Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Reviews

Peter Scott, Triumph of the South: A RegionalEconomic History of Early Twentieth CenturyBritain, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 344 pages,£60 hardback.

The results of more than a decade of publica-tion and work by Peter Scott are encapsulatedin this book, which concentrates entirely onthe years leading up to 1939, and more partic-ularly on the interwar period. The key focus isthe cumulative process of development andgrowth in the South East of Britain and, toa lesser extent, the West Midlands, comparedwith the difficulties facing the areas of stapleheavy industries in what he terms ‘Outer Brit-ain’, that is the North East, North West, WestRiding, Wales and Scotland. It is above alla book dealing with the development of eco-nomic inequalities across space and the strate-gies adopted to deal with the problem beforethe Second World War.

As a necessary prelude to the later chapterson the twentieth century, Chapter 2 traces therise of the British manufacturing belt in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries and theassociated changes in the geography of wealthand urban growth. The export-orientated in-dustries of northern England are seen asgrowing but in a linked system coupled withthe growth of the service and professionalclasses in the south, and especially in theCity of London. Thereafter, and in what readsat times like another Correlli Barnett-like ‘de-clinist’ text commenting on Britain’s economicperformance in the twentieth century, Scott

moves on to examine the falteringmanufacturing base of Britain from the Ed-wardian period onwards. The comparisonsthroughout the book are with Germany andthe USA, whose industrial bases are seen tobe growing stronger and more innovativethroughout the period. The inhibitions on in-novation or the restructuring of British indus-try are constantly compared with the adoptionof new technologies overseas, and to help un-derstand the locking-in of British industries tomore traditional ways of working Scott con-stantly returns usefully to the theme of ‘pathdependency’ (i.e. that to change one elementof production would involve changes in toomany other associated variables which wouldin themselves outweigh the perceived benefitof the initial change).

It is interesting to compare this economichistory of regional inequality with the 2004publication edited by Alan Baker and MarkBillinge (Geographies of England. TheNorth-South Divide, Material and Imagined,Cambridge University Press). Scott’s eco-nomic history leaves little room for imaginedspaces or for any detailed analysis of culturaldifference between the regions. His introduc-tion of the contemporary descriptions ofPriestly and Betjeman, for example, is fairlypredictable; and his mention of the BBC as in-troducing ‘Americanised’ tastes and greatercultural homogeneity is rather too sweeping,omitting as it does the BBC’s attempts tobring regional and home-life in the 1930s tothe nation. But as with the Baker and Billinge

372 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

text there is some recognition of the internalvariations in prosperity within the different re-gions, to add complexity to what would other-wise have been a fairly standard regionaleconomic analysis. The role of the industrialestates is of interest in this respect, promotedby central government and the banks, butcriticised at the time for concentrating re-sources in one spot rather than spreading devel-opment across a wider area, as was attemptedin post-World War Two intervention. Thepassage on these estates, their conception,process of formation and functioning, isa real strength of the book. For the geogra-pher there may be rather too much emphasison the role of capital and ‘invisibles’, or onthe undoubtedly important question of the re-lationship between the Gold standard and1920s economic problems, which at timesthreaten to divert attention away from thecentral regional analysis. A geographer mightalso wish to add to Scott’s analysis of the de-cline of the coal industry some furtherthoughts about the difficulties of modernisingan industry which operated in relatively smallfields due to the inherent geological complex-ities of the coal-bearing strata and overlyingrocks. On the other hand there is an impor-tant analysis, of great interest to geographers,of the long-distance migration in the interwarperiod and the agonising drawn-out responseof central government trying to ensure thatunemployment in the depressed areas was al-leviated whilst at the same time ensuring thatlabour bottlenecks in the growth areas wereminimised.

Peter Scott has succeeded in bringing to-gether a large array of contemporary andmodern sources in a very full economic analy-sis of Britain’s interwar difficulties. However,the difficulties dealt with are primarily thoseassociated with industry, whether the declin-ing staples or the newer industries of the Lon-don area of West Midlands. There is one

chapter on the countryside but it makes littlecontribution to the overall analysis. Indeed,the chapter is curiously self-contained, al-though the importance of the outflow of la-bour from agriculture to industry andservices at this time is duly acknowledged.But we find no mention of the rural dimensionin his overall final conclusions to the book. Itcertainly lacks the more nuanced approach re-cently offered by Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burch-ardt and Lynne Thompson’s The EnglishCountryside between the Wars (Boydell 2006)whose edited work shows the varieties of re-gional rural experience – not all grim by anymeans – at this time.

