Professor Sir E. A. Wrigley is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, former Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and former President of the British Academy.

• Introduction: 1. In search of the industrial revolution; Part I. The Wellsprings of Growth: 2. The divergence of England: the growth of the English economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 3. Reflections on the history of energy supply, living standards and economic growth; 4. Two kinds of capitalism, two kinds of growth; 5. Men on the land and men in the countryside: employment in agriculture in early nineteenth-century England; 6. Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions; 7. Why poverty was inevitable in traditional societies; 8. Malthus on the prospects for the labouring poor; 9. The occupational structure of England in the nineteenth century; Part II. Town and Country: 10. City and country in the past: a sharp divide or a continuum?; 11. 'The great commerce of every civilised society': urban growth in early modern Europe; 12. Country and town: the primary, secondary and tertiary peopling of England in the early modern period; 13. Brake or accelerator? Urban growth and population growth before the industrial revolution; Part III. The Numbers Game: 14. How reliable is our knowledge of the demographic characteristics of the English population in the early modern period?; 15. Explaining the rise in marital fertility in the 'long' eighteenth century; 16. No death without birth: the implications of English mortality in the early modern period; 17. Demographic retrospective; Bibliography.

'Wrigley's reinterpretation of the eighteenth century is of vital importance for anyone wanting to understand how economic ideas were evolving in the period from the English civiil War to the Victorian age.' The Times Higher Education Supplement