Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism by David LevineReview by: John R. GillisThe American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 431-432Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1862366 .

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Modern Europe 431

shift the cost of repair and maintenance from the parish in general to the road user. Yet the trusts were local entities, sponsored by local office- holders, landowners, and merchants, and usually run by local people. The trustees were empowered to borrow funds to make road improvements on the security of future toll revenues. According to Pawson, and contrary to the prevailing view, most trusts were successful in these endeavors.

Pawson clearly documents the spatial and tem- poral diffusion of trusts. Although the first trust was sanctioned by Parliament in 1663, the boom in turnpike building did not come until the mid- 1740s, the years Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole (British Economic Growth i688-i959) have identified as exhibiting a revolutionary increase in the pro- duction of a wide range of commodities.

The question remains, how important an in- novation was the turnpike trust? Pawson does not argue that the roads alone would have been ca- pable of carrying the increased flows of raw mate- rials and finished products created during the in- dustrial revolution. The system remained an unconsolidated patchwork of variable quality. He does argue that it enhanced those processes (spe- cialization, centralization, expansion) that were to be intensified by the newer transport innovations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies. Pawson has successfully defended the turn- pike system against those who have tended to ig- nore its contributions (a group which includes J. D. Porteous), without claiming too much for it.

Porteous begins by reciting the familiar but im- portant benefits of the canal system. Canals facili- tated the switch to a coal-based economy by provi- ding a more efficient means of carrying that high volume, low value raw material; they offered an outlet for idle investment funds; and their con- struction provided employment opportunities dur- ing a time in which the workforce was increasing dramatically. But this is not the focus of the book: it is, rather, the canal as a generator of new ports and shaper of industrial regions. To Porteous this is a "greater feat" than those listed above. This is hyperbole.

What follows is a discussion of the rather obvi- ous impact of canals on existing and newly created settlements, and detailed case histories of four such ports (to be found at the intersection of canals and navigable rivers): Runcorn, Stourport, Elles- mere, and Goole. The interesting part of the dis- cussion concerns not their original development, but how each port adapted to railways and high- ways. Those ports successful in capitalizing on their early strategic location by attracting industry (Runcorn, Stourport, and Ellesmere), continued to grow, while becoming less dependent on their port activities. They did this at the expense of their

uniqueness. Goole, which remained essentially a transport-based town, stagnated.

Porteous concludes by offering a canal port '"model" in the form of an extended narrative. It is unconvincing because it is descriptive rather than explanatory, and a brief sketch of the history of Grangemouth hardly serves as a satisfactory test of the model. The book provides a good discussion of the adaptations made by four towns to the evolving economic environment.

There is some indication that the publisher meant these books to be complementary. They are not, and of the two, Pawson's will appeal to a wider audience.

WILLIAM J. HAUSMAN

liniversity oJ North Carolina, Greensboro

DAVID LEVINE. Family Flormation in an Age of ,Vascent Capitalism. (Studies in Social Discontinuity.) New York: Academic Press. 1977. Pp. xiv, 194. $14.50.

Ever since its emergence as a specialized field of research, historical demography has been remark- ably productive of new knowledge. Of all the branches of our discipline, it is the one most adapt- able to social-scientific technique. This strength, however, has also proved to be a liability, and, for reasons that are both ideological and organiza- tional, historical demography has recently found itself facing a number of dead ends-often unable to explain what its own research has revealed. Preoccupation with quantification, seduction by structuralist sociology, and a stubborn insistence that biological behavior can be understood in iso- lation from other aspects of historical change have all contributed to this regrettable situation. Now, with the publication of David Levine's study of English families from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, a way out has presented itself. By integrating demographic with political and economic history, Levine's important study challenges the conceptual and methodological or- thodoxies of the past two decades. As such, it deserves the attention even of those who would otherwise dismiss historical demography as fatally involuted.

The basis of Levine's study is the reconstitution of families from the parish records of four English communities: Shepshed and Bottesford (both in Leicestershire), Terling (Essex), and Colyton (De- von), each representing a different social and eco- nomic evolution. Shepshed, the prime exhibit, is a village with a long history of rural industrial- ization. Its framework-knitters were already fully proletarianized in the eighteenth century, when their trade enjoyed its greatest period of prosper-

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432 Reviews of Books

ity. Shepshed is contrasted to the agrarian econo- mies of Bottesford, Terling, and (after 1700) Col- yton. Each is shown to have its own demographic history, which Levine relates to the specific mode of production, market situation, and political his- tory of the individual community.

