Books of the Day
Britain's Economic Achievement
English Economic History : Mainly since 1700. By C. R. Fay. (Heifer. 5s.) English Economic History : Mainly since 1700. By C. R. Fay. (Heifer. 5s.) How fortunate economic history is just now in its practitioners! There is Professor Tawney, who writes like an angel , Professor G. N. Clark, who writes like an admirable eighteenth-century man of sense ; Eileen Power, who wrote like the woman of wit and elegance she was; and here is Mr. Fay, whose book is written with that imp of inspiration which Kipling speaks of in his autobiography. Indeed, Mr. Fay is the Kipling of economic historians: a writer full of hearty prejudice, of astonishingly sound instinct and penetrating common sense, and with a streak of genius. Mr. Keynes has already paid public tribute to this curious, brilliant, arresting book—and to be praised by Mr. Keynes is rather like having one's name inscribed upon the dome of St. Paul's, or, shall we say, upon King's College Chapel.
What sort of book is this? It is a slim volume of 25o pages in a blue paper cover, which might be (indeed seems largely to have been) overlooked as some dull official publication. It has more misprints than it ought to have. And yet it is a wonderful little book : 25o pages packed with exciting information, pregnant with wit and wisdom about England's economic achievement in the last two centuries. It is not a text-book. It is a course of lectures (lucky students who heard them!) delivered at Cambridge, and published as they were delivered, with comments on the writers mixed in with the history—a method always popular with students. Mr. Fay offers it as an experiment in teaching, the lectures arising from questions and papers set in advance, and he asks for•criticisms from other teachers. I can imagine nothing more suggestive and stimulating. In effect we are offered the reflections of a ripe economic historian on some of the knottiest problems in his subject, with an original review of the latest and best books out in that field.
His theme is England's—or rather, since a good proportion of it was Scottish, Britain's—economic and industrial achievements. The theme inspires him, and rightly : " the faith . . . underlies the exposition." I doubt how many Englishmen realise that it is they who largely created the constructive side of the modem world. True, they did not create the ugly militarism and nation- alism of Germany, that other great force of the modern world-- and a thoroughly evil one. No: the English (and the Scots) created the beneficent works of modern industry : cheap cottons and woollens for the people, the canals and railways and roads of the Industrial Revolution, street-lighting, gas and electricity, the innumerable uses of rubber and vegetable oils which mark the modern age no less than the steam-engine and steamship which mark the earlier, the steam-turbine and electrical generator of yesterday as well as the inventions and improvements which wrought a revolution in eighteenth-century agriculture. With all this there goes a wealth of great names and great men: Boulton and Watt, Murdoch and the Stephensons, Captain Cook, Telford, McAdam, the Brunels, Josiah Wedgwood, Coke of Holkham, Cecil Rhodes, Trevithick, Sir Charles Parsons. There is indeed an embarras de richesses for such a book. How wonderful it has been, and what reason the English have to be proud, a Cornishman may remind them. Not that the Cornish have a by any means negligible part in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, as Mr. Fay kindly points out. He is much attracted by that genial giant Trevithick, his extraordinary creativeness, and devotes a whole chapter to him and the Cornwall of that day. There were others, too, Humphry Davy, Trengrouse, the inventor of tl.e rocket life-saving apparatus ; he does not mention Goldsworthy Gurney, who awaits a biographer, or Tangye, or the very interesting china-clay industry, whose history should be written.
On a number of contentious issues in economic history he says a salutary, settling word: on the nature of the Mercantile system, for example, which has been so befogged by tendentious (and voluminous) German scholarship: He is not taken in by that. He insists all the time that the one country from which England learnt pre-eminently in matters of trade, finance, commerce, all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was Holland, and that it is to Dutch history that we must look, with our own, for the mercantile system as it was in fact, not in theory. So, too, he speaks sense about what has come to be known as the Tawney-Weber thesis, the link-up of Protestantism with the development of capitalism: a thesis in which there is something, but how much only an archangel can say. And all the while he is absolutely right in his emphasis upon, and pride in, the achievements of our merchants and seafaring men in building up that empire for which today we have such reason to be thankful: as against the abstract economists of the profession, and political doctrinaires of the Left.
Mr. Fay has a blessed quality of making the familiar, ordinary things of life, of domestic use, shine with light and tell- us their exciting stories. His book should be used in all schools and universities and places where they teach (or learn); while that shy bird, the general reader, should take to it like a duck to water.
A. L. ROWSE.
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