“The Origins of the Industrial Revolution in the United States” grew out of Pierre Gervais's French doctoral thesis. It goes a small way toward righting the balance of trade in the field, there being far more research on European topics by North American scholars than the other way around. Having long added to the former total, this reviewer claims more linguistic facility than expertise on the American case, despite living in one of a number of regional contenders for the title of “cradle of American industrialization.”

Gervais begins by reviewing the theory of industrialization and is critical of what he identifies as opposing conventional views. One can be characterized, or perhaps caricatured, as Take-off + Gadgets, the other as Industrial Evolution: many causes + too gradual to date. He gives more credit to two other strains of analysis. The first goes back to Karl Polanyi and stresses the commoditization of labor, i.e., the growth of the population entirely dependent on paid employment. The second blends Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution with Tony Wrigley's “organic” economy and focuses attention on the immediate prefactory system. It should also be said that Marx is a not-so-ghostly presence in all this.

At any rate, the core of the work consists of an analysis of the market economy as it waxed and waned in a small area of central New Jersey (Trenton and Mercer County) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Actually, the term “mercantile economy” (économie marchande), found in the subtitle but strangely absent from the text, is more faithful to Gervais's thesis. He sees the late prefactory economy as totally dominated by merchants, because both landholding and direct production were too fragmented and dependent to constitute a countervailing force. Though the point is not made here, the model cannot easily fit the American South or Britain (among others), given their wealthy and high-status landowners. One consequence of the position is that the genesis of American industrialization as described here is more about trade and transport than about industrial production per se.

Although it may be true that most fortunes in the North originated in trade, Gervais no doubt exaggerates the economic power of the leading merchants, attributing potential profits to them that go rhetorically beyond what even shared monopoly could extract. But I do not want to dwell on the theoretical imprecision, for two reasons. One is that the idea of merchants controlling access to markets (they also dominated the evolving system of turnpikes, canals, steamship lines, and railroads) is one worth retaining. The second is that Gervais confronts an awkward fact: merchants did not actually extract all the profit they could, any more than they competed hard with one another. The reticence to gouge producers (and consumers) he ascribes to nonmarket—political and social—constraints, though without much evidence or detail in the argument. On the other hand, the “class solidarity” among merchants that kept shared monopoly stable in trade and transport gets more emphasis, complete with lots of family alliances and “Greifian” networks (disguised at the time by dummy corporations and other legal and accounting tricks).

So long as trade was king, productivity in production remained unimportant, so goes the argument. Only when goods from outside sources, foreign and domestic, threatened to sweep away the cozy control merchants exercised did that focus change. Only then, therefore, did the cumulative “Schumpeterian” processes of innovation and growth, scale and capital deepening, labor exploitation and price competition take hold in earnest and supplant Smithian growth. Tellingly, merchants led or joined the movement, many becoming major industrial entrepreneurs. On this showing, then, industrialization took place in two successive phases or systems, which Gervais, following F. Braudel, designates by the terms “market (or mercantile) economy” and “capitalism.” By implication, each was integral to the overall process, and the market economy, in particular, should be looked at more closely than terms such as “pre-conditions” imply.

On grounds of both doubt and ignorance, I leave judgment of Gervais's model in this regional application to specialists. The later stages of the story are only sketched out, including the actual shift to more production- and productivity-oriented industrial (and primary) sectors and the epoch-making move to factory wage labor. Yet my limited study of the upper Hudson Valley in the same period has also led me to the conclusion that industrialization only took over when trade became less profitable. In fact, the same succession characterized European urban economies in the pre- and proto-industrial periods. I also agree that it is important to stress how different the Atlantic economies of 1750 were from their late Renaissance counterparts while, apart from limited regions of England and Belgium, as late as the 1840s these same economies looked more like those of 1750 than of 1900.

The book combines close archival study of industries, firms, and entrepreneurs in a small region with a vigorously argued conceptual framework and is thus well worth reading. I hope it will soon be translated. It would also be time, perhaps, for a full-dress synthesis of the distinctive features of antebellum American industrialization, building on the growing number of case studies (Trenton, Paterson, Chicopee, Lowell, and so on) and going beyond the mere ten pages devoted to the subject in volume 2 of the Cambridge Economic History (S. L. Engerman and R.E. Gallman, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 369–79).