Sir Tony Wrigley's classic regional study of industrial development and demographic change in the Austrasian coalfield belt (stretching from Pas-De-Calais in the West to the Ruhr in the East) was first published in 1959. Its first part deals with the circumstances which encouraged more rapid industrial growth in some areas while inhibiting in others, and with the relationship between regional economic growth and the increase of industrial population. The second part deals with the demographic history of the coalfield industrial areas; their relation to the sociology of those areas; and the...

A classic study of the development and changing fortunes of commerce in seventeenth-century England. Barry Supple explores the causes and consequences of the economic crises in the forty years prior to the Civil War through the lenses of economic thought and policy as well as monetary, industrial and commercial questions. He examines England's place in the international economy and the inter-relationship between internal instability and long-term economic development. He argues that England's relationships with economies of other lands had a crucial role to play in her own internal...

A study of the productivity of land in the bishopric of Winchester from 1208 1350. To a student of agrarian society and economy the knowledge of changes in the productivity of land is a crucial factor. For the Middle Ages, only England has the right type of documents - the manorial accounts - to allow cereal yields to be calculated with any degree of exactness. The accounts of the bishopric of Winchester occupy a very special position. This collection not only antedates all others by some 50 years, but is also by far the best series of account rolls in existence and the only one allowing for...

This 2005 book is a comparative history of the economic organisation of energy, telecommunications and transport in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the role that private and public enterprise have played in the construction and operation of the railways, electricity, gas and water supply, tramways, coal, oil and natural gas industries, telegraph, telephone, computer networks and other modern telecommunications. The book begins with the arrival of the railways in the 1830s, charts the development of arms' length regulation, municipalisation and nationalisation,...

This innovative study adopts a distinct perspective on both the industrial revolution and nineteenth-century British culture. It investigates why inventors rose to heroic stature and popular acclaim in Victorian Britain, attested by numerous monuments, biographies and honours, and contends there was no decline in the industrial nation's self-esteem before 1914. In a period notorious for hero-worship, the veneration of inventors might seem unremarkable, were it not for their previous disparagement and the relative neglect suffered by their twentieth-century successors. Christine MacLeod argues...

England's relationship with the Baltic trading area has remained a generally neglected aspect of English commercial development in the seventeenth century. The spectacular colonial ventures have traditionally attracted more historical attention, although the Baltic trade in this period was more fundamental to the English economy: it supplied precisely those naval commodities, such as flax, hemp, timber, pitch and tar, which facilitated the creation of fleets for the colonial trades. Medieval English trade had been conditioned by a search for markets, and the predominantly agricultural economy...

An account of the activities of British merchants in China in the crucial years before the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which transformed the relations between the Celestial Empire and the Western 'barbarians' and placed them upon a footing that was to last for 100 years. Mr Greenberg shows how this change was brought about by the pressures of the expanding British economy of the early nineteenth century. Much of the material is based on the papers of Jardine Matheson and Co., the only firm of pre-treaty days to survive, and the largest of the British firms then established in Canton.

The operation of the land market is a topic of crucial importance to the student of economic and social history in the Middle Ages. In this book, Dr King uses a wide range of source material to examine the character of the land market on the estates of Peterborough Abbey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He suggests that some common pattern emerges in the behaviour of those concerned, and offers an original interpretation of certain familiar types of medieval record.

Uninterrupted economic relations between England and Scandinavia were of vital importance to the maintenance and extension of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Scandinavia supplied Britain with the timber to build her ships, with iron for ship-fittings, armaments and industry, and with smuggled tea at low prices to keep her people content. Scandinavia also furnished merchant fleets as neutral carriers for British goods during the Seven Years War, thus fundamentally assisting Britain's war effort. In addition she represented a small but lucrative market for Britain who was herself...

In this detailed study of population change in Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dr Drake has assembled a great deal of literary and statistical material. He pays particular attention to the interplay between marriage, economic conditions, social custom and fertility. The book also introduces English readers to the writings of Eilert Sundt, a very productive pioneer sociologist whose important work of the 1850s and 1860s is little known outside Scandinavia. Malthus's work, by comparison, is shown to be much less reliable. As Dr Drake demonstrates, remarkably reliable and...