There is, however, an expectation that very late developers will develop at a significantly more rapid rate. This is the ‘great spurt’ out of backwardness, proposed by Alexander Gerschenkron. The hypothesis here is that development elsewhere places the backward economy in a critical situation: economic inferiority imposes political and military perils, yet the industrial might of the advanced powers defines a method of escaping the dangers of underdevelopment. A tension between actuality and potential encourages the state authorities in the backward country to gather scarce resources for a concerted drive for development. Advanced technology will be available because the powerful economies already have it. Growth cannot be gradual because the backward state cannot afford the time, and, anyway, its starting level for industrial growth is so low that the application of new technology will automatically produce high percentage growth rates.
If this model is to resemble reality, it should apply best to the third-wave economies which industrialized after 1890. Some of these, notably Russia and Sweden, did achieve very high rates of industrial growth. Under the prompting of Count Witte’s Ministry of Finance, Russian industrial output achieved an annual growth rate close to 8 per cent during the 1890s, one of the highest experienced anywhere in the pre-1914 world, and possibly exceeded only by Sweden with about 12 per cent for the period 1888-96. The Tsarist empire, Europe’s largest economy, had by 1900 ousted France from fourth place in world iron production and had taken fifth place in steel output. Its railway system, a vital component of modernization in such a vast land mass, increased in mileage by 87 per cent between 1892 and 1903, while oil extraction more than tripled between 1887 and 1898. Indeed, around 1900, Russia became, briefly, the biggest producer of oil in the world.
There are two major reservations to be made about this interpretation. First, even the Russian surge of the 1890s had a prehistory. Between 1861 and 1885, industrial output growth had managed a very respectable average annual advance of about 6 per cent and the ‘railway ukaz’ of the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II—which had recognized that ‘our fatherland, equipped by nature with abundant gifts, but divided by huge spaces, especially needs suitable communications’ —had been passed in 1857. Even before the serf emancipation of 1861, which is conventionally taken as the benchmark for Tsarist modernization, an ‘autonomous stream’ of Russian enterprise was discernible in such industries as cotton textiles, sugarrefining, and distilling. Not even Witte’s drive for growth in the heavy industries lacked a pedigree. Secondly, the other member
Of the third-wave economies for which Gerschenkron tried to find a ‘great spurt’ — Italy—resolutely refuses to supply one. This latecomer contained very significant areas of underdevelopment, particularly in the south, and meets most of the criteria for backwardness. Yet its industrial take-off, which Gerschenkron locates in the years 1896-1914, proceeded, on his own measurement, at average rates of manufacturing output growth no higher than 5.4 per cent per annum. This is actually somewhat slower than the much more mature German economy was managing during its high-technology expansion of the 1890s. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Gerschenkron perspective on the rapid escape from backwardness is overly dependent on the experience of the single Russian case.
World History
