Poverty, Progress, and Population

E.A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial England, exposes the inadequacy of what was once accepted wisdom regarding England's industrial revolution and suggests what he believes should replace it. He examines the issues from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, he shows why England's early modern economy and society grew faster and more dynamically than its continental neighbors.

Definitive account of England's transformation through industrial revolution, from one of the nation's leading historians.

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.