FIRST DRAFT: not for citation.

L’Exposition Universelle et Internationale de , 1900: Contemporary and Historiographical Images of National Businesses at the Turn of the Century.

By Leslie Hannah, Department of Economics, University of Tokyo. ( [email protected] )

I

The Paris Exposition of 1900 is generally recognized as one of the most significant world fairs, perhaps second only to the pioneering Great Exhibition of 1851.1 Not only did it welcome in a new century, but the attendance – at 51 millions (39 millions of them paying) – was the largest by far up to that point and was not again exceeded until the 52 millions of the two-year 1964-65 New York World Fair.2 To put that into modern context, it attracted larger crowds of people than now visit Paris Disneyland in a comparable period (the Exhibition was open from April 14th to November 12th). It took place in the centre of a Paris that was just inaugurating its Metro, at a time when New York did not have such an underground electric transport wonder. The exhibition gave Paris its present , Petit Palais and the Pont Alexandre III. Temporary foreign pavilions – the “Rue des Nations” - were erected on the left bank between the (where the Tour Eiffel’s 300m world height record of the 1889 Fair still remained unmatched) and the Esplanade des Invalides. The right bank had commercial entertainments and exhibition buildings between the Champs Elysees and the Trocadero (built for the 1878 exhibition and demolished for that of 1937). Some 279 acres of central Paris were devoted to the exposition, with larger items relegated to a supplementary 274 acres in the , ten kilometres to the east. The Dreyfus affair soured the atmosphere only a little (a threatened boycott was dropped after the presidential pardon of September 1899), and an air of jollity was generally evident, no doubt especially when, on 22 September, President Emile Loubet gave a grand banquet for 20,444 invited maires de province.

1 The official report is Albert Picard, Rapport Général Administratif et Technique, 8 vols., Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1902-1903; see also Guide Pratique , 20 vols., 1900. Several national delegations also produced catalogues or reports on their participation, see eg. Weltausstellung in Paris: Amtlicher Katalog der Ausstellung des deutschen Reichs, Reichsdruckerei, Berlin, 1900. The Hachette Guide Pratique du Visiteur de Paris et de lExposition 1900 is also useful, and see Frederic Moret, “Images de Paris dans les guides touristiques en 1900,” Le Mouvement Social, no 158, 1992, 79-98.. The best commentaries include Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985; Diane P. Fischer, ed., Paris 1900: the “American School” at the Universal Exposition, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1999; Robert Mandell, Paris 1900:The Great World’s Fair, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1967. On world fairs more generally, see Adolphe Démy, Essai historique sur les Expositions universelles de Paris, Picard, Paris, 1907; Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and Anne Rasmussen, Les Fastes du Progrès: le Guide des Expositions Universelles 1851-1992, Paris, Flammarion, 1992; John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions, Studio Vista, London, 1977. 2 The New York World Fair of 1939 had 45 million paying visitors. In all fairs, nationals formed the great mass of visitors, though in Paris, it was estimated that an - exceptionally high - 3 millions were foreigners (Rapport Général, VII, 1903, 302).

1 This period was not yet christened the belle époque, but many foreign visitors reported that Paris was definitely the place to be that year. However, the more serious-minded among them had begun to tut-tut that the educational purpose of the fairs was being lost in what had become a colossal fun fair: France was, they lamented, already an enthusiastic victim of tawdry Americanisation à la Barnum. But there were better things: Loie Fuller’s private theatre on the right bank, in which the American dancer, clad in revealing gauze, danced in a green spotlight, struck the chord more faithfully than the boringly neoclassical US national pavilion, sandwiched between Turkey and Austria over the river. The contemporary French economist, Leroy-Beaulieu, began the twentieth century curmudgeon’s habit of pointing out that such fairs (or Olympics) were expensive and brought economic costs greater than the corresponding benefits, but he suffered the same fate as all later rational analysts.3 People liked fun and festivals with the added spice of the novel and exotic.

The 1900 Exposition inevitably appears in the later twentieth century historical literature as emblematic of much of the new century. Art Nouveau was everywhere to be seen and the Palais d’Electricité welcomed Thomas Edison to view the wonders he had wrought, while the Lumières Frères made it clear that the future of cinema lay with Paris (Hollywood was a sleepy hamlet on a distant frontier). Appropriately for a new century whose major achievement was to be an expansion of leisure, the recently revived Olympics were held for only the second time (concurrently with the fair), though they then attracted so little interest that few knew they were happening: organized sport was still just emerging from its main nineteenth century origins as an English vice. Significantly, the rich variety of the exhibits of art, technology and the products of agriculture, industry and services – not to speak of the 127 academic and other specialist congresses that took place in Paris that year - were recognized at the time as finally and clearly signaling what had for some time been obvious, but was still only reluctantly admitted: that the world was one of specialists, in which it was no longer possible for a “Renaissance man” to understand even a small part of the significant new developments of knowledge and human creativity that were on display. Nonetheless, Albert Picard, the fair’s Commissaire Général, made a bold attempt to summarise the human achievements of the nineteenth century, in six post-exposition volumes, which remain a grand testament to the Victorian belief in scientific and material progress and the desire of man to comprehend the path of improvement on which he had embarked.4 Many visitors probably concluded, along with the American historian Henry Adams, that Picard’s taxonomy, around which the exhibits were organized, was as confusing, diverse and unfathomable as the century of change in which they had lived.5

