The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560-1765 by David Levine; Keith WrightsonReview by: Buchanan SharpThe American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 488-489Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166879 .

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488 Reviews of Books

Few literary texts can have enjoyed so rich and contradictory a reception history as The Tempest: con- ceived at a crucial moment in the European colonial experience, and declared one of the crown jewels of English-speaking culture at an early stage in the development of the British empire, its terms have pervaded the discourses of expansionism and anti- imperialism alike for nearly four centuries, in Britain, in the Americas, and indeed wherever Prospero's experiment of imposing his own language on the islander he enslaved has been repeated. The first impression produced by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan's impressively comprehen- sive survey of responses to the play's "savage and deformed slave," consequently, is of its sheer range of reference. Here are Calibans imagined by stage de- signers, poets, filmmakers, literary critics, and libera- tionists from London to Lusaka, variously reptilian, Darwinian, pio-Jacobin, and postcolonial. Its scope and pertinence guarantee that this book will hence- forward be a mandatory first stop on a wide range of scholarly journeys, whether into the appropriation of Shakespeare's texts or the appropriation of Africa's territories, the post-Enlightenment reconception of the primitive or the postwar representation of the African American.

If it will be the first stop for such enquiries, how- ever, it certainly should not be the last. Paradoxically, the very richness of the Vaughans' material, ample testimony to the fascination and importance of their subject, has hindered them from producing anything but a comparatively superficial study. Despite its subtitle, this is less a "cultural history" than an illus- trated bibliography, the large number of versions of Caliban to be discussed denying the authors the space to offer a searching analysis of any one of them. The book's organization, unfortunately, only reinforces the cursoriness imposed by its scale. After a section on Caliban's possible literary and historical antecedents (by far the least interesting part of the book, a rather pedestrian run-through of material covered with more elan in the introduction to Stephen Orgel's Oxford edition of The Tempest [1987]), the book divides into a series of chronological lists, several successive catalogues of briefly described Calibans segregated by genre or topic ("literary criticism," "colonial metaphors," "stage history," "artists' rendi- tions," and so on). This procedure largely sabotages the Vaughans' ambitions to be genuinely interdisci- plinary, reimposing rather than crossing the barriers between generically different but culturally proxi- mate materials, and effectively preventing the book's various forays into theatrical history, art history, colonial history, and other avenues from providing much mutual illumination.

Furthermore, by forcing the authors to repeat several times the necessarily simplified account of the last four centuries that all of this disparate material is assumed unproblematically to confirm, the organiza- tion tends to expose the historical idees refues on which

much of the book is based. In general the Vaughans display a surprisingly condescending view of the past, serenely confident as to what is really "in" Shakespeare's text and what is merely an(other's) interpretation. Their account of Caliban's mutations describes not so much a continuing debate about his significance (in which they are themselves partici- pants) as a succession of univocally misinformed agreements: everyone in Enlightenment Britain suf- fered from "eighteenth-century moral certainties" until they all experienced "the Romantic movement," everyone in the late nineteenth century was "compla- cent," and so on (pp. 99, xxii, 114).

This failure to recognize their own interestedness in the stories they tell distinguishes the Vaughans' work sharply from other recent studies of Shakespeare's reception (by Gary Taylor, Terence Hawkes, Michael Bristol, and others). Few of these others would speak so glibly, for example, of "Shakespeare's unmatched universality" (p. 171; is not this familiar transcendent claim itself implicated in the English-speaking imperialism the book else- where decries?), and few of whom would chronicle the vast bulk of nineteenth and twentieth-century criticism determined to prove that The Tempest is definitely "about" the New World without pointing out that most of it has been produced by American scholars with an obvious vested interest in thereby claiming a stake of their own in the Bard. This volume presents a body of information that will be of use to scholars throughout the humanities, and it is likely to remain an invaluable work of reference for many years to come; but as a "cultural history" it remains strictly a Gonzalo in Caliban's clothing.

MICHAEL DOBSON

Indiana University, Bloomington

DAVID LEVINE and KEITH WRIGHTSON. The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560-1765. (Oxford Studies in Social History.) New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 1991. Pp. xviii, 456. $98.00.

