhibition, whenever anything excellent in French manufacture strikes his attention, his invariable question is, 'was the manager of this establishment a pupil of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures?' and in the great majority of cases he receives a reply in the affirmative."2 Only a few years later, at the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Gewerbe-Institut, its biographer will state: "A great number of scientifically trained technicians had graduated from the Institute. Their efforts could be noticed in all provinces of the State and were respected even abroad. In fact the initiators, founders and managers of most of the magnificent industrial enterprises in our fatherland have been former students of the Institute." 3 The sharp line of contrast between England on the one side, European countries on the other is, first of all, only a particular case of the general division between pioneer and latecomer. There was clearly no need for England to avoid formal technical education, but since it proved possible for a while to do without it, England got stuck to its apparently successful recruitment and training processes. On the other side, there was no escape for any follower country from formal schooling since imitation per se demands this methodical approach. After all, it must make a difference whether you embark on uncertain travels, or wether you have a map which shows you the direct route. In this sense any latecomer takes advantage of a Gerschenkron effect in that he knows what he is after and even can make a choice as to which course to follow. This advantage, however, is probably counterbalanced if the lag in time and thereby in economic backwardness relative to the leading countries increases. The first European industrializers had the specific advantage that their way of creating technical manpower by formal schooling turned out to be the

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only way to do it as soon as industry became more sophisticated, more based on the sciences. It is at this time that England finally had to give up its traditional informal ways of training. The common continental pattern of producing technical manpower is yet not only to be explained by referring to the logic inherent in imitation and corroborated by the history of science. The specific historical forms of establishing institutions for higher technical learning is clearly linked to the preindustrial history of these countries. Their long tradition of absolutism and mercantilism includes a strong emphasis on bureaucratization which we do not find in England. With bureaucracy claiming to represent the leading force in society it was quite natural that even fields like science, technology and industry became objects of bureaucratic concern. Again this seems to be rather typical for developing economies whereas England is rather the exception. If we confine our final observations to differences within this bureaucratically administered Europe the institutional pattern conveys certain variations which might help to explain the different industrial developments of these countries. France was never surpassed as far as the level of its technical institutions educating public servants is concerned. Consequently, these institutions and public service attracted the most brilliant talents whereas the Ecole centrale was not only founded later than its Prussian sister institution but could never overcome its second rank position. In Prussia technical public servants could not gain such a high prestige since the training institutions were of a lower quality though higher than that of the Gewerbe-Institut in its beginnings. The Gewerbe-Institut, however, was successively upgraded, according to the rising demands by industry for highly qualified engineers, until it became united with the Bauakademie in 1879. Henceforth the former dichotomy between technical training for public service or private industry gave way to a rivalry between state and industry as to who would get the best graduates. I cannot tell whether these institutional differences had a notifiable impact on the respective success of industrialization, but any effort to study this sort of questions will still have to proceed along the lines of national processes of industrialization, no matter how real the European economy of the time may have been.

1 Sidney Pollard, Working Paper for the Conference. 2 Letter from Dr. Lyon Playfair to the Rt. Hon. Lord Taunton. Journal of the Society of Arts, 1867, June 7, Vol. XV, p. 477 f.; reprinted in: Eric Ashby, Technology

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and the Academics. An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution, London 1958, p. I l l f. 3 F. W. Nottebohm, Chronik der Königlichen Gewerbe-Akademie zu Berlin. Festschrift zur Feier des fünfzigjährigen Bestehens der Anstalt, Berlin 1871, p. 23 f.

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ALICE TEICHOVA / Norwich *

Professor Pollard presented a remarkable range of ideas on one of the central topics in the field of social and economic history. My comments will be confined to the specific development of industrialization in Central-East and Southeast Europe, except for some general introductory remarks. There can, probably, be very little serious objection to treating the Industrial Revolution in Europe as a single process. Although the very formulation seems to harbour an inherent contradiction; i. e. it suggests that a revolution — which denotes a sharp break with previous conditions and the creation of new conditions not in evidence before — equals a process — which suggests continuous gradual change. I t would, perhaps, be more acceptable and nearer historical reality to term the transformation of the economy and society which stretched over two centuries in time and spread over the whole continent of Europe, and indeed beyond it, the process of industrialization. I f it is agreed that by the Industrial Revolution we mean the transition from handicraft and manufactory production to factory production, i . e . to the systematic use of manufacturing machinery, to the introduction of mechanical power and chemico-technical processes, then we are discussing a development which is open-ended even to this day. Each country's transition to factory production undoubtedly constituted a part of the overall process, but it followed an extremely uneven course in the different countries as well as in the individual branches of industry. For this process was decisively influenced by each country's particular historical development, on the one hand, and by the impact of the industrially advanced countries, on the other. In this connection the dividing line of 1815 chosen by Professor Pollard for the formation of 'Europe as a single economy' provides a convenient starting point for the case of Central and Southeast Europe's industrializing efforts. Before that date the Continental Blockade had given the countries of the Habsburg Monarchy either the first impetus to industrialization or accelerated the pace of an industrialization which had taken no more than the first steps. Post-1815 British competition, although creating serious crisis conditions, above all in the cotton industry, * Die Referentin hat ihrem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Comments on Sidney Pollard's Thesis on "Industrialization and 'European Economy'".

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was not as much of a trauma as it is often made out to have been. At least, in the Austrian parts of the Habsburg Monarchy (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Austria) the traumatic conditions produced by the influx of British manufactured products were soon overcome when industrialization shifted to other areas of production, especially to those closely connected with agriculture: sugar refining, beer brewing, distilling and flour milling, and the production of agricultural machinery. The shift from the textile industry to agricultural industries had also national overtones, which found expression in the competition between the German-Austrian and the Czech bourgeoisie in the development of capitalism. The rising class of Czech industrial entrepreneurs was closely bound up with agriculture, it found capital, labour and entrepreneurial opportunities in exploiting industrial crops (beet, hops, barley, potatoes). Here national consciousness was served by savings and their investment in industrial enterprises. The development of agricultural industries and the struggle for national liberation formed an important element in the Industrial Revolution in Bohemia and Moravia, where as a result of political and national pressures industrialization developed its own specific pattern, unlike that of the Western European countries. The specific course of each national economy's industrialization and the dissimilarities with the development of the leading industrial nations deserve far greater attention in economic history research; for an overemphasis on similarities is likely to produce an insufficiently differentiated and thus more distorted picture of historical reality than historians and economic historians have been able to produce so far. These dangers seem to be present in a concept which regards 'Europe as a single economy' at any time of the continent's history and, although a useful, almost counterfactual working hypothesis, it would need to be applied critically and with great caution. There is a case for venturing to say that the disparities between regions and countries strengthened the advanced industrializers and relatively weakened those areas which lagged behind. Herein lies also one of the potent reasons why, to quote from Pollard, the 'early industrializers keep the lead'. The striking dissimilarities in industrial development within Europe can only be assessed against the historical background of industrialization in individual areas. As an example the Danubian region will be referred to especially. In this part of Europe essentially only Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia as well as certain areas of Austria proper had gone through an Industrial Revolution of the 19th century type, starting with the textile industry but then penetrating to agricultural and food industries

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and to mining and metal working. In all its phases Czech industrialization was supported by a continuous inflow of labour and fairly substantial domestic capital accumulation derived mainly from a relatively advanced agriculture which had developed simultaneously. This mode of industrial change which gradually permeated the whole economy of the NorthWestern region of the Habsburg Empire was largely by-passed in the Southeast European areas. There a chronic lack of capital prevailed and production continued in traditional ways. Southeastern Europe was faced with the need to industrialize in 20th century conditions alongside and in unequal competition with high-powered industrial economies. As a result of the more pronounced discontinuity of the SoutheastEuropean region's development in comparison with the Western parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, the middle strata of entrepreneurs had virtually dropped out of the process of industrializing, or played a comparatively insignificant part in it. This applies to countries sudi as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia alike. In the midst of a large but not sufficiently productive agricultural sector and backward, widely dispersed forms of manufacture the percentage of gainfully employed persons in modern industry was so small and concentrated in so few enterprises from the 1890s to the 1930s that this clearly affected the growth of the domestic market adversely. If Professor Pollard speaks of Europe as an economic unit, then there existed very large areas which, because of their surviving autarkic structure, never entered it to a relevant extent. Even within the Habsburg Monarchy, although the Empire provided a unified market within its boundaries and did not enter significantly into foreign trade, one cannot seriously speak of an integrated economy. On the contrary, far from levelling out differences, the disparities between Central and Southeast Europe and the Western European economies were accentuated. The weakness of private enterprise led to the policy of state encouragement of industry in Southeast Europe. Almost identical conditions evoked far-reaching economic legislation from the last quarter of the 19th century in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. Underlying this policy was the endeavour to bridge the gap between their own low level of industrialization and the advanced level of the West. Where domestic private enterprise was unable to achieve industrial advance the state intervened as entrepreneur, investor and consumer. At the same time foreign capital participation was sought in order to gain resources and to benefit from the experience and technical know-how of highly sophisticated finance and industry. Whilst doubtlessly important benefits did accrue to the back-

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ward economies on their path to industrialization, all in all, foreign capital, licences, technical aid and participation helped to shape industrialization in Southeast Europe to the needs and interests of the advanced economies and thus created imbalances in the economies of the relatively backward areas. One example of this relationship is the overemphasis on capital investment in extractive industries; another example is that of railway construction in the Eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which does not show any spectacular linkages to domestic industrialization. Most of the necessary equipment was imported from the advanced Western industrial nations who provided the capital as well as the bulk of the required products (rails, rolling stock, etc.), a policy economically reasonable from the point of view of the investing economy but one which, on the other hand, impeded indigenous industrial development. Thus, the 'natural economic unity' seen by Professor Pollard is perhaps appraised through the eyes of the leading industrial nations who by their economic power constructed a system of dependencies of varying degrees which tended to reinforce discrepancies within the various parts of Europe. At the same time it should be pointed out that early industrializers stimulated either by diffusion, emulation or competition efforts to industrialize in other areas, although the complicated process of diffusion was certainly not only a one-way movement from West to East but one of mutual influences. These comments were not intended to detract from the stimulating ideas contained in Professor Pollard's thesis, but were rather to point out the possible dangers which could arise if historical development in the period of industrialization is too closely modelled on the concept of European economic unity on a Western European pattern.

YEHUDA DON

/ Ramat-Gan *

I wish to present a unique model of industrialization in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and also to contribute to the discussion about the irrelevancy of government policy in provoking or disturbing industrial development. I suggest that the pattern of Hungarian industrialization during the last 40 years of the 19th century demonstrate how a natural course of * Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: A Growth Retrogressional Phase: Hungary 1867—1914.

Model with a

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the industrial take-off was disturbed by unappropriate protectionist policies, pursued under the constraints of a Customs Union. In this respect I would like to make a very brief note to Prof. Hobsbawm, who has indicated that most national units were unifying. There is at least one conspicuous example in the 19th century, that of Austria and Hungary, which was disruptive by its nature and greatly effected the differential economic development of the two partners. Within the European process of industrialization Hungary's development was rather unique, having some theoretical value as a fine example of economic growth under a Customs Union between unequal parties under changing economic policies. The Hungarian model included a phase of retrogression, which has not been analyzed so far. It followed clear signs of a customary take-off process, and ended up with some classical neomercantilistic measures under the constraints of very little maneuverability with tariff policies. Grosso modo, one observes three phases in the early Hungarian industrialization. 1) the classical stage, lasting until about 1877; 2) the retrogressive stage which ran from around 1878 until the first decade of the 20th century and 3) the mercantilist stage leading to World War I. The classical stage perfectly fits into most patterns of take-off process. Using the paraphrase of Sidney Pollard, Hungary was on the right side of the watershed during the middle of the 19th century, and most institutional adjustments had already been made before 1867. Serfs liberated, profession could be choosen freely, guild privileges had been abolished, etc. Industrialization had a clearly distinguishable primary growth sector to rely on; the modern, milling industry, which developed particularly in Budapest. They grew into some of the most up-to-date and competitive industries in Europe. The milling industry and the flour exports were also capable of that particular capital generation which created one of the most important sources of investible capital, mainly into the further development of the milling industry as well as into other industries in the processing of agricultural produce, such as timber and sugar. The milling industry also developed a strong capitalistically minded entrepreneurial class, which, though specialized in the processing of agricultural produce, was clearly urban, and of non-Hungarian origins. It was probably the classical Schumpeterian entrepreneurial prototype. Besides milling, we observe at least three supplementary growth sectors, railways, iron and coal and agricultural machinery. Another aspect of this first stage was the rapid growth of foreign investment, especially from England and France, and of course from Austria. They developed a

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very interesting pattern of division of labour. The primary growth sector, the export oriented milling and then sugar and timber industries, remained mainly under local management and control. The supplementary sectors of iron and coal, agricultural machinery and foremost railway and financial institutions attracted mostly foreign capital. The take-off process, based on flour export, railways, iron, steel and engineering, was very much under way, somewhere around the middle of the 1870s. This development fits perfectly the Gerschenkron model for semi-backward economies. At this stage, economic growth in Hungary was financed mainly through credit creation by banks, as differentiated from processes of industrialization in more developed economies which were financed by self generated capital out of savings. Furthermore, the industry comprised of relatively, very large plants and produced very little directly to the consumers. We come now to the second stage which opened with the general disappointment from free trade in Austria, the fall of the Auersperg Government in Austria and with a heavy decline in grain prices throughout Europe. The result of this decline was that the competitiveness of the Hungarian wheat and milling industry gradually eroded. The parties thus hurt reacted by a special version of what later became known in Germany as the "iron and rye compact" between the industrial and the agricultural interests. The Hungarian grain production gained protection on the Austrian market and Austria's industry had a free access to Hungary. However, at least, until the late 1870s the relative efficiency or competitiveness, under conditions of free trade, of Hungarian agriculture was considerably higher than that of Austria's industry. In other words, at the early stages Austria needed probably more protection than Hungary. However, in 1914 the tariff rate on unfinished textiles, a typical Austrian product, was 13 % on other manufactured goods 19 %, and on cereal and flour 43 %. The eventual imposition of a protectionist policy created a very clearcut process of gradual deterioration within the Hungarian economy, particularly of the agrarian sector. The reaction to protection in Hungary was the discovery that protection was convenient to the ruling agrarian aristocracy, and instead of adjusting to the new price structure, as in other countries, where capital generation for growth depended on agricultural exports, such as Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands or New Zealand, the existence of a comfortable alternative led to the pressure to increase further protection on grain product. Instead of changing production patterns by moving to more sophisticated products with higher income elasticities such as egg, poultry and meat products, the Hungarian

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landlords regulated wheat production to keep prices in the Customs Union among the highest in Europe. There was only one exception, the sugar industry, and it probably verified the rule itself. Sugar production in Hungary, as it was in Austria, was one of the most efficient industries all over Europe. Hungarian sugar producers could not export their surpluses to the Austrian consumers' market under the wings of the tariff protection of the Customs Union, since Austria itself was among the chief sugar exporters of Europe. Consequently to keep abreast with the general developments in the world sugar industry, dictated by the Germans, Hungarian producers had to make technological and organizational adjustments. And indeed, they succeeded, in a very stiff and competitive international market, even after the Brussels Convention which abolished export bounties, not only to maintain their share in the world sugar export, but even to increase it. The effect of this Austro-Hungarian "iron and rye compact" on Hungarian industry was particularly damaging. Tariff on industrial product was not sufficiently high to protect the establishment of new infant industries in such branches where Austria did not develop its own production, however, it was sufficiently high to ensure Austrian domination in such fields where the Austrian industry did specialize. The Hungarian agrarian interest brought into effect anti-industrial legislations to strengthen the protection of grain production from outside competition. Perhaps the best known item of this legislation was the abolition of the 'milling regulations' which had allowed free importation of cereal from Southeast Europe, stipulated to an equal amount of wheat or flour export to the West. This measure, besides damaging the flour industry, heavily impeded trade with Southeastern Europe and hit primarily the industrial sector of Hungary, which regarded Southeast Europe as an obvious outlet for its relatively inferior and expensive products. It also upset that international trend of trade, indicated by Sidney Pollard, by which industrial goods flowed from the more to the less developed areas. During the early 1880s the absolute amount imported from and exported to Romania and Servia was probably 30 % higher than in 1914. Another example of anti-industrial legislation was the duty regulations in the spirit industry which heavily discriminated against big industrial distilleries under the pretext of encouraging cottage industries. The result was that a process of polarization in land distribution took place. The mini-farmers (those with less than five acres of land) did not leave agriculture to the cities, but, besides their part-time occupation on their little plots and limited cottage industries, they maintained a very

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cheap labour force supply and a state of immobile underemployment in agriculture. Many of the more energetic young laborers emigrated to the USA and not to other more developed parts of the Hungarian Empire. The emigration factor from Europe at the end of the 19th century was particularly strong as a movement of rural population from less developed countries to the U. S. Instead of moving from agriculture to industry, they moved from agriculture abroad. Such migratory movements became the common solution for the disposal of surplus population from countries on the wrong side of the watershed to the New World. Such development in Hungary had serious repercussions on industry, both at the factor proportions optimization end, and at the effective demand end. The 20 years of holding up industrialization created an industrial stalemate of a very unique structure. Heavy industry, consisting of mining, iron and power, and heavy machinery employed just about one half of all industrial labour. Processing industry in agriculture employed just about one quarter and the production of building materials about l/10th. The common denominator of all three groups, producing well over 85 % of total industrial output, was their low price and income elasticities. In sharp contrast, all light industries, producing consumers' goods, employed just about l / 9 t h of all workers in industry, and produced about 81/2 to 9 p. c. of total industrial output. Now we come to the third stage in this model, mercantilism under constraints of Customs Union. The fundamental considerations in the reformulated industrial policy were mercantilist on a rather narrow Hungarian nationalistic basis, and were basically motivated by the rather strained relationship between the two partners of the Customs Union. Its main expression was the utilization of budgetary measures, such as direct subsidies, railway tariff discriminations, tax exemptions, etc., for all new industries, with special emphasis on textile. Direct annual subsidy to industry grew fourfold to 4.7 million crowns per annum. It was a very direct and immediate change of policy introduced in 1907. Such measures, however, lead us back to the Gerschenkron model of industrialization through budgetary means (the Russian case), rather than through the utilization of credit creation in financial institutions (the German case). If we recall that industrialization had begun in Hungary in the late sixties, basically through the help of financial institutions and forty years later it fell back on government subsidies, the retrogressive impact of the Customs Union upon Hungarian industrialization becomes apparent. I wish to conclude by re-emphasizing the very great importance of government policy which is capable not only to neutralize the process of

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diffusion of industrialization from one country to another, or from one area to another, and not only to encourage it (such as the economic policy of the early 19th century Prussia proved it), but also to discourage it and cause actual retrogression for a generation or more.

Short Bibliography on Problems of Industrialization in Central-East and Southeast Europe Iván T. Berend & György Ránki, Economic Development of East-Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York 1974. Iván T. Berend & György Ránki, Hungary; A Century of Economic Development, Newton Abbot - New York 1974. Igor Karaman, Privreda i drustvo Hrvatske u 19. stoljecu, Zagreb 1972. Irena Kostrowicka, Zbigniew Landau, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Historia gospodarcza Polski XIX i XX wieku, Warszawa 1966. Herbert Matis, Österreichs Wirtschaft 1848—1913. Konjunkturelle Dynamik und gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Zeitalter Franz Josephs I., Berlin 1972. Jaroslav Puri, Pr&myslová revoluce ν ceskych zemich, Prag 1960. Jaroslav Puri, The Industrial Revolution in the Czech Lands, in: Histórica I I (1960), pp. 183—272. Nicolas Spulber, The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe (Tedinology Press Books in Social Sciences), New York 1957.

FRANÇOIS CROUZET

/ Paris

Most speakers have criticized Pollard's views, but I would like to support them, as he has expressed forcefully some ideas after which I have been groping for some time. I heartily agree with his basic idea that the national state is not the best framework in which to study the Industrial Revolution in Europe and that it would be profitable to consider European industrialization as a whole, as a single process. Of course, the nature of the materials, especially the available statistical data, have often made it necessary to use the national framework, but comparisons of the economic growth of nations by national income methods can be quite misleading, owing to the lack; of homogeneity in economic development inside the various national units. Moreover, for most of the 19th century, there was nowhere any industrialization on a country-wide basis; the Industrial Revolution took place in some small areas of various countries, such as Alsace, the Liège area, Saxony, etc., while in most of the countries at large there was

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no industrialization — and rather a good deal of de-industrialization. And differentials in levels of economic development and in per capita incomes may have been greater, during the 19th century, between regions within each West-European country than between the aggregates for the different nations. Prof. Pollard is also definitely right in stressing that, in the early 19th century, "industrialized" areas, which were the craddle of the Industrial Revolution on the Continent, were a series of small dots on the map, roughly distributed along two axis — one along the Rhine and the Scheldt, the other around the Elbe — which were straddling national frontiers (though there was a third axis: Normandy — Paris — Lyon — Saint-Etienne, which was a purely French affair).1 This is not surprising, as European frontiers are man-made, artificial, the products of wars and diplomacy, and they cut across natural-geographical units and also cultural-linguistic areas (for instance, in the early modern period, France encroached on the Low Countries and Rhineland cultural areas). Moreover, under the Old Regimes, before the consolidation of national states as a result of the French Revolution and subsequent 19th century developments (which, for instance, made customs systems much more efficient), "political" and "economic" frontiers did not coincide in many cases, and many border provinces had far stronger economic links with neighbouring foreign countries than with most of the country under the sovereignty of which they were placed. I would consider it likely that, in the early 19th century, there was not much difference in the level of economic development between both sides of many political frontiers. It was only the subsequent disparities in economic growth at the national levels, as well as in economic policies (specially in the fields of tariffs and of public utilities) which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, created the sharp differences in wealth which strike nowadays the traveller who crosses, say, from France into Switzerland or from France into Spain. On the other hand, the influence of political frontiers — artificial as they may be — and of their changes upon economic development must not be neglected. For instance, the district close to the Franco-Belgian border near Lille, was heavily industrialized quite early on the French side (and the border attracted industry, to take advantage of cheap migrant labour from Belgian Flanders), while on the Belgian side it remained purely agricultural up to a recent date.2 And it is well known that the change of the Franco-German frontier in 1871 had important consequences upon the location of the steel and textile industries in that region. But, even when frontiers did not move, there was, during the 19th century, a good

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deal of short-distance trans-frontiers movements of factors of production — capital, entrepreneurs, labour, technological know-how (for instance between Belgium and Northern France, Belgium and the Rhineland, Alsace and Northern Switzerland). Anyway, as Pollard points out, a major problem is to find out why a number of industrial districts of the early 19th century became the leaders of the Industrial Revolution. I would myself emphasize first their long industrial tradition, going back to the 18th century and even earlier, the importance of the proto-industrialization they had undergone. None of those districts was "new", industrially speaking, and moreover, later on in the century, there were very few "new" industrial districts which emerged to become really important. (Like the steel industry of Lorraine, they were generally resources-based.) This industrial tradition gave to those areas a supply of entrepreneurs and of local capital, and a reservoir of cheap and/or skilled labour, and they had also generally access to foreign and especially overseas markets, where demand was growing faster than on home markets, and where competition was an incentive to modernization. However, an industrial tradition is not enough: there were many old and well-established centers of manufactures which declined during the 19th century and eventually disappeared. In many cases, the survival and growth of industrial districts seem to have been dependent on the availability of coal — though there were some important exceptions sudh as Alsace and North-Eastem Switzerland (but they were well endowed with water-power). Anyway, the later economic destiny of the various European countries was largely a function of the number and size of the pôles de croissance (growth areas) which they possessed, of the large, diversified industrial districts which developed upon their territories.3 One can also point out to the similarities in the industrialization process and mechanism in many continental areas, with the prevalence of what Maurice Lévy-Leboyer has called a "backward" or "upstream" industrialization, which started with the development of labour-intensive industries making quality consumption goods and later moved upstream to the basic industries making semi-finished articles (such as mechanized spinning or the primary iron industries), while in England the process had been in the opposite direction.4 Eventually, the industrialization process gave birth to a number of "types" of industrial districts, each one characterized by its own leading sector and by a particular industrial structure, which can be observed in different countries. For instance, the "textile" type, with ancillary coal, iron, engineering and chemical industries, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as in the Lille area or in

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Saxony; the heavy industries "type", where coal, iron and steel, engineering and the various metal trades are dominant, like in the Ruhrgebiet, Upper Silesia, the Liège or the Valenciennes districts. And also the most interesting example of an industrial nebula straddling several national frontiers, in Alsace, North-eastern Switzerland, Baden, the Northern French Alps and later Lombardy: industrialization started there with fine textiles (cottons and silks) and later diversified into engineering and chemicals, and still later — in the late 19th and early 20th century — there was a swift development, in the Alps, of hydro-electricity and its allied branches in metals and chemicals.5 It seems therefore that an approach to the study of industrialization which would be at the same time regional and pan-European could be most fruitful (an exellent, but unfortunately isolated, attempt has been E. A. Wrigley's book on the "Austrasian" coal-field of Western Germany, Belgium and Northern France).6 However, I wonder if Pollard has not overestimated the change which took place after 1870 and the "destruction" of the natural economic unity of Europe. Indeed, he observes that much economic life still proceeded on a continental basis. Though the major industrial countries — Britain, Germany, France — had a nearly full panoply of industries, there was still a good deal of interdependence, and a detailed study of inner-European trade, especially in manufactured goods, would most likely show that it was not only a matter of German dyes tuffs, French silks, Swiss watches, etc., and that there was a lot of trade in semi-finished articles.7 Finally, unlike Max Hartwell, I would emphasize the similarities and parallelisms between the economic development of European countries, rather than their differences — similarities which are especially striking if we compare Europe to the rest of the world. And I am rather surprised by the importance which several speakers have attributed in this respect to the differences in governments' economic policies; in my view, governments are almost irrelevant to the study of 19th century economic history. On the other hand, I am quite prepared to accept that Britain was unique by being first,8 that she deserves a niche of her own in a study of European economic history, and that her uniqueness is a justification for some rather insular comments which we heard today.

