Why another book on cotton textiles? The editors of this volume of collected articles argue that though there have been many books on national industries, there was a need for one with a global focus. The editors' stated goals were first “to reveal diverse trajectories followed by different industries as well as their common patterns of development,” and second, “to gauge the varying contribution made by the industry around the world to social and economic development” (p. 16). The volume succeeds remarkably well in the first objective, though somewhat less well in the second. Given the ambitiousness of the overall project, that is not a bad record.

The volume stems from a 1997 conference organized in Manchester by Douglas Farnie and David Jeremy, and a session they organized at the 1998 Twelfth International Congress of Economic History in Madrid. Including the editors, there are 15 contributors, and 18 essays. Farnie and Jeremy are noted textile scholars who have made many contributions to what they themselves call the “ocean of literature” on the cotton textile industry. They gathered a panel of international experts: Takeshi Abe, Linda Grove, Tesuya Kuwahara, and Kaoru Sugihara from Japan; Stephan H. Linder from Germany; John C. Brown, Joshua Rosenbloom, Gary R. Saxonhouse, and Gavin Wright from the United States; John Singleton and Alfons van der Krann from Australia; and Stuart Thompstone and J. K. J. Thomson from England.

Farnie and Jeremy set the overall tone of the volume. They chose Degas's Un bureau de cotton à Nouvelle-Orléans, 1873, for the frontispiece. This signals the importance they attribute to marketing. In his chapter, “Merchants as Prime Movers,” Farnie argues that the merchant must be returned to his central place in the story of cotton textiles. He disputes the notion that the fate of a national industry is a necessary result of exogenously determined relative costs. Instead, success or failure follows from the occurrence or absence of creative merchandisers. One interesting section in this chapter contrasts the clever branding technique of the U.S. Knight brothers' “Fruit of the Loom” cloth with the insistence by British distributors that manufacturers produce homogeneous products. British distributors ensured the maximum level of cross firm competition and the lowest prices (p. 50). But the U.S. firm is still functioning, whereas most of its British competitors are gone. Jeremy seconds the emphasis on individuals in his chapter “The International Diffusion of Cotton Manufacturing,” which describes the channels of diffusion of textile technology. These included the often discussed immigration of skilled artisans, but Jeremy also gives credit to the numerous international exhibitions, state sponsorship, and foreign direct investment. His main theme is the role of individuals, whether an artisan selling his skills, a government agent, or a machine maker actively creating a market for his goods. Jeremy takes this theme up again in the chapter, “Organization and Management in the Global Cotton Industry.” He argues that the main job of management is to create links between producers, distributors and consumer markets. The section of this chapter on “culture” cites Gregory Clark's influential paper on inherent differences in labor across countries (“Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills,” this Journal 47, no. 1 [1987]: 141–73), but Jeremy's focus is on the differing managerial cultures in the United States, Britain, and Japan and its effect on their organizations and marketing.

The emphasis on individual initiatives and their accomplishments is echoed in many of the other contributions. Van Der Krann attributes the creation of a modern Dutch cotton textile industry to the intervention of the King, William of Orange. Thompstone discusses in detail the role of Ludwig Knoop in bringing textile technology to Russia. Rosenbloom focuses on the innovations and political maneuvering of Francis Lowell at an early, crucial stage in the development of the New England textile industry. And Kuwahara discusses the role of Sanji Mutō in the creation of a distinctive Japanese management system. Mutō was president of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company. Kuwahara analyzed the 8,271 managerial circulars Mutō wrote between 1902 and 1930. These testify to Mutō's efforts to standardize products. He was the first Japanese manager to gather and use voluminous statistical material, intra- and inter-firm. And he had put much of this managerial technology into place before 1914.

There are two other recurring themes I would like to mention. One is the linkage between choice of technology and national characteristics. Given the simple technology of textile manufacturing, one might assume all countries used the same technique. But that would be incorrect. Several articles touch on this theme. Among these, Thomson compares the diffusion of specific machines in Catalonia relative to Britain, the United States, and France. He explains the circumstances for particular periods of fast or slow diffusion. Even within this one small region, the process was not uniform. Saxonhouse and Wright exploit a large data set on production and sales of British spinning machines, 1878–1933. The data include the number of spindles per machine, machine speeds, and the yarn counts the machines were designed for. Britain was the world's dominant supplier of this equipment. And, because staffing levels per machine, as opposed to per spindle, remained constant or fell across most countries in this period, this data set allows an international comparison of productivity. Although all countries had access to the same technology through British firms, countries differed in their choices in ways one might have expected given their particular histories. These data confirm that the mere availability of technology does not determine success.

A second recurring theme is the role of protection in the creation and continuance of national textile industries. There have been only three countries that were able to compete effectively in unfettered world markets: England to 1914, Japan between 1920 and 1970, and only since the 1960s, China. And the only country I am aware of that developed a prosperous industry without the benefit of early protection was pre-1914 India. Britain itself had erected barriers to Indian cotton goods in the eighteenth century. Singleton's article shows that without the success of the Imperial Navy, Britain would not have had a successful textile industry. The navy insured that the industry would have free access to the Indian market. And because virtually every sovereign nation erected protective tariffs very quickly in the nineteenth century, if there had been no India, what would have become of Lancashire? The role of government policy, or its absence, is a major or minor theme in every article in the volume, with the exception of those of Saxonhouse and Wright and Kuwahara.

The role of the individual, the particulars of technological choice, and the role of government differed across countries, but were always important. In its illumination of these three themes, the book offers many insights on contrasting trajectories of growth, and thus succeeds in its first goal. There is, however, little discussion of the overall place of the textile industry in each nation's development. But that simply suggests the usefulness of another volume.