Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 703 Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prus­ sia. By Colleen A. Dunlavy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 303; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50. To what extent did politics or technology shape the course of indus­ trialization? There seems no better way to answer this question than through comparative history. If, under similar technological con­ straints, nations with different values or class and state structures took different paths, we might conclude that technology is indeterminate. Colleen Dunlavy’s Politics and Industrialization goes some distance to­ ward a verdict by comparing the effects of state structure on the early development of Prussian and American railroads and then reversing the inquiry to assess the effects of industrialization on political devel­ opment. As far as this study goes—and its contributions are many—it opens up as many questions as it resolves. The differences between the modern state in the United States and Germany are well known: the former, fragmented by federalism and the separation of powers, tends toward laissez-faire, while the latter, unified by a strong executive and central state bureaucracy, is interventionary . But these images, Dunlavy demonstrates, were reversed in early-19th-century railroad policy. In Prussia an uneasy equilib­ rium between monarchy and parliament led the crown to abstain from subsidy and regulation. Otherwise it would have ceded precious power to provincial assemblies. By contrast, powerful American states, competing among one another, vigorously funded and regu­ lated railroads. The early economic consequences of political difference were sub­ stantial. Americans constructed railroads rapidly over extensive terri­ tory; they were characteristically diverse and cheap. Making careful use of scarce capital, the Prussians were more metbodical: they built expensive, highly engineered and standardized railroads. The eco­ nomic effects of state structure were also indirect, mediated through the organization of civil society. In Prussia, where groups aborning faced a unitary central state, national associations of railroads and engineers were readily organized. Analogous efforts in the United States foundered on the vast diversity of state regulations. Conse­ quently, by the 1850s Germany was far more successful in standardiz­ ing railroad technology and interfirm operations than the United States. It appears then that politics trumped technology. Not quite. In time, Dunlavy argues, the high fixed costs of railroad technology homogenized industrial and state structures. By the late 19th century industrial capitalism and modern government in Germany and the United States “differed in degree, not in kind”: railroads in both countries became huge national systems organized in managerial hi­ erarchies and railroad politics became national (p. 16). In 1847, the Prussian crown sparked a political crisis by demanding that provincial assemblies approve an unlawfully large railroad loan. 704 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE King and parliament held their ground, and the revolution came the following year. “In that sense,” Dunlavy writes, “the new demands of industrial capitalism—the unprecedented amounts of capital that railroad construction demanded—helped precipitate a transforma­ tion of the Prussian political structure” (pp. 235—37). The new re­ gime, a compromise between central state and assembly, accorded the national bureaucracy sufficient parliamentary legitimacy to aug­ ment the latitude ministers had to subsidize and regulate railroads. As such it opened the door to nationalization. High fixed-cost technology was equally determinate in the United States. Once managers consolidated huge national systems to ensure economies of scale, regulatory politics outgrew the states. By the late 1880s, uniform federal law augmented the capacity of national associ­ ations to standardize technology and operations, as well as to lobby. Directly and indirectly, then, capital-intensive railroad technology led to convergence. Even though politics determined the pace and partic­ ular path of railroad development, technology determined its essen­ tial form: large-scale, professionally managed, national hierarchies. Drawn largely in an extensive epilogue, this conclusion is prema­ ture. Recent work on multiple paths to industrialization within and between nations indicates that technology was far more indeterminate and politics more continuously important than this study suggests. For example, my own work on late-19th-century American railroads shows that cost structures were determined as much by highly con­ tested rules of corporation law as they were...