Includes articles previously published or soon to be published in scholarly journals.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

CONTENTS: Introduction -- Part I. The wellsprings of growth : -- The quest for the industrial revolution -- The divergence of England : the growth of the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- Two kinds of capitalism, two kinds of growth -- Men on the land and men in the countryside : employment in agriculture in early nineteenth-century England -- The occupational structure of England in early mid-nineteenth century England -- Corn and crisis : Malthus on the high price of provisions -- Why poverty was inevitable in traditional societies -- Malthus on the prospects for the labouring poor -- Part II. Town and country : -- City and country in the past : a sharp divide or a continuum? -- 'The great commerce of every civilised society' : urban growth in early modern Europe -- Country and town : the primary, secondary and tertiary peopling of England in the early modern period -- Part III. The numbers game : - - Explaining the rise in marital fertility in England in the 'long' eighteenth century -- No death without birth : the implications of English mortality in the early modern period -- The effect of migration on the estimation of marriage age in family reconstitution studies -- Demographic retrospective -- -- Bibliography --

Our understanding of what constituted the industrial revolution has changed fundamentally in recent decades. Sir E.A. Wrigley sets out to expose the inadequacy of what was once the received wisdom and to suggest what he believes should stand in its place.