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The Dutch Republic and Britain: The Making of Modern Society and a European World Economy
The National Endowment for the Humanities
The University Of Massachusetts Dartmouth
A seminar for school teachers
At The Institute for Historical Research,
University of London,
And The Netherlands Institute of
Advanced Studies, Wassenaar
June 28 to July 30, 2009
The purpose of this five-week NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers at the Historical Institute in London and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar is to investigate how a region of northwestern Europe, centered on the North Sea, acquired the characteristics that historians have labeled modern. We will study how the national economy of the Dutch Republic rose to dominance in the new European world-economy of the seventeenth century, how Britain acquired this supremacy in the eighteenth century, and how it transformed itself to become the first industrial nation. Using a comparative method, we will study contemporary accounts, historical documents, seminal historical interpretations and visit some of the key places that experienced this world-historical transformation. We will explore the historiography of an important topic in European economic and social history, appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of humanistic studies, connect the study of the texts to the subject’s material culture, provide a broader perspective on contemporary issues associated with the term ‘globalization’ and do so in an atmosphere conducive to collegiality, study and reflection. The core texts for the seminar will consist of five important historical works:
Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (1976).
Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000).
Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (1995).
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (rev. ed. 1999).
Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (2nd ed. 1994).
Throughout the seminar we will use contemporary documents to ground our discussion in historical reality and to listen to the voices of actual historical participants. I have photocopied a selection of historical documents, as well as some scholarly articles, and collected these in a volume of ‘additional reading.’ In addition to a detailed analysis of our texts, we will attempt to ask larger questions. How did contemporary observers interpret the social, commercial and industrial changes of the period? Should we understand economic ideas and policies as relative to a particular time and place or against the prevailing principles of modern economic science? How do disciplinary traditions, ideological orientations and national identity help shape the arguments of our texts? How do the historical sites and museum exhibits help us to understand the texts? What is the relationship between the pursuit of profit and empire in the building of the European led world-economy? Did the creation of a global trade network lay the foundation of an industrial economy and modern society in northwestern Europe? Does an economy have to experience an industrial revolution, such as that in Britain, to be labeled ‘modern’? Does our subject provide a useful perspective on our society’s efforts to grapple with the issues of globalization and economic change?
All academic sessions will be at the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street.
Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University press, 2000), Chapters 1-9. Selections from William Harrison, A Description of Elizabethan England (1577); James Harrington, Oceana (1656); and Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (1668).
Discussion of possible Essay Topics in Co-operative Learning Groups
Site Visits: London Docks and Greenwich
Wrightson, Chapters 10-14; Photocopies of selections from Dudley North, A Discourse upon Trade; Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman; David Hume, Of refinement in the Arts and John Millar, On the Origin and Distinction of Ranks in Henry C. Clark, Commerce, Culture & Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (2003). Photocopy selections from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
Chapters (photocopies) from The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. I, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Nicholas Canny, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): Nicholas Canny, "The Origins of Empire: An Introduction"; Michael J. Braddick, "The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625-1688"; G. E. Aylmer, "Navy, State, Trade and Empire"; and Nuala Zahedieh, "Overseas Expansion and Trade in the Seventeenth Century."
Site Visits: The City, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Whitehall
Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1995), Chapters 1-15; photocopies of documents on the origin of the Republic from Herbert Rowen, ed., The Low Countries in Early Modern Times, sections III, IV.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library) and the Mauritshuis, Den Haag
Depart for Den Haag at 8:30
9:00-12:00, Maps, prints, and documents on the Republic’s industry and its worldwide trade at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag
2:00-5:00 Paintings from the Golden Age at the Mauritshuis, Den Haag
Depart from Den Haag at 17:00
Dinner 18:00
Israel, Chapters 16-30; photocopies of documents on religion and government in the Republic in Rowen sections V, VI.
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Site Visits in Amsterdam
Depart for Amsterdam at 8:30
Depart from Amsterdam at 20:00
Israel, chapters 31-44. Photocopies of selections on the trade and commerce of the Republic in Rowen, sections VII, VIII, including Hugo Grotius, The Freedom Of The Seas, Or The Right Which Belongs To The Dutch To Take Part In The East Indian Trade (1609); Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1673). Photocopies of Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Maxims of the Republic of Holland (1662) in Henry C. Clark, Commerce, Culture & Liberty.
Lunch 12:00
Erich Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 1999; first published, 1968), chapters 1-5. How does Hobsbawm define the British industrial revolution? Does this fit with Wrightson’s view of Britain’s long-term economic development?
