This weekend The Guardian publishes two reviews of Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.

The first review, by Maya Jasanoff, argues that the book:

is a compelling and spectacularly detailed retelling of imperial “rise” as well as fall, from Yorktown to Hong Kong. Not since Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy has anyone recounted these events with such sustained panache. Brendon’s empire is a ramshackle affair, managed for decades out of a Colonial Office that boasted “an assortment of rickety chairs and old, baize-covered tables,” a basement “so damp that it had to be pumped out twice a day” and an attic that doubled as a fives court. Virtually every page offers up some memorable observation.

In addition Brendon emphasizes the peculiar characters of the British Empire. Jasanoff writes:

All told, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire presents a glittering panoply of decadence, folly, farce and devastation. Brendon’s characters alone could fill a pantomime stage many times over.

Jasanoff claims that this strength of the book simultaneously suggests its weakness.

This touches on the chief casualty of Brendon’s descriptive approach: the relative absence of explanation and analysis. After so much rich narrative, one is left craving synthesis - particularly comparison across regions, for such interconnections help make an empire what it is. How, for example, did the use of partition in Ireland in 1921 influence its subsequent application in Palestine and south Asia? How might British counter-insurgency tactics developed in one domain - South Africa or Ireland, Palestine or Malaya - have been replayed in others? (To say nothing of their influence on the Americans in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria.) To what extent did imperial personnel carry policies from region to region? What kinds of networks of influence existed among anti-colonial leaders, such as the black nationalists inspired by Gandhi, or advocates of non-alignment? Brendon nods in these directions, but readers looking for deep answers will want to turn elsewhere.

The second review, by Robert McCrum, emphasizes different aspects of the book. McCrum dwells more on the larger themes than in the individual personas (although the latter are sometimes indistinguishable from some of the more notable episodes of the Empire).

Piers Brendon’s prodigious volume is a brilliant account of acts two, three and four in this swelling drama of imperial themes from Yorktown to Goose Green. Despite his title, he knows he is not Edward Gibbon and is the first to concede that Decline and Fall casts a long shadow. While he has resisted ’setting up as a rival’ to the choleric county colonel and his rolling Augustan narrative of Roman decline, the awesome scale of a subject that includes Africa, the Far East and the Antipodes compels the faithful narrator into an enthralling mini-series of colonial adventure from Plessey to Omdurman, via the Zulu wars (Rorke’s Drift) and Baden-Powell’s defence of Mafeking.

Brendon’s empire, about which he has mixed feelings, is a liberal enterprise dedicated, however hypocritically, to the principle of liberty. Although its antecedents trace back to the 16th century and beyond, this empire was inspired by the loss of the American colonies and the ancient rivalry with France. It was made possible by the supremacy of the Royal Navy, by Britain’s industrial revolution, and by the relative weakness of rival European powers in the 19th century.

McCrum argues that the weakness of Pearson’s work is his lack of attention to the role of the United States during the twentieth century period of the Empire’s decline.

If Piers Brendon has a weakness, it lies in his insufficient attention to the role of America in Britain’s decline. Dean Acheson’s famous claim that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’ is both a statement of fact and also a boastful assertion of late 20th-century American supremacy, however brief. Ironically, 1963, the year of Acheson’s comment, was the year of the Beatles’ first American tour and the beginnings of a new kind of Englishness, a global phenomenon but one unintelligible without an understanding of the empire. By 2007, Britain’s role in the world seems to have become more loosely cultural than political. But that’s another story.

Maya Jasanoff’s review in Saturday’s edition of The Guardian: “Last post for the oddball empire”

Robert McCrum’s review in Sunday’s edition of The Guardian: “From Empire to Oblivion”

The New York Times reviews a forthcoming book by economic historian Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, which presents new evidence and a novel argument for why the industrial revolution occurred when it did. The review places Clark squarely in the camp of historians who see a fundamental change occurring around 1800, although there have been others who have argued for an earlier or for a later “start date” to the Industrial Revolution.

