Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell.

• Author: Cameron, Rondo

Ronald Max Hartwell, who once described himself as a "professional Australian," achieved academic prominence as a Professorial Fellow (and wine steward) of Oxford's Nuffield College, and subsequently in the United States at the universities of Virginia and Chicago. He has been accorded the unusual distinction of being offered not one, but two Festschriften. The first, The Industrial Revolution and British Society, edited by Patrick O'Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), was authored by eleven former students, British and Antipodean. The other is the subject of this review. It has fifteen authors for thirteen chapters and the introduction, mainly but not exclusively from the United States.

Hartwell is known primarily for his publications on the so-called industrial revolution in Great Britain, to which, following T. S. Ashton, he gave a radically different - optimistic - interpretation from that originally advanced by the posthumous publication of Arnold Toynbee, (uncle of the more famous Arnold Toynbee of A Study of History), Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1884). The British Festschrift emphasized that aspect of Hartwell's influence, but the American, without ignoring it altogether, emphasizes other and more fruitful strands of Hartwell's work.

There is some overlap between the two. For example, Eric Jones (La Trobe University), who does not share Hartwell's views on the industrial revolution, contributed not a substantive chapter to the British volume but an affectionate postscript, "Appreciation of Max Hartwell" as a teacher and friend. In the American volume, on the other hand, he authored the first chapter, "Patterns of Growth in History." It is filled with pregnant insights but, unfortunately, they will be almost incomprehensible to all but a few economic historians who are familiar with Jones's other works, and totally so to other readers. Thomas W. Laqueur, British-born but now teaching at UC-Berkeley, offered off-beat chapters in each volume: "Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution" in the British, which is merely silly, but a more substantial one in the American, "Cemeteries, Religion, and the Culture of Capitalism," which traces the commercialization of the burial business in nineteenth-century Britain.

Several of the contributions deal with themes other than the industrial revolution that also interested Hartwell. Mark Thomas, another Australian now teaching the...