Discussion of Essay Drafts in Co-operative learning Groups
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Photocopies from The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II, The Eighteenth Century, P. J. Marshall, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): Patrick O’Brien, "Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State and the Expansion of Empire, 1688-1815"; Jacob M. Price, "The Imperial Economy, 1700-1776"; N.A.M. Rodger, ""Sea-Power and Empire, 1688-1793"; David Richardson, "The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade"; and P. J. Marshall, "Britain without America—A Second British Empire"?
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Site Visits to North Holland: Industry, Polders, and Zuiderzee Ports
Depart for the Zaan at 8:30
Depart for Hoorn and Enkhuizen at 11:30
Depart from Enkhuizen at 20:00
Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), Part I. Photocopies of Maxine Berg, "In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present (No. 182: February 2004): 85-142 and Jan de Vries, "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution," Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 249-70.
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Berg, The Age of Manufactures, Part II. Photocopies of Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, "The Course of the Economy: A Macroeconomic Analysis" and "Postlude", The First Modern Economy (1997); Jan de Vries, "Dutch economic growth in comparative historical perspective, 1500-2000," De Economist, 148 (No. 4, 2000): 443-467; Patrick O’Brien, "Mercantilism and Imperialism in the Rise and Decline of the Dutch and British Economies 1585-1815," De Economist, 148 (No. 4, 200): 469-501; and Andrew Porter: "Introduction: Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth Century" and Martin Lynn, " British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century Andrew Porter, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Seminar project presentations and discussion
Lunch 12:00
Dinner 18:00
Site Visits: Historic cities of industry and the arts: Leiden and Haarlem
Depart for Leiden at 8:30
Depart for Haarlem at 12:30
Depart from Haarlem at 20:00
Seminar project presentations and Discussion
Lunch 12:00
Farewell Dinner and Party: 18:00
The creation of European market and industrial societies and a European led world-economy are among the central experiences of history. While Asia, and especially China, developed large scale industry a half millennium before the West, and a widespread Asian trade system operated in Asian waters, it was the Europeans who first knit the Asian, African, European and New World economies into an integrated world-economy and created the world’s first market and industrial societies. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the pioneers in this endeavor, but it was the Dutch and the British who reaped its greatest profit. Whether one interprets northwestern Europe’s leadership as a tribute to the genius of free human beings, or as the enslavement of the human spirit by Western materialism and imperialism, or as something in between, it remains one of the crucial contributions of the West to the world's historical development. Further, the commerce and industry that propelled European goods and guns around the globe also brought in its wake the values of a ‘bourgeois’ civilization, such as constitutional government, religious toleration, and economic and social individualism that challenged cultural, social and political values around the world. Finally, although current state curriculum guidelines commonly feature the building of a British empire and Britain’s industrial revolution as an important subject to be studied in the schools, they pay little attention to the regional context that was essential to Britain’s world-wide success, or to the earlier primacy of the Dutch Republic.
The role of northwestern Europeans in the building of a world-economy and industrial society is not only intrinsically interesting but also of considerable contemporary relevance to arguments about globalization. Debates about the role of the state in the economy and the benefits to be derived, and the costs to be borne, by different groups, regions and nations from economic growth are often rooted in cultural values and economic arguments that can be directly traced to those first voiced during the world’s first industrial revolution. Economic ideas and theories first articulated in northwestern Europe in the mercantilist and early industrial period continue to be used in contemporary debates and form the classical core of modern orthodox economics. Historical interpretations of Britain’s experience of industrialization, in particular, have long been used to define what it means to be a ‘modern’ society and continue to be used in contemporary debates about the social and economic value of the welfare state or a robust individualism. Contemporary discussions about gender roles often cite historical examples drawn from ‘traditional’ European society to support ‘traditional’ gender roles. All these debates can benefit from more knowledge about the history of these societies cited as examples in modern discussions. Unfortunately, the increasing specialization of much of modern historical writing, and especially of modern economic history and historical demography, has managed to obscure broad historical issues with a host of very narrow, technical and theoretical topics which discourage the non specialist. Added to this may be reluctance among many humanists to study economic issues. By contrast, those interested in economics see it as an increasingly scientific and mathematical study and tend to neglect historical and humanistic approaches. The systematic study of some of the most influential modern interpretations of the creation of a European world-economy by the Dutch Republic and Britain offers an excellent opportunity for humanists to deal with some of the central concerns of economic historians.
