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Africa and Asia

firms in turbojet technology through the committee's role as a testing center, research lab, and information clearinghouse. Aviation shares with its nineteenth-century counterpart, the railroad, the mixed blessing of having attracted to it the attentions of a number of historically oriented enthusiasts; one will not find sewing-machine, paper, or electrical industry "buffs" in the same proportion. As Dominick Pisano notes in an introductory essay, "even now the bulk of writing about aviation consists of hagiographic biography and memoirs, insubstantial journalistic accounts, and examples of enthusiast literature, very little of which gives any indication of aviation's effects on people and cultures" (vol. 2, p. 68). Although the sheer fascination with flight has resulted in much valuable and detailed research, it has also contributed to an inclination to celebrate uncritically the industry's evolution as a series of heroic innovations. Unfortunately, not all of the essays in the collection are immune to this tendency, and the reader need be prepared to encounter some long lists of "firsts" along with the genealogies of several types of airplanes. In addition, the scattered focuses of the essays often resist the valiant efforts of several introductory essayists to tie them together. Many of the essays, however, make valuable contributions in explaining commercial aviation in its economic and social context. Deborah G. Douglas, for example, ties the evolution of the American system of airports before World War II to the travel patterns of Alfred Chandler's new managerial class. R. E. G. Davies's summary essay on the necessity for commercial aviation to focus on providing better links with other forms of ground transportation suggests a new style of scholarship coming to the field that places aside technological wonderment in favor of a hard-headed view of the airplane's possibilities. Indeed, aviation could do well to follow the railroad in bringing to bear a form of Robert Fogel's counterfactual: what would we have done without the airplane? Clearly, the ability to speed mail, tourists, bankers, and flowers across continents and oceans has altered the social and economic landscape, but to what extent, and at what cost? The airframe and engine industries have consumed enormous technological and financial resources supplied by states preoccupied with air power, but has the investment provided commensurate returns? The essays in From Airship to Airbus are a valuable step in the process of sorting out these ramifications, if they do not yet merit the title "Airplanes and Economic Growth."