The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

LOSS OF LEADERSHIP^447

And another:

The Dutch merchant seemed to be dozing off on the soft cushions of for­

merly gathered riches and the leaders of industrial business from this period

strike us as belonging to the respectable class of slow fat-bellied trade bosses

whose brains, suffering from spiritual flabbiness, prevented them from haz­

arding the leap from the traditional way of doing business.^13

A harsh judgment, but one could cite others like it. How important
were such attitudes? Economists and "new economic historians" are
skeptical of entrepreneurship as explanation, because it is hard to pin
down and does not lend itself to measurement or prediction. Some
business people may be indifferent or lazy, but others will take their
place. After all, if peasants act quickly on differences in crop returns,
how much quicker should merchants and manufacturers respond to
new technologies! (On the other hand, the stakes in industry are typ­
ically bigger, the payoff slower, the penalties for error heavier.)
That is the point of innovation and initiative: they are not there until
they are there. In the meantime, one has to ask why they took so long,
and longer in some places than others. "Postindustrial" Holland did
not want for capital or cheap labor or experience of industry. What it
lacked, it could import. Transport might have been better, but that too
could be had for the enterprise. We even find a few sports, unexpected
entrepreneurs, people whose assets were, not business know-how, but
rather technical knowledge and government connections. Thus the
ex-naval officer Gerard Moritz Roentgen, back from a failed expedition
to Indonesia, commissioned by the Dutch navy to look into new tech­
niques of ship construction and iron manufacture. In so doing, he
helped found Holland's first steamship yard, in Rotterdam in 1825.^14
But mavericks did not add up to a self-sustaining, general move­
ment. Some adventurers found an outlet in Indonesia. Meanwhile Hol­
land itself marked time and found the long pause congenial. That is
where culture came in: it defined patterns of recruitment, avenues of
opportunity, and sources of satisfaction.
To be sure, culture changes. In the latter nineteenth century, Hol­
land got back into modern industry on an internationally competitive
basis. A protected market in Indonesia helped. The first gains came in
textile manufacture, not coincidentally in the inland, off-the-beaten-
track Twente district; but the real takeoff had to await the "second in­
dustrial revolution" of electricity, internal combustion (diesel motors),
chemicals and artificial fibers; also scientific agriculture and horticul-