3 Mandell, Paris 1900, 23, 43. Leroy-Beaulieu had a harder task than, say, modern critics of the Olympics: one of the economically most successful such initiatives ever was the of eleven years previously, which had a payback period of less than one year and was still earning large franchise profits for Gustav Eiffel for a further nineteen, and thereafter for the French public! 4Albert Picard, Le Bilan d’un Siècle (1801-1900), 6 vols., Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1906. 5 The most famous chapter of his autobiography, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” focuses on the exhibition (The Education of Henry Adams, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1961 edition.)

2 II

Peter Temin, Naomi Lamoreaux and Dan Raff have recently warned business historians not to follow Picard’s instinctive Victorian Whiggery: there are, they warn, dangers in our subject of using hindsight to read back into history linear patterns of development that are simply not there.6 It is all to easy to interpret the Exposition in this way, picking out the immediate or distant future in Art Nouveau, films7, the wireless telegraph, X-rays, the automobile, travelators, or electricity; while forgetting the overwhelming fact that most of the things on display were the products of the agriculture and primary-sector-related industry that still dominated the output of all the countries that exhibited (Britain possibly excepted); and that most of the “modern” industry on display naturally belonged to the nineteenth century age of steam and steel. Equally, it is easy to see, in the fact that the exhibition was well attended by Americans and Germans, while the British generally stayed away, a harbinger of future twentieth century developments, à la Scale and Scope, in their economies and technologies. In fact, that was probably more because Britain was then at war with Kruger’s Transvaal, one of the exhibiting countries, armed by Krupp and Schneider, and that sympathies in Paris and much of the rest of the world were with the plucky Boer farmers rather than with the “civilizing” mission of the British army, busily inventing concentration camps in which more than one in ten internees would die. Few wasted much time considering what either were doing to the indigenous population of South Africa, and fewer still doubted that what the German and Japanese armies were doing to the Chinese Boxer rebels was in the interests of civilization (or Christendom, as it was then most commonly called); while antipodean American anti-guerilla actions in the Philippines attracted little attention.

If we are not to read back into the political or economic events of 1900 a false history, with a distorting perspective from the present, we need to bring to the subject not only an open-minded historical imagination, but some statistical precision. This is not easy, because, while the exhibition generated many statistics, as one might expect in that statistics-conscious age, they are difficult to fit into the terms of modern business history discourse. If one looks, for example at the distribution of prizes won (55% of which went to France and its colonies), one might incautiously conclude that the judges saw France as the most likely winner of the twentieth century economic race; but on reflection that seems more likely to result from more than half the judges (61%) being French or, more charitably, nearly half the exhibits (46%) being French.8 In what follows,

6 Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G Raff and Peter Temin, “Against Whig history,” Enterprise and Society, 5, no.3, 2004, 376-387. See also James Foreman-Peck, “The balance of technological transfers 1870-1914,” in Jean-Pierre Dormois and Michael Dintenfass, eds., The British Industrial Decline, Routledge, London, 1999, 114-138, for a similarly insightful warning against writing technological history backwards. 7 See Emmanuelle Toulet, “Le Cinema a L’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 33, 1986, 179-209. The exhibition itself must have been one of the most filmed events of the time: a collection of twelve contemporary movies by Edison and others can be downloaded from the Library of Congress “American Memory” website. 8 Despite the fact that they were much more numerous (46% of all exhibits), and therefore presumably of lower average quality because drawn from further down the distribution of national achievement, 62% of French exhibits received prizes, compared to 50% of foreign exhibits. Even 44% of the grand prizes, which might have been expected to be more selectively and objectively distributed, went to French exhibits. I

3 I have tried to correct for this by reducing the statistics for France by a standard factor equivalent to the average of the UK, Germany and Italy (i.e the overall French performance is reduced to these three countries’ average level, but variances within this notional French performance are allowed to remain.). It is also clear that the judges had a somewhat demotic belief that all should win prizes, in that more than half the exhibitors gained some official award – if gold, silver and bronze medals and honourable mentions are all included- so I shall pay rather more attention to the grand prizes, which were given to only 3.8% of the exhibitors.

Table 1. Proportion of Exhibits winning prizes by Country.

Country Total % winning %winning Grand Exhibits any prize grand prizes. prizes won Austria 1092 80 9 99

Germany 2696 74 9 248

Italy 3130 64 4 132

France 23619/3006* 62 4 1392/191*

Japan 2128 61 2 38

Great Britain 3193 58 6 194

Belgium 1413 57 7 101

Russia 3179 55 7 210

Rumania 2255 61 2 53

Spain 1526 47 2 33

Portugal 3151 42 1 40

Hungary 3299 41 3 87

USA 7610 31 3 217

Mexico 3478 30 1 37 * the first is the actual figure, the second is the notional figure (the average of Britain , Germany and Italy) which we later use to reduce the misleadingly high French absolute performance to a plausibly comparable level. have used the terms “exhibit” and “exhibitor” as interchangeable, as appears to be the case of the organizers, though presumably some exhibitors had multiple exhibits.

