Escape From Rome by Walter Scheidel

Author:Walter Scheidel
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780691172187
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE FISCAL-NAVAL-MERCANTILIST STATE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

In the end, the visible and often heavy hand of the fiscal-naval-mercantilist state that had emerged in Britain mattered as much as the invisible hand of the market. The economy benefited from mobilization effects: war required intensive use of resources. British cotton production tripled between the 1790s and 1813, while iron and steel output quadrupled. Massive demand for arms and uniforms lay behind this, coupled with a determined push for rationalization.120

During those years, capital fled war-torn Europe. Policies that favored autarky promoted coal and iron at the expense of imports, and domestic diffusion of relevant technologies accelerated. The rate of high-value patenting increased. Meanwhile, other countries’ mercantile sectors suffered, thereby widening Britain’s lead.121

More immediate connections between war-making and technological innovation merit particular attention. The precision demands of firearms manufacturing guided the development of instrumentation and machinery including steam engines. It was cannon precision boring applied to cylinders that first made steam power viable.

Even before then, in the early eighteenth century, war with France had stimulated coke-smelting techniques that made it possible to use domestic iron to produce bar and pig iron. Within just a few years of Henry Cort’s patent of 1784, the Royal Navy embraced the puddling process, which allowed the manufacture of higher-quality bar iron without charcoal. The French Wars then enabled the state to raise both tariffs and domestic production, protecting the profits of manufacturers whose investments funded the proliferation of furnaces and foundries. At the same time, steam engines sustained the huge expansion in coal mining that was required to keep the iron industry growing.122

Economic nationalism boosted nation-building and made mass warfare a reality: economic and military mobilization went hand in hand. In this context, “interstate competition often provided the stimulus if not the sheer necessity to develop.” But did the resultant economic growth and technological change owe more to the promotion of “benign” forces than to the removal of impediments?123

In Britain, and increasingly elsewhere, some impediments were in fact being removed—Eric Jones invokes the “withering away of arbitrariness, violence, custom, and old social controls.” “Benign” institutions arose from competitive political adaptations. Yet some of the most potent policies did not promote overtly “benign” features but the exact opposite: war and protectionism, as well as colonial slavery.124

War was lethal, expensive, and on the face of it produced little tangible gain. Much the same was true of overseas empire, although in terms of economic payoff Britain may have been a rare exception. Bargaining with elites burdened consumers with protectionist tariffs and trade barriers. As Rosenthal and Wong point out, growth was thus associated with policies that were not deliberately benign or growth-enhancing but mere by-products of competition and conflict between states and bargains that favored capitalists within states. If political competition did in the end stimulate economic development, it did so indirectly and often unintentionally.125

Yet even as a comprehensive balance sheet remains beyond our reach, there is a case to be made that the British economy expanded and modernized in part because of rather than in spite of the tremendous burdens of war, taxation, and protectionism.

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