World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (review)

World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization, edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. x+510; tables, notes, index. $79.95.

The eleven essays contained in World of Possibilities are the outcome of an international seminar on "Historic Alternatives to Mass Production." They range widely in period (eighteenth century to late twentieth century) and in geographic scope (United States, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, France, England, and Germany). Its scope is one of the great strengths of the volume; these essays enable the English-only reader to look at detailed cases that are usually available only to the multilingual. Many of the essays also give us a close look at industries that rarely receive attention because they lie outside the standard stories of industrialization. Finally, and most germane to the goals of the volume, they look at specialized industries, large and small, that succeeded outside the realm of Fordist mass production.

It is indeed the intention of Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin to look beyond mass production, to examine alternatives more easily found in European history than in American. The essays do a good job of illuminating an industrial history that has not yet been told, at least not in mainstream scholarly literature. The answer to the question that many historians have asked--"did industrialization have to happen the way it did"--turns out to be no. There were other models that succeeded on a small scale. But there is another important question that is not so clearly posed in this volume: "How much does the local culture shape the form industry takes?" While reading these essays I was struck by the role of the local culture, and by the way in which many of the authors, more often implicitly than explicitly, draw on the importance of culture in their narrative. For example, Carlo Poni's essay on Lyons silk merchants builds from an explanation of the important role of fashion in French and English silk manufacturing and the creation of fashion in the eighteenth century. Peer Kristensen and Sabel's chapter on dairy cooperatives in Denmark owes much to local culture. Other authors begin their analyses with local circumstances of abundant raw materials (Rudolph Boch on the Solingen cutlery industry, Jean Saglio on the plastics industry in Oyonnax) or peculiar environmental situations (Håkon With Andersen on Norway's shipping industry).

Sabel and Zeitlin have written a fairly dense introduction, much of it summarizing their well-known arguments about mass production not being the only model for industrialization. For those unfamiliar with earlier work on the theme, this serves as a good summary. What is most interesting about the introduction, though, is the concluding section with its proposal for a new approach to writing about industrialization. The volume develops a critique of traditional economic history's treatment of this topic. Consequently, the essays are not about generalization and aggregation of historical statistics; rather, they are narratives that respect the individual actors and unique contexts. The editors and authors emphasize the importance of narrative as a corrective to the theory and statistics of economic history. They also suggest a new periodization for the study of industrial history. In place of the traditional chronology, they consider overlapping developments: the modernity of tradition, the battle of the systems, the triumph of mass production, and a new battle of the systems. This conceptual chronology is much more in line with the way social historians write about industrialization than the style of economic historians.

As happens with any collection of essays, these vary in quality, and the volume could have used a heavier editorial hand. Despite the sometimes cumbersome prose, however, most of the essays cover new ground for the English-language reader. There is much that is fresh in the discussion of the French and British silk industries, small-scale manufacturing in Switzerland, Italian metalworking, the eighteenth...