ι On some factors of this location, see François Crouzet, Kriege, Kontinentalsperre und wirtschaftliche Veränderungen in Europa 1792 bis 1815, in: Heinz-Otto Sieburg (Hrsg.), Napoleon und Europa ( = Neue Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Geschichte, Bd. 44), Köln-Berlin 1971, pp. 247—249.

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2 See Finnin Lentacker, La frontière franco-belge. Etude géographique des effets d'une frontière internationale sur la vie de relations, Lille 1973. 3 Pierre Léon, François Crouzet, Richard Gascon (Hrsg.), L'industrialisation en Europe au XIXe siècle. Cartographie et typologie. Lyon, 7—10 octobre 1970 (Colloques internationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Sciences humaines 540), Paris 1972, pp. 600—603, and various papers in this symposium. 4 Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes et l'industrialisation internationale dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Paris. Série "Recherches", 1.16), Paris 1964, pp. 49, 65 s., 95, 169—171, 288—352, 410; also François Crouzet, Western Europe and Great Britain: 'Catching Up' in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, in A. J. Youngson (ed.), Economic Development in the Long Run, London 1972, pp. 121—124. 5 O n the last point see the papers by Paul Guichonnet, Vers de nouvelles formes d'industrialisation: Le type alpin, l'expérience italienne, and Henri Morsel, Les industries électrotechniques dans les Alpes françaises du Nord de 1869 à 1921, in: L'industrialisation en Europe au XIXe siècle ..., pp. 547—555 and pp. 557—587. 6 Edward A. Wrigley, Industrial Growth and Population Change. A Regional Study of the Coalfield Areas of North-West Europe in the Later Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 1961. 7 Ingvar Svennilson, United Nations. Economic Commission for Europe, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy (United Nations Publication), Geneva 1954, pp. 16 s. 8 Peter Mathias, British Industrialization: Unique or not?, in: L'industrialisation en Europe au XIXe siècle ..., pp. 497—510.

WOLFGANG KÖLLMANN

/ Bochum

Die These, die Professor Pollard aufstellt, den Prozeß der Industrialisierung Europas als Prozeß der Entwicklung einer integrierten europäischen Wirtschaft zu betrachten, ist auf den ersten Blick natürlich bestechend. Aber zurückkommend auf die von Herrn Treue gestellte Frage — was geht dabei verloren? — und anknüpfend an Ausführungen von Frau Teidiowa würde ich doch eine gewisse „Vereinheitlichung" des Industrialisierungsprozesses erst für ein späteres Stadium akzeptieren können. So zeichnet sich gerade in Westdeutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts nur ein sehr zögernder Beginn des Industrialisierungsprozesses bei weitgehender wirtschaftlicher Stagnation ab. Solche Stagnation kennzeichnet die Lage gerade der älteren Gewerbezweige, die sowohl im bergisch-märkischen Kleineisengebiet und im bergisch-märkischen Textilgebiet als auch im niederrheinischen Textilgebiet stagnieren, während die westfälische Leinenproduktion im Münsterland und in Ostwest-

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falen eine Phase ausgesprochenen Rückgangs erlebt. Selbstverständlich ist der englische Einfluß vor allem auf technische Entwicklungen nicht zu leugnen, wichtiger erscheint mir aber für die wirtschaftliche Gesamtentwicklung die Abschnürung von älteren Auslandsmärkten zu sein. Sie wurde durch die Wirtschaftspolitik Napoleons mit Konkurrenz ausschließenden Präferenzmaßnahmen für französische Produkte in den beherrschten Teilen Europas (vor allem auf dem italienischen Markt), die Kontinentalsperre und nach 1815 durch den Protektionismus, der, von England ausgehend, fast ganz Europa erfaßte, bewirkt. Gerade dieser Protektionismus begründete für die genannten Gebiete weitgehend eine Verzögerung industrieller Entwicklung, weil die entsprechenden Absatzmärkte verschlossen blieben. Hier zeigte sich die besondere Bedeutung der politischen Grenzen nach 1815. Es ist auch beachtlich, daß in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts kaum internationales Kapital nach Westdeutschland einfloß, während andererseits westdeutsches Kapital im Ausland angelegt wurde. Ein Beispiel dafür ist die Gründung einer Baumwollspinnerei in Manchester durch Friedrich Engels d. Ä. Daneben gibt es geradezu verzweifelte Versuche zur Rückgewinnung oder Neugewinnung von Auslandsmärkten, wie etwa die kurze Geschichte der Rheinisch-Westindischen Kompanie in Elberfeld zeigt. Die Dinge änderten sich erst nach 1850. Maßgeblich dafür war m. E. der Übergang Großbritanniens zum Freihandel, durch den erst die Chance der Konkurrenz auf gewissen internationalen Märkten eingeräumt wurde. Verbunden damit war die erhöhte Bedeutung der deutschen Agrarexporte in ihrer Rückwirkung auf den preußisch-deutschen Binnenmarkt. In dem Maße der Entwicklung internationaler Verflechtung strömte dann auch internationales Kapital nach Westdeutschland, wobei vor allem die Entwicklung des neuen Industriegebiets, des Ruhrgebiets, beeinflußt wurde, wie Herr Fischer gezeigt hat. Aber auch in diesem Prozeß spielte englisches Kapital kaum eine Rolle, wohl aber französisches, belgisches und niederländisches. Erst im Zusammenhang mit dieser neuen Integration in die Weltwirtschaft setzte eine allmähliche Vereinheitlichung auch des Industrialisierungsprozesses ein. Auch unter diesem Gesichtspunkte ist die Frage zu stellen: was geht verloren, wenn man einen einheitlichen Industrialisierungsprozeß für ganz Europa oder zumindest für ganz Mittel- und Westeuropa konstruieren will? Gewiß ist die Abhängigkeit von der englischen Technik und die Start- und Lehrmeisterfunktion englischer Fachkräfte nicht zu übersehen, aber das sind spezielle Erscheinungen in regionalen Entwicklungsprozessen. Wären diese Prozesse einheitlich gewesen, dann ergäben sich zu-

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mindest für Deutschland die Fragen: Warum zeichnen sich differenzierte Entwicklungen in Sachsen und im bergisch-märkischen Raum ab, obwohl Traditionen und Bedingungen hier wie dort in gleichem Maße gegeben waren? Warum erfolgte der frühe Ausbau von Bergbau und Schwerindustrie in Oberschlesien und nicht im Ruhrgebiet? Warum wählte die neu entstehende Maschinenbauindustrie Standorte jenseits der älteren Gewerbegebiete, so daß also deren Kernfunktionen nur mehr zum Teil geblieben sind? Man könnte diesen Fragenkatalog wesentlich erweitern. Wichtig aber erscheint mir, daß solche Differenzierungen verwischt würden, wenn man vor 1850 eine Einheit des Industrialisierungsprozesses postulierte, wie sie im Zusammenhang mit wachsender internationaler wirtschaftlicher Integration nach 1850 mehr und mehr gegeben erscheint.

JÜRGEN KOCKA

/ Bielefeld *

I have one uncertainty about Professor Pollard's thesis which in general I find most useful and stimulating. For the sake of my argument I would like to distinguish between two different though related interests one may pursue when studying problems of industrialization: First, one may study industrialization as a process of economic growth and of economic change; secondly, industrialization can be seen as a process of change in a broader sense with stress on its social implications, conditions and consequences. If I understood this morning's discussion correctly, most arguments critical of Professor Polland's thesis referred to industrialization as a process of economic growth. From this point of view the role of the state was discussed and identified as a sort of limit to Prof. Pollard's thesis. My question refers to the role Prof. Pollard's approach would perform for researchers more interested in industrialization as a process of socioeconomic and social change. One may think of certain consequences of industrialization, of social protest, changes in class relations, development of a salaried "middle class", changes in the family structure, interest organization etc. These changes are not absolutely determined by the economic transformations underlying them; in spite of very similar changes in the economic sphere, they nevertheless are different from country * Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Contribution to the Discussion of Professor Pollard's Thesis.

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to country, from region to region, though they are of course heavily influenced by economic changes. Now, certain social, cultural and political traditions of national scope and character seem to be very important in determining what social consequences follow from or accompany certain economic changes. This is due to the fact that the actions, behaviour and experiences of the people are mediated by a common national language, by educational backgrounds strongly influenced by state action, and by certain other nationally differing traditions. For example, consider the impact of the Prussian or German education on the development of the Prussian (German) entrepreneurial class, and on the habits of the work force. Or consider certain bureaucratic traditions which did not exist in many other countries (like England), but which existed in most German regions since the 17th and 18th centuries and deeply influenced the selfperception, the social claims and ideologies, the situation and the collective actions of the growing "new middle class" (white collar employees) within the German society. With regard to these and similar social aspects of industrialization I would like to ask Prof. Pollard to what extent he thinks that his supranational approach would be as adequate as it seems to be for more strictly economic changes. One might argue that if one studies industrialization as a process of changing or maintaining certain class structures (or in other social historical terms), one should concentrate on national units much more than on regional or supranational ones, because of the fact that at least on the continent with its absolutist tradition class structures and other social relations were deeply penetrated and influenced by central government (bureaucratic) traditions and processes.

H A N S POHL

/ Bonn

In einer Hinsicht müßte Professor Pollard seine These zumindest erweitern, sonst bleibt sie etwas unsicher im Raum stehen. Ich würde auch meinen, daß die Industrialisierung zwar eine europäische Erscheinung ist, daß aber eine Einheitlichkeit {single process, single economy), wie er sie zwischen den einzelnen Volkswirtschaften sehen möchte, nicht bestanden hat. Vielmehr ist die Industrialisierung eine Erscheinung, die sich in vielen Stufen vollzog. Wir haben es doch eher mit einer Stufenfolge zu tun, die außerdem noch chronologisch zu differenzieren wäre und, abgesehen von der regionalen Differenzierung, natürlich auch innerhalb der Gewerbe-

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zweige sehr unterschiedlich verlaufen ist. Herr Köllmann hat das teilweise schon erwähnt und ich meine, dieses kommt bei der Pollard'schen These nicht heraus. Deshalb muß zum methodischen Vorgehen gesagt werden: Diese These muß viel stärker differenziert werden, wenn sie angewandt werden soll. — Ein weiteres Problem kommt hinzu. Durch eine solche These erhalten wir zwar interessante Anregungen für die nationale wirtschaftshistorische Forschung über die Industrialisierung, aber eigentlich fehlt noch das Material, auf das die These aufbauen kann, denn für den deutschen Bereich ist ja beispielsweise der Kapitalsektor so gut wie nicht erforscht. Wir können bisher nur andeutungsweise auf Grund des Aufsatzes von Borchardt etwas darüber aussagen, aber grundlegend ist dieser Aspekt noch nicht untersucht. Das heißt also, wenn die These wirklich abgestützt werden soll, denn das müßte ja materialmäßig geschehen, dann müßte wohl oder übel zunächst auf regionale bzw. nationale Forschungen zurückgegriffen werden, die aber fehlen für den deutschen Bereich — von Ausnahmen wie die Stadt Berlin abgesehen — noch größtenteils. So stehen wir für wichtige Regionen Deutschlands, die in der Industrialisierung eine entscheidende Rolle gespielt haben, eigentlich noch auf dem Forschungsstand vor mehreren Jahrzehnten. — Schließlich noch einige Sätze zu Punkt 6 der Ausführungen von Professor Pollard, in dem gesagt wird, daß die übrige Welt der europäischen als ein offener Markt gegenübergestanden habe. Ich glaube nicht, daß man das behaupten kann. Die übrige Welt, also die nicht-europäische, war sehr differenziert. Sie hatte sehr unterschiedliche Stufen der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung erreicht. Wir wissen, daß dieser Markt auch kein offener Markt war. Vielmehr war er sehr unterschiedlich gestaltet. Das hing von vielen Faktoren ab, etwa ob die überseeischen Völker Kolonialstaaten waren, welche Zugänge zu ihnen bestanden, ob und welche Verträge bestanden etc. Ich würde sagen, in dieser Hinsicht waren die Briten in einer großartigen Position, die Deutschen aber eben nicht, weil sie eine Kolonialpolitik in diesem Sinne zumindest bis zu der Phase, die Professor Pollard als Endpunkt nimmt, nicht betrieben haben. Allerdings glaube ich auch, daß Professor Pollards chronologischer Schnitt überhaupt kein Endpunkt gewesen ist, denn sowohl gesamtwirtschaftlich als auch hinsichtlich der Industrialisierung stellt das Jahr 1870, jetzt gesamteuropäisch gesehen, keinerlei Einschnitt dar, allenfalls der erste Weltkrieg.

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THOMAS N I P P E R D E Y

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/ München

Let me make only one very short remark. I think it is generally quite right to concentrate on the cultural tradition and the patterns of behavior in analysing the process of industrialization and social change. I think, however, it is not always the nation-state-tradition that predominantly determines the patterns of behaviour, but even more the regional tradition. And this tradition is in fact at least in the late 18th and early 19th century a religious tradition. If you consider, for example, the process of industrialization in the Rhineland: the differences between protestants and catholics and the correlation between Protestantism and Industrialism are much more important than a certain so-called national tradition. And we can find similar cases in various other parts of Europe.

WOLFRAM FISCHER

/ Berlin

I don't think I should try to sum up the discussion, I hope we all and foremost Professor Pollard have learned something from it. What I have learned is that one doesn't gain very mudi by fighting over an issue like: Was the European economy part of the Atlantic economy or a continental entity? One can look at the European economy from many points of view: from a European one or from a world point of view or from a national or regional one. It is, however, important to consider the methodological consequences of sudi a change in perspective. Bill Parker made a very important remark in this respect, namely that the whole instrument one uses on a national basis cannot be applied as easily when one thinks in regional, terms or tries to come to grips with regions which are not political units. There arise difficulties which can block such an approach.

SCHLUSSWORT

zur Diskussion * von SIDNEY POLLARD Sheffield

I wanted to take the discussion forward. Brinley Thomas is perfectly right, underlying this is the view that capitalism is one single movement, the world was captured by industrial capitalism only once and it can never happen again. I think one has to see it as a single process. Secondly, my paper was deliberately focussed on Europe to keep it short. Clearly, in a wider context you cannot look at Europe alone: the whole process makes no sense unless you also consider the markets, the raw materials, migration, the colonial wars, etc. On the other issue, I really agree with Alan Milward that the Zollverein was politically imposed and had political motivations all the time, but I would say that the political element is basically a negative element. The Zollverein and the unification of Germany, of Italy, were important because they removed obstacles, and the most that the political element ever did, was of this order. It never did anything positive. This brings me back to something that Max Hartwell said: he thought that European unification was more evident after 1870 than before. I think if you look at the continent about the middle of the century, between 1815—1870, the freedom of capital was remarkable. Capital really used Europe as an international market, whether it was French capital, British or any other. Ideas, technology, including the engineers and the skilled workers moved across Europe very freely. And what is more important, the areas that were in one way or another complementary were pretty free to benefit each other. It is after 1870 that the frontiers, the tariffs are imposed, the coal is separated from the * Die folgenden Ausführungen stellen eine Aneinanderreihung verschiedener Stellungnahmen des Hauptreferenten in der Diskussion und eine Zusammenfassung mit seinen eigentlichen Sdilußbemerkungen zu den einzelnen Diskussionsbeiträgen der Teilnehmer dar.

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iron and increasingly so. From then on governments increasingly encourage industries, because the alternative is to import strategic necessities from another country. In that sense I thought that Europe was much more open earlier, at least that part of Europe that was developing, for part of it really stayed out of all this. After about 1870, when the tariff barriers go up, nationalist policies deliberately interfere with expansion. One more point I would like to refer to is the point Max started with. If you look at any group of countries, the statistics prove that their GNP is at different levels, but I wonder if he hasn't ever felt uneasy about this and how artificial and noneconomic the frontier is. You have the GNP of England but the GNP of Surrey is at least 50 % higher than that of Yorkshire. So it is with all these countries in Europe and Germany above all. Frontiers changed very quickly. What is the state of advance of Prussia or of Germany? It depends on what you call Germany. The frontiers are entirely artificial, economically speaking. And even the notion of foreign trade is artificial. Foreign trade depends on where the frontier is. These notions of national units are supported by the way statistics are collected. *

Many times the difference is much greater within the country. In a sense Germany never was one economy. Germany was always two economies and the Elbe runs roughly between them. And it is only because there is a political Germany, that we have imposed on us, if we study economic development, a misleading set of data. I can't answer what is a frontier because you can't get clarity, because economic development isn't clear. Even if we settle on a small region, and say the Ruhr is a unit, or Lancashire is a unit, we cannot define it, because where does the Ruhr district end? You cannot define it, because real life is not clearcut. But I think it makes more sense to say the GNP of the Ruhr is so much than to say the GNP of Germany is so much. An area like Germany in the 19th century combined all sorts of differences, and many of the statements on structure depend on when the frontiers happen to be. *

With regard to the American link, I thought one would take it for granted that there is a similarity, and a relationship between Britain and the U.S.A. which actually is not entirely dissimilar from that with Europe.

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As for the concentration of advanced areas near the frontiers, I did not really mean to suggest that this as such is important, merely that it seems to show that the nation state is not important, as important as is often assumed. There were the French and the Russians with their tremendous protective apparatus, there were the civil services up and down Europe, doing all sorts of things, and yet, after all that, areas resembled much more their comparable areas across the frontier than they resembled their own neighboring areas within the frontier affected by the same busy legislation. I merely stressed this border location since it seems to prove rather nicely that the notion that the state developed the industrial revolution is not very useful. On the question of nucleus and surrounding area: whether it is the undeveloped area nearby or it is an undeveloped area fifty miles further on the other side of the frontier, in each case it helps a great deal to have a less developed area or, which is sometimes even more profitable an area with an esetablished industry which is backward and can therefore be killed off. There is here another element, the question of comparative factor cost. There is a tendency, at least in the longish term, for wages to bear some relation to each other within an area. Now if an area develops, sooner or later its wages go up and therefore it is at a disadvantage compared with an underdeveloped low-wage area using the same technology in a given industry. You therefore have comparative advantages of the advanced area where it uses a technology which the rest haven't got, and comparative disadvantages where the technology is similar. This is true as between countries, but one also sees this regionally and I think it explains a great deal. Finally, the most interesting dialectic which I think is well worth exploring much further, is the dialectic between the political and the economic revolution. There is clearly an alternation, but as it returns to one or the other, it does not return to the same level: each time it comes back it looks quite different. Thus we see phases of heavy economic involvement by the State, followed by the opposite, and returning after a while to dirigisme, but each phase of political power is very different from the last one. I think that the era of European integration ended around 1870—1900 because political units became strong and as always in sociology, people do team up in groups and the national group at that time was a very useful one and so groups of entrepreneurs, industrialists and even trade unionists after 1870 begin to team up on a national basis. It need not have happened that way, perhaps, but as the national unit became all-powerful, the war of 1914 became inevitable and lasted to 1945: in the years in between when you actually do not have fighting you have economic warfare. Phases of politi-

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cal supremacy seem to be associated with wars, which is not entirely surprising, but each time they recur they show new features. *

Perhaps I should make clear that I am not opposed to dealing with industrialization on a national basis. I have always done so, presumably I shall continue to do so. My point is merely, you can also gain by looking at it as one continued process. Equally I should have thought if I proposed anything at all it was to look at this from a point of view of regions, to say that the region is just as important and perhaps more important than the nation, because the nation state is very often artificial and it changes and Germany changes more than any other state. Consequently I am very happy to support the various views on the importance of regions. Prof Treue has done a lot of work on this and I can't see that this inconveniences me; on the contrary, this is precisely right, and equally Prof. Köllmann's comparison of the Rhineland area and the eastern areas, is an example of exactly the sort of thing I'd like to encourage. Now I cannot be sure, but isn't it possible that the reason why the Rhineland suffered and the reason why it appears for a little while anyway that the eastern regions did not suffer so mudi, is precisely because the Rhinelanders had Great Britain breathing down their necks, while the east had the relatively open less developed areas surrounding it? This is a possible way of looking at it. Two other points have been made which perhaps I should beai with. One is the question of retrogression or of decline, particularly the example of Hungary. The point here, really almost irrespective of any new theories, is that we should not forget that industrialization has its victims, not merely the first generation of proletarians, who are one set of victims, but also established industries killed off. Again, and I hope I made this point clear, one of the other factors that affects economic regions is the action of their government. Governments do influence things, but the more I consider their role (including what I heard in our debate here today), the more I feel that the only way governments influence things is in a negative way. How often do we hear of government action in fact producing retrogression or producing at any rate no benefit? The benefit occurs when the government gets out of the way. Finally I must try and answer Dr. Kocka's direct question. I think you are right, I think the general social and cultural context has to be national, including the influence of language, education, etc. However, curiously enough, over much of this period this national context is not a political

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boundary context, Germany being the best example of this. Whatever the ultimate value of the national context, in contemporary economic matters it had little consequence. Presumably the Saxons were Germans, presumably the Austrians were Germans and presumably the Prussians were Germans and yet their history is very different. But in cultural context the nation state is rather more important. One more point, Dr. Lundgreen's paper: here you see the advantage of being prejudiced. If you are prejudiced about this as I am you see in fact his point as very much a support of the sort of thing I was saying, in at least two ways. First of all, my paper itself suggests reasons why the educational attitude is different in Britain from the continent: precisely because Britain is ahead, British instructors don't have to organize knowledge, their pupils simply watch what goes on. But secondly — and bearing in mind that in this sort of approach, education is made to bear a very heavy load, if we are trying to explain differences in Prussian history and French history by the dates of starting the technical schools — it may well be true that France led the field with national or official kinds of education and was lagging in private enterprise education, but the interesting point is how many of the state-educated French engineers went abroad and developed railways in Austria, Spain and elsewhere. This is a good example which one could match many times over, of the way in which the Government intends one thing but what really happens is quite another. All this effort by the French to develop high-powered technical education seemed to benefit their competitors at least as much as themselves. This evidence does really support my argument about the role of the state in industrialization.

