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Les Origines de la revolution industrielle aux Etats-Unis: Entre économie marchande et capitalisme industriel, 1800-1850 [The origins of the Industrial Revolution in the United States: Between market economy and industrial capitalism, 1800-1850]. By Pierre Gervais. Paris: Editions EHESS, 2004. 347 pp. Tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, euro30.00. ISBN: 2-713-21825-X.
The literature on the Industrial Revolution presents something of a puzzle-at least to the relative outsider. Economic historians clearly have a sense that something important happened between 1750 and 1850, but what exactly that might be, much less why it occurred, are deeply problematic questions. It would seem impossible to make sweeping statements about the Industrial Revolution; timid assertions reign. Into this vexed terrain steps an intrepid voice with an ambitious project. Pierre Gervais is extremely well versed in the historical literature on the period-not just in the United States but also in Europe-and he brings a wonderfully international, or at least North-Atlantic, perspective to bear on what turns out to be, notwithstanding its title, a very local study.
Gervais is unimpressed with classic explanations for the origins of the Industrial Revolution-technological innovation, increases in productivity, transformations in managerial organization, and so forth. Rejecting these, he conceptualizes the Industrial Revolution as a shift from a "market economy"-composed of merchants and independent producers-to a "capitalist economy": industrialized and built on wage labor. Only when the market economy collapses of its own internal contradictions does a "rupture" occur, opening a space for the emergence of the wage-laboring class and ushering in the Industrial Revolution. It is thus the collapse of the old order that has to be explained, rather than the rise of the new, and so Gervais devotes much of...