Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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infrequently, family possession of land was maintained even when peasants migrated

to become workers, as remittance payments supplemented the family’s inadequate

agricultural income. In many areas of Europe, particularly in the south and east, the

owner of a small farm was often the employer of a small number of the landless poor

who comprised a large portion of the rural population. However, the existence of

very large estates was far from a guarantee that agriculture would be progressive and

prosperous.

Spain’s territorially extensive and varied agricultural regions demonstrated the

characteristics and problems of both the latifundia, the large landed estate, and its

opposite, the minifundia.

In both systems traditional crops, age-old agrarian prac-

tices, and ossiﬁed social relations dominated to replicate low productivity regimes

and rural discontent. Demands for agrarian reform revealed political discontent on

the part of both those who aspired to land ownership and those whose ownership

of the land was threatened; this irreconcilable contest was a major cause of the Spanish

Civil War. A different civil war, at the opposite end of Europe, had seen the Bolsheviks

triumph with slogans which promised land to the people and a policy that national-

ized land ownership but recognized the rights of peasants to use what they had

already taken into their own hands. However, by the end of the 1920s a number of

factors conspired to provoke Stalin’s sudden decision in 1929 to collectivize Soviet

agriculture: a scarcity of rural capital; impatience over the growth of agricultural

production and reluctance on the part of peasants to amalgamate holdings or volun-

tarily join state farms; the isolation of “right-wing deviationists,” including Bukharin;

and the apprehensions of the Communist Party concerning the loyalty of the

countryside. Collectivization lurched forward in 1930 and then, after a brief pause,

was ruthlessly enforced to transform Soviet agriculture by 1934, without regard for

lost production or cost in human lives. Standing in sharp contrast, there were the

wealthier regions of northwest Europe, notably Denmark, England, and Holland,

where high productivity agriculture was achieved by intensive, mechanized, and

highly specialized farming methods combined with well-established distribution net-

works that linked producers closely to their markets and often adopted cooperative

organizations.

It is when we turn to the large-scale enterprise that we ﬁnd the most obvious

contrast between the established literature and recent research. And here we can

identify two major themes. First, the large American industrial ﬁrm is often assumed

to be the source of America’s productivity lead at the beginning of the twentieth

century and, secondly, the United States is frequently identiﬁed as the home of “big

business.” Both of these assumptions are questionable. On the ﬁrst count, America’s

productivity lead over all European countries was the result of a comprehensively

superior performance across the full spectrum of economic activities. In every sector,

American small-scale ﬁrms and medium-size enterprises, as well as large corporations,

tended to exhibit greater efﬁciency than their European counterparts. Consequently,

America’s relatively high productivity, and therefore the relatively high living stan-

dards enjoyed by Americans, owed as much, if not more, to the efﬁciency of family

farms on the prairies as it did to large industrial corporations.

Secondly, large enterprises, however they are measured, be it by output or by

inputs of capital or labor, were well established in Europe by 1900. On the eve of

World War I Europe provided half of the world’s hundred largest enterprises,

the economy 109

measured by the size of workforce. The Russian State Railway, the largest enterprise

in the world, employed more than half a million workers, as did the second largest,

imperial Germany’s Prussian-Hessian State Railway. Among the other European

enterprises which appear in ranks of the ten largest in the world were Germany’s

Reichspost, the United Kingdom’s General Post Ofﬁce, the Austrian State Railway,

the Italian State Railway, and the Hungarian Royal State Railway Company. Two

points stand out: ﬁrst, the importance of large state enterprise, and, secondly, remem-

bering that telecommunications were provided by the post ofﬁces, the very signiﬁcant

contribution of the large ﬁrm to the transport and communications systems of the

European economies. Only three American enterprises appear in the ranks of the

world’s ten largest employers in 1912: the US Post Ofﬁce, the American Telephone

& Telegraph Company, and the United States Steel Corporation. The US Post Ofﬁce,

a state-owned communications enterprise, corresponds with its European counter-

parts. There are only two privately owned companies, both American, but as AT&T

operated in a network industry as a provider of telephone services, the US Steel

Corporation was the sole manufacturing company. By these criteria in 1912, the

world’s typical “big business” was European, state owned, and active in the services

sector, rather than the American, privately owned manufacturing corporation sug-

gested by conventional wisdom.