ERSTER T A G 2. Hälfte

Thema

The Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution

Diskussionsleitung WOLFRAM

FISCHER

REFERAT von D A V I D S . LANDES *

Harvard

Looking around, I can see that we have with us a number of people who have published valuable contributions to the debate concerning the effect of industrialization on the standard of living. Messrs. Hobsbawm, Hartwell, and Pollard have all weighed in on this, to say nothing of Mr. Engelsing, whose work on budgets and consumption in Bremen and the other Hanseatic cities is helpful for assessing the German side of the story. And there are probably others whom I have overlooked. I am clearly talking to an audience that has a great deal of expertise on this subject, and I can't help but be reminded of the time I came to address a similar group on the so-called New Economic History and found Bob Fogel unexpectedly sitting in the audience. In the presence of the experts, the best I can do, I think, is to sharpen the discussion, create the proper atmosphere of debate, then step aside and let the missiles fly. What I want to do is offer a series of propositions about what I think we know and don't know on this subject as of now. The first of these propositions lie in the realm of Wissenschaftssoziologie. They deal specifically with the reasons why people continue to be interested in this subject. Proposition 1: This issue of industrialization and the standard of living chestnut, yet very much alive. I think the proof of this is that have been ready to come here and listen to a discussion of it pate in such a discussion. Any examination of the bibliography

is an old all of you or particiwill show

* Der Referent hat seinem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: The Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution Reconsidered. Anmerkungen siehe am Schluß des vorliegenden Beitrages.

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that work is continuing to come out on this subject; there was even a broadcast by the BBC recently on this issue. Proposition 2: The continued discussion is fruitful. I don't think there can be any doubt about this. It continues to stimulate research and produce valuable results. I would go farther: everything we now know makes it clear that there is still a great deal to be done. W e need many more local studies, regional studies, case studies. W e have to get away from national units on the one hand and look at smaller units; on the other hand, one of the best things we might do is begin considering this as a transnational phenomenon. W e need all kinds of raw data — I'll come back to this later — such things as information on the cycle of earnings of individuals in the course of a lifetime of work; or of a family; or evidence of the effect of occupational shifts. Proposition 3: However plausible and cogent these intellectual reasons are, they are not why people continue to engage in this debate. The main interest is fundamentally political. On the one hand are those whose sympathies lie with the Left and want to damn capitalism; on the other, those whose sympathies lie on the Right and want to praise it. Proposition 4: As a result, this argument will never die, even if we were to exhaust all the empirical data, since the debate is essentially immune to facts. With these wissenschaftssoziologischen propositions behind us, I'd like to offer a number of propositions about a strategy of attack. Proposition

5:

This is a problem that has to be considered on a number of levels. ( I have already said this, in fact, under Proposition 2 above.) Proposition 6: The time period covered will necessarily vary with the level of analysis and the focus of inquiry. For example, insofar as we want to study

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different countries or localities and are trying to segregate the effects of industrialization, we presumably have to look at each of these areas during the appropriate period. Thus for Great Britain, we would want to concentrate on the years 1770—1850, conceivably bringing the story down to 1870. For France, Belgium, and Germany, we obviously would have to start later; and so on appropriately for any unit of study. Proposition 7: We are not interested in the simple but potent question whether or not there was poverty or exploitation during these years. I recall in this connection a remark made by Professor Hobsbawm. (I can't quite recall the source at the moment, possibly one of his reviews.) He remarked that one would have to be a fool to ignore or try to deny the extensive misery that characterized Britain during the decades of industrialization. Quite right. Now the last thing I want to be, or any of us for that matter, is a fool. The poverty of large numbers of Britons during these years is so obvious that no one can deny it. It leaps to the eye. Indeed, it would be impossible to deny the persistence of misery and exploitation even in the richest economies of the contemporary world. The point is, though, that is not the issue. The issue that is the focus of this debate is the effect of these industrial changes — what we know as the Industrial Revolution — on the condition of the population; and as much as possible, it's our task to segregate the influence of that Industrial Revolution from other determinants of that condition. Proposition 8: The effect of industrialization has both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Quantitatively, the question is simply put: what does industrialization do to the quantity of goods and services available to the members of a given society, taken both collectively and severally? (Incidentally, this quantitative statement of the issue actually has a qualitative component, in the sense that the quantity of goods and services should ideally be adjusted to the quality into account. For example, it's not enough to be able to say that people were eating more or less; it would be important to know something about the quality of the food they were eating.) But when I speak here of the qualitative aspect of the problem, I am thinking particularly of the larger issue of what we sometimes call the quality of

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life, which I think transcends material considerations and takes in a whole range of psychic and cultural consequences. Proposition

9:

Proxies are important. Up to now, the bulk of the research effort to assess the consequences of industrialization for the quantity of goods and services available has been directed towards some system of direct measurement, either on the macro or micro level. For example, scholars have tried to measure real earnings over time or actual consumption over time. They have tried to establish wage indices, time series of consumption of key commodities per head, or data on family budgets. There has been much less work on what I would call indirect measurement, using such indicators as death rates, health statistics, data on body size (often derivable from military recruitment records) as evidence of what was happening to the people in a given society. There is the beginning of research along these lines, but this area has been relatively neglected. Proposition

10:

The use of proxies like these as indicators of the effects of industrialization is complicated by the intervention of other factors that are in greater or lesser part independent of industrialization. Whatever death rates tell us for example, they tell us about something more than the mere effects of economic change. They are obviously influenced by the course of disease, war, famine. They also reflect changes in residential patterns and ecology, by urbanization, for example; but urbanization is in itself an enormously complicated phenomenon, with a life of its own. We know that societies that do not industrialize are quite capable of urbanizing, as we see around us in the Third World every day. That was also the way it was in much of western Europe in the nineteenth century. There are forces that push toward urbanization which are not necessarily linked to industrialization. The same is true of population change, insofar as that is an important determinant of the condition of the people. Some of the most rapid population growth in nineteenth-century Europe took place in preindustrial societies. In spite of all these difficulties, proxies, if used prudently and shrewdly, can tell us a great deal about the impact of industrialization proper. I don't have to go into the details of these techniques. Suffice it to say that all of these indirect indicators vary from

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place to place and group to group within a given society; so that it is quite feasible to segregate the impact of given influences. So much for questions of research strategy. I would now like to turn to what the research that has been done so far seems to tell us, starting with the material aspects of the problem. Proposition 11: Measures of national income — such as they are, and they are moderately reliable — seem to indicate that wealth and income in this period grew substantially faster than population. Proposition 12: Obviously the change in the material standard of living is a function of the distribution of this increment, which was accumulated over time. Proposition 13: The nature of this distribution is an issue that is impossible to decide a priori. I am thinking here, for example, of Professor Pollard's article, in which he tried to analyze the implications of a high rate of saving and investment for the standard of living: his argument was that, given the need for a high rate of saving and investment, it was almost surely necessary for the mass of the population to pull in its belts, eat less, consume less. The inference was that the standard of living may well have fallen, indeed probably did fall. Yet I don't have to tell you that such an argument is a theoretical construct; and it is not hard to show theoretically that given a sufficiently high rate of increase of productivity, you can generate both the capital required to produce this increase in product and at the same time sustain or increase the level of consumption. The theoretical argument, in other words, can go either way, and insofar as we have some facts on this subject, everything we know about industrialization in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would suggest a higher probability for the second version, that is, productivity gains substantially outstripping capital requirements. In these early days of industrialization, we know that the cost of equipment was as yet remarkably low by comparison with what it would be later on; hence the results of Phyllis Deane, who tells us that there was really very little increase in the rate of saving in Britain until we get to the railway

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era in the 1840's. (On the other hand, the Pollard argument might be applicable to rapid industrialization in follower countries by the late nineteenth century. One thinks, for example, of the Russian case, where the state deliberately imposed severe restraints on consumption, to the point of killing millions of peasants, in order to pay for a forced pace of mechanization and industrialization.) Proposition

14:

Since the theoretical argument can go either way, we are thrown back on empirical evidence, particularly the statistical calculations that have been the focus of most research. Proposition

15:

The results of these efforts leave much to be desired. Take wage indices for instance. Anyone familiar with the debate knows that these, as currently available, are not standardized for employment over time; are not representative; with few exceptions, have been deflated by price indices that are unsatisfactory to begin with and are not congruent with the group of workers whose wages are being converted from nominal to real values; above all, do not take into account the reality of the earning situation over time. I think this last is an especially important point. Professor Hobsbawm has pointed out that the factor of unemployment during cyclical business crises seriously modifies the significance of data on earning per hour or per day. But that is only part of the story. Beyond that is the lifetime employment and wage pattern of a person who enters into industry very young, sometimes as a child, learns techniques and goes on to better-paying work as an adult, and then sees his earning power shrink as he grows old. There is in other words a life cycle of earnings, which existed before modern industry and the factory system but was surely modified by them, and this has to be taken into account in assessing the impact of the Industrial Revolution. By the same token, there is a family cycle of earnings. When the children are very small, they are an expense; when they are first employed, the family may break even on their care; and as they grow older, they become a source of net income. Their role is partly a function of new employment opportunities in mechanized industry; and later on, of legislation stipulating the conditions of child employment. Social factors also play a role. How long can an industrial family, living in crowded housing in an often demoralizing urban

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environment, keep wage-earning children at home? All of these are things that, it seems to me, are not taken care of by the usual wage indices, which are at their best simply a measure of what is being paid for a given type of job over a period of time. Proposition 16: The consequence of these inadequacies, plus others not mentioned here, is that it is indispensable not only to consider these individual and family patterns, but also to trace shifts of occupations. It is a fact that industrialization necessarily entails substantial movement of workers from rural to urban employment, from agricultural to industrial activity. The effect was to move large numbers of people from areas of low income to others of substantially higher wage and income levels. The pattern is the same today as it was then; one has only to consider the significant contribution of Gastarbeiter and similar worker immigrants in the advanced industrial countries of western Europe today. The process, then as now, was for the immigrants to move in and take the poorest, most difficult, most distasteful jobs, while the older hands moved up to better things. The creation of a labor aristocracy and a new white-collar working force, even the proliferation and prosperity of the middle classes — all of this was done on the backs, as it were, of a burgeoning, largely immigrant lower layer coming either from the countryside at home or from an overpopulated countryside abroad. Professor Crouzet has mentioned the way the industry of northern France depended largely on the availability of a labor reservoir in rural Flanders. One could make the same remark of the Alsatian textile industry, which drew heavily on the peasantry of Baden and Switzerland. (It's hard to remember that in those days Swiss wage levels were far below those of France.) The British of course drew heavily on Ireland. And so on. So any effort to measure what was happening to earning and the standard of living has got to take this process into account and try to see on the macro level what was happening as a result of movements through space and the job hierarchy. To do this, we have to take into account the whole of the labor market, and here I join Professor Pollard in saying that you can't look at this simply as a national issue. It is unfortunate that most of the discussions of the British situation have tended to overlook the fact that the labor market at that time included Ireland. This is a serious distortion. Any effort to confine this kind of analysis to political boundaries is bound to give misleading results.

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17:

Such empirical data as we have clearly indicate that the effect of these movements was to increase real earnings per head for the people concerned. The migrants who went from the country to the city did so for a variety of reasons, but one of them, certainly, was that they could earn more in the city. Proposition

18:

Not only did they earn more in the city, but the areas they left behind were better off for their departure and enjoyed higher wages and a better standard of living than those areas that could not find an outlet in industrial employment. Here I would cite Caird's famous line across Britain. Caird noted around the middle of the nineteenth century substantially higher earnings for farm labor north of the line running from Bristol in the West to the Wash in the East. That was no accident. It's not that the land was somehow more fertile north of the line or more suitable to more profitable crops. The explanation for the disparity is simply that it was from the areas north of the line that industrial centers drew the bulk of their factory labor. The result was competition for labor in the countryside, which was necessarily reflected in higher wages. In further support of this argument, one author has suggested that these higher earnings made possible in turn a substantially higher standard of living, which was then reflected in higher productivity. That is, because people could afford to eat better, they were capable of working harder, producing more, and hence earning more. This same process holds good for Third World countries today: those that are able to find outlets for emigration are clearly in much better shape than those that are not. Proposition

19:

The benefits that accrue in this way to poor areas have to be weighed (deflated) by the damage inflicted on them by a competitive, technologically superior, intrusive industrial world. What I am saying is that the plight of these areas was and is not independent of the industrializing process. They are at once losers by being bypassed by industrialization and victims of industrialization. I am thinking here, for example, of the British treatment of Ireland as a colonial area, of the obstacles that Britain placed in the way of Irish industrial development. I am not pre-

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73

pared to say that Ireland would have developed successfully as an industrial nation if Britain had accorded it more freedom of action; but certainly Britain made it impossible for Ireland to institute the kinds of policies that might have fostered industry at home, thereby imprisoning Ireland in its role as a generator of labor for Britain's cities. (The problem with this kind of contrafactual speculation about what might have been is that there is nothing in freedom of action per se that ensures that one will take the right action. I'm thinking here of the record of reactionary political decision to protect activities bypassed by technical change and thereby freeze a population in the past while time passed it by. One of the best examples is Belgian policy concerning the linen industry of Flanders in the 1820's and 30's, which led inevitably to the disastrous famine and collapse of 1841.) When all is said and done, however, the most important single factor in shaping the fate of rural populations was not policy, but demography. A country like Ireland was suffering from what I'd call a galloping inflation of population, independent of industrial development, and even a large and growing emigration was not enough to save the day. In view of the unsatisfactory character of wage indices, consumption might seem to offer a more accurate clue to what was actually going on. Here too, unfortunately, the empirical data leave much to be desired. This is especially true for Britain, where we do not have accurate statistics of the production and hence consumption of key foods. (On this point, I refer you to the Hobsbawm-Hartwell debate, with its dispute over the amount of meat being slaughtered for market in London or the supply of fish coming into the city as a supplementary source of protein. Once you get into these sometimes unquantifiable details, which are unquestionably relevant, the picture gets very blurred. The growing reliance on "inferior substitutes" such as potatoes further complicates the balance sheet of profit and loss.) Now it may be that more recent research has produced more accurate information in these areas. If so, I'd like to hear about it. I do think that we are, or at least can be, better informed concerning the Continental countries, because there we want to look at a later period (post - 1815), when serious statistics on the production or consumption of agricultural products become available. By comparison with food, clothing is a known quantity. For example, we can get at one important part of clothing consumption, that of cotton fabrics, for the simple reason that this is one industry that must draw all

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its raw material from abroad. Hence we can measure output by using proxy data on net imports, especially if we can make allowance for changing stocks and changing rates of utilization of raw material. The area where we are least well off is housing. Not only don't we have good direct measures of the density of occupation, but the quality of housing varies so greatly that it is extremely difficult to produce a standardized measure of space and comfort. We do, however, have some useful proxies — in particular, data on health and disease. On the basis of such data as we do have, the following propositions seem to me to be defensible: Proposition

20:

Whatever may have been happening to British food consumption during the Industrial Revolution, there is no question that intake per head went up on the Continent during these years. To be sure, average food consumption does not in itself say anything about real nourishment for a given people. There is always the question of the distribution of the increase in food supply. Still, it's hard to argue that a substantial increase in the supply of wheat, rye, and potatoes can possibly have been concentrated in a few mouths of well-to-do consumers. There is a limit to how much bread a man can eat, and everything we know about food habits would indicate that the effect of increasing income in the middle and upper classes was to limit consumption of bread per head. So that if there was a substantial increase in the supply of the basic starchy foods, we must assume that the small man as well as the big man was eating more. Proposition

21:

Clothing consumption per head was going up everywhere. The data on textile output seem to me unequivocal. Again, as with food, it is hard to believe that the increase in the average was accompanied by so marked a shift in distribution as to entail a lower level of consumption among working classes. Although rich people are capable of buying, if not wearing, large quantities of clothing, they would have had to build storehouses instead of closets and armoires to accommodate an increment of this size.

Referat von David S. Landes

Proposition

75

22:

Housing would seem on balance to have degenerated in every industrial center we know of. Wherever we look, population density goes up; the surface covered by slum housing increases; the condition of older housing in city centers deteriorates. The evidence of proxy data seems to confirm this. Statistics of mortality in urban areas in Britain in the period 182050 show a situation that is either getting worse or at best not getting better. The situation was certainly much the same in the worst of the Continental centers, say Lille or Rouen, though the long persistence of rural industry in many parts of the Continent may have eased the transition. (By rural industry, I don't mean dispersed cottage industry, but modern factory industry in rural settings. The long reliance of Continental producers on water power made for country mills and often subsidized factory housing·) In general, one has the feeling that the Continental countries were better off than Britain for starting later, though I am not prepared to be categorical on this point. Here, as in other aspects of the debate, one has to balance advantages and disadvantages. Thus there were penalties for lateness, among others, that of building a large dispersed cottage manufacture that was destined to be destroyed in another generation or two. On the Continent, putting out was not only, as in Britain, a prelude to factory industry; it was, far more than in Britain, a rational response to the opportunities offered by mechanization of certain processes; that is, an adaptation to industrialization. But it was, within one or two generations, an obsolete adaptation and the scene of disasters unimagined even in monstrous centers like Manchester. So much for quantitative aspects. There still remains the question of the quality of life. Here I think we have to distinguish between the quality of work and the quality of the rest — the quality of work, obviously, because people in those days worked well over half their waking hours; so that when you are talking of the quality of life, you are talking largely of the quality of work. Proposition

23:

The quality of work deteriorated as the result of industrialization. Here the effect of population and occupational shifts would seem to have been the opposite of that in respect of wages. Whereas income per head rose as the result of the move from country to city, from agricultural to urban

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employment, the quality of the work performed fell. It's not that factory work was any harder than that performed on the farm or in the cottage. If anything, the intensity of work could be greater in the puttingout system over a given period of time than it could be in any factory arrangement. The big difference was that machine work was usually more repetitive and subject to severe constraints of pace. The factory worker was a prisoner of the clock. He had to come at a certain time, work alongside and often in collaboration with other workers at a speed dictated at least in part by the machines, and stay on the job until quitting time for all. Time was of the essence, and it is no coincidence that heavy fines were levied on workers who came late to the job or allowed themselves to be distracted while on the job. (I remember in this regard seeing an Ufa cartoon purporting to give a history of mankind: the cartoon gave as its symbol of the new industrial era, not a smoking chimney, a steam engine, or similar symbol, but a clock. I have always thought that extremely perceptive.)

Proposition

24:

This deterioration in the quality of work varied enormously with locality and with size and character of enterprise. Essentially, the quality of work was better in the more progressive and more prosperous centers of manufacture than in the older, more backward ones. These had to struggle for existence and could hang on only by making use of second-hand machines; their lack of capital made them work their capital and their men as hard as possible and as long as possible; and they did everything they could to cut costs by using marginal labor at the lowest possible salaries. Everything that I have said about localities applies to enterprises as well. Other things equal, the best firms were the richer and younger ones, which enjoyed the advantage of the most up-to-date equipment and could afford to treat their employees better. Proposition

25:

This derives directly from the preceding: precisely because of this superiority of the conditions and quality of work in the more advanced enterprises, the quality of work in a given industry or country tended to improve over time. Hours became shorter; technique improved; the quality of capital went up; buildings were better adapted to equipment,

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instead of being changed over from other machines or other purposes. Conditions of work were planned rather than improvised. In Britain, this improvement was reinforced by the passage over several generations from extensive reliance on unfree labor to exclusive reliance on a free labor force. In the beginning, as is well known, factory work was so disagreeable, by reputation if not in fact, that employers necessarily drew much if not all of their labor force from parish poor houses. These young people, many of them very young children, were not free workers but rather indentured servants, and an unknown proportion of them suffered grievously at the hands of unscrupulous, exploitative employers. Whatever opportunities the system gave to exploitation, however, it was disadvantageous on balance. All the evidence indicates that unfree labor worked poorly and reluctantly, so that employers came very quickly to prefer free workers when available. This preference was reinforced by the growing intervention of state authorities in this domain. It was not easy to persuade the British Parliament that the government had a responsability in this matter; but the argument was successfully made that sudi intervention would not constitute an interference with freedom of contract. How could there be freedom of contract in the forced labor of unfree minors? The course of events on the Continent was somewhat different, though here too there was something of this shift from unfree to free labor. The Continental countries did not have anything approaching the completeness of the British system of parish relief and poorhouses, but there were the hôpitaux and public workhouses, and in the early decades of industrialization these did supply labor to the manufactories that preceded on the Continent the true factory (with central power) of the Industrial Revolution. There, as in Britain, such labor did a mediocre job at best, so that these protofactories proved unviable in a competitive market. They couldn't compete with free cottage industry, much less with mechanized factory industry of the British type. When they went, unfree labor went also.

Proposition

26:

This improvement in the quality of labor over time was counterbalanced to some extent by heightened intensity of work. As equipment improved, it moved faster and compelled closer attention. In the meantime management, as it grew familiar with the new techniques, was more and more

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able to organize the work efficiently, eliminate dead time and waste motion, and tighten quality control. So much for the conditions of work. What was happening in the meantime to the quality of life outside the work place? Proposition

27:

The deterioration that characterizes the shift from nonindustrial or preindustrial to modern industrial work holds also off the job. The primary consideration here is that the new technology took much work out of the home and drew with it into the new units of production women and children as well as adult males. The result inevitably was severe neglect of the home and of the children within the home. The material and spiritual effects were devastating. All one has to do is look at the mortality figures for infants up to one year of age or children up to five in the major industrial centers to realize what was happening. The figures are so ghastly that they are hard to comprehend: in such places as Manchester and Lille, two out of five died before the age of a year, and more than half before the age of five. Proposition

28:

Here too, however, as on the job, conditions tended to improve over time. Shorter hours for women and children, prohibitions on the use of child labor below a certain age, compulsory education — all of these necessarily limited the ravages within the home. Even so, it is striking to note how long it took for those death rates to fall. In the advanced industrial nations, it's really not until the last half or even last third of the century that a combination of social legislation, improved sanitation and hygiene, and somewhat superior medical practice turned the mortality curve down once and for all. The foregoing comments are obviously going to leave many of you puzzled by the whole problem. What is, after all, the balance sheet of all these pros and cons? Can we even draw up a balance sheet? I am inclined to think that on the whole it would be extremely difficult to do so, if only because there are so many important considerations on both sides of the scale, many of them difficult if not impossible to measure. Take, for example, the shift from country to city living. We've talked about the effect of factory employment on the home, but that's obviously only part of the story. The home itself exists in a larger ecological unit —

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a neighborhood — and this in turn in some kind of town or city. Life in this kind of ecological system (or ecosystem, to use the current jargon) was, in the nineteenth century, disagreeable and even hazardous for the poor. The fundamental source of trouble was high density of residence: it was very hard to accommodate the ins and outs, the intake and excretion, of large numbers living in small spaces. It was not that the city dweller was necessarily dirtier than his country cousin. The point was that the country cousin could keep his pig near his cottage, while the city dweller who brought a pig into the courtyard or a tenement made it unlivable and posed a threat to the health of every resident in the building. The problem of putting a thousand poor families into a square kilometer is very different from spreading them over a countryside, and this is the primary reason why health in the city was so poor and why mortality rose in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, before the cities could adapt to this challenge. On the other hand, there was nothing in city life itself that necessarily entailed higher death rates. As one English minister put it around 1840, "the congregation of men is not of necessity unhealthy".1 The task was to devise ways to organize cleanliness and hygiene and provide those amenities for the group as a whole that made possible the health of the individual. This brings me to my next proposition: Proposition 29: The same industrialization that accelerated urbanization and generated mankilling coketowns and chimney jungles provided the technical basis for a new and healthier urban civilization. It was the new industry and technology that provided cheap pipes to bring water or take away sewage, more effective methods of excavation, better transport of a more widely dispersed urban population. On the other hand, the application of these techniques was slow, uneven, costly. The rich were served first; the poor last. Jurisdictional disputes imposed long delays; vested interests also. The human problem remained: how to teach inexperienced and often ignorant newcomers to behave in ways that would not impair the wellbeing of neighbors. Individual rationality and group interest did not always coincide. It's not surprising, then, that the tide was not turned until the second half of the nineteenth century. It was only then, for the first time in human experience probably, that cities, thanks to improved hygiene and superior medical care, actually became healthier places to live than the countryside.