The works to be studied and their historiographical context
The broader context of our investigation of the making of a modern commercial and industrial world-economy lies in the contemporary interest in world history, or meta-history, narratives. Perhaps the most contentious of these narratives is the question of why Europe was so successful in organizing the world-economy. Recent ‘meta-narratives’ by David Landes, Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz, among others, has given a new interest to the topic. These contributions were preceded by the classic ‘world-system’ analysis by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. All these studies, and earlier explanations by Karl Marx, Max Weber and the historical economists, such as Werner Sombart and William Cunningham, despite the many fundamental disagreements among them, agreed that the commercial and industrial economies of northwestern Europe, and especially those of the Low Countries and Britain, were able to benefit most from the opportunities presented by the emerging world economy between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While meta-world historical narratives have suggested very bold and important questions, their very worldwide approach makes many of these works more valuable for raising questions than as persuasive historical narratives solidly rooted in documentary evidence. This seminar will look at the European side of the debate and focus on the region around the North Sea. What was it about the societies and economies of the Dutch Republic and Britain that allowed northwestern Europe to become the organizers of an integrated European and then the world-economy? How did this region develop a commercial and an industrial society? Was it essential that they did so within a relatively religiously tolerant, politically free and ‘bourgeois’ society, as most liberal Anglo-American economic historians have argued? Or was their success primarily achieved by the state’s pursuit of power, mercantilist regulations, war, and expropriation, as others believed, especially those sympathetic to the arguments of socialist historians or the historical economists? Should we agree with a view often expressed that the Dutch Republic attained its leadership primarily through the pursuit of commercial profit, while Britain reached its pre-eminence through state power? What should we think of the view, which Friedrich List argued so powerfully in The National System of Political Economy (1844), that, once Britain had vanquished its rivals in the Napoleonic Wars, and had become not only the world’s financial center but also the ‘workshop of the world’, it sought to perpetuate its dominance through a mid-Victorian ‘empire of free trade’? Historians of early modern Europe have long challenged the view that the decisive break between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ society came with the French and Industrial Revolutions. Instead they have argued that the process of modernization was much more gradual and rooted in the earlier creation of a market society and world-economy. Taking their cue from the impact of globalization on the economic structure and prosperity of today’s regional and national economies, as well as from new interpretations of the British industrial revolution and the economy of the Dutch Republic, some have argued that the "first modern economy" was not Britain’s but that of the United Provinces. In the process, they have challenged the view that an economy cannot be modern without going through an Industrial Revolution akin to what Britain experienced. The seminar will not provide set answers to these questions, but it will discuss these, and other questions, by studying major modern historical works so that participants can attempt answers rooted in specific historical knowledge rather than those based on abstract theories or ideological polemics.
We will begin by analyzing a general survey of the early modern European economy by Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750. First published in 1976, the book has been reprinted twelve times and remains widely used as an overview of the subject. Since its publication, de Vries has published major studies on early modern European agriculture, urbanization, and with Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (1997). The latter has had a wide impact in the field of economic history for it challenged the orthodox view that the path to economic modernity lies through an industrial revolution. Although we will use its well-written conclusion for the seminar, the book is too large for our purposes. However, the outline of his arguments from his larger studies can be found in the earlier survey. After the economic expansion of the long sixteenth century, the restructuring of the European economy during the seventeenth century crisis saw northwestern Europe replace the Mediterranean as the dominant and most dynamic European economy. The Northern Netherlands, in particular, based on its efficient shipping, fishing and agricultural industries, and helped enormously by Spain’s success in imposing its religious and political will upon the Southern Netherlands, was able to substitute Amsterdam for Antwerp as the center of the European trading system. After gaining its independence, the Republic was able to support an expanding population, attract skilled immigrants, and develop its industrial base by using resources from its worldwide trade network. Through its free market in labor, innovative business organizations, efficient capital markets, cheap shipping and ‘proto-industrialization’, it accumulated and invested a large stock of capital at home and abroad. De Vries also emphasizes the dynamic role of the state, both in the Dutch Republic and in Britain that encouraged and protected merchant interests both in Europe and around the world. Finally, he assigns a significant role to increasing demand as an engine of economic growth, especially for goods from around the world by the growing and prosperous middle classes of this region. Why then did the Dutch Republic not experience an industrial revolution? He argues that perhaps the very success of the Republic’s economy stood in the way of radical innovation in the eighteenth century, that the Dutch state was less effective in pursuing an aggressive protectionist strategy than Britain, and, in an argument later made famous by E. A. Wrigley, the Dutch relied upon an ‘advanced organic energy economy’ of peat and human and animal power, rather than Britain’s increasing dependence on a ‘mineral-based energy economy’. Finally, de Vries reminds the economic history profession that economic growth does not take place in a political vacuum. Just as the Dutch Republic was able to emerge out of a fortuitous political and military situation in Europe during the seventeenth century, its relative stagnation in the eighteenth century was in no small measure due to the vigorous mercantilist measures of its rivals and the ruinous cost of defending itself against its neighbors.
