5 - Political structure, state policy, and industrial change: Early railroad policy in the United States and Prussia

Summary

The historical relationship between politics and industrial change remains a fascinating and complex subject, fraught with theoretical and practical implications alike. In what ways has politics shaped patterns of industrialization since the late eighteenth century? To what extent has the process of industrial change, in turn, altered domestic configurations of power? Scholars have wrestled with these deceptively simple questions for decades. For generations of students, the classic inquiries of scholars such as Karl Polanyi (1957) and Alexander Gerschenkron (1962), rooted in the experiences of the 1930s, set the initial contours of debate; most recently economists, historians, and political scientists have opened exciting new lines of inquiry by refurbishing and extending the economic institutionalism that also flourished in the 1930s. Binding the old and the new is a shared passion to understand the subtle, historical interaction of polity and economy.

The contributions of this new economic institutionalism to the historical study of politics and industrial change are many and substantial. Concerned principally to explain economic performance, the new economic institutionalists clearly acknowledge the importance of politics, not only in the familiar sense (as overt struggles for advantage) but also as embodied in institutions that reduce uncertainty and facilitate exchange, both economic and political. At its best, moreover, historical analysis in this vein explores the workings of institutions at several levels of aggregation, paying explicit attention not only to the individual firm and to relations among firms but also to the state as the institution that specifies and enforces property rights (North 1981; North and Weingast 1989).