I gather from the review that Clark’s argument hinges on a change in behavioral attitudes and the widespread adoption of “capitalist values” (or at least the values and attitudes necessary for a capitalist economy). The novelty in Clark’s work, apart from the considerable amount of new source material he has uncovered, is the part of his argument that suggests that the values necessary for capitalism could have been transmitted genetically.

For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Dr. Clark’s ideas have been circulating in articles and manuscripts for several years and are to be published as a book next month, ‘A Farewell to Alms’ (Princeton University Press). Economic historians have high praise for his thesis, though many disagree with parts of it.

The final part of the review quotes several other prominent economic historians, including Kenneth Pomerantz, whose book The Great Divergence I am currently reading, and Robert P. Brenner, whose series of articles in Past and Present from the late 1970s and 1980s are basically “required reading” for any British or European historian. Both Pomerantz and Brenner are somewhat critical of Clark’s argument.

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

Reaction to Dr. Clark’s thesis from other economic historians seems largely favorable, although few agree with all of it, and many are skeptical of the most novel part, his suggestion that evolutionary change is a factor to be considered in history.

Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the economists’ view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives. Hence they seek to explain events like the Industrial Revolution in terms of changes in institutions, not people.

Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little, which is why there is so little agreement on the causes of the Industrial Revolution. In saying the answer lies in people’s behavior, he is asking his fellow economic historians to revert to a type of explanation they had mostly abandoned and in addition is evoking an idea that historians seldom consider as an explanatory variable, that of evolution.

Most historians have assumed that evolutionary change is too gradual to have affected human populations in the historical period. But geneticists, with information from the human genome now at their disposal, have begun to detect ever more recent instances of human evolutionary change like the spread of lactose tolerance in cattle-raising people of northern Europe just 5,000 years ago. A study in the current American Journal of Human Genetics finds evidence of natural selection at work in the population of Puerto Rico since 1513. So historians are likely to be more enthusiastic about the medieval economic data and elaborate time series that Dr. Clark has reconstructed than about his suggestion that people adapted to the Malthusian constraints of an agrarian society.

“He deserves kudos for assembling all this data,” said Dr. Hoffman, the Caltech historian, “but I don’t agree with his underlying argument.”

The decline in English interest rates, for example, could have been caused by the state’s providing better domestic security and enforcing property rights, Dr. Hoffman said, not by a change in people’s willingness to save, as Dr. Clark asserts.

The natural-selection part of Dr. Clark’s argument “is significantly weaker, and maybe just not necessary, if you can trace the changes in the institutions,” said Kenneth L. Pomeranz, a historian at the University of California, Irvine. In a recent book, “The Great Divergence,” Dr. Pomeranz argues that tapping new sources of energy like coal and bringing new land into cultivation, as in the North American colonies, were the productivity advances that pushed the old agrarian economies out of their Malthusian constraints.

Robert P. Brenner, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, said although there was no satisfactory explanation at present for why economic growth took off in Europe around 1800, he believed that institutional explanations would provide the answer and that Dr. Clark’s idea of genes for capitalist behavior was “quite a speculative leap.”

Dr. Bowles, the Santa Fe economist, said he was “not averse to the idea” that genetic transmission of capitalist values is important, but that the evidence for it was not yet there. “It’s just that we don’t have any idea what it is, and everything we look at ends up being awfully small,” he said. Tests of most social behaviors show they are very weakly heritable.

He also took issue with Dr. Clark’s suggestion that the unwillingness to postpone consumption, called time preference by economists, had changed in people over the centuries. “If I were as poor as the people who take out payday loans, I might also have a high time preference,” he said.

Dr. Clark said he set out to write his book 12 years ago on discovering that his undergraduates knew nothing about the history of Europe. His colleagues have been surprised by its conclusions but also interested in them, he said.

“The actual data underlying this stuff is hard to dispute,” Dr. Clark said. “When people see the logic, they say ‘I don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s hard to dismiss.’ ”

The complete review from The New York Times:

Biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville

Books, History

Posted Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 12:00 am