The Shepshed population appears to have been adapting itself to the various mutations of capital- ism since the sixteenth century. The knitters there broke with peasant and artisan traditions of mar- riage, fertility, household composition, and sexual relations at an early date. In the boom period of rural industry, Shepshed workers married younger, had more children, and developed rela- tively flexible relationships between the sexes. When their livelihood collapsed in the i830s and 1840s, they adjusted again by changing their household composition and fertility levels, while retaining the pattern of early marriage. The other villages, each of which was affected by the capital- ization of agriculture, produced different patterns of change. But there too, family strategy was re- markably flexible, responding in complex ways to shifts in material and political conditions.

Confronted with evidence of complex changes well before i8oo, the demographers' cherished no- tion of a dramatic transition marking the turning- point from preindustrial to industrial society crumbles. In Levine's work the industrial revolu- tion becomes a terminal rather than a starting point. The dichotomous concepts of modern- ization theory-tradition/modernity, rural/ur- ban, preindustrial/industrial are shown to be in- appropriate, indeed misleading.

In this short space it is impossible to dojustice to Levine's sophisticated thesis, an argument that challenges the recent tendency to explain intimate behavior exclusively in terms of mentalite, but one that never loses sight of the importance of values in determining reproductive behavior. The author avoids idealist and materialist reductionist posi- tions by insisting that demographic history must be situated in the context of changes in society at large. The author's synthetic approach rescues the study of the family from sterile isolation by bring- ing it together with a Marxist perspective, the mode of analysis that historical demographers have most insistently rejected. There are aspects of the book that both camps may wish to dispute. Family reconstitution in the absence of precise occupational information is, as Levine himself ad- mits, problematic and leaves open questions about the exact fit between economic and demographic change. It must also be noted that his limited selection of communities does not allow the author to develop a theory of change as inclusive as those he is refuting. I)espite these qualifications, how- ever, it is clear that Levine has produced a work of

methodological sophistication and bold vision that carries forward the early research of J. D. Cham- bers and also meets the standards established by the recent work of Michael Anderson. This is one of the rare books that deserves the attention of all historians interested in the social formation of Western society.

JOHN R. GILLIS

Rutgers University

G. W. BOWERSOCK et al., editors. Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Emppire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1977. Pp. xii, 257. $11.00.

To commemorate the bicentenary of the pub- lication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpYre, a conference was organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On January 7, 1976, twenty scholars assembled on the Campidoglio to begin three days of reading and discussing papers. Those papers-but not the dis- cussions-have been presented in the work under review. For our purposes it will be convenient to divide the papers into three categories: i.) biogra- phy; 2.) intellectual history; 3.) historiography.

i.) David Jordan and Martine Watson Brown- ley indicate at what cost Gibbon triumphed over psychological, social, and physical problems. Gib- bon retreated from English society and from much of life and "created 'the historian of the Roman Empire' " (Jordan). Onie comes closest to the man in John Clive's study of Gibbon's humor, perhaps the gem of the collection; the man who could casually dismiss Voltaire as one who cast a "keen and lively glance over the surface of history" had an independent and coherent view of things.

2.) Frank Manuel traces Gibbon's debt to French thought, a debt which made him a "philos- opher" rather than an erudite; he was thus able to organize great masses of material because he had a theory of the "springs" of Rome's expansion, apogee, and decline. Robert Shackleton makes a solid case for Gibbon's great debt to Montesquieu. j. G. A. Pocock develops this analysis in a rich and subtle paper which places Gibbon in the civic hu- manist tradition; his explications of key passages are models of hermeneutic method. Francois Furet shows Gibbon's reliance on the sociology of the day, based on a sharp distinction between savag- ery, barbarism, and civilization.

3.) On the Decline and Fall itself and its place in Roman studies less instruction is offered, the ex- ception being an illuminating paper by Owen Chadwick on Gibbon's use of the Church histo- rians. For centuries sacred and profane history were separate, and this distinction had recently

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