Product Description

Long neglected, the Eighteenth Century is now the focus for much of the most exciting work in history today. This new research has so altered and expanded our understanding of the Georgian economy that some historians now question the very idea of an `Industrial Revolution'. John Rule uses the latest scholarship for a comprehensive and magisterial review -- of population, output, agriculture, manufacture, labour, communications, towns, finance and domestic and overseas markets -- through which he reassesses the `vital century' in which the contours of the modern economy first emerge to view.

An analytical survey which offers the first comprehensive economic history of the C.18th.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #616602 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review

'Regardless of their backgrounds, general readers and university students alike have been done a great service by the publication of Professor John Rule's fine pair of historical surveys.'

History

Customer Reviews

Read it from back to front
...In "The Vital Century' we have another display of that pervasive Longman historians' syndrome, uncommitted balance: on the one hand Professor Bloggs says this, on the other Doctor Muggs says that. While proto-industrialism offers an explanation, it also confuses the issue etc.

The tone of discussion is bland, the air heavy with spoken and unspoken reservations. Yet all this cautious, unruffled urbanity surrounds the exciting field of eighteenth-century demography!...

Well, that's the bad news about the not-so-vital century. The good news is that the book gets more vital as it goes along. By the time you've finished it you realise you've enjoyed it somewhat but would have enjoyed it more if only you'd known the secret of how to read it. That secret is to read it from back to front.

The conclusion (Ch10) makes a fine, challenging introduction. Ch 9, on debt, taxes and currency, is about a subject that interests everyone. The best three chapters in the book (8,7,6) are on markets, transport, and labour in manufacturing and mining (John Rule's specialist field). Absolutely absorbing - and Chs 4 and 5 on the manufacturing and mining industries are almost as good.

Save Chs 2 and 3 for bedtime. By then you will have been engrossed in a fact-packed incisive survey of the economy of eighteenth-century Britain in which the key points are illustrated with many well-chosen examples. Even human beings creep into the account: farmers, engineers, aristocrats, industrialists and ordinary workers.

The book ranges right across England and spends more space on the provinces than on the capital. It even makes economics (as distinct from demography) a living thing. The chapter on eighteenth-century transport is the best account of this topic I've read anywhere.

Must finish here. I'm going back to re-read the book - beginning at Chapter 10.