This remarkable volume by David Levine and Keith Wrightson forces one to rethink the meaning of the Industrial Revolution. Modern scholarship has tended to locate the origins of the Industrial Revolu- tion in a handful of changes in the technology of production in the Lancashire cotton industry during the 1780s and beyond. After the first round of changes, innovation in production and work practices radiated out from Lancashire to other sectors of the economy and other areas of the country and the globe. Levine and Wrightson move the discussion of origins back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries, and from the textile to the coal industry. In making the case for this double shift, the authors are not totally original, as they are well aware. The coal

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Modern Europe 489

industry has always played a significant role in any account of the Industrial Revolution, but in most modern accounts the rapid expansion of coal produc- tion is regarded as a nineteenth-century phenome- non. In arguing that the first industrial society devel- oped in the coal-mining areas of the Tyne valley during the period 1560-1765, Levine and Wrightson have also, as they note, revived the long out-of- fashion arguments of J. U. Nef.

The revival of Nef's ideas suggests, once again, that there is nothing new under the historical sun. Nef argued, on the basis of the rapid expansion of the use of coal as a fuel, that there was an industrial revolu- tion in England during the century 1540-1640. While Levine and Wrightson do not necessarily agree with all of Nef's assertions about the nature of economic change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the underpinning for their work is an acceptance of his emphasis on the growth in coal production from the sixteenth century onward as the fuel that pow- ered economic and social change. But their study goes far beyond Nef's work in providing a compre- hensive treatment of a major Tyneside coal-produc- ing parish, Whickham, over two centuries as it under- went profound economic, social, and cultural changes consequent to the rapid increase in coal output.

That rapid increase can be followed in the port books of Newcastle, which record the coastal ship- ment of coal from the Tyne valley largely for sale in the growing London market. At best the records provide only a partial accounting of total coal pro- duction, but they indicate the magnitude of the increase over time. For the year 1563-64, the port books record 32,951 tons shipped. By 1597-98 the tonnage increased to 162,552. In 1633-34 it was 452,625 tons, and in 1684-85 it was 616,016 tons. At the beginning, the development of Whickham's coal seams appeared to be simply the continuation of existing mining practices that had medieval roots. Long before the late sixteenth century, bishops of Durham had regularly leased out the rights to mine coal, and the agricultural population regarded coal mining as a routine, income-supplementing activity in their midst. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the crown, in an effort to maximize resources and reward its supporters, received a lease of the coal mines in Whickham and then assigned the lease to one of its officials, who in turn sold his rights to mercantile interests in Newcastle. The way was now open for a rapid increase in output.

In their drive for increased production the New- castle lessees, at least in the early seventeenth century, were sensitive enough to the rights of Whickam's copyholders that monetary compensation was regu- larly paid for any damage to agricultural land. At the same time the copyholders and their families pros- pered as a result of the increased income supple- ments available to them because of the development of the mines. Before long the copyholders of Whick- ham found themselves caught in a web of rapid

economic development, which they could not escape and which eventually ruined or marginalized their agricultural land. By the beginning of the eighteenth century Whickham was inhabited largely by a floating population of landless wage laborers who followed the coal industry as it moved from one parish or township to another, while at the top of the social scale wealth accumulated in the hands of a few powerful individuals.

Perhaps the most striking achievement of this book is the way it manages to convey the restless motion of economic development. By the mid-eighteenth cen- tury Whickham was no longer the center of the Tyneside coal industry, investment and mobile work- ers had moved elsewhere in the region, but the remaining inhabitants were enmeshed within an ap- parently irreversible system of production.

One can raise some points of criticism. The com- munity of Whickham on the eve of the rapid increase in coal production seems to be sentimentalized. The evidence of copyholder resistance to the rapid devel- opment of coal mining appears to be exaggerated and could more accurately be described as adaptation. Finally, there could have been more detailed compar- isons made between the social circumstances of textile workers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their contemporaries in the mining districts. The assertion that textile work was simply a by-employ- ment flies in the face of considerable evidence that, at least in the areas producing for export, textile work- ers were overwhelmingly wage laborers. But such minor points aside, this is an excellent book that will stimulate rethinking of a major point of historical transformation.

BUCHANAN SHARP

University of California, Santa Cruz

MICHAEL ROPER and JOHN TOSH, editors. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. New York: Routledge. 1991. Pp. x, 221. Cloth $55.00, paper $15.95.

As Michael Roper and John Tosh suggest in the introduction to this volume, British masculinity has been continually in crisis over the past two centuries. Until comparatively recently, historians usually exam- ined this crisis as a self-contained phenomenon, di- vorcing the construction of manliness from the con- temporaneous construction of womanliness. Lately, however, the trend has been toward viewing mascu- linity in the context of both genders, neither separate nor monolithic, but conditioned alike by feminine presence and feminine absence. It is the latter out- look with which Roper and Tosh ally themselves and their contributors.

While the editors' position is that women's absence from "work on all-male institutions and on manli- ness" represents "the crucial problem" with such

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