Firms, Networks and Business Values: The British and American Cotton Industries since 1750 (review)

Responding to what she sees as numerous publications that assess the British cotton industry from the perspective of the United States and that assume U.S. superiority, Mary Rose sets out to provide a less biased comparative history of the two countries' industries from 1750 to the present. She argues that in each case the cotton manufacture was the product of "peculiarities of its history" (p. 2), and she mistrusts assessments providing a hierarchy of accomplishment, a succession of successful tactics from one country to the next. Rose also aims to emphasize the cultural dimension of development and its influence on the other aspects of economic history in order to provide greater flexibility in interpretation than is offered by the institutionalists, either new or old.

Rose sees the roles of families, of individualism versus community, at the core of her story, along with networks and their impact on government-industry relations. Drawing primarily on secondary sources, of which she lists some five hundred, she follows the development of Britain's several vertical and spatially specialized, isolated branches of the cotton industry from craft beginnings through industrial maturity and decline. She contrasts the British experience with conditions in the United States, which lacked craft skills and financing, and with the development of the Northern "Massachusetts model," along with those of Philadelphia, southern New England, and Southern branches of the industry. In every case she finds local, not national, influences shaping the pattern of industry. Local approaches find a niche in which to develop along historically predictable lines, with common reliance on commission houses for selling and fashion knowledge. The great divergences come in the relations between the countries' industries and the government and market forces with which they deal. In England diverse voices and a disinterested government result in minimal assistance, as the needs of the industry come increasingly into conflict with the demands of Empire; in the United States a multi-layered government structure leads to successful demands for tariff protection throughout the industry's history, which, along with an unparalleled domestic market for plain and simple materials, form the cotton producers' strength.

One current with the literature on the textile industry finds much that is familiar and cannot but admire the success with which Rose has digested such a vast array of material and the degree to which she manages to keep so many scholarly balls in the air at once. At the same time, the masses of data become bewildering at times, and one repeatedly follows arguments for pages, debating one's own assessment, only to find a final qualifier undercutting both the argument and the reader's evaluation of it.

Given the quantity of Rose's sources and the extent of her discussions, the reader is sure to find aspects to dispute—for example, her claims for the significance of the industry in the Southern United States before the late nineteenth century or the desire of the Boston Associates to create a society where advancement was based on merit. Yet these do little to interfere with her impressive summary of the broad array of developments she describes. More disturbing, I found, is her desire throughout the book to contest the assertions of my colleague William Lazonick that one can discern a progression in national industrial behavior from the proprietary capitalism of the British to the managerial approach of the Americans and to the more collective forms of the Japanese. Her claims that the British cotton industry represents an exception to this pattern are unconvincing and are maintained only by shifting the focus from the origins of practices and markets to the ability to adjust to changes in circumstances, and ultimately by the claim that the U.S. industry was no better prepared to deal with changing international circumstances, particularly...