PURSUIT OF ALBION 237alization kept the British example before them, whether as model or
countermodel. To understand them and the process, one has to know
the point of departure and the goal. And of course historians have
their own special needs: an ideal type has heuristic value, if only as
measuring stick and counterexample, so long as one keeps in mind
what one is doing.^11
A map of the Europe of 1815 in terms of machine readiness would give
the highest grades to those countries and regions already engaged in
manufacture for the larger world economy. I say "regions," because
some of these industrial areas overlapped national boundaries, them
selves unsetded and ephemeral; and because all these countries were so
cially and culturally heterogeneous.* Indeed, this temporal diversity (as
though they were living in different times) was a critical aspect of eco
nomic preparedness. The lowest grades would go to those that had
long lived in isolation from the currents of exchange, whether of com
modities or ideas, the places were older agrarian structures of status and
power were largely intact.
The machine-readiest societies lay in the northwest quadrant of the
Continent: France, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, the Protestant
cantons of Switzerland, and outiiers in the northeast corner of Spain
(Catalonia) and in Bohemia. Readiness fell, often precipitately, as one
moved east across the Elbe to eastern Germany, Austria, Poland, and
Russia and southeast into old Ottoman lands; also south to the
Mediterranean (most of Iberia and the Kingdom of Naples). One eco
nomic historian speaks of a "developmental gradient," a downward
slope, and quotes from another who does not mince words: "To move
east was likewise to go back in time, or in levels of economic develop
ment; in eastern Europe and Russia the industrial centers were oases in
a sea of peasant sloth and bureaucratic inertia."^12
- The importance of the region as a unit of production has long been noted. See, for
example, the monographs of N. J. G. Pounds in the 1950s; Pounds and Parker, Coal
and Steel; Wrigley, Industrial Growth (on what was once called Neustria, in Charle
magne's time); and a long series of French studies of human geography going back to
the beginning of the century. To argue from this, however, to a rejection of the nation-
state as a useful, nay indispensable, unit of study is to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. The one does not exclude the other. So long as economic activity is shaped
by national concerns and policy, and so long as it is the nation that is the principal
source and frame of our numbers—'twas ever thus, and I see no change in prospect—
national studies and comparisons will be the heart of the matter. Cf. on this point John
Davis's discussion of Pollard, Peaceful Conquest, in Davis, "Industrialization in Britain
and Europe, p. 55.