4 One measure of the judges’ perception of overall national exhibit quality is the ratio between exhibits and prizes shown in Table 1. This is confined to countries which showed more than 1,000 exhibits, to avoid small number bias (which would rank Morocco as the most promising economy of 1900!) It is easy to recognize, in some of these large exhibitors, the phenomenon of countries trying to “punch above their weight” on the international stage: Portugal, Hungary and Mexico submitted more exhibits than Germany, and should perhaps not have been surprised that fewer of their exhibits won prizes. We also do not, of course, know how much politics – rather than the pure quality of exhibits - affected the results. Were the judges trying to compensate the Japanese for the appalling racial solecism of the French organisers’ decision to situate their pavilions not with their peers on the Rue des Nations, but with the European and American colonies at the Trocadero? Were they being especially nice to Germany (even forgetting Alsace Lorraine), because they were pleased that so many German visitors had come, encouraged by enthusiastic reviews in the German press, especially after Germany had boycotted Paris 1889 and France had trumped Germany’s initial ambition to host the 1900 exhibition? Or was it that, objectively, French contributions were so weak and shabby compared with Germany’s that, while giving France ample undeserved prizes, they reluctantly and honestly also felt obliged to recognize this appalling truth, as some later commentators suggested whe n trying to explain why the French were cured of their nineteenth century enthusiasm and would not host another exposition for decades.9 We do not know and are, perhaps, unlikely to find out.

The most surprising anomaly in the table is the USA, which had a real 1900 GDP only 10% below Germany’s and Britain’s combined, but a distinctly less impressive prize performance.10 The US organisers made a vigorous effort to encourage submission of many, strong exhibits (their exhibits numbered 44% more than one might have expected from the USA’s economic weight relative to Britain and Germany). Yet, if we are to take Table 1 seriously, American exhibitors struggled to achieve the average quality levels of Hungary, Portugal or Spain (column 2) and won fewer grand prizes than Germany alone, a country half America’s size. The USA apparently could not match , in the eyes of the Paris judges, even after allowing for its palpably striving

9 Mandell, Paris 1900, 111-112. 10 At least the USA was that relative size in Maddison’s constant 1995 dollar PPP estimates. Alternatives (e.g. Bairoch and Prados de la Escosura PPPs, and official exchange rates) would put the US GDP ahead of Germany and the UK combined in 1900, see Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “International Comparisons of Real Product, 1820-1990: an alternative data set,” Explorations in Economic History, 37, 2000, p.26. Countries were grouped in the reported prize totals with their empires (i.e. Canada is part of the UK, Indo- China of France, Cuba of the USA), but it appears that most prizes and exhibits were from the metropolitan countries and I have ignored this factor in the discussion, since the data to correct for it was apparently not published (though 400 of the 7,610 US exhibits were from Cuba (Fischer, Paris, 133) and the British colonies’ space – actually only Canada, Western Australia, Ceylon, India and Mauritius were there - of 1,690 square metres in the Trocadero was reported to be the largest (Rapport General, V, 60.) This factor seems likely to exaggerate the performance of Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal, more than Germany and the USA, despite the German advance in Africa and the Pacific and the US takeover of the Western territories, Alaska, Hawaii and, more recently, the Spanish Caribbean and Pacific empire. There was an amusing negotiation between the Americans, who instinctively resisted their possessions being called colonies, and the French, who insisted that if it was big, grey and had a trunk and thick hide, it was an elephant.

5 harder.11 It is not easy to discern any strong political motive in this, though there had been some French sympathy with Spain in the recent war. It may simply reflect a general European condescension and fin de siècle underestimation of the achievement and potential of the developing republic’s culture (a viewpoint, of course, that many contemporary Americans shared, in their slavish admiration of life in Paris and London). The exhibition was, after all, held in a country whose ambassador to Washington at the time did not consider it a necessary qualification for the job to speak English. (And is it possible to make any sense of the judgment of Rumania, in general prizes, or of Russia, in grand prizes, except in terms of rewarding ruling class francophones or places that were unusually receptive to French investment?) It is, of course, possible that the quality of American exhibits – other than electricity, horses and the like, where US achievements were readily recognised– was not high. It is also plaus ible that America suffered from a judicial leveling-down instinct, as the world’s largest industrial economy and the largest non-French exhibitor12.

