| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Giovanni Federico. An Economic History of the Silk Industry, 1830–1930. (Cambridge Studies in Modern Economic History, number 5.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 259. $59.95.

Billed as "the first . . . example of commodity analysis in historical perspective" (p. 2), Giovanni Federico's history of silk production and trade is based on a comprehensive synthesis of the literature in the European languages and on econometric analysis. He focuses primarily on the principal producer countries of Italy, China, and Japan and on the principal consumer regions of Western Europe and the United States. He aims to answer two fundamental questions: why did silk production and trade increase greatly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what determined changes in the producing countries' competitiveness as measured by market shares? 1

Federico argues that the growth of silk exports from the late nineteenth century was a consequence of both surging demand in the core economies of the West and increased output by the producing countries, due largely to technical progress. Economic growth in the West brought about the "democratization" of silkwares, which became a mass-consumption commodity. The demand for improved quality stimulated the shift from hand-reeled silk to steam-reeled silk under the factory system. The supply of raw silk in the West, however, was threatened midcentury by the outbreak of pebrine, which decimated silkworm crops in the Mediterranean basin, and by the disruption of Chinese sources because of the Taiping Rebellion. Japan entered the global market for raw silk at a fortuitous moment, becoming the world's leading exporter by the 1910s. . . .

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