Nature of Industrialization – serie

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 book explores 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"?