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Proposition 30: In spite of the disagreeable and even dangerous conditions of urban living, the people of the day clearly preferred city to country life. They came in large numbers, and what is more important, continued to come in spite of unpleasant experience, extreme hardship, and periodic business crises. P r o p o s i t i o n 31: The evidence is that they came voluntarily. Mudi has been made of enclosures as a factor in expelling people from the land and driving them to the cities in the Britain of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Subsequent demographic research has made it clear, however, that there was no such emptying of the land. On the contrary, population rose, even in purely agricultural counties, and it was from this increment that the country was able to supply the city with labor. Why did they go? First of all, for material reasons. The pay was better in the city, and the prospects of employment more varied and attractive. However dark the picture of urban housing and employment, the countryside seemed dead and stifling in comparison. There is no way to overestimate this psychic factor. The city was movement, diversity, the place where "the action was." As a result, even when the city was hostile and cruel, the poor were reluctant to leave it. During the worst economic contractions, when well-intentioned or perhaps anxious city fathers did their best to persuade country families to go back home — put them on coaches and trains and paid their fare — they resisted going, primarily because they had nothing to go back to. There is one last issue I want to take up — one easier to raise now than it would have been fifteen years ago. I am speaking here of the counterfactual arguments. These are now popular and respectable; but when they were first used, people were horrified by them. What is the appropriate counterfactual in this controversy? Simply put, it is the proposition a c o n t r a r i o · , what would have happened, had there been no industrialization? The answer I think is clear: Proposition 32: As heavy as the bill for industrialization was, especially for that first generation and for Britain, which was after all the first and least experi-

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81

enced country in such matters, Europe was clearly better-off for having industrialized than it would have been had it not done so. I say this because of one crucial consideration, namely, the fact that the population explosion of the second half of the eigtheenth and of the nineteenth centuries was largely autonomous and would have proceeded regardless of the success or failure of industrialization. Now that's a debatable issue, and some of you may depreciate this autonomy by comparison with my estimate. There is good reason, for example, to believe that the increase in the birth rate over part of this period in many areas was essentially a function of economic change. But on the side of the death rate, which was in the last analysis the more important side of the equation, we are dealing, it seems to me, with a continent-wide phenomenon, occurring in both nonindustrial and industrialized countries. The fall in the death rate was taking place everywhere. Take a country like Ireland or some of the poorest parts of Continental Europe — wherever we look, we find population growing well in advance of industry or even in the absence of industry. It is not hard, therefore, to picture the possibility of a substantial diminution in the standard of living as a consequence of population growth unaccompanied by comparable gains in productivity in agriculture and industry. And in fact, this is clearly what did happen in certain areas. Ireland furnishes the best known example, but there were similar Malthusian catastrophes in places such as Flanders and Silesia. When all is said and done, then, I am an optimist. The returns are perhaps not yet all in, but insofar as we can judge by history and experience, I must conclude that Western man is far better of than his ancestors were as a result of that remarkable but painful achievement that we call the Industrial Revolution. Here I am adopting, as it were, the position of Friedrich Engels. I quote him from an article in which he talks about the revolutionary future of men. He is upset (Engels was often upset), because he has been reading something by the French historian Louis Blanc in which Blanc seems to have sung too much the praises of France for her contribution to the progress of mankind: "Now without intending to depreciate in any manner the heroic efforts of the French Revolution and the immense gratitude the world owes the great men of the Republic, we think that the relative position of France and England with regard to cosmopolitism is not at all justly delineated in the above sketch [by Louis Blanc]. We entirely deny the cosmopolitic character ascribed to France before the Revolution, and the times of Louis XI and Richelieu may serve as proofs. But what is it M.Blanc ascribes to France? That she never could make predominant any idea except it was to benefit the whole world. Well, we should think M. Louis Blanc could not show

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us any country in the world which could do otherwise than France is said to have done. Take England, for instance, which M.Blanc places in direct opposition to France. England invented the steam engine; England erected the railway — two things which we believe are worth a good many ideas. Well, did England invent them for herself or for the whole world? The French glory in spreading civilization everywhere, principally in Algiers. Well, who has spread civilization in America, in Asia, Africa and Australia, but England?" 2

1 find this a somewhat amusing quote, but I do not cite it for that reason, but rather because it is representative of a judgment that both Marx and Engels make of the Industrial Revolution. They see it as a major advance in the condition of mankind, largely because it is a precondition of the transition to, first, capitalism, and then socialism. It is the Industrial Revolution that created the modern proletariat and hence, in Marxian terms, the army of the revolution, but it was for both Marx and Engels also an advance in the sense of pulling people out of the Malthusian slough — that tenacious, dangerous slough of powerlessness in the face of fickle Nature. It is the Industrial Revolution, in short, that opened the future and multiplied enormously man's opportunities as well as his perils. ι See Edwin Chadwick, [Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department etc.], Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain [London 1842], ed. with an introduction by Michael W. Flinn, Edinburgh 1965, p. 234. 2 The Northern Star, XI, No. 530 (18 December 1847), p. 2.

BEITRÄGE UND

SUSAN FAIRLIE

KOMMENTARE*

/ London **

I have two basic but separate points to make about the Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution. The first is very general and I speak on it largely from intuition. The second is a specific point which derives from my own detailed research and applies solely to England and Wales. The first, general point concerns population. That there was some sort of strong association between population growth and industrial revolutions, not only in England between about 1760 and 1830, but also in other areas where industrial revolutions have occurred is nowadays not really in dispute.1 What is in dispute is the nature of the association — whether it is fortuitous 2 or causal, and if causal, which is the primary factor — population growth or industrialization. To quote Drake: 3 "The debate that forms the subject of this volume centres on the relationship between population growth and economic growth in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England — the period of the first Industrial Revolution. For a variety of reasons the debate, which still rages, is an enormously fascinating one." — "The production of statistical series over limited periods, areas, institutions and themes, or the juggling with the national data is still an important element in the debate. It is however, only a first stage, since it barely touches the core of the problem, namely wheather the jump in the rate of growth of England's population in the eighteenth century was the product of more or less profound social and economic changes, or whether the relationship was reversed. Put more crudely, such enquiries cannot tell us whether the Industrial Revolution brought about a rise in the rate of population growth, or whether it was the population growth, independently generated, that facilitated the * Siehe den Hinweis in Anmerkung * (oben S. 17), der auch für die folgenden Diskussionsbeiträge gilt. ** Die Referentin hat ihrem Beitrag den Titel gegeben: Contribution to a Discussion on the Standard of Living in the Industrial Revolution.

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Industrial Revolution." There is of course a third possibility, that of symbiosis which Drake does not here mention. My own position is, broadly, that it was population growth which was independently generated, to use Drake's words, or that it was autonomous to repeat the expression used by Professor Landes verbally in the present paper. I think it has to be this way round because it is clear that although population growth was virtually universal in Europe from about 1760 onwards, industrialization was not universal. In other words insofar as the Industrial Revolution may have been a result of population growth, it was not a necessary result.4 However, to shift the focus of the discussion a little, it is a fact that, so far as I am aware, existing writers have contented themselves with mentioning that population growth could occur without necessarily causing industrial revolution, and have failed to tackle the problem from another angle; that is they have not been systematic enough in listing the other possible effects which population expansion might have had. These are many and various. The agricultural overcrowding, famine and disease which resulted in Ireland in the 1840's have been implied in passing, while Professor Landes has himself mentioned today the famines in Flanders and elsewhere which occurred also in the 1840's. In another case, returning to the period which we have strictly in mind, the dominant outcome may be internal strife and civil war, ostensibly about religious or political issues, but really caused by basic economic malaise resulting from too many people pressing on too little space.5 I have France in mind here. In another case there may be external wars of conquest. The most successful longrun example of this at the time was Russia. But the different reactions may be intermixed inside a single country or area. France is once more the obvious example for our immediate purposes, since internal strife eventually channeled itself into external conquest in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which were coincidental with a crucial period of the Industrial Revolution in England. (Incidentally it bears stressing that Russia by and large kept the conquests she made at this time whereas France did not.) In saying all this I may seem to have wandered rather far from the Standard of Living. But my point is that it is putting the problem in far too narrow terms to associate the Standard of Living purely with the Industrial Revolution, without constantly bearing in mind the universal population growth which lies at the back of both the Industrial Revolution itself and of many of the other things which were happening at the same time. Insofar as population growth resulted in land-hunger, disease, civil war and foreign wars in general, standards of living were obviously

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likely to fall. It is therefore manifestly a tricky job to isolate the Industrial Revolution, which was just one of many things which were happening, and to say it had this and this result on the Standard of Living. It may be that overall, even in England, the other factors associated with war and general population growth were more important than the particular factors associated with a nascent Industrial Revolution. Even this is not entirely original because Clapham and Ashton made a similar point about the effects of the Napoleonic Wars in England a long time ago; but the point needs to be emphasized because Clapham and Ashton saw the wars as something merely incidental to the course of the Industrial Revolution, while I see them as irrevocably interconnected as part and parcel of a varied set of reactions to a common cause. This is important because it helps us to get away from that awful conflict of 'isms' which Professor Landes has already mentioned 6 and which has so bedevilled the debate about living standards especially as conducted by Professors Hartwell and Hobsbawm, both here present. I know that at least one of them has disclaimed his identity with an 'ism', but he was rather wasting his breath since the debate is fixed in the public mind very much in terms of a conflict between the proponents of Capitalism and those of Marxism.7 Indeed we may think of this modern conflict as merely another enduring by-product of the internal tensions generated by the original (and subsequent) population growth, but perhaps this is pushing things too far. Professor Landes sees the Industrial Revolution as a means of escape from population pressures. Perhaps it was — though not necessarily immediately — and whether it will continue to be so in present world conditions is another question. I now come to my second major point — that is the results of my own specialist research on England and Wales. My own particular subject is the corn trade. I have been trying for some years to construct a production series for wheat, barley and oats in England and Wales from 1791 to 1889. I should remind those of you who are not familiar with the British agricultural scene that this is indeed sorely necessary because the British government did not provide its own cereal production statistics until 1884. The bearing of this on the Standard of Living should be immediately apparent. Professors Hartwell and Hobsbawm have been conducting their long debate, in which amounts of food consumed are rightly a basic issue, without either of them being in possession of proper figures about large areas of basic food consumption (except for a few figures about malt and beer and the usual figures derived from the import trade). Professor Lan-

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des has commented today about the lack of concrete figures on food consumption. To be fair, Hartwell has himself complained about the lack of figures — "there are unfortunately no adequate statistics for bread and meat consumption",8 but because bread was obviously a key component in the standard of living at the time 9 both Hartwell and Hobsbawm have struggled with the probable level of per head wheat consumption without either of them being able to come up with any satisfactory results. Neither has really anything specific to say about the Napoleonic War period (let alone the period from 1760 when the Industrial Revolution may be popularly said to have begun) though they would probably not disagree that consumption stagnated during the wars. Insofar as their debate about breadstuffs is in quantitative terms it is mostly confined to the period from about 1815 to about 1850. Both agree in fact that wheat output in England and Wales was actually increasing in this period. Where they disagree is simply about the rate of the increase in relation to population. The optimists think per capita levels were increasing,10 whereas the pessimists, that is the 'Marxists' think they were decreasing.11 My own figures about the cereals are unfortunately not ready for final presentation; but I think they are far enough advanced for us to draw some valid conclusions from them. Their derivation is partly discussed in my own article entitled "The Corn Laws and British Wheat Production 1829—76".12 In origin they are statistics of quantities of sales of wheat, barley and oats recorded in various market towns in England and Wales in various years between 1791 and 1889.13 As will be seen from Table I enclosed, the number of these towns was changed from time to time, necessitating a complicated mathematical exercise to produce what I have called the Basic Sales Index as shown in Table II. This index represents in absolute level only a proportion of probable total production of the three grains. The next job was therefore to inflate it by factors appropriate for each grain. These factors were chosen by reference to a large number of indicators, and of course the basic assumption had to be made that sales and production fluctuated in parallel. A major test in this context, at least for wheat and barley, was to set probable total supplies, as represented by the inflated Basic Sales Index plus imports, against probable total consumption as represented by total English and Welsh population in the case of wheat and by total quantities of malt excised in England and Wales in the case of barley. This test, though not shown here in its original form, was very encouraging, because it showed a pretty steady year to year relationship in each case, and because the absolute quantities involved seemed about right.14 However it did reveal certain important

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discontinuities in the sales series, notably in 1821 and 1864-65, probably caused by administrative changes. These were corrected for by altering the conversion factors for various parts of the series, and this is the form in which the results are given here in parts 1 and 2 of Table III, with reference to column 1 in each case. Since a consumption test was not possible for oats, there being no figures for horses, the Basic Sales Index for oats is shown uninflated and uncorrected. Even as it stands however, it contains one glaring weakness, since from 1828 inclusive it incorporated Irish imports; and furthermore it is likely that in this case, sales and consumption were very far from being the same thing, since most English oats never entered a market. We shall therefore say nothing further about oats. It may be objected that I am using what is essentially a test exercise, in which probable consumption is used as a yardstick, to produce positive conclusions about actual consumption of wheat and barley — in other words that the exercise is a tautology. My full justification for doing so would merit an independent paper of its own, but all we need to say here is that enough work has been done on the figures in the detailed contemporary context to give confidence that the relationship between the processed production figures of wheat and barley plus imports on the one hand, and the probable demand as represented by population and malt excise respectively on the other is a meaningful one, albeit controversial in certain respects. To repeat, the first column in parts 1 and 2 of Table III represents total probable production year by year (though it should be borne in mind that there is probably a one year lag between quantities as shown and the harvest of the preceeding year which actually gave rise to them). The second column in parts 1 and 2 of Table III represents total available supplies for each year, since UK imports have been added to probable English and Welsh production. The third column in part 1 shows the implied annual wheat consumption per head in England and Wales in parts of an Imperial Quarter. The third column in part 2 shows the implied proportion of total barley production which was turned into malt. A large figure indicates relatively plentiful barley supplies. A small one indicates a shortage. In Table IV these third column figures are averaged out into 5 year periods to give a birds eye view of the availability of grain supply in relation to demand period by period. In Table V the availability of malt proper in relation to population is thrown in as a bonus (though as we have already remarked, malt and the beer that was derived from it did not necessarily move together).

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The first point to notice is that the results, if true, obviously have to be viewed in several phases. The first lasts until about 1810 and we may think of it as the war period. The second begins about 1811, towards the end of the war period, and lasts, with a major interruption in 1815, until just before mid-century — until 1845-46 in the case of wheat and until 1838 in the case of barley. This covers part of the classical period of the English Industrial Revolution, and the debate about its effect on the Standard of Living. The third phase is virtually post-Revolution especially in the case of wheat where the date 1846 coincides with the repeal of the British Corn Laws. The picture in the first phase is quite clear. Wheat supplies per head were low and stagnating. Barley was scarce in relation to malt. Even gross supplies of both were falling. The picture of stagnating wheat supplies is borne out by some completely separate but unpublished work I have done on wheat and flour supplies in London from 1758 to 1814. In other words, Industrial (and Agricultural) Revolution regardless, some factor seems to have been keeping down the per capita supply of wheat during the Napoleonic War. I revert to my earlier argument about war and population growth depressing the Standard of Living. The picture in the second phase is also quite clear. Per capita supplies of wheat were rising steadily until 1845-46 and supplies of barley in relation to malt were rising until 1838. So far as wheat is concerned this appears to range me firmly on the side of Professor Hartwell in this period. The picture in the third phase can be seen as highly controversial because it shows a per capita decline in wheat consumption and a continuing decline in the availability of barley in relation to malt. It is highly controversial insofar as Hartwell and Hobsbawm agree that living standards were certainly rising after about 1850 whether or not they had done so before. It is however not controversial if you see it as a manifestation of Engel's Law, at least in the case of wheat. But what does all this add up to? Let us confine ourselves to the two periods before 1846. All we know is that wheat and barley were scarce relative to demand in the years before the end of the wars; and becoming relatively plentiful up to 1846 and 1838 repetively. If you believe that an increase in wheat and beer consumption is a manifestation of increasing living standards, then it is clear that such an increase was occurring after about 1811. But there are questions. Firstly, who was getting the extra? Secondly, what had they been eating before? On the first point, my evidence seems to suggest that the increase, at least in wheat, was closely associated with the textile and metallurgical urban centres of the English

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Industrial Revolution and it is even possible that, in spite of the overall increases in supplies, people in the old agricultural areas in the south and east were actually getting less than they had before. If so, I am on Professor Hobsbawm's side in this limited respect. Incidentally, on the recent parallel of French butter, it it possible that the extra wheat, produced under the artificial stimulus of the Corn Laws, was not all being eaten even though it was there. O n the second point, even if w e disregard Engel's Law, it is just possible that the extra wheat was less nutritious than the potatoes, oatmeal and barley meal which it was replacing. However, nutrition experts assure me that it was more nutritious precisely because it was more palatable, and it was only the advent of roller milling, which took out the healthy germ from the grain, which made white wheaten bread into the dietetic bane of the late nineteenth century.

1 Economic expansion and population growth tend to be closely associated; the former seldom occurs without the latter . . . this generalization is a true today as it is of past centuries." Michael W. Flinn, The Origins of the Industrial Revolution, London 1966, p. 19. "Recently there has been much debate about the relationship between the industrial and demographic revolutions." François Crouzet, England and France in the Eigtheenth Century: A Comparative Analysis of Two Economic Growths, in: R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (Debates in Economic History), London 1967, p. 162. The association is also implied in the very existence of sudi a book as Michael Drake (ed.), Population in Industrialization, London 1969. 2

"Thus even though the two forms of growth have tended to occur at roughly the same periods of history, they are not necesssarily related." M. W. Flinn, The Origins of the Industrial Revolution ..loc. cit. 3 Loc. cit., introduction, p. 1—3. 4 This is by no means original. See for example an earlier written statement by Prof. Landes himself: "It is clear that its (population growth's) source was in a large measure independent of the Industrial Revolution, as Ireland alone suffices to demonstrate" (David Landes, Technological Change and Development in 'Western Europe 1750—1914, in: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, VI, part 1, Cambridge 1965, p. 599). See also Ronald Max Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution in England (Historical Association. General Series, no. 58), London 1965, p. 8. "J. R. Hides for example has suggested that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population. But population by itself is obviously no necessary inducement to growth; the example of Ireland after 1750 is a painful demonstration that population can grow markedly with no development except in potato acreage." Crouzet says (England and France ..., in: R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes ..., p. 162), "while population growth was doubtless a necessary condition for the Indus-

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trial Revolution, it was by no means a sufficient or decisive one, since it was general throughout Western Europe". 5 That overcrowding generates internal tensions is now a fashionable anthropological-zoological approach. 6 See also his Technological Change ..in: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe . . V I , part. 1, p. 465: "The arguments commonly advanced are concerned with the consumption not only of manufactures but all goods and services, and rest as mudi or more on theoretical deductions, political dogma, and sympathy as on empirical data — for what they may be worth." 7 A recent collection of essays by R. M. Hartwell et al. called The Long Debate on Poverty: Eight Essays on Industrialisation and 'The Condition of England', London 1972, was reviewed by Harold Perkin in the Guardian early in 1973 under the title Half a Loaf because, according to the reviewer, only the Capitalist point of view was represented. Also John Burnett, Plenty and Want. A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day, London 1966, p. 30: "The 'standard of living controversy' has been made the favourite arena for opposing political beliefs." 8 R. M. Hartwell, The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800—1850, in: The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIII, 3 (April 1961), p. 407. 9 See for example George E. Fussell, The English Rural Labourer. His House, Furniture, Clothing and Pood from Tudor to Victorian Times, London 1949, p. 86s., 129 etc.; J.Burnett, Plenty and Want ..., p. 26s., 33, 42 etc.; Sir James Caird, English Agriculture in 1850—51 [London 1852, republ.], London 1968, p. 484. 10 See for example R. M. Hartwell, The Rising Standard of Living ..., in: The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIII, 3 (April 1961), loc. cit., quoting Tooke, Porter, McCulloch and Mill to the effect that "agricultural output increased faster than population". 11 See for example Eric J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour, London 1964, p. 85; and Eric J. Hobsbawm and George Frederick E. Rudé, Captain Swing, London 1969, p. 29: "broadly speaking demand kept pace with or ran ahead of supplies for the whole of this period until the third quarter of the nineteenth century". 12 The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXII, 1 (April 1969). » The raw data are mostly available in the Parliamentary Papers but I had to process the data for 1791, 1799 and 1806-14 from original manuscript returns kept by the Public Record Office. I 4 Tables VI and VII are designed to show that I have arrived at the right general order of magnitude for wheat consumption and production. Perhaps the key table here is the last one where the official production figures for years after 1884 are used, though the Lawes and Gilbert production figures are also important. The latter overlapped with the official series but I have shown it only for years before 1884. It is quite credible that in the nineteenth century about half the barley put on the market was sold for malt, though unfortunately malt, and the beer for which it provides the raw material, do not necessarily move in parallel.

Beiträge und Kommentare Tabulations

to the Contribution

91

of Susan

Fairlie

TABLE I

Raw Figures in England

of Total Recorded

and Wales 1791,

1799

Sales of Wheat; and 1806—89

Year

Wheat

Barley

Oats

Year

1791 1799 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820

1190 590 903 785 987 748 619 995 1066 1113 1244 834 1207 1034 1036 1217 1392

1297 471 896 750 637 622 720 816 619 780 789 466 676 899 795 665 876

881 920 1689 1286 1473 1388 1498 1682 1483 1363 1367 941 1354 1213 1198 1088 1275

1842*

1821*

1582

972

1343

1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827

2192 2195 2254 2033 1889 2075

1277 987 1439 1528 1151 1183

1630 1433 1361 1441 973 763

1828*

2771

1650

1973

1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841

2576 3153 2811 3296 3577 3769 3928 4393 3889 4064 3175 3850 3914

1610 2115 2025 1954 2360 2154 2034 2430 2071 2480 2403 2291 2225

2271 2063 1988 2204 2257 2242 2286 2376 2122 2299 1932 2015 2206

* Years of change in collection π * * Estimated for 1791, 1799 and

Barley and Oats

** (thousand

quarters)

Wheat

Barley

Oats

4091

2577

2202

1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864

5302 5456 6666 5959 4638 5400 4454 4687 4487 4855 4561 3913 5257 5047 5244 5204 5498 4623 4290 3588 4493 4992

2777 2834 2468 2938 2041 2402 2100 2235 2334 2389 2474 2268 2609 2679 2263 2434 2410 1787 2393 2282 2488 2599

2219 1990 2001 1673 960 1023 851 866 940 948 880 765 817 701 537 483 503 496 625 703 571 509

1865*

3580

1768

217

1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880

3135 2725 2680 2816 3399 3275 2582 2442 2392 2515 2202 1943 2142 2022 1608

1724 1576 1666 1388 1842 1767 1593 1735 1938 1489 1835 1795 1732 1421 1592

255 285 250 162 206 197 184 193 169 122 149 176 184 162 165

—14. Actual thereafter.

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TABLE 1 1881 1882

1738 1904

1632 1874

211 212

1883*

2901

2576

408

1884

2833

3149

493

{continued) 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889

2740 2740 2495 2428 2945

2766 2474 2590 1912 3330

1791 — 10 July 1821 in 139 towns — 31 Geo. I I I c 30 10 July 1821 — 11 July 1828 in 148 ( 150) towns — 1 & 2 Geo. IV c 87 11 July 1828 — 29 April 1842 in 150 towns — 9 Geo. IV c 60 29 April 1842 — 31 Dec. 1864 in 290 towns — 5 & 6 Vict, c 14 1 Jan. 1865 — 3 March 1883 in 150 towns — 27 & 28 Vict, c 87 3 March 1883 — 12 April 1890 in 187 towns — 45 & 46 Vict, c 37 * Years of change in collection methods.

393 367 309 256 416

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93

TABLE I I Basic Sales Index

Series, England and Wales 1791,

Actual figures 1843—64.

