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And Thou, Happy Austria? A Review Essay

In recent years some economic historians of the nineteenth century have been inclined to abandon the state as the appropriate unit of analysis and employ a more regional approach, disregarding if necessary political boundaries. Industrialization and modernization, in this view, were local rather than national affairs, and scholars therefore should compare Lancashire with Sambre-Meuse or Bohemia rather than England with Belgium or Austria. Industrializing regions in different countries often had more in common with each other than with the backward areas which happened to be in the same political unit. There is something to be said for this notion. The writing of economic history in terms of national economies (as practiced in the 1960s by Rostow, Gerschenkron, and others) can at times obscure regional nuances. It is, for example, quite correct, if not very novel, to point out that "Britain" did not undergo an Industrial Revolution, just some parts of it. Countries are aggregates and averages, and aggregating and averaging always mean wasting some information. Regional differences should not be excluded and can be utilized to discover cross-sectional regularities, since there are a lot more counties and provinces than there are national units. But surely no one should infer that there was no such thing as a "British" (Irish, Belgian, German, and so on) economy. To the unifying forces of central administration, law, financial institutions, economic policy, taxes, monetary systems, wars, and often language and culture, should be added the prosaic constraint that many of our data come at the national level. The three books under review here are good proof of the usefulness of the "national" approach. Although they do, naturally, discuss subregions, they are firmly committed to the state as the unit of analysis. If the approach works so well for the enormously diverse Habsburg Empire, its usefulness for some homogeneous units is assured. Austria-Hungary was, of course, not one state but two. Yet as arbitrary as it seems to define the river Leitha as a dividing line between the two units, David Good, John Komlos, and their colleagues are able to tell an instructive tale about the economic developments in central Europe, despite its ethnic and economic diversity. Good and Komlos continue an impressive effort of American-trained scholars to write a quantitative and analytical economic history of the Habsburg Empire. The tradition