This article discusses William Petty's 1665 estimate of the wealth of England and Wales - the first set of national accounts - and compares it with Gregory King's (1696), which is shown to be heavily influenced by it. There are conclusions about the methodology of the first political...

In the later seventeenth century, material progress was first identified in England as a recent achievement with boundless future promise, and it was welcomed despite fears about the threats that it was perceived to present to national and personal well-being. The article investigates the roots...

Improvement was a new concept in seventeenth-century England; only then did it become usual for people to think that the most effective way to change things for the better was not a revolution or a return to the past, but the persistent application of human ingenuity to the challenge of...

A multi-disciplinary analysis of the evolution of water politics and policy by an international team of distinguished experts. Water management in the Middle Ages in Europe, its evolution in the USA, the elaboration of the European Water Framework Directive, the British experience of water...