Next we will turn to the creation of a ‘market society’ in Britain before the industrial revolution. Keith Wrightson argues in his brilliant combination of social and economic history, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000) that between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries an integrated national economy was created in which market forces "became not just a means of exchanging goods, but a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society". This society was closely linked to the emerging world-economy and saw the extension and ‘ideological sanctification’ of private property rights, a vast expansion in the market for labor power as a ‘commodity to be bought and sold’, and a redistribution of power in the hands of those who were able to profit from the increase of productive power. All this involved modest but long-term increases in output and per capita income and consumption, especially for the ‘middling sort’, but also a diminished wellbeing for those left behind. Wrightson makes heavy use of a generation of detailed and quantitative scholarship in demography and economic history, but nonetheless provides us with a superbly written account, free of social science jargon, that enlivens the data with many examples of particular lives to illustrate his themes. Reaching beyond the work of the heavily analytical and sometimes a-historical work of many contemporary economic historians, he rescues the interpretations of contemporaries and earlier historians, especially the pioneering work of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the English historical economists, to offer us an appealing model for a revitalized humanistic economic history. We will try to follow Wrightson’s example and trace the transformation of economic and social thought during the period by studying selections from those who lamented economic changes in England, such as Sir Thomas More, and through the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who created the discipline of political economy out of reasoning and observation of the market society in which they lived. We will discuss the origin of England’s empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its growing trade with Europe and the rest of the world that had already linked this ‘market society’ to a world–economy before the industrial revolution by discussing chapters in The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) by Michael J. Braddick, Nuala Zahiedieh and G. E. Aylmer.
On the Dutch Republic we will use Jonathan Israel’s standard work, acclaimed as such even by Dutch scholars, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (1995). Since it is a very large work, we will emphasize the broad outline of the story while its very comprehensiveness will allow each of us to pursue further our particular interests. Israel’s synthesis begins with a brief account of the Low Countries under the late Burgundians and the Habsburg Empire. He emphasizes the rise of Antwerp as a European entrepôt, the culture of Renaissance tolerance exemplified by Erasmus, and the Dutch revolt against the Spanish attempt to impose Catholic orthodoxy and a more centralized imperial government upon the provinces of the Netherlands. Israel provides a detailed account of the political, constitutional and military story of the Republic but he also devotes much space to its social and cultural history. We will pay special attention to the nature of the Republic’s remarkable freedom of expression during the period, its development of religious toleration, the central role of merchants in its governance, and the explosion of artistic expression, especially in the visual arts, that placed a particular emphasis on depicting the lives and values of a ‘burger’ rather than an aristocratic society, or what Simon Schama has called a culture of ‘the embarrassment of riches’. In addition to brief selections from contemporary documents to illustrate these themes, we will use web sites and museum visits to discuss the nature of Dutch art during the period and its connection to the modernity of the Republic’s market society.