Another possibility is that the exhibition was biased to handicraft production, rather than mass production and interchangeable parts manufacturing, in which the USA allegedly excelled. If the exhibition organizers and national committees favoured the unique over the mundane – and there was obviously a limit to which the general public could be induced to pay to see the latter - then painting, ceramics, silk, wine and automobiles would be privileged over coal, steel, copper, wheat, sewing machines, cornflakes and buggies; on such a biased playing field, European countries would stand a better chance of outpacing the United States. As Picard noted, Frenchmen commissioned their shoemaker to make shoes to order, while shoe machinery had made such personal fitting virtually extinct in America. 13 A perusal of the exhibition catalogues suggests that such an explanation is not implausible. However, the judges emphatically signaled that most American products were unprizeworthy, not that America produced averagely good, rather than exceptionally meritorious products: indeed, the contrary is implied by their awarding the USA 7% of grand prizes, against only 5% of other prizes.

III

One way of correcting both for any product category bias and the apparently demotic instincts of the judges is to look at national performance differentials within more disaggregated product categories for the grand prizes alone. The results for all of the 18 exhibit categories, for each of the eight countries that won more than 100 grand prizes, plus Japan, are shown in Table 2. These official exhibition categories differ somewhat from current international standard industrial classifications that have influenced business historians’ usages. Equipment used is often allocated to the using

11 If the USA had submitted the appropriately 10% fewer exhibits than the British and Germans combined, and yet still won the actual number of prizes that its 44% higher submissions achieved, its success rate in col. 2 would still have been only 45%. However, in column 3 it would have been a respectable 8% 12 In absolute numbers America won more prizes than anyone except France and more grand prizes than anyone except France and Germany: its shortfall was relative to what might have been expected from its larger economic size and exhibit numbers. 13 Picard, Bilan, IV, 438-9.

6 Table 2. National Allocation of Grand Prizes by Product Category.

Category Austria- Belgium France* Germany Italy Japan Russia UK USA Hungary

Education 21 9 10 7 20 5 42 24 39

Art 8 4 3 7 3 0 4 4 4

Instruments 15 3 7 36 7 0 1 5 10

Engines/Machines 6 5 2 10 1 0 1 5 10

Electricity 7 1 3 17 3 2 4 3 5

Transport 22 8 9 33 4 1 18 19 22

Agriculture 25 5 7 18 14 3 16 16 14

Horticulture 3 3 3 5 1 0 7 6 6

Forestry/Fishing 13 5 4 1 1 3 4 13 5

Food/Drink 10 3 5 6 6 1 6 10 8

Mines/Metalwork 9 12 5 6 5 1 14 12 18

Decoration/Furniture 8 3 5 17 3 4 6 6 6

Textiles/Clothing 13 13 11 15 19 6 30 19 13

Chemicals 9 5 5 19 8 4 12 8 7

Miscellaneous 3 2 5 12 1 5 3 5 8

Welfare 11 15 12 33 33 0 15 17 30

Colonies 1 1 2 0 0 0 5 3 0

Armaments/Military 2 2 3 6 3 1 10 4 4

TOTALS 186 101 191 248 132 38 210 194 217

* the bloated French prize figures are reduced to comparable levels, by assuming that their total grand prizes were the same as the average for Germany, Britain and Italy, i.e the total for France is purely notional, but the distribution between product categories reflects it relative performance in each field.

7 industry and may be a significant part of it: thus, “transport” is dominated by civil engineering and the assembly of ships, trains etc., rather than the operation of transport services; agricultural machinery is included with “agriculture”; the manufacture of rifles and fishing boats is in “forestry and fishing”; domestic stoves are with “decoration/furniture”; and textile machinery with “textiles” (the Northrop automatic loom was the most impressive on display); “colonies” includes equipment for colonists. Most of the categories are otherwise self-explanatory and similar to modern usage.14 However, “instruments” includes musical, printing, photographic and stamping instruments as well as scientific and medical ones; “engines/ machines” includes stationary steam and other engines, but also machine tools; “electricity” includes electro- chemicals, telegraphs and telephones; “chemicals” includes not only chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but papermaking, leather curing, perfumery and tobacco (an apparently odd classification that actually makes just as much sense as ours in terms of contemporary processes or product use!) The “miscellaneous” category includes cutlery, toys, brushes, jewellery, clocks, basketwork, and rubber and paper products. “Welfare” includes a wide range of worker, government, employer and commercial initiatives: including consumer and producer cooperatives, worker housing, insurance, credit unions, apprenticeships, factory inspection, public health, profit-sharing and pensions. Of course, significant sectors of contemporary business activity, notably finance and retailing, are substantially absent, presumably because they did not generate artefacts considered worthy of exhibition. 15

There are some results in this table that suggest reasonable doubt about the sanity of the judges, though a combination of their being constrained by what was exhibited and our own false perspectives can probably explain the anomalies. In judging Russian imperialism to be superior to American, the judges may not have had in mind our modern notions of the relative attractions of Siberia and Hawaii. The apparently revealed views of the judges that Russian education was the best in the world could no doubt be questioned (in higher education, the Swedish Nobel judges who, the following year, awarded all the inaugural prizes to researchers in German universities were surely nearer the mark, at a time when Harvard, Oxford and the struggled to match them). The view that Austrian or British food was better than Italian or French (obviously no one took the judges to Maxim’s?) was also not universally shared; and anyone who really believed the Russian military were ten times better than the Japanese was in for a rude shock in 1904. It is less surprising to see Germany’s significant lead in “electricity”, “instruments”, “chemicals”, “decoration/furniture”, and “welfare” or America’s in “mines/metallurgy” (American mining exhibits occupied half the ground floor of the Palais des Mines). Equally the fact that “textiles” was the product category in which the