It is signiﬁcant that, at the turn of the century, the large enterprise was a relatively

new phenomenon in the United States and this novelty goes some way to explaining

why Americans reacted so strongly to its appearance whereas, to contemporary

Europeans, this was a less spectacular and far from novel development. The signiﬁ-

cance of this is all the more striking when one speciﬁc element of the conventional

story is examined; this is the role which a traditional interpretation awards to

Henry Ford.

Ford introduced and developed an industrial system which standardized factory

practices, employed machine tools, constructed units from interchangeable compo-

nents, and honed moving assembly line methods to achieve mass production. In the

interwar years, by which time they had been adopted in Europe, these components

were to be identiﬁed as integral to modern factory organization and, when uniﬁed

as a system, were often termed “Fordism.”

However, far from being typical, Henry Ford was in many ways a revolutionary

businessman, a true mold-breaking entrepreneur, who adopted and adapted the

assembly line to raise productivity in the automobile industry to unprecedented levels.

Furthermore, although Ford established his new enterprise, the Ford Motor Company,

in 1903, it was only a decade later at his new Highland Park factory in Detroit

that he was able systematically to implement standardization, interchangeability, and

assembly line production. Additionally, in the face of absenteeism and a high turnover

of labor, Ford introduced a high wage strategy, the $5 day, to compensate workers

for the effort and drudgery they experienced on the assembly line. Signiﬁcant though

the Ford Company’s output was to become, not only was its contribution too small,

relative to the whole US economy, but also its growth occurred much too late to

explain America’s already signiﬁcant productivity lead over Europe in the two decades

before 1914. Even as late as 1912 the Ford Motor Company employed barely 7,000

workers. Thereafter the company experienced rapid expansion. When the last Model

T rolled off the assembly line in 1927 over 15 million had been produced.

110 peter wardley

While the huge American market provided the primary impetus for this expansion,

this was supplemented by the growth of demand in Europe. Almost immediately

after the company’s creation, Ford’s cars and tractors were sold in the European

market, with sales ofﬁces established in France, Russia, and Scandinavia – although

England was the focus of Ford’s European activities. In World War I Ford delivered

transport equipment urgently required by Allied armies and, with the restoration of

peace, it expanded production to meet growing consumer demand. In 1911 Ford

started production in Europe at its Trafford Park assembly plant, Manchester and,

after World War I, additional factories were built at Barcelona, Bordeaux, Copenhagen,

Cologne, Cork, and Paris. In 1928 the company decided that Dagenham, near

London, would act as Ford’s European Detroit, and a vast complex was constructed

to manufacture parts, assemble cars, and supply other subsidiary plants. Managerial

difﬁculties, combined with the difﬁculties caused by the Great Depression, necessi-

tated a major reorganization of the company and in 1932 the European management

at Dagenham coordinated the introduction of the Ford Eight (Model Y), Ford’s ﬁrst

car designed specially for the European market, at several of its European assembly

plants.

The impact of Ford was even more considerable than the company’s impressive

contribution to European road transport equipment and farm mechanization. In the

1930s advisors from the Ford Company were inﬂuential in both the Soviet Union

and Nazi Germany; at the Gorki tractor factory in Russia they assisted in the design

of factories and speciﬁcation of assembly processes and they acted as consultants to

the Volkswagen project. Indirectly, the Ford Motor Company also provided a blue-

print for European manufacturing companies. At Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili

Torino), for example, Giovanni Agnelli not only adopted its mass production methods

at his Il Lingotto factory in 1920 but, by establishing subsidiary companies in France,

Germany, and Poland, he also followed Ford’s expansionist policy of opening facto-

ries in other countries. Henry Ford also exercised personal inﬂuence in interwar

Europe; greatly admired by Adolf Hitler, Ford was a notorious antisemite and a

longstanding supporter of the Nazi Party. Flirting with fascism, however, was not

conﬁned to Ford; after World War II several US-owned multinationals, including

General Electric, General Motors, IBM, IT&T, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, were

to face accusations prompted by their business activities in Nazi Germany.