Wheat

1791 1799 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846

2331 1154 1769 1563 1932 1464 1213 1949 2086 2179 2437 1632 2363 2025 2028 2383 2726 3002 3722 3727 3825 3448 3206 3521 4114 3321 4065 3624 4250 4611 4859 5064 5664 5014 5240 4093 4964 5046 4462 5302 5456 6666 5959

and

Other years adjusted to make them

with 1843—64 Year

1799,

Barley

2411 875 1755 1395 1185 1157 1338 1518 1151 1450 1466 866 1257 1671 1479 1237 1629 1576 2187 1683 2463 2613 1972 2025 2596 2113 2775 2658 2564 3098 2827 2669 3188 2717 3255 3154 3007 2920 2911 2777 2834 2468 2938 * Irish imports known to be

as base period (thousand Oats

Year

Wheat

1104 4638 1847 5400 1154 1848 2117 4454 1849 1612 4687 1850 1846 4487 1851 1740 1852 4855 4561 1878 1853 3913 2109 1854 5257 1855 1859 1856 5047 1709 1857 5244 1714 5204 1180 1858 5498 1859 1698 1860 4623 1520 4290 1861 1502 1862 3588 1364 1863 4493 1598 4992 1864 1668 1865 4615 1991 1866 4041 1732 1867 3513 1648 1868 3455 1739 1869 3631 1171 1870 4382 925 4222 1871 2340* 1872 3329 2554 3148 1873 2320 1874 3084 2235 1875 3243 2478 1876 2839 2538 1877 2505 2521 1878 2761 2570 1879 2607 2672 1880 2073 2386 1881 2241 2585 1882 2455 2173 1883 2973 2266 1884 2507 2480 1885 2738 2355 1886 2280 2219 1887 2472 1990 1888 2421 2001 1889 2873 1970 included from this date.

1806—89. comparable

quarters) Barley

Oats

2041 2402 2100 2235 2334 2389 2474 2268 2609 2679 2263 2434 2410 1787 2393 2282 2488 2599 2321 2262 2068 2186 1822 2417 2319 2090 2277 2543 1954 2407 2356 2273 1865 2089 2141 2459 2673 3140 2745 2543 2604 1896 3319

960 1023 851 866 940 948 880 765 817 701 537 483 503 496 625 703 571 509 244 286 320 281 182 232 222 207 217 190 138 167 198 207 182 185 238 238 352 388 311 310 261 211 358

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TABLE I I I {part 1) English and Welsh wheat production (Basic Sales Index inflated and corrected); total available supplies, and per capita availability, 1791—1889 (first two columns in '000 quarters) 1791 1799

9091 4501

1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 Basic Index

6 899 6 096 7 535 5 710 4 731 7 601 8135 8 498 9 504 6 365 9 216 7 898 7 909 9 294 10631 10 357 11166 11181 11475 10 344 9 618 10 563 12 342 9963 12 195 10872 12 750 13 833 14577 15 192 16992 15 042 15 720 12 279 14 892 15 138 13 386 15906 16368 19998 inflated

1846 17 877 1847 13 914 1848 16 200 1849 13 362 1850 7 098 .74 14061 .66 1851 13 461 6 454 1852 7561 .76 14565 .61 1853 6102 13 683 .60 1854 6108 11739 1855 15 771 7719 .75 1856 15141 .79 8249 15 732 1857 8 838 .83 1858 15612 10 105 .93 1859 .59 16494 6501 1860 13 869 9406 .84 1861 12 870 .78 8 918 1862 10 764 .82 9 485 1863 13 479 9743 .83 1864 14 976 11128 .93 1865 16153 10 294 .85 1866 14144 .90 11061 1867 12 296 .88 11077 1868 12 093 .90 11504 1869 12 709 10 696 .83 1870 15 337 10181 .78 1871 14 777 .82 10818 1872 11652 13 009 .97 1873 11018 11554 .85 1874 10 794 13 822 1.00 1875 11351 13113 .94 1876 9 937 12 909 .91 1877 8768 .98 14037 1878 9664 14 694 1.01 1879 9125 15127 1.03 1880 7 256 16 979 1.14 1881 7 844 15294 1.01 1882 8 593 16 936 1.11 10406 1883 15115 .97 1884 8 775 17 241 1.10 1885 9583 17909 1.12 1886 7 980 16 426 1.02 8 652 1887 16 971 1.04 1888 8 474 17 747 1.07 21140 1889 10 056 1.26 by 3.9 in 1791—1820 3.0 in 1822—1864 3.45 in 1821 3.5 in 1865—1889 9489 4 591

—

.51 q.

20221 18 379 19 282 18 164 18 891 18791 18 730 20001 16272 19 024 21350 19 843 21026 21510 21299 21650 22 441 20 686 21705 22183 20 997 21428 20611 23080 23 948 25128 22 762 23 065 22 303 25 345 22 048 23 583 23592 26159 23 230 24 491 27 439 30 257 24 387 28 794 23 618 27 368 27420 28 473

1.19 q. 1.07 1.11 1.03 1.06 1.04 1.03 1.09 0.87 1.01 1.12 1.03 1.08 1.09 1.07 1.08 1.10 1.00 1.04 1.05 .98 .99 .94 1.04 1.06 1.10 .99 .99 .94 1.05 .90 .95 .94 1.03 .90 .94 1.04 1.14 .91 1.06 .86 .98 .97 1.00

Beiträge und Kommentare TABLE III (part

95

2)

English and Welsh barley production (Basic Sales Index inflated and corrected); total available supplies, and product of these divided by malt excised in England and Wales (first two columns in '000 quarters) 1791 1799

9668 3509

3 528

.92

1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889

2.11 7 038 7040 1806 1.85 5597 1807 5594 4752 4756 1.75 1808 4652 1.65 4640 1809 1.83 1810 5 365 5379 1.88 1811 6104 6 087 1812 4616 4627 2.05 5 835 2.15 1813 5 815 1.86 5 879 5899 1814 1.06 3 474 1815 3 473 5056 1816 5 041 1.91 2.62 6701 1817 6831 1818 5 931 6627 2.15 4 960 5 530 1.89 1819 1820 6 532 6556 2.03 1821 5780 5 785 1.77 1822 7 326 7340 2.20 5638 1.81 1823 5 633 1824 8 251 2.40 8 275 1825 9176 2.48 8 754 1826 6606 6 879 2.01 1827 6784 2.22 6 973 1828 2.32 8 697 8 859 1829 7 079 7346 2.51 1830 9296 9 434 2.81 1831 8 904 9280 2.25 1832 8589 8 677 2.19 10378 1833 10460 2.48 1834 9470 9549 2.22 1835 8 941 8 965 1.99 1836 10 680 10745 2.31 9102 1837 9179 2.18 1838 10 904 10 886 2.57 1839 10566 11144 2.64 1840 10 073 10 694 2.33 1841 9 782 10 047 2.60 1842 9 752 9 825 2.55 1843 9482 9303 2.46 1844 9494 10513 2.64 1845 8268 8 636 2.26 1846 9 842 10217 2.29 Basic Index inflated by: 4.01 in 1791—1820 3.68 in 1821 3.35 in 1822—1864

6 837 8047 7 035 7 487 7 819 8 003 8 288 7 598 8 740 8 975 7581 8154 8 074 5 986 8017 7 645 8 335 8707 9052 8 822 8 065 8 525 7106 9426 9044 8151 8 880 9 918 7 621 9 387 9188 8 865 7 274 8147 8350 7131 7752 9106 7961 7375 7552 5498 9625

7 613 9102 8417 8523 8 651 8 629 9112 8151 9089 9706 9282 9815 9 802 8099 9417 9500 10402 10085 11241 11183 9 657 10618 9362 11447 11443 12 364 11467 13 092 10715 12 123 12 817 12 829 10507 11424 11096 11482 12 361 12 733 12 264 11215 11539 11463 14497

3.90 in 1865—1881 2.90 in 1882—1889

2.01

229

2.03 1.98 2.00 1.95 2.01 2.05 2.41 2.25 2.04 2.07 2.01 1.59 2.24 1.84 2.22 1.85 2.05 1.98 1.68 1.95 1.69 2.02 1.95 2.14 1.78 1.98 1.60 1.83 1.89 1.97 1.63

Erster Tag • 2. Hälfte TABLE I I I {part 3) English and Welsh oats; Basic Sales Index uninfiated and uncorrected 1791 1799

1104 1154

1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846

2117 1612 1846 1740 1878 2109 1859 1709 1714 1180 1698 1520 1502 1364 1598 1668 1991 1732 1648 1739 1171 925 2340 2554 2320 2235 2478 2538 2521 2570 2672 2386 2585 2173 2266 2480 2355 2219 1990 2001 1970

1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889

('000

quarters)

960 1023 851 866 940 948 880 765 817 701 537 483 503 496 625 703 571 509 244 286 320 281 182 232 222 207 217 190 138 167 198 207 182 185 238 238 352 388 311 310 261 211 358

Beiträge und Kommentare TABLE

Years

Pet capita wheat in England and Wales quarters

1806—10 1811—20 1821—30 1831—40 1841—50 1851—60 1861—70 1871—80 1881—89

.67 .81 .88 1.02 1.10 1.04 1.03 .98 .99

97

IV

Total available barley in England and Wales divided by English and Welsh malt 1.84 1.96 2.25 2.32 2.31 2.04 1.95 (1871—79) 1.86

TABLE V

English and Welsh malt excised divided by English and Welsh (bushels) 1801—10 1811—20 1821—30 1831—40 1841—50 1851—60 1861—70 1871—70

population

2.50 2.10 2.07 2.32 1.90 1.89 1.99 2.13

TABLE V I

Lawes' and Gilbert's figures for total available United Kingdom wheat supplies divided by United Kingdom population and by English and Welsh population ('000 quarters unless otherwise indicated). Ann Avs. Years 1852—3/1859/60 1860—1/1867—8 1868—9/1875—6 1876—7/1883—4 1884—5/1891—2

Supplies UK Pop 000 18 224 20777 22 730 25229 27 364

28 067 29738 31943 34 615 36950

UK per cap bsh.

EW Pop 000 *

EW per cap q.

5.19 5.60 5.69 5.83 5.92

18 937 20 767 22 967 25524 27 991

.96 1.00 .99 .99 .98

* EW population averaged in calendar years, 1852—59 etc. All figures except these and the succeeding column are Lawes' and Gilbert's own.

Erster Tag · 2. Hälfte

98

TABLE VII

Official figures for English and Welsh wheat supplies, plus United Kingdom Imports divided by English and Welsh population Year Prod. OOOq. 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889

9 733 9462 7447 9062 8 725 8 876

UK Imps. '000 q.

EW suppl. OOOq.

EW Pop. '000 q.

Per cap. q.

15 612 19211 15 638 18716 18 766 18 417

25 345 28 673 23 085 27 778 27491 27293

26 922 27 220 27522 27 827 28 136 28 448

.94 1.05 .84

1.00 .98 .96

WOLFGANG KÖLLMANN / Bochum

Eine kurze Bemerkung zur Frage Bevölkerungswachstum im Industrialisierungsprozeß: Ich bin nicht der Auffassung, daß man kausale Verknüpfungen zwischen der Bevölkerungs „explosion" und dem Industrialisierungsprozeß konstatieren kann, obwohl selbstverständlich Analogien zwischen Bevölkerungswachstum und Industrialisierungsprozeß gegeben sind. Mit Recht haben Frau Fairlie, aber auch Professor Landes das irische Beispiel erwähnt. Dieses Beispiel ist, wenn man es nicht nur bis 1850 verfolgt, besonders interessant für die Beantwortung der Frage: Was passiert, wenn keine Industrialisierung eintritt? Selbstverständlich kommt es dann zunächst zu dem, was ich einmal einen „malthusianischen Effekt" nennen möchte, daß also Hunger, Seuchen oder Kriege usw. Bevölkerungen reduzieren. Dies wirkte sich in der großen Hungerkatastrophe Irlands aus. Aber wenn man das irische Beispiel weiter verfolgt, so zeigt sich, daß der Übervölkerungsdruck in Irland nach der großen Katastrophe nicht nur zu Auswanderungen geführt hat, sondern zu einer Veränderung der generativen Strukturen, das heißt, der altersspezifischen Fruchtbarkeiten und Sterblichkeiten. In diesem Falle ändern sie sich ohne Wandel der älteren kulturellen und geistig-religiösen Bedingungen. Vor allem die Geburtlichkeit geht durch Verlagerung der altersspezifischen Fruchtbarkeit in höhere Altersklassen zurück. Dies geschieht auf eine sehr einfache Weise durch Heraufsetzung des Heiratsalters, das nach der großen Hungersnot nirgendwo in Europa so hoch gewesen ist wie hier in Irland. Zwar blieb die volle Ausschöpfung der Fruchtbarkeit in der Ehe weitgehend erhalten, aber die allgemeine Fruchtbarkeitsziffer sank ganz beträchtlich ab. Das andere Bei-

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99

spiel ist Frankreich, wo wir ohne Industrialisierung bereits in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts einen Rückgang des Wachstums haben. Aus diesen Beispielen ist vielleicht zu folgern, daß für Mitteleuropa und für England wahrscheinlich Katastrophen des irischen Ausmaßes eingetreten wären, wenn die Industrialisierung nicht entsprechende Ausweitungen des Nahrungsspielraums gebracht hätte, aber ebenso wahrscheinlich wäre eine entsprechende Änderung der generativen Strukturen in bzw. nach der Katastrophe für diese Länder gewesen. Es ist ein glückliches Zusammentreffen, daß der Industrialisierungsprozeß hier ansetzte, als das Bevölkerungswachstum ein bestimmtes Stadium erreicht hatte. Wir dürfen jedoch nicht übersehen, daß sich in England schon seit etwa 1890, in Deutschland seit 1900 die Zuwachsraten trotz fortschreitender Industrialisierung verringern, so daß das Bevölkerungswachstum zwar nodi sehr hoch bleibt, aber relativ zurückzugehen beginnt. Um auf einen anderen Punkt, die Entwicklung des Lebensstandards, einzugehen: Es erscheint mir fraglich, ob die Zuwanderung vom Land in die Stadt, wenn sie unter dem unmittelbaren oder mittelbaren Einfluß des Bevölkerungsdrucks geschieht, tatsächlich selbst bereits eine Erhöhung des Lebensstandards für den Zuwanderer gebracht hat. Ganz sicher ist sein Geldlohn höher. Man darf aber doch nicht vergessen, daß das agrarische Einkommen sich nicht nur aus Barlöhnen zusammensetzte, sondern aus einer Reihe von Naturalleistungen, die die Nahrungsgrundlage sicherten. In dieser Hinsicht brachte der Übergang in die Industriearbeiterschaft eher größere Unsicherheit als Verbesserung. Damit hat der Übergang in industrielle Lebens- und Arbeitsformen nach meiner Auffassung zunächst kaum eine Erhöhung des Lebensstandards gebracht. Im Gegenteil, der Industrialisierungsprozeß wird ja (zumindest möchte ich das für Deutschland für die fünfziger und sechziger Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts behaupten) weitgehend eingeleitet und beschleunigt durch die Bildung von Investitionskapital auf der Basis von Konsumverzicht. Das heißt in diesem Falle, daß nur Löhne geboten werden, die ein Leben am Lebensminimum gestatten. Ich habe mir oft die Frage gestellt, wie die Leute eigentlich gelebt haben, ohne sie bisher befriedigend beantworten zu können. Nach den verfügbaren Daten aus der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts haben nämlich die Löhne häufig unter dem, was als Minimum des Lebensnotwendigen für eine entsprechende Familie angesehen wurde, gelegen, zumal das Familieneinkommen doch tatsächlich weitgehend dem Einkommen des Ehemanns entsprach, nachdem die Kinderarbeit in den fünfziger Jahren weitgehend reduziert war. Diese Fragen sind allerdings außerordentlich schwierig zu beantworten, weil schon die Loco-Preise ausgesprochen differieren. Wenn etwa, um ein

100

Erster Tag

• 2. Hälfte

Beispiel zu geben, Krupp in Essen Ende der vierziger Jahre davon sprach, daß drei Taler wöchentlich ein auskömmlicher Lohn seien, so gibt es gleichzeitige Quellen aus dem immerhin nur 20 km entfernten Wuppertal, wo erklärt wird, daß 4 Taler, das heißt also 25 % mehr, nicht das Lebensminimum garantierten. Von daher ist natürlich zu wünschen, daß wir sehr viel mehr lokale Studien bekommen, als wir bisher haben, um dieses Problem überhaupt methodisch bewältigen zu können.

YEHUDA DON

/ Ramat-Gan

The standard of living controversy may be defined to a number of criteria. I have here at least five to be used as yardsticks to measure changes in the standard of living or standard of welfare. In the wages versus consumption argument, I prefer wages instead of consumption for some grave shortcomings in the measureability of consumption figures. I understand Prof. Hartwell also prefers changes in wages, corrected by price and length of the working week, asking to what extent did real wages per hour change through time. The apparent answer seems to be, and I was rather convinced by reading Prof. Hartwell's arguments, that they had indeed improved. However, the Hartwell case does not necessarily prove higher living standard, even by assuming that we can measure and include all wage goods and all non-marketed self produced goods into this index, as long as we do not measure total national income, including public goods. Public goods might probably be estimated by dividing budget by population. Assuming that the government is a rational body and allocates its budget in a fashion to maximize total welfare, some addition to the welfare of most individuals must be reckoned with through the consumption of public goods. Parallelly tax allocation and tax incidence must also be taken into consideration. I know it is an extremely complicated task, but even by a partial correction, by adding public goods in a general form, the index would have been greatly improved. There is another possibility of measuring standard of living through wages, by looking into the general wellbeing of the wage earners as compared to that of the capitalists. The question to be posed, would not be whether there was an absolute rise in real wages per hour, but whether the absolute rise in real wages per hour was higher, lower or equal to the rise in the remuneration to other factors. The optimum index which Prof. Hobsbawm has been working on would thus be a comparison of utility

Beiträge und

Kommentare

101

functions, to examine whether the utility, or the subjective feeling of wellbeing of the wage earners, did or did not rise. Thus a utility function could be conceived in which the independent variables are real wages per hour, the quality of labour and some subjective factors, such as those included in Prof. Landes' paper, like a shift from rural to urban occupations, getting outrooted from customary conditions, etc. This estimation could, of course, be optimal, yet I do not know how and whether it could be measured in any way. On the other hand, wages as such have a very grave shortcoming. In the business cycle, statistics for England in the 19th century, we observe that changes in real wages usually move against changes in prices. On the other hand, changes in prices go together with employment. Generally, wages display a much more rigid behaviour along the various stages of the business cycles than either prices or employment. Consequently, through the business cycle real wages are relatively high but employment low. An improved way of measurement could have used macro-economic figures such as total wage bill, including the income of self employees. This last index could be used as an index to measure general changes in the economically observable facets of the standard of living. I should like to make a general remark to the paper of Prof. Landes. He combines in his analysis inductive and deductive methods. I would have preferred the more statistical approach, though, I am not quite sure to what extent do we have data for it. On the other hand, deductive theorization must take into consideration more factors than Prof. Landes presented to us. Let us take the statement that urbanization increases wellbeing in agriculture. It is based on the obvious proposition that migration from the village increases labour productivity on a given amount of land, and since labour productivity reflects wages, wages in agriculture will move up. However, we do have other factors, which, under circumstances of rural emigration, tend to reduce welfare of rural population, such as the provision of public services. The smaller the rural community the more expensive it is to provide a given standard of public services. Another factor is the deterioration of public life in rural areas (quality of life, social life, etc.) as a result of reduced rural population. There is another remark to the same effect, regarding the quality of work. The general proposition was that the richer the area and the richer the capitalists, the better the physical conditions of their respective plants. This proposition is not necessarily valid. Its validity depends on the production function we assume. If we assume that type of production function, which, let us say, Robert Owen introduced in New Lanark, which regarded wages as a

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positive factor to increase productivity, then the proposition stands. However, New Lanark was a single example followed by very few contemporary entrepreneurs. On the other hand, if we assume normal production function, for the customary profit maximizing entrepreneur, I can see no necessary correlation between the means at the disposal of the entrepreneur and the conditions he provides for his labourers. The introduction of a "New Lanark" type of production function was the solution Mill found to the "Wage Fund" controversy, when he included wages in his production function as an independent variable positively correlated to production. Finally, "what would have happened" is an extremely hypothetical question for which any answer is good, provided we assume the proper assumptions. The question should not be "what would have happened if industrialization did not take place?", but, whether that was the optimum path for industrialization. Let us take the case of Russia. The Soviet Union industrialized during the 1930s at the cost of sacrificing a whole generation, but accomplished industrialization in a very short time. There could have been another pattern, laid down after the 1905 revolution in Russia, to industrialize through a lengthy but smooth way of increasing productivity. If we do ask ourselves hypothetical questions I would not ask "What would have happened if? ", but rather "was the actually chosen path the optimal, or there might have been a better, more feasible one under the then existing circumstances?"

ALAN S. MILWARD

/ Manchester

I think first of all we would be very well advised to admit that we are almost completely ignorant of these questions of income distribution in the nineteenth century. This is the biggest gap in economic history. I am very glad Professor Landes is getting interested in this question but it must make him very miserable because it is a task on which one starts absolutely from scratch. We tend to have a great aggregate called consumption. I am not sure that we can define a unit of consumption in the same sense as another concept we have always had, a unit of production. This question of the definition of a unit of consumption comes to have more serious consequences the nearer the actual consumer is to the breadline, or maybe in the 1840s the nearer he was to the lifeline. We should try to disaggregate this concept of consumption into a set of concepts

Beiträge und Kommentare

103

which might be more useful measuring instruments to trade down this question.