14 The detailed classification is conveniently reproduced in Schroeder-Gudehus and Rasmussen, Fastes, 136-138. 15 The main French bank pavilions at the exhibition were for the practical provision of financial services to the public, not for display. Of course, the Bon Marché, La Samaritaine and Galéries Lafayette department stores were also part of the everyday Paris scene and several, together with S. Bing’s impressive art nouveau emporium, built special pavilions on the Esplanade des Invalides. That services were inherently less suited to formal exhibition than manufactures is suggested also by the contemporary public response: the “welfare” and “education” sections of the 1900 exhibition were generally empty.

8 prizes were most equally distributed among this very diverse set of nations corresponds to the common historical perception that this was the leading sector in early industrialization, whose techniques were most easily copied by late developers.

The overwhelming impression is, however, of a judicial Euro-centrism and, perhaps, a special penchant for continental powers. Italy was certainly more developed on some dimensions than Japan, but Japan’s economy overall was almost as big and had many similar characteristics: it is therefore surprising that it won only one quarter of Italy’s tally of grand prizes, putting it on a par with Portugal and well below Rumania. Business historians, with all the Panglossian wisdom of hindsight, have no doubt wrongly forgotten the real achievements and potential of the Hapsburg and Tsarist Empires at this time: it is worth recalling that the competitive foreign and domestic petroleum producers of Asian Russia in 1900 produced much more (and cheaper) oil than Rockefeller’s price-increasing and output-restricting Standard Oil monopoly. (The honour of sponsoring the oil pavilion went, however, to Rumania, rapidly developing Europe’s most promising oil source.) Still, it is a little surprising to see Austria-Hungary ranked on a par with Britain16, and Russia well ahead. As they contemplated their gentlemanly decline, contemporary Britons traditionally preferred to compare themselves pessimistically with America and Germany, not Russia and Austria. An economy that accounted for nearly a third of world manufactured exports at the time could have been pardoned for believing that the revealed preferences of world consumers counted for more than the quirky prejudices of the Paris juries (impressionist painters also had to devise self-serving excuses at the prize ceremony, as the judges awarded the art prizes to some of their ghastliest rivals). Typically, while governments enthusiastically backed the American, French and many other nations’ participation (and the Kaiser himself chose the architecture and some of the contents of the German pavilion), the British government largely left the organization and finance of British participation to private enterprise. Picard, with the lofty disdain of the functionary of a state that understood gloire, noted that their practical and cheap approach was a curious characteristic of the wealthy inhabitants of that island over the Channel.17

The lesson to be learnt from this exercise is not, as some of its historians have been tempted to suggest, that the Paris Exhibition of 1900 held key clues to the twentieth century future. There were many possible such futures and the selective quotation of either statistical or qualitative data from the exhibition has too often obscured the complex choices that contemporaries faced, which were shown in 1900 Paris in all their rich, uncertain, and even biased variety. Electricity had a big part to play, but the most reasonable conclusion for the future from the exhibition was that it would be far more focused on its role as a fuel for transport (at least, if what the exhibition called “aerostation” (aerial balloons) did not supercede it there): it did not point to electricity’s prime future role as an industrial power source and replacement in transport by the internal combustion engine. The prize tally could be seen as forecasting the rise of German capabilities (Germany won most grand prizes after France), but could equally logically be seen as forecasting the rise of Portugal, Rumania, Austria and Russia (which

16 It would actually have been ahead of Britain, if Bosnia-Herzegovina’s prizes were also included. 17 Rapport general, V, 20.

9 won more prizes than their share in global GDP) and the inevitable fall of the USA (which won less). We should not overclaim an imagined capacity for technological or business forecasting for such business history sources, by overusing hindsight as a biased selection device.

IV

One surprise (particularly to any historian familiar with later twentieth century exhibitions) is the paucity of corporate sponsorship in 1900.18 The typical exhibitors appear to have been small and medium scale producers, mirroring, of course, the structure of business at the time. I have rarely seen medals from the exhibition, but it is probably no accident that when I did so last year, it was proudly displayed on the wall of a small craftsman’s shop deep in the rural north of Honshu (the proprietor’s grandfather had won a bronze). But where in 1900 was the visible hand of the large-scale corporation? The European visible hand was rather more conspicuous than the American, though representatives of both had their specialist pavilions and displays. Of course, at this stage of corporate development, America had no overwhelming lead in large corporations. The most numerous contemporary large corporations were railways: Britain’s LNWR or the Prussian State railways were each larger (in terms of capital values19) than the largest American railroad, the Pennsylvania. Even in France, The Paris- Lyons-Meditérranée railway company was not much smaller, and the Suez Canal Company was larger. (Among exhibiting public transport providers, I have only been able to identify the Southern Railway (USA), Canal Maritime de Suez, Messageries Maritime, Compagnie Generale de Navigation, P&O, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Hamburg- Amerika Linie, the P-L-M, the Italian railways and there were undoubtedly more.) Most European travelers to America at this time spoke enthusiastically of the superior luxury that a ticket in Pullman class bought, seeing it as well ahead of European first class (and there were some Pullman coaches on display?). However, the commercial concession to run the popular Trans-Siberian Railways panorama ride, won by the Belgian- headquartered Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, its smaller continental European rival, undoubtedly stole the show, as dedicated world travelers looked forward to a halving of the time taken to travel round the world (until then, mainly by sea) when that railway actually completed the Lake Baikal-Manchuria-Beijing links and connected Vladivostock to Moscow.20

