New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy: Essays in Quantitative Economic History, 1860-1914.

• Author: Hausman, William J.

Quantitative economic history, or cliometrics, remains one of the most vibrant and productive fields of economics, and British cliometricians have been particularly prolific in recent years. These scholars have addressed issues vital to the understanding of British economic developments (leading first to great success and, more recently, to relative decline), and the work generally has been of first-rate quality. The papers in this edited volume continue the tradition. The volume brings together papers delivered at two Quantitative Economic History conferences supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. The papers focus on the late Victorian and Edwardian economy, a time period during which Britain reached the height of its economic and political powers, but which, according to many commentators, also contained the seeds of later relative economic decline, made evident so tragically in the interwar period and still lingering today. Was British industry losing its competitive and technological edge during the period under discussion? Were the fruits of success spread too unevenly to be sustained? Did British monetary and banking policies fail to promote stable economic growth? These are some of the crucial questions addressed in the volume.

The first chapter contains an excellent introductory essay by the editor. Foreman-Peck not only summarizes the findings of the papers, but also puts the work into a larger context, including discussions of overall economic growth, demography, and foreign trade during the period. The papers that follow are organized into three topical sections: technology and industrial organization, distribution, and the monetary system and monetary policy.

The first section contains four papers. John Cantwell uses patent data to construct indexes of "revealed technological advantage" by sector, which he then uses to examine British industrial potential across industries, between countries, and over time. He argues that invention is fundamentally a cumulative process and that Britain found itself "locked in" to industries using more mature technologies, which explains in part disappointing productivity performance. James Foreman-Peck examines again the issue of the social saving of railways. Although a total factor productivity index reveals that efficiency growth in British railways was only half that of U.S. railways, the calculated static social savings were large by the end of the nineteenth century, and...