Beckert’s book reminds me of the
old saying that “There is much here that is new and much that is interesting.
Unfortunately, that which is new is not interesting, and that which is
interesting is not new.” The interesting parts are the discussions of the
industrial revolution (mostly Robert Allen’s theory), the role of force in
promoting trade (Findlay and O’Rourke, and others, have made this
argument); the capitalist nature of slavery (Conrad and Meyer and Fogel and
Engerman said this a long time ago). What’s new is the argument that cotton,
slavery and empire were not just important parts of economic history, they are
the key to how
the west got rich and capitalism was born. The book falls into the popular “________
that changed the World” category, where you insert whatever it is you are
writing about into the blank. It places too much emphasis on one part of the
economy: cotton. This is particularly true for the United States. We see many
references to the importance of cotton as an export, but we never see any
information about how important exports were to U.S. growth. The problem is that
economic historians for more than half a century have been moving away from
simple monocausal arguments about economic growth. Beckert declares that slavery
was the first big business, not railroads. But the new history of
capitalism is on no firmer ground making slavery the driving force behind
economic growth than Rostow’s non-communist manifesto was in making railroads
the driving force. The only difference is that much of the evidence about
railroads the importance of railroads was developed after Rostow wrote.
Of course, one can make the argument
that “Plunder may not have directly fueled the Industrial Revolution, but
mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the context within which
it originated, expanding markets and ensuring the supply of raw materials.” (Findlay
and O’Rourke, xx) But Findlay and O’Rourke already made this argument in Power
and Plenty.
Sheilagh Ogilvie and A.W. Carus Institutions
and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective is at the opposite extreme.
For them the devil is in the details. One of their key points is that it is not
really productive to consider the influence of one institution in isolation;
particular institutions can only be understood within the broader institutional
framework that they are a part of. Beckert should have given more consideration
to this point because the most obvious problem with his argument is that the
institutions at the center of his story (slavery, expropriation, and the use of
force to control trade) have existed for a long time. They did not lead to modern
economic growth. If Ogilvie and Carus are right understanding modern economic
growth might be hard work.
