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  • La gloire de l’industrie, XVIIe – XIXe siècle. Faire de l’histoire avec Gérard Gayot edited by Corine Maitte, Philippe Minard, and Matthieu de Oliveira
  • P. M. Jones
Corine Maitte, Philippe Minard, and Matthieu de Oliveira, eds. La gloire de l’industrie, XVIIe – XIXe siècle. Faire de l’histoire avec Gérard Gayot. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012. 341 pp. ISBN 978-2-7535-1800-1, €18 (paper).

Gérard Gayot, professor of modern history at the University of Lille III and eminent specialist of the textile industry in northern France and Belgium, died in 2009. This publication is intended to mark his passing, and it contains a number of papers that were presented at a commemorative conference held in Lille the following year. Altogether, there are twenty-one contributions, which convey the work of some twenty-five authors, the majority of whom knew Gayot either as a colleague or as a PhD director. The book is loosely organized into four sections: “Entrepreneurs and Institutions”; “Products and Commercial Networks”; “The Dynamics of Territory”; and “Worlds of the Worker.” The topics covered are miscellaneous and the quality rather uneven as tends to be the case with publications of this sort. Most of the authors focus on the period 1680–1850 or thereabouts, but they range across the whole of Europe from Cadiz to Constantinople.

Several themes of consummate interest to business historians are addressed. The role and outlook of the entrepreneur in a context of accelerating institutional change and trade liberalization is one. How did merchants respond to the wholesale abolition of economic institutions and the consequential deregulation of trade that the French Revolution ushered in (the contribution of Guillaume Foutrier on the [End Page 894] business community of Rouen)? Were merchants always and everywhere driven by the profit motive (the theme of Arnaud Bartolomei’s analysis of French merchant culture in Cadiz during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars)? What constituted the most appropriate model for continental industrial capitalists to follow in the early nineteenth century: the socially risky path of British-style industrialization or the state-guided approach of Napoleonic France (Stephan Sammler’s contribution on vormärz Saxony)? Who, or what, drove technology transfer, innovation, adoption, and adaptation in the early modern period? Was it the ambition of the entrepreneur, the mobility of the skilled craft worker, or the economic vision of the bureaucrat (the subject matter of contributions by Olivier Raveux on Armenian calico merchants and artisans and Igor Moullier on the industrial trajectory of the Belgian departments of the Napoleonic Empire)? How territorial was business in an age of family capitalism (the contributions of Jean-Michel Minovez on the origins of a specialist woollen industry in southern France and Jean-Luc Mastin on the formation of the “industrial district” of Roubaix-Tourcoing)? Finally, how did craft workers defend their position against both machine-wielding employers and unskilled newcomers (the topic tackled by Samuel Guicheteau in respect of the textile workers of the Nantes district and François Jarrige in his overview of the pan-European struggle of cloth dressers to defend their livelihood)?

Some of these essays are deeply researched and of real value to specialists for the case-study evidence they provide. Others are more perfunctory, speculative, and under documented. The former seem very often to be the work of recent PhD students whose theses are either inaccessible or awaiting publication. As such, they are all the more welcome. Arnaud Bartolomei’s careful reconstruction of the evolving strategies of the French merchant community in Cadiz in the midst of the collapse of the Indies trade is a case in point. After the alliance reversal of 1796, Cadiz found itself blockaded by British warships. Despite a degree of impoverishment, the merchants remained in the port and adapted to the new situation. Investments were diversified and profits sought in privateering instead. Olivier Raveux provides us with another refreshingly original microstudy. He opens a window on the complicated business of technology transfer (in this instance dyestuffs and dyeing practices) by going into the notarial archives and reconstructing the activities of Dominique Ellia, an Armenian calico merchant who arrived in Marseille from Constantinople...

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