ERIC J . HOBSBAWM / London

I agree with Professor Don that if this discussion has any real interest, it's not because it discusses whether industrialization or even capitalist industrialization could improve the standard of living, but whether the kind of industrialization which is based on individual cases gave optimal results. That at any rate has modern policy implications more than purely ideological implications. There isn't really and there has never been any serious doubt about the long term positive results of industrialization on the material standard of living in Europe or anywhere. About the quality of life the matter is much more controversial, but as Professor Landes has shown the whole matter of the quality of life is an exceeding difficult one to determine and even more difficult to measure. As far as the material things are concerned there isn't really any doubt that over the past 200 years, material consumption, material standard of living has increased very considerably pretty well every-where. The question which Max Hartwell and I have been discussing is a shortrange question and in some sense it's a trivial question, namely what happened in Great Britain in a specific period. For the wider theoretical argument it does not greatly matter whether what is shown is a slight improvement or no significant change or slight diminution in the British standard between 1790 and the 1840s. If there is any large scale implication in this it derives from the fact that the improvement, if it took place, was exceedingly modest in Britain during that period. Why was it so modest compared to what happened later on? Why the apparent slowness, with which the working population got any pay-off? Whether it got no net pay-off or slight negative result, seems to be a relatively speciali2ed question. What has surprised me personally isn't so much the discussion between Max Hartwell and myself, which concluded ten years ago, not even the interest in these matters by other scholars, which has not been excessive, but the enormous and continued interest among the public of students and others, which has forced Max and me to go on, doing our double Vaudeville act. By now we have done it in I don't know how many different journals and how many different languages and by now we have done it in a variety of different media, including television. Why should there be this continued interest

104

Erster Tag · 2. Hälfte

in this, it has really nothing to do with the merits of the debate as we are discussing it now though it would be a very interesting question of what you might say the political and ideological sociology of the 1960s. The question which arises out of David Landes paper is, whether it is a short range question which is separate for each country or whether it effects the whole of the European area at a particular period, according to Pollardian assumptions. I am inclined to think that inspite of the differences in time in the process of industrialization, we are indeed talking of a particular period in European development, possibly the first half of the 19th century, possibly a period up to say the late 60s. I think most of us would agree that from the late 1860s on some genuine signs of improving wages can be seen in most countries, and the question therefore becomes somewhat different. I put this forward very tentatively. If we are dealing with a general problem of European development as a whole then the very interesting aspect would be the one that David has suggested, namely that referring to indirect evidence through indicators such as physical height or mortality, above all anthropometric data. So far as I am aware physical body size is influenced almost entirely by such things as food consumption. In Great Britain unfortunately not many statistics are available, so British scholars simply cannot do this exercise but in other countries there are good data. The only attempt that I have seen to do this for the whole of the 19th century is by the French, who have done a lot of work and find no global tendency for body size to increase until after 1860. There was quite an interesting curve in Annales, a few month ago, which is the only global curve I have seen and it should be extremely interesting to see, whether in other parts of Europe the anthropometric data, military "Tauglichkeitsstatistik" and things like that would show anything comparable. The question must be left open. There are only two other points I would like to make, being in general very mudi in agreement with David Landes. The first is that I think the macro-arguments, the arguments from things like GNP, national income, really ought to be eliminated from this discussion, partly because we don't know much about it. Above all, because they simply are not conclusive one way or the other. Supposing you divide GNP per capita for the first half of the 19th century in England and for the second half you arrive at the result that GNP per capita increased at a much lower rate in the second half of the 19th century. Can you infer from this, that the standard of living increased more slowly from 1850 to 1900? You obviously can't. All the evidence direct or indirect we have, demonstrates that it increased much faster after 1850. The macro-figures are so macro as actually not to tell

Beiträge und Kommentare

105

us very much about what we really want to know. As for the question which is indeed crucial of the shifts in employment. I think it's crucial in Britain, I think it is more crucial in any other period in the years from 1850 to say the late 60s, because that is the period when so far as we can tell there are, surprisingly enough, no major changes in wage raise at least for the unskilled. Apparently there are even falls for the same population, for the same occupations in wage rates. For the labour aristocracy there are increases, but by and large not for any body else. And yet on exactly the grounds on which I find myself sceptical about increases in the first half of the century, I am forced, by the evidence to accept that there was quite a substantial improvement in per capita consumption, which I can simply put down to first of all the decline in structural unemployment in this period, also, so far as we can measure it, relatively less cyclical unemployment. But I would suggest also to a very great extent, it was due to this shift from relatively lower paid occupations to relatively better paid occupations, from country to town etc. What one would like to know is what the average differential was, say between town and country. We know that in some countries of the Third World, the income differential is quite enormous. We may be tempted in our present discussion, we always use unconciously the example of what we see about us, to assume that the thing was rather similar in the 19th century. Can we work on this assumption? I don't think we can make this assumption quite to the same extent, but of course we just don't know, what the pay-off of moving into a town was. If the pay-off was as great as say in Latin-America today, it clearly does mean an awful lot of people if they were ready to migrate would move out voluntarily, otherwise they might move because they had to. Finally, there is one question again in terms of what's around us, that is the whole question of the environment. It does seem to me, that in certain countries pollution was serious and once again Britain and Belgium as the first industrial economies were probably the worst sufferers. The sheer physical environment of the early industrialization was probably worse than in some of the later ones. There is I think a difference and there are perhaps ways of quantitative and qualitative getting at it. I think there is little doubt at least according to the military statistics when we begin to get them in the early 20th century and the First World War, that the physical condition of a large part of the English working class was extremely bad, probably worse than the physical condition of some other populations, certainly in the industrial areas. I'd like to conclude with what an American journalist said in the early 20th century. He spent his time going around labour and

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Erster Tag · 2. Hälfte

socialist congresses in most of Europe and he made some quite interesting observations about other matters, but what struck him most was first of all the Belgians, who seemed to be both ignorant and the poorest, which is probably true and the English, who seemed to be pretty miserable. But he thought the Germans, though poor, had somehow succeeded in keeping "a loaf or two of bread ahead of capitalism". He contrasted the impression of comparable groups of workers, say the German workers of the same kind with the miserable looking English and even with the American ones, who he felt weren't so miserable but looked so terribly tense when they came out of the factory. It seems to me that these elements which clearly have a direct bearing on the problem of the standard of living, the environmental combined with the question of intensive work should and could be brought into the discussion. Can we finally say, whether this discussion ought to go on or not, what the advantage of it is? I myself haven't really done much work in this field for a long time. I don't think there is an enormous amount of profit in doing so, unless we start changing the questions and make them more interesting. The ideological element is of course always there. Max Hartwell will continue to defend capitalism and I shall continue to be against it, but it seems to me neither the defense nor the attack really depend on what happened in Lancashire in the 1830s and 1840s to anything like the extent which has been supposed, not only by me and I hope not by Max. I think we'll return to Professor Don's point, namely would it have been possible to do it with less suffering? I am inclined to think in Britain it could have been done, certainly I think in Belgium it could have been. Is there any lesson for this for the present? In this respect there are conceivable lessons to be learned for the 20th century from the 19th. I think there has been a failure to consider the problem of the working class standard for living except as a function of the increase of production and its distribution through the market, which is essentially what took place in the earlier part of the 19th century. That attitude has not died out yet. Indeed it is at the moment reviving in certain countries and to that extent the first part of the 19th century still has some lessons to teach us, though exactly what lessons, or what the exact policies deriving from them are, is a matter on which I had better not to continue to talk, because there ideology undoubtedly comes in.

Beiträge und WILHELM TREUE

Kommentare

107

/ Göttingen

Ich möchte mich auf die Zeit zwischen 1860 und 1914 beschränken. Wenn ich mir diese große Diskussion über große Zahlen, über weite Zeiträume anhöre, weiß ich nicht, wieviel mir das an neuem, zuverlässigem Wissen bringt. Ich meine, die Lebenshaltung hat sich zum Teil sehr konstant gehalten, ohne Rücksicht auf den wachsenden Wohlstand, auf die Industrialisierung. Wenn zum Beispiel der Verbrauch von Gerste in Deutschland in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts gewachsen ist, dann weiß ich nicht, ist die Gerste für Bier verbraucht worden oder für Gerstensuppe. Wenn der Verbrauch von Weizen steigt, dann weiß ich nicht, handelt es sich um Kuchen und Weißbrot für die Reichen, oder haben die Armen angefangen, Weizenmehl zu verbrauchen und Weizenbrot zu essen — aber das ist ja immerhin von einiger Bedeutung. Oder wenn ich mich daran erinnere, daß man noch in meiner Kindheit Kalbfleisch als Halbfleisch bezeichnete, daß im Gegensatz zur Gegenwart im frühen 19. Jahrhundert die armen Leute gerade „schlechtes" Kalbfleisch gegessen und die Wohlhabenden das ausgewachsene Rindfleisch bevorzugt haben, die Statistik nimmt davon nicht Kenntnis. Oder in einem anderen Gebiet ist es noch heute so, daß die Menschen bevorzugt Schwarzbrot und Speck essen und keine Butter. Sie sind nicht zu arm, um Butter zu essen, sondern sie mögen sie nicht. In anderen Gebieten wird das schwarze, trockene Brot verachtet, und man ißt Butter darauf. Hat das alles in der Statistik einen Niederschlag gefunden? Ich habe mich im Zusammenhang mit den Forschungen der Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung ein klein wenig mit der Frage der Lebensmittel, der Wohnverhältnisse und ein wenig mit der Gesundheit gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts beschäftigt. Ich bin zu dem Ergebnis gekommen, daß wir unzählige Quellen und zum Teil sehr zuverlässige Quellen für ganz bestimmte, verhältnismäßig eng umschriebene, kleine Gebiete zur Verfügung haben. Für Berlin zum Beispiel, aber auch für andere Garnisonstädte, haben wir die Listen für die Verpflegung der Soldaten, die sehr zuverlässig sind. Wir haben die Listen der Kantinen von Fabriken, und je mehr Fabriken es gab, um so mehr solche Kantinen hat es gegeben; wir haben die Verpflegungsangaben über Internatsschulen, über Arbeiterheime usw. Danach habe ich den Eindruck, daß sich in diesen offiziellen Verpflegungskategorien die Verpflegung in der Zeit zwischen 1870 und 1914 qualitativ ganz erheblich verbessert hat, zumindest für die Familienväter. Sie ist bei den Soldaten sehr viel besser geworden, und sie hat da einen sehr eigenartigen Effekt gehabt. Der junge Soldat, der in die Kaserne kam und dort regelmäßig

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Fleisch und gutes Gemüse in großer Menge bekam, und Brot und Butter und Käse, ist nach ein paar Jahren aus der Kaserne gekommen, hat geheiratet und hat von seiner Frau verlangt, daß er so ähnlich verpflegt wird wie in der Kaserne. Von den Kasernen her gibt es also ganz entschieden einen Effekt auf die Verbesserung des Lebensstandards und des Kochens und der Zubereitung und Darbietung der Speisen. Dies scheint mir redit wichtig gewesen zu sein. Es kommt hinzu, daß wir nicht immer nur von den Geldlöhnen sprechen dürfen. Wir müssen bedenken, daß auch in Großstädten nodi bis 1914 die Arbeiter vielfach ein kleines Häuschen mit einer Einliegerwohnung gehabt haben, sie haben sich Gartenland selbst besorgt oder sie haben es von ihrer Fabrik gestellt bekommen, weil sie ja einen sehr niedrigen Lohn bekommen haben. Sie haben ihr Schwein gehalten, sie haben ihre Ziege gehabt, sie haben regelmäßig, das kann ich aus meiner Kindheit noch sagen, sie haben mindestens einmal im Jahr, nämlich im Herbst oder zum Winter hin eine Reise zu der Verwandtschaft auf das Land gemacht, wo sie sich Schinken und Wurst und eingelegte Sachen geholt haben. Sie haben ihre Kartoffeln vom Lande bekommen, alles das kommt nicht in der Statistik vor. Das ist einfach eine Steigerung des Lebensstandards, von der wir nur Kenntnis nehmen können, wenn wir sie miterlebt haben oder wenn wir sie aus irgendwelchen Berichten aus früherer Zeit wissen und mit in unsere Betrachtung einbeziehen. Gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts beginnt dann auch die Konservenindustrie. In Deutschland jedenfalls gewinnt sie eine gewisse Bedeutung, natürlich fängt sie an mit teurem Gemüse, mit Spargel für die Reichen usw., aber die konservierte Speise, Wurst, Sülze und Fisch usw., das beginnt nach 1900 auch in die Arbexterbevölkerung, mindestens in die Bevölkerung der kleinen und mittleren Angestellten, der Kommunalbeamten einzuziehen und dort wesentlich die allgemeine Verpflegung zu verbessern. Die Wohnverhältnisse sind zweifellos in Berlin bis in die achtziger Jahre für die arbeitende Bevölkerung schlecht gewesen. Ich will hier nicht auf die verschiedenen Aufschließungsgesetze von Berlin eingehen, wo man die Höfe so eng gehalten hat, daß die Feuerspritze sich gerade noch in dem Hof drehen konnte, ich will nicht darauf eingehen, daß es eine lange Diskussion in der Literatur der Zeit gegeben hat, über die Frage, ob das Wohnen im Dachgeschoß gesundheitsschädlicher ist als das Wohnen im Keller — mit dem Ergebnis, daß man im Dachgeschoß häufiger im Sommer einen Hitzschlag bekommt als daß man im Winter erfriert. Im allgemeinen ist man aus dem Keller leichter und häufiger an die frische Luft

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gekommen als aus dem 8. oder 9. Stockwerk. Man kann, glaube ich, sagen, daß sich seit dem Ende der achtziger und Anfang der neunziger Jahre folgendes ergibt: ganz eindeutig steigen die Löhne und Gehälter der kleinen Einkommensgruppen, der Soldaten, der Arbeiter, der Unteroffiziere, der Feldwebel, der kommunalen Angestellten und Beamten. Ganz eindeutig steigen nicht die Mieten für die Wohnungen dieses Personenkreises, aber der Komfort in den Wohnungen steigt ganz erheblich. Wir können sehr genau feststellen, daß sie eigene Toiletten haben und eine eigene Wasserleitung und daß sie Gasleitungen haben. Der Wohnungskomfort steigt, die Belastung des Gesamtetats eines Arbeiterhaushaltes steigt nicht mit diesem Komfort, ganz im Gegenteil kann man, ob man Marxist ist oder nicht, sagen, daß gegen Ende des 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts der Lebensstandard des Arbeiters, des kleinen Angestellten beträchtlich gewachsen ist gegenüber der Zeit nach 1848. Eine letzte Bemerkung zur Frage der Gesundheit. Wir wissen, daß in Deutschland gegen Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1914 im allgemeinen die jungen Leute, die zum Militär kamen, um dort Rekruten zu werden, wenn sie aus den Städten kamen, gesünder waren, als wenn sie vom Lande kamen. In den Städten hat man besser gegessen, auf dem Lande hat man die Milch erst abgerahmt und die Butter verkauft, bevor man die Milch getrunken hat. Man hat das schlechtere Gemüse gegessen und das bessere verkauft. Dahin gehört auch, aber das will ich hier nicht ausführen, die Frage der besseren Schulbildung. Der Arbeiter hat in Berlin seit den neunziger Jahren immer häufiger einen Werksarzt gehabt, für die Armen hat es Armenärzte gegeben, auch für die mittleren Angestellten hat es so etwas wie einen Hausarzt gegeben. Natürlich ist das alles im Sinne unserer heutigen Ansprüche nicht befriedigend gewesen, aber gegenüber den vierziger, fünfziger Jahren bedeutete es eine ganz beträchtliche Verbesserung. Idi spreche hier nur von dem Gebiet Berlin, vielleicht kann man auch noch Hamburg dazu nennen, wo Antje Kraus ihre Arbeit gemacht hat, auf die ich nodi extra hinweisen möchte, und vielleicht noch ein paar andere große Städte in Norddeutschland, aber im wesentlichen möchte ich mich auf Berlin und Brandenburg beschränken; es ist, glaube ich, ganz eindeutig in dieser kleinen Region eine wesentliche Verbesserung des Lebensstandards festzustellen in der Zeit seit den achtziger Jahren bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges.

110 R . MAX H A R T W E L L

Erster Tag · 2. Hälfte

/ Oxford

I will make my remarks very brief indeed. The first point is this: insofar as the political element is important in this debate, I think that it has been recognized from the beginning. The first article I wrote on the subject was exactly on this point. However, I would argue also that interest in the standard of living controversy transcends political interests. I think it is connected very much with the universal interest in underdevelopment. It is connected also with a whole range of interests in social protest and working class movements in general. There is a feeling that somewhere in the matrix of the first Industrial Revolution lie the answers to the questions about underdevelopment and social protest. This is one of the main reasons for studying Industrial Revolution and the standard of living. Secondly, on the problem of distribution, which quite rightly has been emphasized by a number of people, there is more known and more to be learnt than some people have admitted. I think that we can find out a lot about 19th century distribution, but I agree that there has been no systematic study of distribution in the industrial revolution period. Thirdly, on the quality of life it seems to me that the debate has always mixed this up with the standard of living; but again this has been pictured clearly enough in the debate. I do not take quite so pessimistic view as the pessimists, but I think here is a subject where we have not yet got agreed criteria of measurement. It's all very well to 'assert' that there was a deterioration in the way of life, but that does not 'prove' that there was. Fourthly, on macro-economic arguments. Essentially what we have been doing all day, is trying to aggregate; the very nature of economic history is to aggregate; if we do deny ourselves the possibility of aggregation, we go back to studying individuals and it becomes impossible to generalize. We do generalize about what happened, both optimists and pessimists, and to admit that the standard of living was increasing after 1850, as the pessimists do, is a macro-economic argument. It seems to me much of this controversy lies in the macro-economic aspect of it. Fifthly, the observation of John Hicks on the slowness of working classes to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. I agree: the slowness of the working class to benefit from the Industrial Revolution was directly related to the slowness with which productivity rose. It took one hundred years in the case of England for productivity to rise to a 'substantial' level, and during that time the standard of living was kept down more by the slowness of the rise in productivity than by changes in distribution. Finally, I agree with almost everything that David Landes said, except the part on

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the quality of life, while admitting of course, that this is an extremely important subject.

SIDNEY POLLARD

/ Sheffield

I shall be brief, two minor points and just one major: one of the minor points is the conclusions that David Landes drew from migration to town. One must not forget that we may be trying to hit a moving target in this. The fact that the workers were prepared to move into town and not to move back does not necessarily mean that there was an improvement. It may well mean that there is a deterioration in acriculture, that between the time when they left the land and the time when they are told to go back, the agricultural situation has worsened, largely probably because of the population increase. There is a dynamic element in this so that I do not think we can argue that it is necessarily better to go to town. It may merely have meanwhile got worse in the country. Secondly I was very interested in what Prof. Treue said about institutional cooking and institutional provision. It may well have been true of the soldiers' cookhouses in the barracks in Germany, but one has to be very careful. In England some have been misled by work-house records which show that on paper these people had enormous supplies of meat and other provisions, and fared better than the working people outside the poor-houses. I think there is a difference in what the workhouse master put down on paper as being provided for his inmates, and what the inmates actually got. Thirdly, I am very glad that David Landes raised the point that we tend to underestimate very greatly the quality, not of life only or of eating, but the quality of working conditions, or the pace of work. I think it is only Robert Owen who made this the centre of his thought. Most people are at work for most of their waking hours so that their happiness, as he put it, at work is an important consumption good. This was neglected by employers who were only interested what the workers were willing to work for and under what conditions, and their happiness at work merely entered into their calculations via the demand for wages. But it has also been often neglected by workers themselves, because of all sorts of social conditions. In some areas, for instance in the coal mines, it was considered manly to work hard and sissy to complain about hard work, so that most men shrank from raising this issue even in their trade unions. It was apparently in order for the trade unions to ask for more wages, but rarely

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to ask for less work. There is an enourmous gap in our range of knowledge. We know very little about hours of work, the intensity of work. I happen to believe that during the Industrial Revolution intensity increased very greatly. Adam Smith, who begins with the division of labour and shows how it is possible by division of labour to multiply the output of pins, really describes an enormous intensification of labour. There are no extra machines but instead of the workman going from one process to another, he is staying on the same bench doing the same thing all the time, and thus output per head rises merely by intensification of labour. Or again, one could quote the famous story of the British workmen building the first French railways: the British workers got five shillings a day and the French got one and sixpence, yet the British labour was cheaper, so much harder had they been conditioned to work. We are told that the French came and watched the British (or rather, the Irish) eat, astonished how much they could put away. The important thing is, that a few years later, the French too were getting five shillings and were earning it. They had learned to work very hard. Even today some people work very much harder than others, who appear to be in similar kinds of occupation. It is for that reason that, historically, much agitation by employers for longer hours of work, and much agitation by workers for shorter hours, turned out to have been misplaced: people discovered that longer hours do not necessarily mean more work and shorter hours need not mean less, as there is pressure for greater intensity. In the Sheffield steel works, for example when they changed from twelve hour shifts to eight hour shifts, production per shift hardly changed. Obviously in eight hours somebody was working harder. Here is a whole area of quality of life, part of life, that we tend to neglect. Perhaps sometime in the future somebody will start working on it.

SCHLUSSWORT zur Diskussion von DAVID S . LANDES Harvard

I will respond to comments and questions in the order they were made, so as not to forget any. I thought that Professor Kallmann's point about what actually happens when people go from the country to the city is an extremely important one. Obviously we need more studies; even so I would say that the bulk of the evidence available at this time indicates that in our period — at any time in our period, that is, the nineteenth century — there was a significant differential in earnings and even in consumption between urban and rural populations. I say this in spite of the fact that country folk can augment their income substantially by growing their own food, which doesn't enter into trade, is often omitted from income estimates, and even when included is hard to measure. There is evidence, for example, from the French and Prussian statistics on meat consumption indicating a significant difference in consumption per head between city and country. Obviously, man doesn't live by meat alone; and it may well be that the country dweller sold his birthright for a mess of potage when he went to the city. This is the kind of thing that we have to look into. Still, I would be surprised if the balance sheet did not show a gain in material income for those making this move. On this point, Mr. Hobsbawm points out that the difference in income varies considerably, and that it may well be much larger today than it once was; so that we may be allowing ourselves to be misled by contemporary evidence. Perhaps, but I don't think so; I don't think you need differences of ten to one; even a difference of 30 or 50 per cent would be significant. Mr. Don spoke of the various criteria for measuring gains and losses in position. He spoke of the relative change in returns to the factors. Of course, that's the old issue, which the Marxists have laid particular stress on. You remember the old argument about " immisera tion." Was it hap-

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pening, and if so, was it absolute or relative? Well, you can work it the other way as well: are there gains, and if so, are they absolute or relative? Of course, when you open the door to the question of relative returns to factors, you are getting into some very difficult methodological and definitional problems. It's a question well worth studying, but I am not at all sure it can be handled without complicating our task considerably. Mr. Don also raised a question about the correlation between the resources of the employer and the conditions of work in his plant. Well, I am not prepared to say that there is anything intrinsic in superior resources that will lead the richer and more prosperous employers to pay their workers better or treat them better. Nevertheless the fact is that if you look at any time at a brandi of industry with a range of units of differing size and efficiencies, the highest wages and best conditions — other things equal — almost always seem to be found in the most efficient units. This is something, incidentally, that was already noted by the French historian Michelet, who wrote a fascinating essay called Le peuple in which he noted that it was the marginally inefficient enterprise that was compelled by circumstances to pay the lowest wages and exact the most work from its staff. Finally, I want to talk about what someone called the "operative question". What do I mean by that? I mean, what was the best way to reconcile the Industrial Revolution with social justice? What was the best path to follow? Frankly, I am not prepared to answer that here, if only because it would take much too long. One thing, of course, we do know, that none of the contries that have industrialized has ever followed the optimum path. We can say that simply on the basis of a priori reasoning: it is a fair assumption that everyone falls short of the best. The real question is, how short? If I look at the best-known and perhaps most important case, that is, Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, it's quite clear that not only was the path followed far short of the optimum, but it was well short of what the British themselves might have done under happier circumstances. By happier, I mean first of all the elimination of war, which imposed severe hardships on the population during the revolutionary and Napoleonic generation. Even more important perhaps would have been a more flexible, open-minded approach to these problems. If the British had not been prisoners of a political ideology that deprecated state intervention in the economy and society, all kinds of improvements would have taken place earlier. A litde willingness to undertake collective efforts would have made a lot

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of people much happier. I think that here Eric Hobsbawm makes a very good point when he says that there are lessons to be learned from all this. The only thing I would add is that we would want to learn from not only the European experience, but that of other parts of the world as well.

ZWEITER TAG

Thema

Economic Theory of the Growth of Western Europe

Diskussionsleitung WOLFRAM FISCHER

REFERAT* von D O U G L A S S E . NORTH

Seattle

(Summary)

Dissatisfied with existing theories and hypothesis of European economic history, Professor North tried to show in his lecture that economi'" historians still have a great task to perform, namely to develop a framework of analysis for European economic history that will explain the rise of Western civilization. The theory which Professor North presented to the conference should be understood as a first step in this direction. In developing his theory, he admitted his indebtedness to Marc Bloch, Carlo Cipolla, Maurice Dobb, Joseph Schumpeter and others, but through extensive research with several American colleagues notably Robert P. Thomas, he has significantly expanded their theories. Thus, he feels, his model may be regarded as a new and perhaps even heretical approach to economic history. Instead of asking — as most contemporary economic historians do — how do we get economic growth in a society, we should, in Professor North's opinion, ask how do we avoid economic growth. According to this approach, there are basically three different ways to avoid getting economic growth: 1. People do not want more goods, or they have tastes which imply that they would rather have less goods than more goods. 2. There exists a reason why one does not automatically get growth in * Da der Referent zwischenzeitlich die in seinem Vortrag über Economic Theory of the Growth of Western Europe dargelegten Gedanken zusammen mit Robert P. Thomas ausführlicher in dem Buch: The Rise of the Western World. A New Economic History, Cambridge U. P. 1973, behandelt hat, wird mit Einverständnis des Referenten sein Vortrag nur in einer Zusammenfassung vorgelegt, während wir die Zusammenfassung seiner Diskussionsbeiträge im Schlußwort im vollen Wortlaut wiedergeben.

