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Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age

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This interesting and well argued book is an attempt to broaden economic history and treat it as the subject of economic sociology, an effort to look carefully at the interactions of economics in modernizing states with the inheritence of distinctive political traditions. Dobbin uses the development of national rail systems in Britain, France, and the USA as a series of illustrative case studies. He argues that over the course of the 19th century, each of these nations successfully developed this key feature of modernity but pursued different paths to the end of developing strong national rail systems. These different pathways, in turn, were the result of applying different conceptions of national politics and state function to the task of economic development. For France, where the emphasis was on a strong central state, this resulted in a rail system whose development was overseen by the central state. For the USA, the first half of the 19th century saw heavy involvement of state and local governments in railway financing but not governance or planning, reflecting the decentralized nature of the early American state and its empahsis on aggregative private action in the public interest. In the second half of the 19th century, rail systems were national with the Federal government playing an essentially adjucative role and anti-monopoly measures pursued to enforce market competition, a very different policy than the first half of the century but one exhibiting some underlying thematic consistency. Similarly, Dobbin argues that Britain, another "laissez faire" state pursued another course with an emphasis on individual properties rights, little government involvement in financing or governance of railroads, and later in the century, encouragement of cartelization and de facto price controls to protect smaller firms. Dobbin is arguing, and arguing quite well, against physics type model of economic laws and rationality in which fundamental economic laws and consequences of technological change determine the course and nature of economic and social change.

Dobbin's general argument is generally strong and his study of the individual cases provides solid support for his thesis. Any argument for more sophisticated, multicausal analyses of national development is attractive. There are, however, some problems with his argument. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that France, Britain, and the USA pursued roughly equal strategies and in the sense that they all achieved good, functioning, national rail system, this is correct. But was there really that much theoretical freedom of choice in these countries? That is, could the USA have pursued a French type approach? Given the huge size of the USA compared to France, let alone Britain, this seems unlikely. Dobbin argues that despite significant changes in national rail policy in Britain and the USA, there are essential elements of continuity. He makes a good argument, but in the absence of a substantial, well trained, civil service, did the USA really have a choice? Dobbin also overemphasizes the centralized nature of the French state in comparison with Britain. In important respects, 18th century Britain was a more successfully centralized state than France. As shown by John Brewer, on a per capita basis, Britain had a larger and more professional bureaucracy, and was much better at tax collection. This is one of the reasons the British bested France in their 18th century rivalry. This fact doesn't directly refute Dobbin's general argument but only makes the economic history even more complex than his analysis implies.

While written clearly, sections are repetitive, and since the intended audience seems to have been his fellow social scientists, there is a fair amount of technical language (which some would call jargon).