358 journal of social history

entailed in writing history with the politics left out. Yet it is Eltis's magisterial
reconstruction of the last, and most dynamic, century of the slave trade and the
Atlantic slave economy which should command our attention. In its depth of
documentation, its systematic treatment of alternatives, and in its geographical
scope, it is a landmark in the history of the slave trade.

University of Pittsburgh Seymour Drescher

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FOOTNOTES

1. In view of the pivotal role accorded to high wages in Economic Growth, one would like to have
seen some discussion of recent findings that real wages were stagnant or falling in late eighteenth.
century England, just when the elite was being converted to the "free labor ideology." For recent
views on the discussion of wage trends, see, inter alia, P.H. Linden and J.O. Williamson "English
workers' living standards during the industrial revolution: a new look," Economic History Review, 2nd
ser. 36 (1983), pp. 1·25; L.D. Schwarz, "The standard of living in the long run: London 1700·1860,"
Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 38 (1985), pp. 24·41; and F.W. Batham and E.H. Hunt, "Wages
in Britain during the industrial revolution" Ibid., 2nd ser. 40 (1987), pp. 380-399.

The Causes of Progress: Culture, Authority and Change. By Emmanuel

Todd, trans. Richard Boulind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. xv
plus 217 pp. $34.95).

In his second book to be published in the series "Family, Sexuality and Social
Relations in Past Times," Emmanuel Todd continues his analysis of the effect of
different types of family systems on world development. His earlier work tried to
explain ideology by family structures;' here Todd turns to the modernization
process, defined (p. xiii) as "a very long, term cultural and anthropological
movement stretching over centuries." Rejecting the conventional focus on
industrialization as the key transformation, he proffers a three-stage "cultural
development," first ofrising literacy, followed by the demographic transition to
low mortality and fertility regimes, ushering in the final story of rising per capita
income, or rising standard of living. The English Industrial revolution is relegated
to a minor role in this drama, which sweeps the reader from the historical
transitions in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe to the Third World
countries today.
Todd usesstatistical data to rank the family systemsof the world in terms of their
treatment of women, and hence of their encouragement of high literacy: women
"create the climate for education" even when they don't engage directly in
teaching reading, writing, and numeracy skills to their children. The status of
women is measured by the mean age of women at marriage - the higher the mean
age, the greater the degree of equality between the sexes, and the parity in the age
of husband and wife. Family systems are ranked in terms of their potential for
"cultural development" by two criteria: the type of kinship system (matrilineal,
patrilineal, bilateral) and the relationship between parents and children (au,
thoritarian being equated with vertical). Of the six family types in the world, the
REVIEWS 359

bilateral vertical family found in the Germanic cultural sphere from Switzerland
to Norway has the strongest development potential; the patrilineal and matrilin-
eal non-vertical family types found in Africa and the Islamic world have weak
development potential, and the bilateral non-vertical or patrilineal vertical
family systems elsewhere fall in between. Succeeding chapters use data on
literacy, mean age at marriage, and generalizations concerning variations in
family type to analyze long-term changes along the path of cultural development

