In the preceding lecture I have tried to show in what way Russian economic history can help us in formulating a general concept of mercantilism; beyond that I have also intimated in a tentative fashion how the legacy of mercantilistic policies—that is, their long-term effects upon economic development—may become comprehensible as a graduated pattern, once the Russian experience is seen as an integral part of a general European pattern.

In this last lecture I planned to deal with a problem that represents a natural continuation of our discussion of mercantilism; that is, to demonstrate how the phenomenon of Russian industrialization in the three decades or so before the outbreak of World War I can be found illuminating for the history of modern industrial development in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is still my purpose, except that I could not help making this lecture much more polemical than had been my original intention, and also inserting within its purview a discussion of Soviet industrial history. Let me explain what caused me to change my plans.

As I was preparing this lecture, I stumbled across the fine Festschrift which Charles Feinstein had edited in honor of Maurice Dobb. This volume contains an essay by E. H. Carr in which he raises a number of severe, if not vicious, objections to my treatment of the industrial development of Europe in the nineteenth century. Not every criticism calls for a reply.