18 Conclusions in this section are particularly tentative prior to a thorough search of the exhibition catalogues. 19 Unless otherwise stated, I have measured corporate size by the equity capitalization (number of shares multiplied by the average of the high and low price for 1900), or by balance sheet assets for state and family firms. US data on 1900 equity capitalisation is taken from David Bunting, Statistical View of the Trusts, Greenwood, Westport, CT, 1974, or, for railways, calculated from Moody’s Manual; for Europe I have calculated 1900 capital values from national statistical year books or from standard bourse sources such as Stock Exchange Official Intelligence, Saling’s Borsenjahrbuch, Annuaire Chaix and Le Receuil Financier. 20 Rapport Générale, VII, 183. Pullman already franchised its brand – perhaps the top high-class brand of the day? – to Britain’s Midland Railway, though I am not clear from what date Wagons-Lits franchised it.

10 There were in 1900 no European industrial firms to equal the size of the three largest US industrials, Standard Oil, the Carnegie Steel partnership or Singer Sewing Machine, but at the next level down there were as many European as American industrial giants. The extent of corporate and other securities quoted on global stock exchanges was discussed by 950 participants at the 1900 Paris Congrès International des Valeurs Mobilières: the full values they calculated for the Berlin, Vienna, Paris and stock exchanges were impressively high. They hardly discussed New York, partly because there were remarkably few large American stocks quoted there that were not also quoted in Europe (the largest 1900 NYSE-quoted company, the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, had been quoted on Philadelphia and London for decades before it belatedly in 1899 got a quotation on New York). Aggregate statistical information for investors and researchers on the New York market was also relatively primitive21, but it is clear that more domestic non-railway capital was quoted on the main European exchanges than was the case at the time on the New York Stock Exchange.22 America probably did not, at this stage, have any lead over western Europe in the divorce of family ownership from managerial control (if anything, the reverse); and most large industrial firms, everywhere, were controlled by founders or their heirs.23

Many large American corporations had no desire for the publicity that the exhibition could give their products; indeed they were highly secretive and anxious to downplay or conceal their corporate size and profits to avoid the increasingly common antitrust prosecutions. It was precisely for that reason that companies like Singer, Standard Oil, or Procter & Gamble refused to list their stock on New York: they were obsessively unwilling to accede to the publicity requirements that the NYSE was seeking to impose on American companies, and that European companies already generally took in their stride (that being long required by continental commercial codes, and newly legislated for all companies in Britain in 1900, where the London Stock Exchange had earlier required it for quoted companies). Such secretive companies were unlikely to see Paris as a useful shop window overcoming similar concerns about publicity; and, of course, some of them, like Singer and Standard Oil did not lack other, certainly more

21 The US pavilion at the exhibition did have a ticker for US visitors, giving instantaneous access to New York and Ch icago prices; and in the USA itself stock price information was also widely and readily available. The US data problem was rather with aggregate information, double counting in new issue statistics and non-railway corporate accounting quality. 22 Ordinary shares (common stock) in all domestic non-railway corporations quoted on December 31st 1899 were valued at $1,624m in London, $1,378m in Vienna, $1,073m in Paris, $1,064m in New York and $1,016m in Berlin, see Alfred Neymarck, “Rapport”, Congrès International des Valeurs Mobilières, Paris, 5-9 June 1900; Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, Triumph of the Optimists, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002. In domestic railway equity, New York was larger than all except London, mainly because in many continental countries railways were wholly or partly state-owned, or, in the case of France, state-guaranteed and hence highly geared with few ordinary shares. 23 I leave open the question of whether this was a good or a bad thing, which has, of course, been hotly debated by post-Chandlerians, especially in Europe. No doubt we can anticipate arguments that, by avoiding agency problems, family ownership was a cause of rapid late nineteenth century American growth, and that highly developed domestic industrial equity markets divorcing managerial ownership from family control were a European curse (indeed a version of the latter has already been vigorously argued by W.P. Kennedy for Britain).