Central to Israel’s synthesis is his earlier important work on economic history, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (1989). He places the commercial history of the Republic in its broader political and military context. Israel argues that Braudel’s analysis of the European world-economy as centered around a succession of core cities, from Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam and finally to London, implies too much continuity in form and function. Venice and Antwerp, he insists, operated in a much smaller geographical sphere and had much less predominance within the ‘system’ than the Dutch maritime provinces. According to Israel, leading European emporia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries still operated in a late medieval ‘polynuclear phase’. While Antwerp operated in a wider geographical context, it remained primarily a storehouse of commodities and center of distribution. Instead of Europe’s economic leadership moving from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe as a whole, as Braudel and many others have argued, it moved to a tiny fringe of northwestern Europe, southern England and the Dutch maritime provinces, after Antwerp’s fall in 1585. Combining the ‘bulk trades’—such as fish, grain, timber and salt—with the ‘rich trades’—such as spices, textiles, and later sugar—allowed the Dutch to integrate European markets and to tie them to New World silver and luxury goods from around the world. Thus, for Israel, the dominance of Amsterdam and the Dutch maritime provinces was different in function from Antwerp’s effort to control the European world-economy. The Republic had the world’s largest and most efficient merchant fleet, the most productive agricultural and fishing industries, and it became a leader in many new and technologically advanced industries. Further, the Dutch created new forms of business enterprise, such as the Dutch East India Company, and its limited partnerships, the rederijen. Finally, Israel insists that Dutch primacy owed far more to an effective federal state apparatus than has been acknowledged. It successfully defended its trade and borders against larger rivals, assured the quality of its products through regulation, and provided social and political stability that resulted in much lower interest rates on capital. Throughout his detailed work, Israel raises larger questions. How great was the impact of the seventeenth century Dutch dominated world trading system on European and non-European economic and social life? How much of Dutch success in overseas markets was due to business efficiency and how much to military force, exploitation and mercantilist manipulation? We will supplement Israel’s book with documents and selections from contemporary observers of the Republic. The Republic produced some of the earliest pleas for a system of relatively free trade. We will study selections from Pieter de la Court’s famous Interest van Holland (1662), translated in 1746 and praised by both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Dutch economic success, however, produced calls for mercantilist reprisals and war against the Republic in other states and we will study these in selections from such mercantilist writers as Josiah Child and Daniel Defoe.
Eric J. Hobsbawm will introduce us to the debate that explicitly links British industrialization to empire, and especially to slavery. We will analyze the first five chapters of his classic account of British industrialization, first published in 1968, Industry and Empire (rev. ed. 1999). Hobsbawm is not only the most important British Marxist social and economic historian but his work is probably the most widely read social and economic history in Britain. According to Hobsbawm, "our industrial economy grew out of our commerce, and especially our commerce with the underdeveloped world". Central to Hobsbawm’s argument is that the rise of Britain’s economic pre-eminence was the use of mercantilist measures and naval power in not only forging its own empire but in limiting the empires and trade of its rivals. We will pursue this debate from a ‘liberal’ perspective through Patrick O’Brien’s comparative article, "Mercantilism and Imperialism in the Rise and Decline of the Dutch and British Economies, 1585-1815" (2000) and in chapters in The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) by Jacob M. Price, N.A.M. Rodger, David Richardson, and J. Marshall. Hobsbawm will also introduce us to the ‘standard of living debate’. His ‘pessimistic’ interpretation argues that most workers saw few benefits from industrialization before the 1850s. Instead, the massive economic changes brought by the factory system and rapid urbanization, combined with political repression, produced a degradation in their quality of life, which formed a ‘working-class consciousness’ that would ultimately foster the creation of a socialist labor movement. By contrast, most of today’s economic historians argue that the quantitative evidence does not demonstrate that British workers as a whole saw their living standards decline, and that they did not develop a coherent class consciousness, during the classic period of industrialization.
During the last third of the twentieth century, the ‘new economic history,’ which uses sophisticated tools of economic and statistical analysis, challenged many of the long held assumptions about the nature of the British industrial revolution. Its conclusions have created a new orthodoxy among economic historians, which emphasizes that aggregate British economic growth was moderate during the classical period of industrialization, that many sectors and regions remained fairly traditional before 1850, and that international trade did not play a key role in British industrialization. Unfortunately, much of the new economic history is highly theoretical and unreadable by non-specialists. The seminar will wrestle with modern scholarship on British industrialization through Maxine Berg’s influential and well-written, The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, first published in 1984 and significantly revised for its second edition of 1994. After an extensive review of the findings of the new economic history, she accepts the view that aggregate rates of growth and technological change were indeed slower and that the new ‘factories’ were largely confined to particular regions and industries during this period. The overall result, she nonetheless insists, remained revolutionary. According to Berg, not only did the dynamic regions and industries experience their own dramatic transformation in technology, the physical environment, the scale of enterprises, the social roles of owners and workers, demographic behavior and the place of the family and child and female labor in their own regions, but these revolutionary changes encouraged new social and intellectual attitudes, patterns of trade, state intervention, forms of politics, notions of class, and changes in social relations that also transformed more traditional regions in Britain. Instead of relying primarily upon the economists’ growth models and stage theories, "which have narrowed our account of historical processes to aggregate and macroeconomic analysis," she emphasizes the complex relationships between social history, economic history and the history of technology to offer us an account of the "age of manufactures," which consists of an intricate web of improvement and decline, large and small scale production, and machine and hand processes that created the new and revolutionary industrial society. Berg’s scholarship fully integrates recent scholarship on women and children in her work. As the first female professional historians taught early in the twentieth century, one of the most revolutionary and controversial aspects of early industrialization in Britain was its extensive use of female and child labor. Although Berg agrees that the new economic history has accumulated much evidence to disprove Hobsbawm’s conclusion that trade was the ‘spark’ that lit the Industrial Revolution, she argues that he was correct in the sense that the rise of many of Britain’s new industries were closely tied to the vast increase in international trade during the early stages of industrialization and that British mercantilist measures played an important role in developing new industries. According to Berg, Britain’s success in replacing the Dutch Republic at the center of the world-economy in the eighteenth century stimulated British industries that processed and re-exported a significant proportion of overseas goods to the Continent. Moreover, Europe and North America’s growing population and prosperity greatly stimulated demand for British manufactured goods. Berg’s scholarship also reflects an important trend among historians that emphasizes the role of household consumption, led by middle class women, in the growth of important industries.