However, the Ford Motor Company was but one component of the system of

big business that impacted upon the economies of North America and Europe

between 1900 and 1945. Alfred Chandler, the undisputed pioneering authority of

business history, devotes relatively little attention to the Ford Motor Company, as he

attributes superior American corporate performance to managerial hierarchy and

organizational learning rather than the exercise of personal authority and individuali-

stic ﬂair. Indeed, one consequence of his research was to redirect the attention of

historians who previously had concentrated on the less constructive activities of the

“Robber Barons.”

For Chandler, it was the deployment of the “Visible Hand” of management,

achieved by the implementation of departmental structures to exploit unprecedented

economies of scale and scope, that enabled the large industrial corporation to sup-

plant the “Invisible Hand” of the market, which economists had identiﬁed as the

source of economic efﬁciency ever since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of

the economy 111

Nations in 1776. The purposeful development of managerial hierarchies by full-time

salaried executives provided the crucial ingredient in Chandler’s explanation of the

success of the large American industrial corporation.

The growth of businesses was often accompanied by an expansion in the range

of the economic activities undertaken, so that the scope of a ﬁrm often expanded

along with its size. Horizontal and vertical integration resulted in the creation of

large multi-unit industrial enterprises that could only thrive if order was imposed by

senior managers who monitored and co-coordinated the activities performed by

middle or lower managers, supervisors, and workers; the implementation of this

corporate strategy required a change in organizational structure. Signiﬁcant econo-

mies of scale were achieved by investment in new production processes in the petro-

leum, chemical, metallurgical, and engineering industries, all of which were relatively

more capital intensive than traditional manufacturing industries such as textiles, cloth-

ing, furniture, and publishing.

Outstanding examples of America’s large integrated industrial corporations at the

beginning of the twentieth century include Standard Oil, International Harvester,

Du Pont, and the United States Rubber Company. Furthermore, and especially for

those that could sell directly to the retailer, there were gains to be obtained by invest-

ing in an extensive distribution network; examples here include the American Tobacco

Co., Proctor & Gamble, producers of household chemicals, and two meat-packing

companies, Armour & Co. and Swift & Co. The most conspicuous was the Singer

Manufacturing Company, prominent in North America, the British Empire, and in

continental Europe, which created distribution networks across the globe to sell its

ubiquitous sewing machine. Singer also illustrates another Chandlerian theme, that

of “ﬁrst mover advantage”: although it faced competition, Singer invested in technol-

ogy and established extensive customer-serving facilities that guaranteed its leading

status. By contrast, Chandler suggests that the United States Steel Corporation,

the world’s largest company at its creation, a bank-sponsored amalgamation which

amounted to little more than the sum of its federated parts, failed to invest in man-

agement, product research, and distribution and consequently suffered erosion of its

ﬁrst mover advantage.

These inﬂuences were not restricted to North America and many of these ﬁrms had

a presence in, and an impact on, Europe. For example, both Armour and Swift invested

in extensive distribution networks, including freezing plants and shipping facilities,

which enabled them to sell their processed food products in European markets. In

1901 American Tobacco’s expansion into European markets prompted a defensive

response in Britain when 17 British ﬁrms created the Imperial Tobacco Company.

These two industrial giants then cooperated to create a jointly owned company, the

British-American Tobacco Company, which was designed to act in markets outside

America and Britain. BAT, which became a British company after antitrust action taken

by the US Supreme Court saw American Tobacco broken up in 1911, became the

dominant tobacco manufacturing company in Germany through its acquisition and

expansion of Jasmatzi, previously an American Tobacco subsidiary.

