Some Further Thoughts on Accident in History: A Reply to Professor Crafts

Author(s): David S. Landes

Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 599-601
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Economic History Society
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 Economic History Review, XLVIII, 3(I995), pp. 599-60i

Some further thoughts on accident in

history: a reply to Professor Crafts'
By DAVID S. LANDES

Crafts is a brilliant and ingenious cliometrician. He has developed

numerical measures and estimates, repeatedly corrected and refined
them, and told us much about aggregate aspects of British industrial growth.
We are all in his debt. I am pleased to see that, on the basis of newer
figures, he has now abandoned some of his earlier belief in Anglo-French
parity (in rate of industrial growth and readiness for technological change)
in the eighteenth century. He maintains, however, his faith in the possibility
of major accidents in history. One cannot argue with faith, but I would
make a few brief comments.
Crafts argues from Mokyr's classification of inventions into macro- and
microinventions and his stipulation of the British cotton spinning machines
as macroinventions, that is, by Mokyr's definition derived ab nihilo, that
they would not 'necessarily' (Crafts's word, not mine) have been invented
in England; that they might well (just as well?) have been found in France.2
Far be it from me to disagree with Mokyr indirectly (via Crafts), but I
would be most surprised if Mokyr thought that the cotton spinning machines
of Arkwright and Crompton just appeared out of nowhere. In any event,
Crafts's method of argument here is flawed: one does not infer substance
from classification, but the reverse.
Secondly, the statement that something would not 'necessarily' have
happened as it did is intrinsically weak and a straw man. I never said
anything about necessity. I argued that it was not an accident that Britain
produced the cotton inventions, that this was explicable in terms of need
and opportunity. (This would fit with Usher's Gestalt approach).3 If I were
to resort to Crafts's formulation in terms of probabilities, I would say that
the ex ante odds of these novelties appearing in England rather than
elsewhere were very high, say, 0.95; and, what's more, if they had occurred
elsewhere, it would have been the British who would most quickly have
developed them. (In Mokyr's terminology, the microinventions-the detail
improvements-would have been British.) This assertion rests not only on
the situation of the British textile industry vis-A-vis those of competitors,
but on the superior British pool of mechanicians-which superiority may
be inferred from the time it took continental makers to copy and keep up
with these machines, even with British example and help.

I Crafts, 'Macroinventions'.
2 The source for the distinction between micro- and macroinventions is Mokyr, Lever of riches, p. 13.
3Usher, History of mechanical inventions.

(? Economic History Society 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, ro8 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 eJE, UK and 238 Main Street,
Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

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 6oo DAVID S. LANDES

A few words on the accident theme. The possibility of revolutionary

accidents has its theoretical interest, in economics even more than in history.
It is, however, a counsel of despair in the search for understanding and
explanation. Thus Crafts alludes to Crouzet's characterization of the search
for the causes of the industrial revolution as akin to the quest for the Holy
Grail.4 I am surprised; such folkloric metaphors are ill suited to a cliometrics
that would be scientific. But I take the Crouzet analogy differently: as a
statement not of intellectual possibility, but of perception-as testimony to
the persistence of problems in historiography. Where would historians be
if they did not have things to argue about?
In the meantime, this search for explanation is clearly not a 'fruitless
pursuit', unless one focuses on so-called macroinventions ab nihilo or on
things that did not happen. (Macroinventions as defined by Mokyr are not
necessarily big inventions with regard to their effects, although he does not
always maintain that distinction.) Elsewhere I have put forward a demand-
driven model of technological change in cotton manufacture: the increasing
cost and unreliability of cottage labour powerfully focused British minds on
the possibility of substituting machines and placing the workforce under
supervision.5 In other words, it is not the subsequent superiority of the
British textile industry that tells us about Britain's chances for technological
change (Crafts's bugbear of post hoc, ergo propter hoc), but its previous
development. I still find this explanation convincing. Crafts does not. May
he keep looking and not surrender to the snare of might-have-beens and
random chance.
Having said this, I do deplore one piece of Crafts's rejoinder: the ad
personam remarks about my 'anti-cliometric prejudices' and my 'characteristi-
cally failing' to present my own figures.6 Such animadversions are a tacit
admission of weakness; besides, it never helps to get personal. By way of
response, I would simply deny any prejudice against cliometrics. On the
contrary, I honour and make use of its achievements. Even so, all of us
have to be on the alert for bad cliometrics, no less than for bad history of
any kind. (I do not believe, for example, as Crafts remarks en passant, that
output per worker in French industry in the early nineteenth century 'may
well have exceeded that of Britain'.7 The leap to judgement and revisionism
in this field puts credulity to shame.)
Nor shall I apologize for not supplying better figures. I do what I do
best (I believe in comparative advantage) and am happy to leave quantitative
estimates to the people who enjoy devising them.
But the gravamen of Crafts's uncharacteristic personal remarks, their
subtext as it were, does not concern me alone. The remarks are really
directed to the profession and imply that those who generate numbers have
a higher authority than 'ordinary' historians. This hieratic-hierarchical
impulse has been an abiding flaw of cliometrics-a case of justifiable pride
carried to excess. It has had a deplorable effect on recruitment to the

' Crafts, 'Macroinventions', p. 595.

5 Landes, Unbound Prometheus, pp. 56-60.
6 Crafts, 'Macroinventions', p. 592.
7 Ibid., p. 593.

(a Economic History Society 1995

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 A REPLY TO PROFESSOR CRAFTS 6oi

discipline, especially in the United States, where there are many fewer
historians who work in economic history and where much of the work is
now more in the nature of applied economics. That's good, but not good
enough to persuade students of economics that they should do economic
history.
Further to the question of authority: one should not take for granted that
the people who produce estimates are the best qualified to interpret them
(even where the figures are their own); nor should one accept numbers as
defining or definitive just because they are numbers. For these early periods,
they are usually not measures, but figments. As a result, they change
repeatedly. Worst of all, they do not always fit other, more direct evidence.
In such instances, the economic historian has a duty to be sceptical.
In the meantime, let us not 'pull rank'. Crafts should go on generating
numbers and making estimates; and the rest of us should feel free to
criticize.

Harvard University

Footnote references
Crafts, N. F. R., 'Macroinventions, economic growth, and "industrial revolution" in Britain and France',
Econ. Hist. Rev., XLVIII (1995), pp. 591-8.
Landes, D. S., The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development in western Europe
from i750 to the present (Cambridge, i969).
Landes, D. S., 'What room for accident in history?: explaining big changes by small events', Econ.
Hist. Rev., XLVII (1994), pp. 637-56.
Mokyr, J., The lever of riches: technological creativity and economic progress (New York, i990).
Usher, A. P., A history of mechanical inventions (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).

(C Economic History Society 1995

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