(^236) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
Karl Marx saw the British experience as an expression of historical
logic. Capitalist production had its laws: "It is a question of these laws
themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards in
evitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only
shows to the less developed, the image of its own future."^9
Yes and no. On a larger, metaphorical level—Adam Smith's "natural
progress of opulence"—Marx was right. But in detail—timing, com
position, direction of change—he was wrong. Every country has its
own resources and capabilities, and if it permits reason and the market
to rule, its economic development will follow those paths that make the
most of its means. Thus a country rich in coal will engage in fuel-
intensive branches of industry and adopt techniques that a coalless
country would eschew. A country short of coal but rich in running
streams will rely, when possible, on waterpower rather than steam en
gines.
(To be sure, the force of these material constraints will vary with
technique: a lack of coal, for example, will be far more constraining if
costly transport makes it impractical to bring in fuel from outside. In
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the French iron indus
try was severely handicapped by the high cost of fossil fuel, and it was
not until canals and railways were built that this constraint was eased,
at least partially. Two hundred years later, it paid South Korean iron-
makers to move coking coal from western Pennsylvania to the Great
Lakes, ship it down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic, and move it by
ship through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific. Different times,
different means, different possibilities. Meanwhile, a few miles away,
Pittsburgh steel was dying. It takes more than cheap raw materials to
make a successful industry.)
So we have no uniformity of sequence, no single way, no law of de
velopment. Each of the would-be industrializers, the so-called follower
countries, however much influenced by the British experience—to
some extent inspired, to some extent frightened or appalled—devel
oped its own path to modernity. And if this was true of the early in
dustrializers, how much more is it true today. Everything depends on
timing. The content of modern technology is ever-changing and the
task and means of emulation change with it. Developing countries
today will necessarily skip stages and processes that occupied the British
for decades: why should they repeat what they don't have to?^10
All of which does not make the British experience irrelevant. One
must distinguish between objective and process. The nineteenth-
century statesmen who tried to move their countries toward industri-
nora
(Nora)
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