“The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”
I gave broad thoughts on David Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations earlier this week, but today I’m going to try to give a flavour of the kind of broad themes he talks about. This, I think, is the real strength of the book: the breadth of scope and insight it brings to bear,
The kind of broad questions he tackles are not thought about enough, I think. Sung China had mechanized power in ironmaking; Europe had windmills; early modern Italy had shipbuilding. Why didn’t they have an Industrial Revolution? Why did England? And why in the 18th century?
He argues it occurred in the UK for 3 reasons. The autonomy of intellectual inquiry, the method and language of understanding science and discovery, and the invention of invention (the routinization of research), all, he argues, contributed to England’s success. Other countries in Europe had obstacles to development, holdovers from the medieval period like serfs, guilds, and trade barriers, while the UK led the way in changing those institutions to suit the new economy. In addition, he gives some credit to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, though he is equally happy to credit a Buddhist work ethic that emphasizes the same virtues. A follower of any religion can have the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, etc., he points out, but perhaps the incentives were higher for Protestants.
Most of us have heard of the industrial revolution, but it’s the uncommon book that can really capture the industrial evolution from mechanized textiles, which led to steel through a focus on process, which led to dyes made with coal byproducts, which would in turn spawn modern chemistry, of critical importance to World War I. After that, food refrigeration and processing would further modernize and globalize the world, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Something he doesn’t appear to be familiar with is some work I’ve seen by Bob Allen, the economic historian at Oxford. He has built estimates of real wages for labour in countries around the world for much of history, and argues a key driver of the location of the industrial revolution was the price of labour. In the UK, the return to adopting a spinning jenny was 40%, because the employees it replaced were so expensive: in India, the return was negative 4%, because labour was cheap. I suspect Landes would happily agree with this as a driver, so it was a shame it didn’t appear he’d seen it.
For me, his thoroughness on the industrial and colonial periods is his greatest strength, and he does well to spend considerable time on other regions, like South America and Asia. The one notable exception is Africa, which though mentioned in reference to other regions is given little time itself. It’s possible he left it out due to time, but it is an unfortunate absence. For perhaps the same reason, his concluding chapters feel weak. Still, for the middle chapters alone, the book may well be worth it.
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