11 efficient, direct channels to the European consumer.24 One of the most prominent American exhibitors at the (unfortunately little visited25) Bois de Vincennes was American Bicycle, a company which was weaker than its European competitors and was to go into receivership in 1902. McCormick (the future core of International Harvester) also exhibited its agricultural machinery there, in a privately erected exhibition hall, next to a general collection of elevators, Smith & Wesson guns, and other American machinery. A Goss press was the centrepiece of the, more frequented US official typography pavilion, printing and folding 50,000 copies per hour of the Paris edition of the New York Times. The other three official US pavilions chosen to showcase US business hardly provided material to show off the organizational capabilities of her large corporations: they were for shipping (an area of chronic US underperformance26), agriculture and food, and forests.27 Of course some US companies had a low profile among the general exhibits simply because they had had their day at earlier international exhibitions: Remington typewriters were now lost in a host of competing, mildly different machines, though US producers still dominated world markets28. The new Kodak Brownie may have appeared on the American market in 1900, but it was other advances in photography at the experimental frontier, not commercialization, that won prizes at the Paris exhibition.

Mira Wilkins has shown us that many American firms were venturing abroad at this stage, though aggregate US foreign direct investment remained low compared with that of Europe, and, if a corporate revolution in American capitalism was taking place, it was, as far as the visitor to the Paris Exhibition was concerned, “capitalism in one country”, not much inclined, except in the case of machinery makers, to expose itself overseas. The America on display – despite President McKinley having put recognizably nationalist and imperialist US business interests in charge of assembling the American exhibits for shipping to France on board the USS Prairie - was at least as much a land of horse breeders, harness makers, doctors, farmers, teachers, painters, negroes29, Indians, Tiffany, and other small businesses, as of large corporations. And, of course, some American corporations were not represented simply because they did not yet exist. The men on the streets of Paris that year, despite the best early morning efforts of the

24 Even the fiercely patriotic Picard was forced to admit that, while (of course) most sewing machine inventors were French, an un-named firm with factories in the United States and England (he meant, of course, Britain: Singer’s main factory was near Glasgow) dominated world markets, see Picard, Bilan,IV, 300-301. 25 The American building on the Rue des Nations confused visitors, since it was essentially a club for visiting Americans, with an American restaurant in the basement, whereas other nations used their central space strategically to display their exhibits. The Bois de Vincennes, where the Americans chose to concentrate their exhibits, attracted only 2.5 million of the exhibition’s 51 million visitors, despite the new metro link. 26 Compare Gordon H. Boyce, Information, Mediation and Institutional Development: the Rise of the Large Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995. 27 Rapport general, V, 54. 28 Picard, Bilan, I, 1906, 458. 29 The whole negro exhibit won a grand prize and individual exhibitors, including Booker T Washington and,W.E.B Du Bois, within it won 12 medals. I fear the European judges may have seen it more as an inspiring example of how America had civilised subject peoples, than in the terms some of the black exhibitors intended.

12 thousands of Paris barbers, wore rather more beards than we would expect, until we reflect that it was several years before Gillette invented the safety razor. Du Pont in 1900 was a family partnership orchestrating a loosely organized (and illegal) cartel of US explosives manufacturers, at a time when the European industry was substantially more integrated and professionally managed by the (Anglo-German) Nobel Dynamite Trust (and its Latin sister company), the already residual Nobel family control of both having in 1896 been ended by the most effective method then known to leading-edge European organizational designers.30

Some of the European exhibits at Paris also offer clues to the organisational capabilities of some large corporations that have been strangely neglected by business historians. It may at first sight appear odd that the modern tobacco industry was represented by the ancient French Régie, or state monopoly, when the obviously more technically and managerially sophisticated and dramatically modernizing force of James Duke’s American Tobacco Company might have been attracted to the Fair. Yet, in fact, the French Régie adopted the Bonsack before Duke, had standardized demand and promoted cigarettes more effectively than Duke, was probably the largest French manufacturing firm of the time by profits or capital, was more professionally managed by meritocratically selected engineering graduates of the grandes écoles, and achieved higher productivity levels than the USA, one of the few French manufacturing industries of the time to do so. The achievements of French state management were perfectly clear to dispassionate observers at the time: the Japanese, for example, were in 1900 investigating the various options for running their own tobacco industry and rejected the American model in favour of the French. Yet French superiority in building this part of the modern corporate economy seems to come as a surprise to most French or American business historians.31 (The large Austrian, Italian and Spanish tobacco monopolies have also received little attention32).

Other large European enterprises exhibiting were the armaments firms Vickers Sons & Maxim (which had an enormous display, covered by a roof shaped like a cruiser, in the Palais des Armées de Terre et de Mer) and Schneider (which had its own separate pavilion just outside, showing steam and electric railway equipment as well as artillery). Krupp diplomatically refrained from rubbing French noses in its growing technical superiority in weaponry and battleships (Frenchmen had still not forgotten what happened three years after the display of Krupp’s cannon at the 1867 Paris exhibition), presenting itself instead in the “welfare” section as a housebuilder, consumer cooperative and moral improver. (The French returned the diplomatic nod: in a simulated naval battle exhibited to visitors, the French submarine Narval triumphed over the “enemy,” i.e. England: this was, after all, only two years after Fashoda.) Many European armaments

30 Alfred Nobel died childless. 31 Leslie Hannah, “The Whig Fable of American Tobacco, 1895-1913,” University of Tokyo Working paper, 2005, and see Muriel Eveno and PaulSmith, Histoire des monopoles du tabac et des allumettes en France XIXe-XXe siècles, Editions Jacques Marseille, Paris, 2003. However, Picard, Bilan, V, 128-9, undoubtedly went absurdly far in describing the history of cigarette machine innovations between 1867 and 1900 without once mentioning James Bonsack! 32 Though see Lina Gálvez-Munoz, Compania Arrendataria de Tabacos, 1887-1945, Empresarial, Madrid, 2000.

