Introduction -- The stock market in early modern England -- Politics, warfare and finance -- Financial innovation and trade -- The bubble and the crash -- Reasons to invest in the South Sea Company -- Criticism and financial complexity -- The social history of the crash -- The real effects of...

Revisionist estimates of growth rates during the British industrial revolution, though largely successful in presenting a more modest picture of Britain's 'take-off' prior to the 1830s, have also posed fresh analytical difficulties for champions of the new economic history. If 18th-century...