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in Europe, Russia, East Asia, Indian America, Islam, North India, and Africa.
How does cultural development link to political, demographic, and economic
change ?Todd discusses each of these topics in part two. Rates of male literacy are
used to posit a three stage political progression, from theocratic societies with less
than five percent literacy, "paleo-bureaucratic" societies, where literate males
(five to 50 percent of the male population) were confined to the ruling and
mercantile classes; and finally democratic societies, where over half of the males
are literate. Revolutions, defined as "the entry of the masses into violent political
action," can be anticipated when over 70 percent of males aged 20,25 become
literate: here as elsewhere in this book, Todd explicitly discounts purposive action
by organized entities like political parties or states. Some provocative if unsub-
stantiated generalizations stem from Todd's focus on family systems: for example,
that communism has triumphed only in regions dominated by the exogamous
community family (p. 145), or that the expansion of European ideology into other
world regions is "almost over" because of the lack of fit with family systems in the
Third World (p. 151).
Can variations in demographic regimes also be explained by literacy variations?
Todd finds a close inverse correlation between rates ofliteracy and mortality, but
also a linkage between family structures and fertility. The quick adoption of birth
control in south Asia is ascribed to the "matrilineal tendency" there, as opposed
to the barriers imposed by patrilineality on Latin American fertility (p. 160). That
other factors are also at work is briefly considered: France, the historical leader in
fertility decline, had neither the "right" family structure nor high literacy rates as
compared to the rest of western Europe ca. 1750; but Todd dismisses these
exceptions to conclude (p. 168) that "Only a small fraction of the variations in
fertility cannot be explained in terms of literacy."
What about "economic modernity"? The measure used by Todd is per capita
income. It is virtually axiomatic that declining fertility will result in rising per
capita incomes. For Todd, the English economic advantage through the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is unimportant; eventually (1979) the
European countries with the highest literacy rates ca. 1850 and highest age at
marriage for women ca. 1840 emerged with the highest per capita products. Japan
and Korea, two Asian countries with the same "authoritarian family" structure as
Germanic Europe, were also (p. 60) "the first outside the Western world to take
off." Family structures triumph again.
This is an ambitious, original, and provocative if flawed marriage of statistics
and anthropology. The attempt to encompass complex historical changes occur,
ring over several centuries in all parts of the globe under one rubric suffers from
inadequate data about various regional cultures and an overly simplistic analytic
scheme. The mechanism by which the high status of women produced rising
360 journal of social history

literacy rates is not presented in sufficient detail to convince. Ignoring major

events like the English industrial revolution, European imperialist expansion,
and the twentieth-century nationalist development of the Third World offends
historical sensibilities. The apolitical stance of the author who states (p. 179) that
"autonomous action by the State is very largely an illusion" will no doubt outrage
as many readers as the author's rejection of a development schema focused on
economic change.

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Let me give some specific examples of the failings of this book from the area of
my own specialization, China. Sometimes the author's ignorance produces wildly
inaccurate generalizations. His statement (p. 100) that there is "less anti-
feminism in south China," or that (p. 101) "lineage relationships flourish where
women have a more significant role" in Guangdong and Fujian, the homeland of
the androcentric corporate lineage, where the majority of the land is held by
lineage estates to which only males have property rights, is mind-boggling, A
generalization on the popularity of matrilocal marriages in south China is based
on a study of one Taiwan locality (p.101), with no recognition of the many other
Taiwan fieldwork studies showing precisely the opposite. Isliteracy a determinant
of revolution (Table 6.1)? One could argue the opposite in the case of China. Not
only did the Chinese revolution of 1949 predate mass literacy, it enabled mass
literacy by bringing about political stability and creating the school system.
Political action can make a difference. So can economic factors. Todd explains
1978 regional differences in fertility (Table 7.2) in terms of the political control
exercised by Beijing on north China, ignoring the enormous distance between the
capital and Sichuan, the province with the lowest fertility; these differences are
better explained by the economic rewards to large families produced by the
socialist system, both before and after decollectivization.' Similar flaws are no
doubt duplicated in Todd's discussion of other world areas.
The great value of Todd's book lies elsewhere: it forces scholars out of the
increasingly narrow specializations in which we tend to spend our lives. We may
disagree with Todd's interpretation and his facts, but we can learn a great deal
from the structural comparisons he makes. If comparative studies are stimulated
by books like this, we may eventually achieve a more satisfactory synthesis to
explain the demographic, economic, and cultural changes that are central to the
early modem and modem historical ages.

University of Pittsburgh Evelyn S. Rawski

FOOTNOTES

1. The Explanationof Ideology: Family StruCtures and Social Systems, trans. David Garrioch (Oxford,
1985).

2. William Parish, Jr. "Socialism and the Chinese Peasant Family," Journal of Asian Studies 34.3
(1975): 613·30; Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Resistance to the One-Child Family," Modem China 10.3
(1984): 345-73.