13 firms licensed some American steel technology, but their American equiva lents (William Cramp & Sons and Bethlehem Steel) were neither as integrated nor as large, and do not appear to have been represented. However, Frederick W. Taylor - who worked closely with both companies – did receive a gold medal for his invention of the Taylor-White process of treating high-speed tool steel.33 Inevitably, the armaments industry, then probably the most research- intensive in Europe, displayed its already well known (rather than new, advanced and secret) wares, but they were still visibly lethal. (Not everyone was impressed by what this seemed to show about Europe’s priorities: the reclusive John Ellerman, soon to be Britain’s richest man (from his investments in beer and shipping), hurried his young daughter through that part of the exhibition, telling her it was wrong to spend so much money on the tools of war.34) Many other continental steel companies, like Italy’s Terni, were represented in the Palais des Mines et Metallurgie, though US and UK steelmakers generally were absent.

The largest European chemical firms (which were bigger than any in America) were the private Belgian Solvay Company, the publicly quoted Anglo-German Nobel Dynamite Trust, and the publicly quoted French St Gobain, though I have been able to trace only Solvay and Nobels as exhibiting (and the latter only from the British side). However, Germany’s smaller fine chemical threesome - BASF, Hoechst and Bayer – did exhibit, though collectively and, at the behest of the German government, without pushing their corporate names in the display. BASF got round this enforced anonymity by producing a separate corporate brochure for distribution to visitors.35

Arguably the most effective large, global monopoly of the time, the London-based De Beers Consolidated Mines, sponsored an exhibition of diamonds and demonstrated diamond washing operations. The UK’s (and world’s) leading soap manufacturer, Lever Brothers, was represented only in the workers’ housing section. German electrical firms were dominant in 1900: AEG and Siemens & Halske were then larger than General Electric and Westinghouse. They contributed impressive displays, including large dynamos (AEG’s 3MW machine beating Siemens’ 2MW), but what was equally apparent in the Palais d’Electricite was the very wide range of relatively small- scale electrical manufacturers, contractors and innovators from all over Europe.36

V

The world viewed from Paris in 1900 is not, pace many historical commentators who have so far quarried this and similar sources, an easy-to-decipher harbinger of the twentieth century world to come. That view is as tempting and facile, and ultimately as ridiculous, as Whiggish approaches to history always are. Only if business historians can escape from their national obsessions that produce such absurdly

33 Internet source, check. 34 Ellerman biography, 320. It is likely the girl’s postwar recollection of this incident confused the blood- red Schneider display with Krupp’s peaceful display, which she actually reported it as: more distorting hindsight. 35 Jeffrey Allen Johnson in Werner Abelshauser et al., German Industry and Global Enterprise: BASF: The History of a Company, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, 115-117. 36 And the dynamo of the Helios Company, Cologne, was 5MW!

14 unhistorical distortions of hindsight (whether Panglossian validation of the American century, searching for the roots of the Sonderweg, celebrating British “declinism” or bemoaning France’s Malthusian tendencies), and seek to develop a more culturally neutral and statistically-based comparative perspective, are they likely to develop convincing and sustainable generalizations. The Europe of 1900 was the home of significant organizational, technical and other capabilities that were, for a variety of reasons (political and cultural as well as economic) partly squandered (as well as substantially developed) in the twentieth century, while at the dawn of the twentieth century the USA had much catching up and creative innovation still to do in business and financial institutions (though not – thanks to its natural resources and wise market- oriented responses - in living standards). By recognizing that explicitly – as I hope this contribution has achieved on some modest, concrete dimensions - we may be able to develop a richer comparative history than one which falsely sees the twentieth century as predestined from its 1900 (or any other arbitrarily imagined) pregnancy. Instead, we need to recognize the complex mix of right, wrong, and plain undecip herable business choices; the equilibrating force of national and global markets, that led many of these not to matter very much; the true – if sometimes temporary or inconsequential - elements of national institutional convergence and differentiation; the areas where path-dependency or cultural embeddedness gave institutional differences a truly determining role; and the role of contingency in the slight contrasts in the twentieth century performances (at least in growth rates of GDP per head) of the major countries of north America and western Europe, along with the more obvious institutional and performance differentials in the more tortured path of less fortunate, but (if we believe some of the Paris judges’ ratings) justifiably initially confident, eastern countries.

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