The book contains several chapters of fun-damental importance, which summarise theintricacies of interwar regional policy. Indeed,Scott regards regional policy at this time aslargely cosmetic (p. 254) and even the SpecialAreas Act 1934 was not nearly as successful inpromoting growth in the provinces as theworsening international political situation,which brought employment growth in allthose industries associated with rearmamentfrom 1935 onwards. The fledgling and largelyexperimental regional interventions of the pe-riod, still anathema to many political and eco-nomic commentators reared in an olderatmosphere of laissez-faire, minimal balancedbudgets and London-dominated internationalfinancial importance, were not finally to cometo fruition until after the Second World War.

The book is part of the Modern Economicand Social History Series. At times it readsa little like a PhD thesis, with its concernfor the correct interpretation of data sourcesand spatial units which, while important inthemselves, might have been relegated to anappendix. There are a few typographical andother proof-reading errors of which perhapsthe most serious is the omission of eight foot-notes on pages 170–171, and most annoyingthe incidence (I counted three) of a line

the argument that the increased presence ofimmigrants has created an openness towardout-groups (‘diversity capital’) instead of themore common in-group ‘trust’, or ‘socialcapital’.

The text not only ‘places’ the concept of di-versity capital, it also examines the interplay ofinternational migration with the political andcultural agendas of national minorities in re-ceiving areas (e.g. Francophones in Quebecand African Americans in Washington). His-torical geographers in particular will appreci-ate Ruble’s review of the historic events ineach city that bore transformations from land-scapes of bifurcation to landscapes of diver-sity. Ruble starts by contrasting all threecities with New York City, which ‘embraceddifference’ early in its history, incorporating18 languages by the 1640s (p. 4). Montreal’shistorical experience is more contentious. Fol-

373Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 371–392

of text beginning with a superscript numberleft over from the line above. It is also some-thing of a pity that the part of Britain domi-nated by declining heavy industry issometimes referred to as the manufacturingbelt, but also as the ‘axial belt’ and as the ‘fac-tory belt’, without any indication that thethree labels refer to the same or to differentareas. But these are relatively minorquibbles in a book with an excellent andvery full bibliography, and which will retainvalue as an insightful economic analysis ofearly twentieth-century British industrialchange across the regions of Britain.

Brian ShortUniversity of Sussex, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.01.012

Blair A. Ruble, Creating Diversity Capital:Transnational Migrants in Montreal,Washington, and Kyiv, Washington, DC,Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005, 256pages, US$22.95 paperback.

Although social scientists tend to identify cit-ies like New York and London as classic ‘im-migrant destinations’, these traditionalgateways are now sharing their entrepot statuswith cities that are smaller yet increasingly dy-namic in their economic and demographicmakeup. In his book, Creating Diversity Cap-ital: Transnational Migrants in Montreal,Washington, and Kyiv, Blair Ruble draws ourattention to three such cities that are also historicplaces of cross-cultural tension – between Fran-cophones and Anglophones in Montreal,Blacks and Whites in Washington, DC, andUkrainians and Russians in Kyiv. Pointingto diminishing bifurcation and increasing‘multiculturalism’ in these cities, Ruble makes

lowing the conclusion of the French and In-dian War in 1763, Montreal—with its two‘old races and religions’ living side by side—became home base for Canada’s ‘unending re-negotiation with itself’ (p. 10). By the 1800s,Montreal was a city of ‘two solitudes’ whereFrancophones and Anglophones (includingmost new immigrants) lived in a ‘sequence ofghettos’ (p. 13). In Washington, DC, the de-scendants of British settlers and African slavesbecame increasingly segregated under Presi-dent Woodrow Wilson’s anti-Black employ-ment policies in the 1910s and urban renewalstrategies that pushed African Americans outof Southwest DC in the 1950s. Although Rus-sian labor migration and ‘Sovietization’ pro-jects in the 1950s and 1960s ultimatelysuppressed spatial expressions of ethnic differ-ence in Kyiv, the latent tensions among thecity’s Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Polish,and new immigrant groups were evident dur-ing the 2004 presidential election and the sub-sequent pro-Ukrainian Orange Revolution.