Chandler suggests that America’s superior economic performance owes much to

the three-pronged investment strategy, which committed resources to production

facilities, sales networks, and managerial hierarchies, developed by its industrial cor-

porations. To make a trans-Atlantic comparison, Chandler identiﬁes three national

112 peter wardley

industrial systems: America’s “competitive managerial capitalism,” Germany’s

“cooperative managerial capitalism,” and Britain’s “personal capitalism.” Each system

is weighed in the balance, to the clear disadvantage of the British. Despite the eager-

ness of German ﬁrms to operate as members of cartels, which uniquely were both

legal and amazingly multitudinous, and the active participation of the banks on the

boards of industrial companies, reﬂective of their long-term investments, that Chandler

identiﬁes as distinctive features of the German system, he suggests that in their

investment strategies, managerial structures, and economic performance, German

industrial ﬁrms more closely resembled American corporations than did their British

counterparts.

Although business organization and practices may explain some aspects of Europe’s

inferior industrial performance relative to the United States, the adoption of the mul-

tidivisional form of corporate organization per se can be eliminated as a major explana-

tory factor before World War II. Far from being a carefully planned organizational

innovation, the multidivisional structure pioneered by Pierre Du Pont in 1921 was a

response to crisis. As the short-lived boom which followed the end of World War I was

succeeded by deep economic depression, like many other US companies Du Pont and

General Motors faced ﬁnancial catastrophe. They were only saved from bankruptcy by

radical action in the form of a managerial overhaul which resulted in the imposition

of multidivisional structures at both companies. This form of organization spread,

both within the USA and abroad, but the rate of diffusion was slow. It is important to

remember that until 1921 the departmental structure remained the most advanced

form of business organization in the United States, and that it would remain the most

prevalent form of organization there until at least World War II.

Chandler’s publications have raised a number of salient questions which will

prompt comparative research for some time yet. However, it is fair to report that he

tends to assume the inferior performance of British ﬁrms and that his preferred

measure of performance, the relative size of an industrial corporation’s assets, is far

from optimal. Cassis has shown recently that by this standard and by others, includ-

ing proﬁtability, size of workforce, and longevity, Britain provided a larger contingent

to the ranks of Europe’s large industrial companies than did its German and French

neighbors throughout the twentieth century.

Furthermore, Chandler has little to say about the services sectors in the twentieth

century, though a signiﬁcant portion of the productivity gains obtained in the half

century before 1945 were provided by companies in these sectors. Here he is not

alone. Although the national income data at our disposal clearly demonstrate the

sizable and signiﬁcant contribution of services, we are less certain about how this was

achieved. Recently published research does not suggest that the large corporations

in the services sectors of western Europe lagged behind their American counterparts.

British banks, for example, which were much larger than US banks, acted according

to the three-pronged investment strategy identiﬁed by Chandler.

At the end of

the 1920s English retail banks consolidated national branch networks, invested in

mechanization, and overhauled their management structures while adopting the

same enthusiasm to engage in rationalization contemporaneously demonstrated by

Chandler’s US industrial ﬁrms.

In European countries, as in the US, there was a lag between the initial adoption

of a new technique or organizational form and the broad diffusion of these innova-

the economy 113

tions across the economy as a whole. Although national circumstances differed – with

high per capita income western Europe more closely resembling the United States

than poorer regions of southern Europe – big business in interwar Europe was

successful, proﬁtable and productive. The shock of World War II, which not only

stimulated managerial change within large US corporations but also disrupted and

fragmented the corporate systems built by giant European companies, contributed

directly to the dominance which American big business would exercise for several

decades after 1945.

Conclusion

The European economies experienced discernable economic growth which raised the

average income per capita of most Europeans during the four decades after 1900,

though the two world wars and the Depression of the early 1930s were detrimental

to economic performance. While average incomes increased at a rate which was far

from dramatic (the rates of growth were lower than those which were to be achieved

during the “Golden Age” of the third quarter of the twentieth century, though higher

than those experienced in either the interwar years or during the mid-nineteenth

century), the economic gains made in the four decades before 1945 were signiﬁcant,

and for many these resulted in an increase in real living standards.

