Jeff Horn is Professor of History at Manhattan College, New York. He is the author or editor of The Industrial Revolution: History, Documents, and Key Questions (2016), Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (with Leonard N. Rosenband and Merritt Roe Smith, 2010), The Industrial Revolution: Milestones in Business History (2007), The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830 (2006), and Qui parle pour la nation? Les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765-1830 (2004). Horn was president of the Western Society for French History in 2013-14. His research has been supported by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, New York University's Faculty Research Network, Manhattan College, and Stetson University, Florida.

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: profits and economic development during the Old Régime; 2. Privileged enclaves and the guilds: liberty and regulation; 3. The privilege of liberty put to the test: industrial development in Normandy; 4. Companies, colonies, and contraband: commercial privileges under the Old Régime; 5. Privilege, liberty, and managing the market: trading with the Levant; 6. Outside the body politic, essential to the body economic: the privileges of Jews, Protestants and foreign residents; 7. Privilege, innovation, and the state: entrepreneurialism and the lessons of the Old Régime; 8. The reign of liberty? Privilege after 1789; Bibliography; Index.

'Horn's book is probably the fullest examination of eighteenth-century French trade and industry available in English … [it is] an impressive book.' Michael Sonenscher, The American Historical Review