A Cultural History of Economics?

I am grateful to Victorian Studies for this opportunity to discuss my work. The reviewers are generous in their praise and incisive in their criticism. To have three such scholars engage with one's work is a rare treat. Replenishing the Earth argues that an underestimated Settler Revolution took place in the nineteenth century and has major implications for issues such as industrialization, Europe's so-called great divergence from the rest of the world, and our understanding of settler societies, their metropoles, and the indigenous societies they displaced or marginalized. All three reviews kindly acknowledge that I have posited a new variable worth considering, and then ask legitimate questions about its explanatory weight in relation to more familiar approaches to nineteenth-century colonial expansion.

One telling criticism (made especially by Cain) is that I play up the nineteenth century at the expense of the seventeenth and eighteenth in trying to explain Anglophone elephantiasis; another (made especially by Makdisi) is that I play up the white settler dimension of nineteenth-century European expansion at the expense of non-white subjects. I confess some guilt here. There are points where the perils of polemics led me to overstate my case, and others where I did not make my true aims sufficiently clear. I did want to play up the nineteenth century and white settlers, but not at the expense of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or non-white subjects. This is no zero-sum game. My nineteenth-centrism was in reaction to a succession of long-term, path-dependent explanations for the spread and growth of the Anglophones. The most respectable of these is that, by about 1688, geographical and historical circumstance had allowed England to develop a suite of institutions that happened to be growth-friendly and spread-friendly. It is important to contest such views because they are hard-wired into orthodox economic history from which, directly or indirectly, mainstream historians derive the economic information that is crucial to their stories too. Path-dependent theories seek to leapfrog complex history. If you need to explain C, and B is complex and confusing, assert that simpler A led inevitably to C without bothering about B. I argue that for at least a century after 1688, alleged Anglophone advantages had not led to any Anglo edge over Spain or Russia, in settlement at least. This settlement edge had instead to wait for the nineteenth century and had causes more proximate and varied than the institutional miracle of 1688. But I should have acknowledged more clearly that the long-range networks, the addictive and extractive trades, and the accumulations of capital and ideas developed by Europe before 1800 were necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for the subsequent Anglophone explosion.

As Cain notes, I also argue that industrialization had no revolutionary effect until after 1800, even in Britain. As he knows very well, this is still a bitterly contested issue among the experts and here I can only point out that there is considerable support for my position.1 Cain suggests, furthermore, that I do not take sufficient account of the concept of industrious revolution—the idea that, from the seventeenth century, the desire for exotic goods such as sugar, tea, and cotton led families to work longer and harder, with women and children in particular working for wages more often. This helped create the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution that, Cain thinks, was in turn a precondition of my Settler Revolution—a post-1815 explosion in Anglophone emigration. In fact, my position is that industrialization supercharged, but did not cause, the explosion in settlement. Some settlement booms occurred without significant input from the most relevant face of industrialization, namely steam transport.

I go on to suggest, quite tentatively I admit, that the causal relationship between mass settlement and industrialization may have been the other way around. The key concept here is "outsourcing," by which I mean Britain's importation of necessities, as against luxuries, from overseas. Well before 1800, Britain was importing crucial supplies of such things...