However, despite the rising average income per capita which was achieved across

the continent, poverty remained an obvious feature of every European country,

though the incidence, extent, and severity of its impact varied considerably. Marked

inequality of income, and even more striking inequality of wealth, is a characteristic

of capitalism, which was the dominant form of economic organization in all European

countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. While vestigial remnants of previ-

ous economic structures survived, remaining to varying degrees in different coun-

tries, the market provided the predominant organizing principle of economic activity

in Europe. Even if the hegemony of the capitalist class was far from unchallenged,

particularly in the less economically advanced countries, where the landed elites

resisted threats to their traditional supremacy, capitalism was triumphant.

Nevertheless, economic development was uneven across the continent. Longstanding

inequalities in relative incomes were maintained which resulted in large differences

in the average level of income experienced in the geographical regions which comprise

Europe. Where the inhabitants of countries which fringed the North Sea basin – the

Belgians, British, Danes, and the Dutch – enjoyed relatively high levels of per capita

income, those who lived in countries bordering the Baltic or Mediterranean or Black

Sea experienced signiﬁcantly lower levels of income. In addition to these disparities

in national per capita income, there were signiﬁcant regional differences within coun-

tries.

The coal-rich and industrialized areas in northern France and Germany’s Ruhr

generated higher average per capita incomes than those earned in the more agricul-

tural regions of southern France or eastern Prussia.

However, to view economic growth in Europe largely as a result of a shift from

agriculture to industry would not only provide too narrow a perspective but also

would exclude recognition of the major structural change in economic activity which

would come to dominate all the developed economies of the world. Until relatively

recently, however, the signiﬁcance of the development of the services sectors remained

114 peter wardley

under-appreciated or even unrecognized. Although this phenomenon had been

noted by some contemporaries, in the aftermath of World War II and for at least

three decades afterwards the implications of this development tended to be under-

appreciated by historians, who continued to stress the primacy of industry; while

often deﬁned more broadly to include all aspects of economic development, the use

of the term “industrialization” often led to an overemphasis on manufacturing.

Similarly, historians have probably placed too much emphasis on the contribution of

the large industrial corporation in the achievement of America’s relative productivity

lead. As it is probable that European big business lagged relatively little behind

American practice in the years before 1940, it is more likely that the relative efﬁciency

of the US economy was a result of superior economic performance across a broad

range of economic activities. In the postwar years the magnitude of America’s eco-

nomic dominance prompted a view that Europe had continued to lose ground rela-

tive to the US throughout the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. By contrast, it

appears that the US economy faltered signiﬁcantly in the 1930s, when some European

economies prospered in relative terms, and that it only recovered to achieve its com-

manding economic lead, in both absolute and relative terms, under the stimulus of

World War II. However, while there were signiﬁcant differences which characterized

different national experiences, it is important to recognize the similarities which the

European economies had, both with one another and with the United States. One

major commonality was the experience of modern economic growth.

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, it is difﬁcult to fail to recognize

the relative importance and signiﬁcance of the services sectors, as they provide the bulk

of the jobs and by far the majority share of output in all developed economies. One

hundred years ago this prospect was far from obvious to contemporaries, although our

historical datasets reveal that the more broadly deﬁned process of “modern economic

growth” was already underway. Scholarship undertaken in the last twenty years has

consistently demonstrated the importance of sectoral change, with the services sectors

playing a role which was much more active than had previously been accepted. In the

1930s, contemporaries such as Simon Kuznets and Colin Clark

were grappling with

their newly created datasets, trying to recognize the future in their present. Thanks to

the efforts of these pioneering proponents of the concept of modern economic growth

it has been possible to construct a clearer picture which allows us to review the process

of European economic growth in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. However,

there is still much that we do not know.

