First industrial nations : an economic history of Britain

Almost fourteen years will have elapsed between the initial publication of The First Industrial Nation and this much-revised second edition. In the interim only such corrections as could be made without re-setting pages were possible, so that the text has been more revised against than revising. Such has been the pace of new research that attrition has come swiftly even if (as one hopes) the book has grown old gracefully. The opportunity of re-setting puts any author of a textbook - particularly a general study in a fast-moving discipline - into a quandary. A 'face-lift' just incorporating revised data offers only superficial advantages, but beyond a certain point, structural changes, alterations in method or in essential style would produce a new book altogether. I have tried to incorporate and discuss the results of new research, bring bibliographies and some tables up to date, but yet maintain the same structure and family resemblance to the text of 1969.

The dilemma is all the greater because new research has not just been adding and revising data. The nature of the subject has been changing; the essence of what is known as economic history has been experiencing a sea-change under the impact of the new methodologies. The preface to the first edition anticipated such consequences and now they are coming, and will come, in full flood. I doubted, in 1968, whether the new demands to measure and to analyse would yield more unified conclusions than the older tradition of scholarship had done. At this moment, aware that interim judgments alone are possible, it seems to me that such doubts have been borne out. It is not just that radical historians suspect that the computer produces only quantified equations of bourgeois ideology - no model can escape its own limiting assumptions - but that the new quantification, unlike Clapham's, is always at the service of theory, embodying a highly specific view of how specified variables interact. Indeed, such precise specification is at the heart of the matter for the new methodology.