We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of two key issues raised by the seminar. First, should we continue to hold up British industrialization as a paradigmatic model for the achievement of modern and sustained rates of economic growth? We will read two stimulating comparative essays by de Vries, which argue that the high living standards of Dutch ‘burgers’ and the high wages of skilled workers during the Golden Age had already encouraged an ‘industrious revolution’ that had produced sustained economic growth without an industrial revolution. Moreover, de Vries insists that the British industrial revolution must be understood in a broader process of modernization that "involved more than industrial production, unfolded in a European zone larger than England, and began well before the eighteenth century". Secondly, we will use. Martin Lynn’s chapter on "British Policy: Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," to reflect on the penultimate debate on the value to be assigned to Europe’s leadership of the world economy and to suggest a broader perspective on modern debates about globalization. Did Britain’s adoption and promotion of free trade in the nineteenth century constitute ‘free trade imperialism’, which was not fundamentally different in its purpose than the mercantilist measures by which they replaced the Dutch in the eighteenth century, as many socialists and historical economists have suggested? Or was free trade, as Victorian liberals believed, and most neoclassical economists and economic historians maintain, not only inherent in classical economic thought but was also a moral imperative for raising the standard of living for all humanity?
Seminar structure
The seminar will meet three mornings per week from 9:00 to noon with a break for refreshments. In addition we will meet one whole day per week for our museum and site visits. Participants are expected to attend all sessions. Except for the third week, there will be no meetings on Fridays. I will be widely available for individual meetings with participants. The seminar will be organized into five cooperative learning group and these groups will serve as the chief organizing principle of the morning meetings. Each group will lead the discussion on a rotating basis. The group will pose questions, provide a context, analyze the reading, suggest comparisons and present additional perspectives. This is not a lecture course. I will use the model of encouraging all of us to participate actively.
As an historian who requires a good deal of writing in my classes, I believe that the process of writing is crucial to learning. Each participant will be asked to keep a journal in which to record daily reactions to the reading, discussions and site visits. A few participants will be asked to share these reflections during each meeting. Each participant will write an interpretive essay, or a more narrowly focused paper, on any topic related to the seminar. While longer papers are acceptable, the goal is to write a well-crafted and thoughtful essay rooted in the literature of the seminar of about eight pages. Drafts of essays will be discussed within each cooperative learning group and its argument will be presented to the seminar during the last week. Participants are welcome to revise their essays after the seminar, if they so wish, as long as they return it to me by September. I will collect them in a binder, ‘publish’ them as our Proceedings and place them on our website. I will also send a complete set to each participant and one to the NEH.
Throughout the seminar you will have access to electronic resources at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library. This is particularly useful for electronic access to scholarly journals through JSTOR. I will enroll all of you in a UMD summer course (whether you opt to receive graduate credit or not) to make this possible. Thus, be sure to note password and student ID information that the university will send you electronically since you will need this to access the Library resources. You will find an electronic version of the syllabus on our WEB CT site for the summer http://dartmouth.umassonline.net/, which you can access with the student information the university will send you. Our seminar website will serve as a convenient source of resources on our subject. It will welcome future contributions from participants, such as research contributions, essays, lesson plans, documents, or audio-visual material related to our seminar. Our website http://www.umassd.edu/euro/ will thus serve as a means of continuing the learning community that we will build during the seminar. Essays and many resources from some of my previous NEH seminars on the industrial revolution in Britain can be found at: http://www.umassd.edu/ir/