NOTES

1 See Brian R. Mitchell,

International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–2000, 5th edn

(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics:

The Americas 1750–2000, 5th edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

2 S. Kuznets,

Modern Economic Growth (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1966) and

S. Kuznets, Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

3 Angus Maddison,

The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development

Centre of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001); see

also A. Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

the economy 115

1982) and A. Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy (Paris: Development Centre of

the OECD, 1995). Maddison’s data for national income, population, and per capita

income, which inform the next section, is available as a spreadsheet at his personal website:

www.eco.rug.nl/~Maddison/.

4 See A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed,

The Growth of the International Economy,

1820–1990, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9–158; J. Foreman-Peck, A History

of the World Economy: International Economic Relations since 1850 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf

Books, 1983), pp. 127–82.

5 See Derek H. Aldcroft,

From Versailles to Wall Street (London: Allen Lane, 1977).

6 See C. H. Feinstein, P. Temin, and G. Toniolo,

The European Economy between the Wars

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

7 See C. P. Kindleberger,

The World in Depression 1929–1939, 2nd edn (London: Penguin,

1987), pp. 70–94.

8 Kindleberger,

World in Depression, p. 170.

9 See Kenwood and Lougheed,

Growth of the International Economy, pp. 163–228;

Foreman-Peck, History of the World Economy, pp. 186–253.

10 See Sidney Pollard,

Wealth and Poverty: An Economic History of the 20th Century (London:

Harrap, 1990), pp. 94–127.

11 See Gabriel Tortella,

The Development of Modern Spain: An Economic History of the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),

pp. 50–72.

12 See Peter Wardley, “Business Size and Performance before 1914: An International

Perspective,” in Y. Cassis and A. Colli, Business Performance in the 20th Century

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

13 A. Chandler,

Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge MA:

Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 131–40.

14 Chandler,

Scale and Scope, pp. 235–7, 496–502, 591–2, 594–605.

15 Youssef Cassis,

Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997).

16 See P. Wardley, “The Commercial Banking Industry and its Part in the Emergence and

Consolidation of the Corporate Economy in Britain before 1940,” Journal of Industrial

History 3 (2000): 71–96.

17 See S. Pollard,

Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialisation of Europe 1760–1970 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. xiv–xv, 35, 111–23, 220–51.

18 C. Clark,

The Conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan, 1940).

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge MA:

Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1990). Provides the seminal study of the emergence of

the modern industrial corporation in the USA, Britain, and Germany; it augments and

expands The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge

MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977) and Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the

History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1962).

Charles H. Feinstein, Peter Temin, and Gianni Toniolo, The European Economy between the

Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Short, pithy, and extremely valuable.

James Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy: International Economic Relations since

1850, 2nd edn (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1994). An economist’s history of the inter-

national economy.

116 peter wardley

A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy, 1820–1990:

An Introductory Text, 4th edn (London: Routledge, 1992). A highly readable and well-

presented student text.

Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939, 2nd edn (London: Penguin,

1987). A classic study which remains a storehouse of data and ideas.

Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre

of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001). Summarizes a

lifetime’s work to provide a quantitative assessment of economic growth in the long run.

Brave in its assumptions, it will provide economic historians with an important resource for

future research. Maddison’s data, for national income, population, and per capita income,

are available as a spreadsheet at his personal website: www.eco.rug.nl/~Maddison/.

Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, 5th edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2003). A three-volume work which provides essential economic data for Europe, the

Americas, Australasia and Africa, and Asia and Oceania.

Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Allen Lane, 1969). A highly successful

text which inspired many scholars to further research.

Sidney Pollard, Wealth and Poverty: An Economic History of the 20th Century (London: Harrap,

1990). An attractively illustrated and concise introductory text.

Gabriel Tortella, The Development of Modern Spain: An Economic History of the Nineteenth and

Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). A highly readable

account which assesses Spanish economic development in a comparative European

framework.

Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990: Recovery after Decline (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1982). Provides an excellent survey of modern Italian economic

history.

Part II

Before the Deluge