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a system, i. e. no decision has been made about the distribution of the incentives and rewards for various kinds of economic behaviour. 3. A third reason is that productive gains caused by innovations in one sector of the economy are more than offset by the losses that occur through that innovation. Professor North gave the following example. If somebody invents the horseless carriage, a lot of horses and carriages have to be put out of business. Therefore, while having invented the horseless carriage and increased the income of a substantial part of society, losses have been incurred, losses by others. If these losses are not compensated for, people will try to prevent an invention. What has been described here are, as Professor North pointed out, property rights. He further suggested that the historian should focus his attention upon them, since, he feels, they are what stimulate productive activities. All economic systems, according to Professor North, whether they be capitalist, socialist or communist use property rights to control the flow of goods and services, to allocate resources, and to maximize the benefits of economic change. Thus in this model property rights are the key to analysing any economic system. They form the framework within which economic decisions are made. If this proposition is correct, then this body of theory is applicable to all kinds of societies, to communist and capitalist societies as well as to ancient Rome and Greece. The problem of all these societies Professor North stressed, has always been of how to develop rules in order to allocate resources in a certain fashion. North offered several examples: For many centuries the progress of ocean navigation rested on being able to determine a ship's position at any moment of time. This meant, that sea-going people would have to know two coordinates — longitude and latitude. If they did not, ships could be lost on reefs, might be late, etc. The inability to determine the position of a ship was thus an enormous impediment to progress, and only after long research, a solution was found. Professor North suggested that the breakthrough would have occured earlier, if an inventor had received some of the benefits resulting from the saving of ships and time. In addition, there would have been enormous gains for society as a whole. A second, although slightly different example for the enforcement of property rights is the case of the Spanish Mesta. At a time when land was abundant in Spain and labour was still scarce, the Spanish crown — in need for additional revenue — organized all the shepherds into a guild an gave them the exclusive monopoly for moving sheep back and forth across Spain. In return the guilds paid substantial fees to the crown. In the 15 th and 16th century population grew while returns from agriculture

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diminished. Thus it would have been natural to redefine the rights of the shepherd's guild since the fields and crops were destroyed by wandering flocks. The Spanish crown, however, was not convinced that it could gain anything from abrogating the rights of the guilds. In fact, the crown would have lost its revenues for a number of years, for all property rights on the land would have to be redefined. A third example for the importance of property rights is piracy. The threat of piracy raised the costs of commerce, reduced it, and made protection necessary. Only when navies enforced property rights, did piracy disappear. The common characteristic about all three examples is, as Professor North stated, that benefits go to a third party which has not contributed to growth. This, in his opinion, discourages economic growth. In traditional economics this characteristic is called an externality; in North's theory it is nothing more than an illspecified property right. If, however, the private and social rates of return in a system correspond, a system progresses and grows. This, North feels, leads to an important question: What gets people interested in property rights? According to his definition, it is the sudden scarcity of desirable property. If, for example, land or labour are abundant, there are no defined property rights. A good example for this hypothesis, Professor North pointed out, is Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages. It is furthermore possible to specify conditions under which slavery, serfdom, or free labour are to be expected in any given society. The same is true of all other things; when they are scarce, property rights are defined. In order to connect property rights with standard economic theory, Professor North introduced a three sector model consisting of (a) agriculture with its factors land and labour, (b) nonagriculture with the factors labour and capital and (c) government with its factors labour and capital. Of these three sectors, government is the most interesting for this new economic theory. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, there was abundant land, scarce labour, no diminishing return in agriculture, a small non-agricultural sector. During this period governments were small political and economic units, intended to provide protection and justice. The role of government was and is to enforce property rights in a system. The minimum efficient size of governments depends on whether it is impossible to survive in a system. On the supply side, survival depends upon its military power, while on the demand side it is dependent upon the power to enforce and protect property rights.

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In the Middle Ages, in contrast to the Roman Empire and to the 16th century, the basic unit of protection one needed to survive was small. Thus governments according to Professor North were small. Governments can enforce property rights more cheaply than can private parties. This means, if the protection of property rights is handed over from private enforcement to a government, there is an increase in income. With this increase in income, private parties can pay part of their income to the government as a tax. In short, if the system is succesful and provides sufficient returns, population will also grow. The growth of population will then lead to the growth of trade and commerce. This in return leads to an evolution of the manorial system and to specialization, because the system of previous labour inputs is no longer efficient. The second result of population growth is diminishing returns. With diminishing returns the price of land increases, while the price of labour decreases. This will then lead to an increase in agricultural prices, rising rents and a fall of real wages. In summary, the whole set of incentives of the system have been dianged. These changes, according to Professor North, do of course react upon the institutions of the society, since if it is possible to lower the costs of enforcing property rights in trade, trading costs will decrease in general. In order to lower these costs, trading companies, banks and insurance companies will be created. At the same time, property rights will be specified. As a result, the size of government also increases, since a larger institution is needed to protect long-distance trade. Furthermore, the development of markets, technology and warfare have also changed the efficient size of government. The result of these expenditures for the government are diminishing returns. It will lead to famine, pestilence and a general reversal of the factors of production and their relative scarcity as it happened in the 14th and 15th centuries. This is a period where labour is scarce, land is again abundant. In this kind of environment a competition for labour starts, which leads from serfdom to free labour. Thus, North argues, we get a revival of population growth somewhere from 1425 to 1474, and Western Europe goes through another Malthusian-Ricardian type of cycle development. This set of phenomena just described, these changes are common to all of Western Europe, with only slight differences. There are slightly different patterns in the 17th century between England and the Netherlands on the one hand, Spain on the other, and France somewhere in between. The reason for this parallel development is that the costs of the new kinds of warfare were enormous — much more costly than in previous

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times. To mention but one example, the change from the long-bow to far more complicated weapons required more training and organization. As a result the apparatus of the state had to be bigger than in previous times. In order to make the system work, high fiscal returns were necessary. They were dependent upon: 1. the degree of competition for running the public sector of society, 2. the gains the private sector obtained from trading property rights or taxes for other property rights, and 3. the structure of the system that produced net receipts. The crucial point about the theory — why growth is not necessary in a system — is that there exists no necessary reason why a government faced with a runaway fiscal problem, as all governments were throughout this period, should necessarily trade efficient property rights for revenues, in fact, the revenues that governments could get from trading various kinds of monopoly privileges could be substantially greater than those from selling property rights that encouraged productivity and efficiency in a system. The decisive point for every government was to get revenues immediately. As a result a king, a government, or any other authority would trade exclusive property rights in order to obtain sufficient revenues. An examination of the tax structure and fiscal policies of France and Spain over the above mentioned centuries seems to verify this conclusion, while in England and in the Netherlands governments felt that they had to grant a great deal of tax rights to the private sector. The whole development in England leading to the supremacy of Parliament in the seventeenth century appears to be the result of a struggle over embodied impersonal law and embodied property rights.

KOMMENTARE

W O L F R A M FISCHER

/ Berlin

Professor North has presented an economic theory of the growth of Western Europe. In a way this is amazing at least for those who have known Professor North for some time, because he is an expert in American economic history. But Douglass North has many talents. So he would be able to present as well a comparative analysis of French or German wines or a talk about the economic historian as an entrepreneur, because he is one of those who like to try new combinations of the factors of production in economic history and look what comes out of this new combination. I think it was such an entrepreneurial experiment what he offered us today. He wants to talk about a new theory of the growth process in Western Europe before the industrial revolution. Insofar his topic is very closely connected to Sidney Pollard's view of the industrialization process on the European Continent in the 19th century and we will see how both views fit together or how they contradict each other. What Professor North has done is to take a surprisingly simple body of accepted economic knowledge and apply it in an unusual way to things where you usually do not apply economic reasoning. For those who are pure and straightforward historians this may look somewhat strange, but for those who are used to economic reasoning this presentation was quite stimulating. In 1970, Peter Lundgreen and myself together with about twelve other scholars from different countries tried to tackle some of the problems of that kind, e. g. the differences in the bureaucracies of England, Spain and France in the early modern times, or the question of why they developed different fiscal systems. Professor North seems to have some simple answers, and if we had found the same, it would have been mudi easier for us to come to grips with these problems. We will publish a big volume at the Princeton University Press, and it may well be that with Douglass North's smaller volume on hand, we would have saved a lot of hard labour.

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DAVID S . LANDES / H a v a r d

First, let me say that I agree with a great deal of what Douglass North has said; so much so, that when I was trying to explain the precocity of European industrial development in the first chapter of The Unbound Prometheus, I made a great deal precisely of the special character of property rights in Europe and the multiplicity of units of political sovereignty, which multiplicity produced the kind of competition that Douglass was just talking about as a limit on the arbitrary, whimsical power of the state and as a protection of these same property rights. But the point I'd like to make now is simply that he ought to push his analysis a little more and look at government, the government sector, in much the same light as he looks at the rest of the economy; that he use some similar model and see what results it gives. Just to paraphrase the original equations, I am going to have Pi greater than Po, in which Ρ is power, and then my equation—which is what I think you meant to write—has a minus sign, and then we get an increment. Then we are back to essentially the same model: just as Douglass feels it is kind of normal and in the nature of human beings to prefer to have more rather than less—more goods and services, more property rights, etc. — so I am now arguing that it is in the nature of human beings to want more power rather than less. The question, then, that should pose itself to historians is why there is any limit on power. Why is there a multiplicity of units? Why isn't there one huge unit that takes over everything? (You can see here the parallel to the other argument, which runs, why isn't there growth everywhere?) And the answer in both cases lies along similar lines. But it will not be based so mudi on relative efficiencies of performance on behalf of the subjects of power, as opposed to the wielders of power. That is, it is far less likely that political behavior (including size of unit) will adjust itself to the needs of the private sector than to its possibilities of maintaining and imposing its power over others. In other words, when you look at the medieval system, you don't talk in terms of the efficient size of government, or argue whether or not in the Middle Ages a small unit was capable of protecting property rights, whereas in later times you needed a larger unit. (The fact is, there are many people who would argue today that there are all kinds of property rights that could be better protected right now by small units rather than large. There are even those who argue that police forces should be neighborhood police forces as against municipal police forces; that there should be a great deal more local autonomy in these matters as against

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national control.) All of this, of course, is largely talk. What really controls is not whether you can do these things one way or another. What counts is what the state is able and prepared to deal with, what it is able and prepared to impose, and the state has its own raison d'être, which we know as raison d'état. The reason then, for the fragmentation of sovereignty in the Middle Ages was not that it was somehow more efficient then to enforce property rights on a small scale. The controlling factor was the ability of those people who had claims to kingship and rule to govern over space and numbers. Their range of government was limited for the reasons that Douglass just pointed out. He spoke of chaos, of problems of communication, of limited movement. Because of these and similar impediments, rulers simply could not secure to themselves, appropriate to themselves, the means of enforcing their power. The question, in other words, is not what the subjects or beneficiaries felt was desirable or sufficient; it was what the rulers could and couldn't do. It seems to me that if you look at the problem this way, you come to a more meaningful understanding of what is a viable, effective political unit. If you think primarily in terms of the efficiency and protection of property rights, you simply cannot explain the enormous variety of political systems in Europe, or even more, in the world as a whole. There are all kinds and sizes; some do well; some don't. I suggest that the way to understand this variety is to introduce a second model of power relationships alongside the other model of economic relationships.

JÜRGEN K O C K A

/ Bielefeld

Certainly, the proof of the pudding is the eating, and the test of the value of a theory is its fruitful application to the exploration of concrete phenomena. In this sense it would be most promising to test Professor North's approach by using it for explaining concrete structures, processes and events of the late medieval and early modern times. This must be left to other occasions and historians specializing on those periods. I would like to comment on Professor North's approach on a more preliminary and more general level. There has been a long epistemological discussion on the merits and limits of historicism. Sometimes it was argued that the historian should not apply present theories and concepts to past phenomena, but try to express himself as much as possible in the language of the sources, with

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the concepts of the time period to be studied. I do not agree with this position. But I am sufficiently convinced by some historicist principles to argue that it is necessary that every historian asks himself whether his theories, models and concepts are adequate to the object of his study. I would like to ask this question with reference to the theory or model proposed by Professor North. 1. It is a central part of Professor North's model to distinguish between the private sectors of the system and government. Other historians (Otto Brunner for example) have convincingly argued that such conceptual separation is itself a result of something which can be described as a real separation between the socio-economic system and the political system. Of course, such a separation has never been perfect, but to a large extent it occurred on the West European continent together with the development of the modern nation state, especially during the period of absolutist rule. To apply this pair of concepts (private sectors — government) to earlier times may be very misleading since the economic, social and political dimensions were so intrinsically intertwined in the Middle Ages that one can hardly distinguish between those sectors. Think of the landlord of the 13th or 14th century. He fulfilled a certain economic function and performed a certain social role, and — by doing so — he held and executed political authority. He was not a "private" person nor a "public" one — these concepts do not fit. Professor North does not seem to realize that. He seems to have a modern notion of government; of course he does not find much of it in medieval Europe, so he concludes that government was of small size in those centuries. But would he say the same if he took into account that "government" was very dispersed and diffused into the "private" sector and that — in a way — every landlord was part of the political system of this time? How would his model change if he had concepts less anachronistic and more adequate to pre-modern times? 2. His model is also very modern and perhaps inadequate for studying pre-modern times as far as he explicitely and implicitly presupposes that a certain type of "rational" thinking and behaviour was sufficiently frequent in that early time — "rational" in the sense of aiming at optimizing the relationship between the means and costs on the one hand and the resulting gains and ends on the other. If "rational" thinking and behaviour in this sense was not developed, or if it was restricted to very small groups of people or counteracted by strong non-"rational" attitudes, dispositions and patterns of behaviour, then Professor North's model would not have much explanatory power for these early times. Now,

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historians and social scientists (Max Weber for example) have tried to show that this type of rational thinking and behaviour is a historical phenomen itself, that is, it is a product of historical processes, and cannot be regarded as necessarily given in all time periods. No one will doubt that there were some individuals — merchants for instance — who represented sudi "rational" thinking and behaviour even in the early Middle Ages. But it remains at least an open question whether sudi "rationality" guided the motives and actions of sufficiently large groups of medieval people in a sufficiently dominant way so that economic, social and political processes can adequately be explained as results of this type of action. 3. Professor North implies the relative dominance of economic factors among the causes of change and the motives of action, not only with respect to economic activities and changes proper, but also with respect to the development of the size, structure and functions of government. This becomes very clear when he defines property rights as bundles of rights of the use and sale of resources (factor markets, land, labour, capital, goods and services), and that this was the framework within which economic and political decisions were made with the aim of increasing income and returns. I doubt whether this was the dominant framework within which landlords, artisans, peasants, knights and monks of the 12th and 13th centuries made their decisions. This needs to be explored empirically. But if this was not the dominant framework within which a sufficiently large number of medieval actors made their decisions, what then does Professor North's model tell us about the causes of social change and the genesis of institutions? It would be another thing to talk about the junctions of certain changes and institutions for economic growth as conceptualized by this neo-classical model. But, if I understood him correctly, Professor North claims to do more. He presents a model for the causal explanation of certain changes (including institutional changes and the development of "government"). Here I have grave doubts. Professor North applies concepts and theoretical notions which were mainly developed in the 18th century and later, for explaining modern realities. The notion of the separation between a public sector (government) and a private sector, his notion of the "homo oeconomicus" within an environment based on property rights and basically contractual agreements, and the idea of the dominance of the economic dimension — these are largely ideas of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which possess some explanatory power when applied to the modern socio-economic reality (out of which they originated). Like all concepts and theories their applicability increases and decreases with the extent to which the elements

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they identify exist and dominate in the real world which is to be conceived of by those concepts and theories. Applying a theory without first exploring whether — or to what extent — such correspondence between concepts and reality is given, may easily become anachronistic.

WILLIAM PARKER

/ New Haven

I get hung up at the very beginning on the question of the relation of property rights to growth. You seemed to imply that this was sort of an automatic connection. If everybody just got what he contributed, bearing indeed also the costs that were incurred by the contribution, then you could hardly avoid growth. Now I don't understand the difference between your concept of property rights and monopoly. Are you saying that you can get a maximum of innovation and expectation of innovations by vesting the exclusive and perpetual property right to the innovation in the innovator? I can't believe that you are making that strong an argument for monopolies. Competition is by definition an infringement, an abrogation of property rights, yet surely it has something to do with growth. Besides, growth is a matter not just of invention, but of investment, and there is no automatic answer to the question of how much should a society invest. If it invests more, it gets more growth; if it invests less, gets less, but property rights don't tell you how much to invest. I think there is confusion here from the very start in this use of property rights, as an automatic solution to the problem of how fast a society would grow.

YEHUDA DON

/ Ramat-Gan

The theory of Professor North is capable of explaining, in the medieval context, much more than presented in his lecture. It can explain, for instance, urbanization as well as competition for labour during the 13th century and 14th century. There was sudi competition and the approach of Professor North may explain it very well. The Flämische Recht and the Villa Nova are obvious examples of such competition and the new structure of the extra-feudal village system is another example. This is just a general remark. However, Professor North makes a very crucial assumption, regarding the similarities of the preference functions of all individuals operating in

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the society. I tend to think that most historical events were exactly the results of differential preference functions of various groups in society. Just to mention a few examples, let us look at the schism between the church and the commercial sector. Both had preference functions and each of them tried hard to maximize something different. Furthermore most conflicts emanated from such differences in preference functions of different groups who came to conflict either in their attempts to gain a greater share of the existing physical resources of society or on the issue of what should be the eventual production function of society with regard to maximization of certain objectives. Let me make another remark as regards the production functions themselves. The introduction of the government sector into the production function is just too pertinent a thing. I would suggest to introduce into the two sectors production function model a third independent variable, government services. Thereby sector A's output will thus be the function of land, labour and government services. And the amount of externalities that a particular sector in a certain set of circumstances expects to obtain in order to preserve its property rights and set it out to produce, will depend on factor endowments and relative prices. In that respect the model would be probably more complicated since the output which is the dependent variable of sector C is becoming an independent variable for sectors A and B. Finally, I have some general remarks. You assume homo oeconomicus. This assumption boils down to disregarding spiritual movements, ideologies, phenomena like national self-identifications. Such an assumption, indicating that only the rational considerations for the economic wellbeing exist where they are just not present, is a gross and unpermittable oversimplification. Would sudi extra-economic considerations not influence the objective function of the government sector? What is the demand for government services in Holland during the Spanish system and what is the demand for government services during the era of independence? When we have a situation of inherent dissatisfaction due to the lack of fulfillment of some sort of extra-economic desires, the amount of government demand and the sort of services needed will be totally different than in a situation of social, national or religious fulfillment. Irrational sets of values have great influence upon the amount of and quality of government services demanded by the public.

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MAX HARTWELL

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/ Oxford

Actually, some of the things that were said were things that I'd like to say. Indeed Professor North should have been here in the first session, because I agree with him that one of those interesting problems in economic history is the relationship between man and state and that makes the state perhaps the most important unit of study in economic history. I think, however, that he has demonstrated that a necessary condition of economic growth is not also a sufficient condition of economic growth. It seems to me that there are many reasons other than the ones he mentioned why economies do not grow; they include natural resources and population. There are disabilities within any economy which arise from inappropriate property rights or a lag in establishing property rights, but to explain growth at any time you must do more than look at the structure of property rights and the legal structure. I agree with you that these must in some sense be 'appropriate', but they are not in themselves any necessary conditions of growth. On the other hand I totally disagree with you in thinking that economic theories are irrelevant for pre-industrial economies. All you are saying is, that 'rationality' in sudi societies can be defined in terms of religious satisfaction or the other satisfactions; but personal utility functions can be defined in different ways. Many medieval organizations were very 'rational': the medieval manor to my way of thinking may have been a very efficient organization in terms of rationality. What you might say, of course, it that over time the type of economic rationality that Douglass North was talking about, makes for greater economic efficiency. I do not see that this conflicts with economic theory. In any case the economic problems which a society faces at any time are exactly the same as in another society: the problem of scarcity, of organizing the factors of production, of what goods to produce, of how to produce, of how to distribute. Economic theory is concerned with the science of choice, with deciding these things or at least with explaining these decisions.

ALAN

S.

M I L WARD

/ Manchester

Of course it is acceptable in medieval society or medieval government to analyse by this kind of neoclassical analysis, it is acceptable everywhere, but it seems to me to leave Professor Kocka's main point quite unscathed.

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As you yourself admit neither medieval society nor medieval government was in fact a production function. I submit to you that the reason that you don't have the 'exogenous factors' in your model is because your model would never be big enough to hold those 'exogenous factors' in it which are really important. They are not slight incidents, but very significant factors. I also submit to you that a theory of economic growth is not a theory of economic history. And that a theory of economic history is certainly not a theory of history. So we are somewhat short of what you claim to have told us. I caught another word. I don't think that theories of economic growth nor theories of economic history nor theories of history are theories of progress. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that progress is a meaningless word. Finally, I submit to you that rationality is not always to be equated with the kind of model building that would really explain, as Professor Kocka said, medieval society. I am not attacking the main points of your thesis, I am trying to reduce it to its correct size. I want to see how little it really applies itself to and how trivial it is historically.

FRANÇOIS CROUZET

/ Paris

If I understood Douglass North properly, he sees the abolition of serfdom as a consequence of the demographic and economic decline of the 14th and 15th centuries, which made again land plentiful and labour scarce. Of course this is quite logical, but, as a matter of fact, at least in France and some other countries, most serfs were freed in the 13th century, and the emancipation started in the 12th century in some places, and therefore during the period of population increase.

HENRYK SKRZYPCZAK

/ Berlin

I am going to restrict myself to two short questions: Question No. 1 : Professor North differentiates between communist as well as socialist societies, on the one hand and market societies on the other. Why doesn't he call a spade a spade, why is he avoiding the term "Capitalist society"? Question No 2: Does Professor North exclude under all circumstances

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that market elements could be combined with basic structures in socialist societies?

ALICE TEXCHOVA / Norwich

I would like to say a few words, because I heard Douglass North a few years ago at Yale University (in 1968), when he was weening his theory. Since then he and Robert P. Thomas have made substantial additions to the theory. I have tried to do my homework by reading their articéis in the

Economic History Review and in the Journal of Economic History. However, when I tried to follow today's lecture I became rather confused, and I failed to see what the theory is supposed to solve. When I heard its first version it was to explain 600 years of economic development, i. e. from 1200 to 1800, in the Northwestern parts of Europe. Yet today's talk proclaims it to be a theory which explains all societies all through the ages, or at least from ancient times to the present day, including even a socialist society. If this were so, it would of course be a tremendous contribution to theory. I am not quite sure whether this is what Douglass North actually meant. If so, may I put a few questions to the speaker. The first question concerns the assumption of the rational man. I feel that the rational man is a horror in society. Can one really accept as a serious working hypothesis that everything a human being does conforms to the profit maximizing motive? Secondly, I should like to ask whether concepts of a modern society are not anachronistic when applied to medieval society. If terms like price mechanism, wages of labour and market forces are used (as is done in the articles) to describe a medieval economy, doubts must be voiced; for medieval economic systems were to a large extent autarkic, and consisted of extremely dispersed and unconnected economic units where a money economy in the market sense hardly existed until the very late middle ages. Thirdly, am I right in assuming that Professor North is basing his ideas on the theory that private and social profitability have a tendency to equate themselves? Fourthly, is it correctly understood that he takes population change as one of the prime movers of economic development, i. e. that he relates various economic phenomena to the growth or decline in population? In

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our discussion yesterday, I think, it was more or less accepted that history has shown population changes to be very often an autonomous factor. My last point concerns Professor North's concept of the state which appears as the guardian of property relations. He says in his article that his theory sounds like Marxian but it isn't: this reminds me of an advertisement I saw on television in the United States which claimed of a product that 'it tastes like tomato juice, but it isn't'. When one regards the state as a coercive power to defend property rights in every society, it seems to me to agree with the Marxian concept of the state's function in society.

SIDNEY POLLARD /

Sheffield

I have been roused by the remarks about Marxism. Although I think Professor North's is a very interesting theory and it raises a lot of interesting questions, it has the delightful quality of assuming that every vote in this world is equal. But history is not like this. What matters, and the rationale behind "rational" decisions, is the interest of the people who make decisions, and not of Society as a whole. Thus there is no justification for postulating that the greatest social benefits will be chosen. You are apparently studying classical History now, and clearly there are long periods in the history of the Roman Empire when the Romans lived by conquering, robbing and enslaving new colonies; while the output of the Mediterranean basin became lessened thereby, the Romans (who were the only ones who mattered in that context) did well on it. Or again, look at the behaviour of the Spaniards in Latin America. Quite clearly the result of their activities in their first 100 or 200 years was that the total benefit was less while the Spaniards got more. Another example might be the re-establishment of serfdom in Russia. Total satisfaction probably declined, but the satisfaction of those who made the decisions probably rose. Rationality in historical situations consists of the maximizing of wealth, power, satisfaction etc., to the people who make decisions. I have a second point, a positive point. There is a theory in existence, by R. G. Wilkinson, which has many striking similarities to yours, though it starts from exactly opposite assumptions. He assumes that societies prefer no change. A happy society is a society that does not grow or does not want to grow, happy people are people who do not want to get richer, and the only time when change or innovation occurs, is when the society is under attack.

