This book examines the relationship between international trade and domestic economic growth in Britain since the eighteenth century. It was during this time that Britain enjoyed first a dominant role in world trade and then, from the outbreak of the First World War, saw its economic strength eclipsed by other emerging international powers. The essays here focus on two central concerns in the history of British economic development in the period: was overseas and colonial trade in the eighteenth century the principal motor of British industrial development? Has the structure of Britain's overseas trade in the twentieth century been one of the factors contributing to the "decline of the British industrial economy"?

In exploring these central ideas, the book examines the evolving structures of British commercial relations, the development and impact of commercial policies and Britain's changing international economic position. The volume contains both general essays which survey current debates and chapters dealing with more specific issues, including, for example, the role of the Atlantic trade in British economic growth in the eighteenth century; the impact of British trade on Continental Europe in the first half of the nineteeth century and the commercial factors which determined Britain's reaction to the founding of the European Community. The collection draws on distinguished scholars, whose work together offers an important contribution to our understanding of Britain's economic development during this pivotal period and to the wider debate on the relationship between trade and economic growth.

By setting industrialization against the background of wider processes of economic growth, recent trends in economic history have once again placed agriculture at the center of debate on the formation of modern economies. The nine essays in this volume examine the broader terms and implications of this new emphasis, and reassess the contribution of agriculture to economic growth in contexts that range from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and from Europe to Russia and Asia.
The essays are tightly focused around a set of central themes. Emphasizing how contexts of time and place have determined the relationship between agricultural change and economic growth, they explore comparatively such issues as the problems of interpretation and methodology posed by the close inter-dependence between agriculture and social organization, the critical role of political intervention in agricultural change, as well as the technical difficulties involved in measuring changes in productivity and their wider impact on economic growth. As a result the volume offers a uniquely broad but coherent and critical assessment of current trends in the interpretation of agriculture's major but complex historical role in modern economic growth.

This is the first volume in the new series "The Nature of Industrialization". It provides a critical review of controversy over the established interpretations of industrialization processes in Britain and Europe before 1950. This book starts off with a general critical discussion of conventional images of the industrial revolution in Britain and the relations between industrialization in England and in Europe during this period. Following essays offer more detailed analysis of five specific themes: how industrialization was financed; transport; agriculture; population; and the transformation of work under European industrialization, there is also some comparative discussion of Europe's relations with the rest of the world. This book provides an introduction to recent groundbreaking work on the nature and causes of industrialization. It is also an introduction to the series as a whole; many of the issues raised here in the context of the first industrial revolution will be taken up on a thematic and comparative basis in subsequent volumes.