Metals, Culture and Capitalism is the latest in Professor Sir Jack Goody's long and distinguished sequence of publications on topics ranging over a broad field of social anthropology, social and economic, and cultural history. Focusing on issues including kinship organisation, production technology and literacy, the author's approach has been distinguished by a broadly materialist (sometimes termed Marxisant) approach and a keen eye for the underlying connections between areas frequently treated in isolation from each other. In Metals, Culture and Capitalism he turns his attention to ‘the role of metals not only in relation to early cultures but to the European Renaissance and to “modernity” in general’ (p. xiii).
The chronological and geographical sweeps are both broad. In twelve chapters the author takes us from the Chalcolithic Age (c. 6000–4000 BC) to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Geographically, the main focus is on Europe, the Mediterranean world and the Near East, but Africa together with South and East Asia all receive some attention together with briefer allusions to the experience of the pre-Columbian America. The book provides a useful account of the development of metallurgical technology over this broad expanse of space and time, but its most thought-provoking contribution lies in the analysis it provides of the role of metals in pre-industrial agrarian economies.
This has to be seen against the background of an influential interpretation of such economies that emphasises the defining significance of their dependence on organic sources of energy and raw materials – a significance captured in E. A. Wrigley's term ‘the organic economy’. For writers working in this frame of reference – including the present reviewer – it was this dependence that shaped the spatial organisation of such economies and underlay the endemic poverty and highly constrained ‘asymptotic’ patterns of growth that characterised them. Goody's argument builds on these ideas to some degree, but requires them to be rethought in respect of the role of mineral resources. The contribution of metals to organic economies was, he argues – though quantitatively limited – potentially important in at least two respects.
The first of these – the capacity of metal tools to boost agricultural productivity both directly, and indirectly through the fashioning of more effective wooden equipment – is already well recognised, but less attention has been given to the importance of metals for the spatial organisation of organic economies and the polities that depended on them. This stemmed from the significant mismatch between the geographies of soil productivity and mineral endowments, a mismatch which, from the earliest days of agricultural economies, required dwellers in fertile valleys to engage with the pastoralists of mountainous and upland regions so as to obtain tin, copper, and eventually iron. This engagement was of great cultural and political importance, but it also promoted the development of transport and communication technologies – particularly where materials had to be moved across water. Hence the search for metallic ores was a key driver in the process of spatial integration which itself represented one of the few significant routes to growth in organic economies.
Metals, Culture and Capitalism provides a valuable and thought-provoking account of the role of metals in organic economies. It does, however, have its limitations. In part these reflect the lengthy period over which the author has been able to pursue his investigations. Many of his best shots are aimed at adversaries who quit the field some time ago. It is unlikely, for instance, that many twenty-first-century students will need to know in quite as much detail as they will find in these pages of the limitations of V. Gordon Childe's ethnological theorising, or the shortcomings of Euro-centric interpretation. The proliferation of scare-quotes around terms such as ‘civilised’, ‘barbarian’ or ‘discover’ may, likewise, once have had some heuristic value, but is more likely to distract than to illuminate the contemporary reader.
Less excusably, the author has been poorly served by his publishers who have not given the manuscript the degree of editorial attention it deserved. There are many more typographical and minor factual errors than a serious academic publisher such as CUP should have let through – one does not get to Europe from the Levant by travelling East, Thebes is not in Bactria, Saladin was not a Mameluke and Alexander the Great did not found the Seleucid dynasty (the clue is in the name). More seriously, there is a great deal of unnecessary repetition – particularly of the technical material. (This reviewer lost count of the number of times he read of the difficulties of manufacturing cast iron and of China's precocity in this respect.) The book's chronological organisation also required more attention since extensive passages on the Renaissance and more recent periods are allowed to stray into chapters supposedly devoted to the medieval and ancient worlds.