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And usually this happens because resources decline in relation to population, either because population grows or because resources decline. You will recognize here a problem of ecology. Out of it he develops a theory that innovation and change are defensive reactions and sometimes if you are lucky, the pendulum swings too far, and, trying to prevent a decline in resources, society innovates so much that an increase occurs. I think that you may find it interesting to compare this line of thought with your own.

S C H L U S S W O R T

zur Diskussion * von DOUGLASS C . NORTH Seattle

I would like to answer all of your questions and remarks. David Landes raised some points that happen to be things that are enormously more elaborated elsewhere and also happen to be exactly what I am working on right now. In short, I think that the key to all of economic history today is theorÌ2Ìng about the relationship of the state to the economic system. That is the dilemma, the dilemma of the failure to grow. Always somehow you have a state which does not enforce an efficient set of property rights. Therefore what you want to do is, you want to have some theorizing about the state. I do not agree with some of what David Landes said, and I want to encourage anybody, who intends to integrate theorizing about the state with economic theorizing to do so, because I think that is where we are going to make some progress. Let me suggest a couple of things in response to what David Landes said. First, I think he and I disagree about what we mean by efficiency. All I mean by efficiency is that you get the same result at a lower cost, or to put it another way, that I can have some amount of protection and justice at X cost and if it is less efficient it costs me more, or I get different points on the scale. Therefore my definition of what I mean by efficiency is: efficient units are going to survive against inefficient ones. This is very crucial, because I think if you follow that then you can make logic out of what is an efficient size unit because in fact what I hope to do in my forthcoming book is to talk about what in fact does determine the supply function for protection of justice, and * Die folgenden Ausführungen stellen eine Aneinanderreihung verschiedener Stellungnahmen des Referenten in der Diskussion und eine Zusammenfassung mit seinen eigentlichen Schlußbemerkungen zu den einzelnen Diskussionsbeiträgen der Teilnehmer dar.

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what determines the demand function for it and what in turn therefore is going to be the efficient size and what happens to it over time. In fact, I want to move to another point, that is related to it over times. Now I would like to examine this public sector, this sector three in my model in exactly the same way as you examine the first two sectors and in fact that also is over its time that we did do look at the productivity in the sector. I am willing to look at it exactly the way you do in the private sector which is: you look at output per units of input. You say that is impossible with governments. In the last 25 years in economic research we have been trying to measure productivity in the service sector of the economy. It has been enormously difficult, because the service sector typically does not produce the tangible output, it produces insurance or banking or things like that. We have been having an enormous job doing it. We are beginning now to get into things like health services. We are getting measures of productivity. I submit, that looking at the efficiency with which you can provide any given level of protection and justice is exactly the same thing. Now what I want to argue is that what makes for economic units tending to decline, to get in a vast array of invested things, is that the productivity of the three sectors together fall. I think it falls for reasons that I hope I can explain over time but which essentially means that you have probably the public sector productivity falling, which in turn drags down the other two. I am not sure that we are too much in disagreement with what you mean by power and I mean by economic efficiency, because I would argue that power, the degree in which you really are powerful is the function of how economically efficient you are. *

Let me start out with another point now, which I think touches on quite a few of the points that have been raised; that is when I talk about the three sector model, or the model in which there is agriculture, nonagriculture and something called the state or government. Let me emphasize that this model with very slight variations is applicable to all systems at all times, including communist systems, socialist systems, any other system. I want to make that point very strongly because, indeed, that is a crucial point. Now it is true that given the concept of looking at medieval economy and its breakdown and the rising of more modern economies I talked about as though it was a private sector. The first two were private, the third was something called government. It doesn't make any difference to my model with respect to a theoretical framework of

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analysis in terms of analysing the structure of all economic systems that the first is just called an agricultural sector, the second is just called a nonagricultural sector and the third is called the state. The reason is that there are certain critical constraints that are technical engineering and physical, that specify what can happen in these systems. I don't care what the system is like. *

Let me specify some of the items you raised. There are times when the first sector was subject to constant returns, when the supply of land was perfectly elastic or almost perfectly elastic. Obviously under those conditions, why then the first and the second sectors have the same characteristics? I don't argue about that. All I am saying is, that because in my view and I might add in along view of history, diminishing returns turn out to have been an overwhelming recurrent dilemma for all of man's history. You want to separate the sectors off, because in fact this produces the changes in relevant factor prices, that produced many of the consequences throughout history, even though there are times when two sectors could be treated in homogenous fashion. But I do want to emphasize this general point, because I would say that indeed there is a fascinating literature growing up now. I am applying it to the Soviet Union. I am applying it to Poland today because all societies are exploring the dilemmas in the relationship of three sectors which have certain characteristics to them with respect to the patterns of behaviour you get. So what I want to emphasize about the model is, that it is not just one that relates to the modern world, or a world of private enterprises, it is a model that relates to the structure of all economic systems. All economic systems have to operate within this set of constraints, and I want economic historians from my viewpoint to begin to think this way. Having been reading for the last 1 1 / 2 years about ancient history I am simply horrified at what I read with respect to simple knowledge about the basic elements of this model, what it would do to unravel vast amounts of things which should not be very controversial, because that part is not controversial in the sense that David Landes and I agree on it, which as Bill Parker says, must be the end of the world. I think that that produces some interesting implications. This leads me to the point about neoclassical theory and I, of course, would agree with Max Hartwell. All of neo-classical theory as I use it — and incidentally I don't use macro-theory — is nothing more than

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talking about what a production function is about with certain specified constraints. You don't even have explicit prices in the system for something, as it becomes relatively scarce, to have people bidding it away in different fashions. Indeed as I hope to illustrate in a minute, they did that in all societies whether there really were explicit prices or not. They do it in socialist societies. One of the vast dilemmas of communist and socialist societies is how to define a body of property rights in the system that encourages productivity increase. There is a story that a friend of mine has told me many times, which is true, about the Soviet Union in attempting to do this. When they tried to encourage output and they did so by saying to a factory manager, who produced glass, that he must produce so many pounds of glass a year, and the factory manager did. He produced the quota of glass and it was this thick, because you can produce thick glass very easily. You couldn't see through it, but he got his quota. Since that wasn't quite what they wanted, they said, well, we will make it square feet of glass and so the next time he produced the requisite amount of square feet of glass, but that time he produced such vast amounts as soon as you touched it, it chattered. The dilemma of that sort of thing is that you don't provide a set of signals in the system to get what you want and that is all you are talking about by the structure of property rights, and so it is relevant to socialist societies. It is subject of a big controversy today about the running of Jugoslavian factories, all which revolve around a set of property rights, about the structure of incentives in the system and who gets the gains from that X increase in output. It's universal and has not anything to do with neo-classical theory in a sense, all it's got to do with it is: what is the combination of parameters, constraints, be it physical engineering or science that man works with, which influence him, and in agriculture there was a constraint all through history that land of certain quality was relatively fixed. I am trying to apply exactly the same model to government and argue that you can make a model specifically about the size of government that can survive in precisely the terms of a supply curb, with a shape to it like the supply curbs of others and which also has a fixed factor in it. The fixed factor — suffice to say — I cannot explain it here, is information cost, and with a fixed factor of information cost therefore changes in technology like writing for example shift the function out enormously, because the cost of information of organizing a large scale system fall tremendously. But the point I want to make is that you are not talking about anything that necessarily means you buy neo-classical theory in any more elaborate sense than that.

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Rationality, point two, simply means that when man knows better he chooses to not do something that would give him as much output as he can have or as much income as he has. I submit to you that frequently happens, I don't want to argue that man always acts rational, in fact it isn't necessary for the model to always act rational. It is necessary if there are enough people in the system who prefer more goods to less goods, so that they act that way. I submit to you that all systems through history always had people who felt that way, and I submit there is a stronger point than that. The lower the level of well-being that man had, the less he could afford to be irrational. He didn't have a lot of leadway in the system to behave in the way that got him less, because in fact he was always on the edge. So that if a peasant behaved irrational, he was going to starve to death. Now it is true the head of a great corporation, Henry Ford for example, could afford to be as irrational as he wanted for a long period of time and he would still survive. That was mudi less true as you go back to economies with greater and greater scarcety. So I don't think rationality is something that is a problem, that is worth too much discussion. *

There are different degrees of risk diversion and one of the big developments of institutiones are institutions devised to change risks in a system. And in fact, a lot of the institutions we talk about here, are institutions which are specifically developed in device, because they shift from uncertainty to risk, they allow you to act, to determine distribution of risk in the system and therefore to reduce the cost of undertaking activities. The whole development of capital markets essentially is concerned with this kind of a phenomenon, but I don't regard that as a degree of irrationality. We do say that people have different sets of preference functions any moment of time with respect to risk diversion. Now, did landlords make decisions rationally with respect to property rights? There is a vast literature that suggests that in fact that they did. When you have a common property resource, for instance, when you are talking about air today which is a common property resource, or water frequently, or pasture land in the medieval world, you overuse it, if you don't have a set of exclusive rights to a resource. And as soon as you define them that way, you force people to use them differently and by economic terms more efficiently. That's not a very controversial point. Environmental problems today are simply the problems of defining prop-

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erty rights over things tha tit is very hard to define property rights on, and they become scarce. That's all the environmental issues are today. It may be hard to define them and specify them which is what I have always said. The problems of measurement of property rights in this context poses us a dilemma, but they are not a different problem from common property rights and the pasture problem in medieval times when you got population growth and pressure on population. What was government in the medieval times? Again referring to the general model, all I want to do is look on government as something that specifies and enforces property rights. You say that is a very limited view of government. Suffice to say that I agree. The manor in the medieval world is partly a government, but it is also sort of a voluntary organization, in the sense that it is inbetween. It doesn't pose me a problem with respect to how I look at it in terms of the three sector model. There is no doubt that the lord of the manor at times was being a landlord and renting out land, even cultivating his own. At times he was also sitting in justice over the group of serfs that he had. Now that's no different than today. I have somebody who owns a piece of land, and part of the time he is acting as a landowner and part of the time he is acting as a labourer on his land. There are still factors of production which I separate out for heuristic purposes, I want to theorize about. Bill Parker's point about the relationship of property to growth: There is nothing in what I have said, that can be called an optimum rate of growth. There is no such thing in economics as an optimum rate of growth. What there is however, is a rate of growth, that you will get if you specify just two things in the world and then have zero transaction costs: These are peoples' preferences with respect to present versus future goods and peoples' preferences with respect to the number of children they want to have. If you put that into your long run model then if you add zero transaction costs, you are going to get various ways of growth depending on the preferences on those two items. But that's all you need to have a perfectly close model, and it answers all the problems about what rate of growth you are going to have. As far as I am concerned, we are not asking: do I want to have an infinite rate of growth? But with respect to the rate of growth — and I am not asking whether you will get one rather or another — I am saying what will make an economy grow is zero transaction costs or as close to no externalities in the system as possible. Because that in fact is going to mean that everybody gets the rewards for what they give and get, and get punished for

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the costs of things that they do. If they have that set of preferences, you get whatever rate of growth is dictated by those other two variables. Let us take the savings: First of all, we know it is an empirical function that people do prefer present over future goods. Indeed, the Soviet Union and lots of places have learned that you cannot do without an interest rate for precisely this kind of a problem. If you give everybody free choice what in fact they will do is: they want to consume today and tomorrow if there is no uncertainty about tomorrow. As soon as you introduce uncertainty you get various kinds of preferences. You have to pay them a premium of some sort with respect to the postponement of present consumption in favour of future consumption, then they do invest in the future. The second point about children. I see no reason why one shouldn't treat the whole issue of fertility exactly within the context of a property rights approach. There is no reason why we shouldn't look at private and social costs of having children in which we recognize that children have private benefits and costs to them and have social benefits and costs and that these diverge, because children incur certain costs on the rest of society beyond the cost that they incur on their parents. But social costs are very different in, for example, a period of diminishing return. There an additional amount is not just the fact you get less from him when you have him in your family than you did when there was no diminishing return. But also he increases the competition in an already swollen labour supply, which (a) reduces everybody's wage rate a little bit, and (b) incidentally in the medieval world contributed to crowding and probably to disease spread. So you have a divergence between the two. Let me just say that this is not such a wild approach to fertility as it sounds. With respect to differential preference functions, part of that relates back to what Bill Parker said. I think that quite clearly in all societies amongst any group of people there are very different preference functions that exist. I don't want to argue that a model like this explains behaviour which is purely non-economic in this world. There is no implication in my discussion that I am trying to say that this model explains everything. I want to make this clear, because it seems that one criticism you always get when you try to cast your net somewhat wider than existing models, you always get attacked. I want to argue that with this model I can explain a greater array of economic phenomena in the past than we could before. I don't want to say that the world is all determined by economic behaviour, it is clearly not. I want to say that I can explain more with

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this than I can without it and not suggest. I want to make this a general theory of human society and behaviour for all kinds of activities. *

I hate to restate the argument: If you make the two assumptions that I made about savings and children, economy automatically grows at some rate and there is nothing else that enters the thing. You can throw something in and say that, but it is exogenous to the model at this point. I just don't think it serves the model. I don't want to argue that they don't impinge upon it. I think at this point it does not help the model to throw them in. Incidentally, the church is in the model. The church was not only rational but it behaved like another state. It sold salvation in addition to selling protection and justice, so that you had property rights in both worlds. That's why it survived so long. Do you want to include government in the first two sectors again, which is what you are saying? You are saying that in the first sector you ought to include let us say agriculture, but I suppose you can rework the model. I think it is more useful the way I approach it for this reason, that I am saying that you are trading taxes for a set of rights with respect to the specifications enforcement of property in each of those sectors; I'd rather keep the costst and the benefits of that in the third sector, because in terms of analysing that third sector I think I can do more with it. *

In some respects the way in which an economist approaches attempting to deal with history and the historian does it is different enough, so we spent a lot of time talking past each other. Let me repeat something I tried to say, but I don't think I have gotten over very well. That what I view theorizing in economic history is all about is: attempting to develop models which have greater explanatory value for the phenomenon that we are interested in than those that currently exist and by that I have a purely relative notion. I think there are two questions that economic historians are interested in: what causes changes in the absolute amount of income that a society has, defined properly which the national accounts don't do, and what happens to distribution of income in the course of those changes. What economic historians are concerned with is to explain why there are changes up or down in income of the society over time, what happens and why it happens and to who gets how mudi of that change. Given that

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kind of thing, what you try to do is to develop models that provide you with better explanatory power. This is precisely the methodology of the social sciences which in this case is precisely analogous to the physical sciences, that is nobody that I know of in physics has claimed that you have a general model in physics, that explains everything. As a matter of fact, Newtonian physics became a special case of a general model after Einstein and there are all kinds of inconsistencies that physicists find today about the world, that are not explicable by their theory. In fact, the whole process that you go about in physical theory is to enlarge in the model and to explain a greater array of phenomena. That's all I am trying to do. — In respect to the serf issue; we discussed that, and I don't know how mudi I want to go back over the details of the process by which feudalism and serfdom was transformed in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. Suffice to say that there is nothing inconsistent with what you say, with the way in which we treat the transformation in this book we talked about. We talked about how in the 12th and 13th centuries commutation and changes in the relationship between serf and lord were affected by the increasing abundance of labour, or the falling relative price of labour. And that the change in the master-servant relationship of serfdom was transformed in the 14th and 15th centuries. With respect to socialist and communist societies and markets and why I do not call the society capitalist? I have never found a definition of capitalism that I understood. At one time, I got asked to be on the panel in the international economic history meetings on it, so I finally withdrew because I could not figure out what was meant by capitalism. And I think indeed we spend too mudi time on labels that I do not think are terribly meaningful. I think, it is more important to provide some rather neutral and analytical framework of the system which analyses and explains what we are trying to do. I do not mind calling it capitalist, if we all agree by what we mean by capitalist. I do not mind calling it socialist or communist for the same reason. Does that mean you have markets in one or the other? I submit to you that this brings me to a very neglected point in the exposition, which focuses very largely in this and has been a focus even more largely in subsequent work. All decision making in all systems in the world is made in one of three ways. It is either made in the market place, it is made by voluntary organisations or it is made by governments. One of the things it seems to me we are concerned to answer is, why the range of decisions varies over time. Why did we get periods in history, when an increasing

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proportion of decisions moved from the market into voluntary organisations or from the market into government or vice versa. Let me assert for you right now, that indeed they move in both directions over long enough periods of time. And indeed all the interesting work that I know is going on in theory of organization — which happens to be one of the hottest cups of topics in economic theory — is concerned with the logic of what proportion of economic activity is encompassed in a market or what is enclosed let's say in a firm. And I submit it is a very exiting body of theory which goes a long way and is complimentary to what I am trying to do, because it really explains why these things change over time. In that sense, of course, you do have markets in socialist countries. Jugoslavia has been attempting to simulate them for a long time. It has been very important for them to do so. Some other socialist countries are trying to do so, just as we take things out of the market. I think all societies have to solve this problem by varying mixtures of the way in which decision making is performed. In this book I am attempting to provide a model which provides an explanation of more of the phenomena that have bothered economic history, about what made feudalism have a degree of stability, what the internal relationships were in it, what made it decline, what made it become replaced by a different mixture of markets, voluntary and government, which we sometimes call the nation state, mercantilism etc.; and what eventually led to the relative differential growth patterns of the four countries, Netherlands, England, France and Spain. The model was specifically oriented to that. Let me say that when you take a model, that is general and you want to apply it then, you add additional specifications to the model to make it apply to the particular problems that you are concerned with. But the more I got into it, the more I was interested in the general problem that it seems to me is crucial for economic historians to come to grips with: to have a common framework of examining what makes all economic systems work. I don't say that this is nearly as neat, it is on a much more abstract level, but it seems to me enormously useful with respect to its potential implications as far as how we can use it to get at problems in other spheres. *

If you gain property, you gain wealth. And the basic presumption I make in the model of people who prefer more wealth than less is that they are always trying to do that in any system. What I am more interested in

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is that the model as elaborated in the first essay in the Economic History Review, said nothing more than there is an economic model which is a simple Malthusian-Ricardian model on which however, because of the change in relative factor prices, you get changing incentives to create new institutions. So it is a model that tries to grab a purely economic model with a model of institutional change. What now we have gone on to is to try to also explain how the institutions do not necessarily guarantee progress. I do not therefore believe that private and social rates of return necessarily tend to equate over time. Underdeveloped areas in the world are a classic prove that they do not. The fact that most of the world is underdeveloped, and I would apply this model to them, suggests in fact that there is no such tendency. The decline of the Roman Empire suggests that it moved in the other direction. I would presume, population change is the exogenous factor in the model, it is indeed for me population change what makes it move. I include the state really as a sector, and its factors of production in producing protection and justice in the state. Is it a Marxist model? It is in the sense that both, Marx and I are concerned with, about the same things. Marx said the development of an efficient set of property rights was progress for a capitalist society and I agree. What I think the model is concerned with is to go on to explore exactly why that is so. It differs radically from a Marxist model on a very crucial point. A Marxist model implies that you are always going to get to the desired end, i.e. you eventually get to a socialist society, but there is nothing inevitable about progress, if that is progress, in my model. It is build into my model, you can get growth not progress, or you can get stagnation and decline in the system. In that sense it is very crucial. There are also some other differences. It is not an Adam Smith model either. He doesn't talk about what makes governments efficient or inefficient in the sense that I try to do. Where does the church emerge? I thought we had talked about that two or three times. I do not know if there is anything more to say, except to say that it is slighted. I agree in this, but despite the fact that it is slighted I do not think that it poses me a problem. I said it humorously but I meant it, that you treat the church as a state. It did in medieval times provide protection and justice. It really was a state and it also offered in addition salvation and got paid for it. You willed your land to the state and you had a better chance to make it into the next world. There is a very interesting paper on this by an economist named Warren Scoville which he has never published, but which explores this in some details.

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I would like to get to your point that everybody is equal. If I had more time I would explore in much more detail the whole relationship between fiscal policy and property rights. There it assumes that the relative bargaining position of — and I would grade the sectors down in much more details — various groups in these sectors suggest for instance where the taxes are going to be. If in fact, they offer threats to the system, they are going to be less likely to be taxed than if they do not. It is much more sophisticated with recognizing, but it is explicitly looking at people unequal with respect to their bargaining strenght vis-a-vis the other sectors. Now that may be an inadequate way but at least it goes part way to your point. Your next point is no different than my point about the state. I am saying what in fact you get with inefficient property rights is that some people gain at the expense of others when in fact you grant a monopoly. The result is that you get less output in the system. But some groups gain and the state is willing to do it because in the short run it gains from doing it. So I do not want to argue that it produces quite the opposite. A big part of the argument is exploring why states decline, which in fact is usually because some group did gain, but it was an inefficient source of gain with respect to the total output in the system.

GRUSSWORTE zum Abschluß der Tagung W I L L I A M PARKER

/ New Haven

On behalf of myself, and I assume the others, I think, we should thank our hosts and especially Professor Büsch for this invitation to the conference and for the efforts they have put forward to make the session so well planned, interesting and lively. Thank you!

OTTO B Ü S C H

/ Berlin

Meine Damen und Herren, ich habe Ihnen im Namen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin dafür zu danken, daß Sie alle im Rahmen des Konsultationsprogramms zu diesen "intellectual exercises" zu uns nach Berlin gekommen sind, vor allem Professor Pollard, daß er dieser Tagung mit seinem Namen und mit seinem Thema "Industrialisierung und 'Europäische Wirtschaft'" den zentralen Inhalt verliehen hat. So möchte ich hoffen, Sie werden von dieser Tagung die Erinnerung mitnehmen, daß wir hier im internationalen Gedankenaustausch gemeinsame Probleme haben besprechen können und daß Sie willkommen gewesen sind in Berlin, wo unsere Historische Kommission ihren Sitz hat und von wo aus sie hofft, weitere Freunde dazugewonnen zu haben. In diesem Sinne wünsche ich Ihnen allen bleibenden Gewinn von diesen Berliner Tagen.

HISTORISCHE KOMMISSION ZU BERLIN Berlin 4S (Licbterfelde)

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Vorstand: HANS HERZFELD / OTTO BÜSCH WOLFRAM FISCHER / GERD HEINRICH GEORG KOTOWSKI / DIETRICH KURZE HANS-DIETRICH LOOCK / ILJA MIECK FRITZ MOSER / JOHANNES SCHULTZE HENRYK SKRZYPCZAK / WILHELM TREUE KLAUS ZERNACK

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VERÖFFENTLICHUNGEN DER HISTORISCHEN KOMMISSION ZU BERLIN

Band 9 KURT HINZE

Die Arbeiterfrage zu Beginn des modernen Kapitalismus in BrandenburgPreußen 1685—1806 Bibliographisch vermehrte und verbesserte, mit einem Register-Anhang versehene 2. Auflage mit einer Einführung von O t t o Büsch Groß-Oktav. X X , 296 Seiten. 1963. Ganzleinen D M 44,— Band 20 ILJA MIECK

Preußische Gewerbepolitik in Berlin 1806—1844 Staatshilfe und Privatinitiative zwischen Merkantilismus und Liberalismus Mit einer Einführung von Wolfram Fischer und O t t o Büsch. Groß-Oktav. X V I , 276 Seiten. 1965. Ganzleinen D M 46,— (Publikationen zur Geschichte der Industrialisierung 1) Band 24 HANS ROSENBERG

Große Depression und Bismarckzeit Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik Mitteleuropas Groß-Oktav. X I I , 301 Seiten. 1967. Ganzleinen D M 34,— (Publikationen zur Geschichte der Industrialisierung 2) Band 39 INGRID THIENEL

Städtewachstum im Industrialisierungsprozeß des 19. Jahrhunderts Das Berliner Beispiel Mit einem Vorwort von O t t o Büsch Groß-Oktav. X I V , 504 Seiten. Mit 36 Tabellen im Text und 8 kartographischen Darstellungen in Rückentasche. 1973. Ganzleinen D M 84,— (Publikationen zur Geschichte der Industrialisierung 3) Band 40 HARTMUT KAELBLE

Berliner Unternehmer während der frühen Industrialisierung H e r k u n f t , sozialer Status und politischer Einfluß Mit einem Vorwort von O t t o Büsch Groß-Oktav. X I I , 302 Seiten. Mit 33 Tabellen. 1972. Ganzleinen D M 68,— (Publikationen zur Geschichte der Industrialisierung 4)

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