British economy of the nineteenth century

THE investigations which these essays reflect had their Torigin in 1934, when I was an undergraduate at Yale. They were pursued there in 1938-9 as a graduate student, as well as at Oxford (1936-8) and as a Social Science Research Council Fellow in New York City (1939-40). Along this way many have helped. At Yale, Wallace Notestein, David Owen, Stanley Pargellis, Alvin Johnson, Charles Cole, and the late James Harvey Rogers; at Oxford, Humphrey Sumner, A. B. Rodger, W. M. Allen, and R. F. Bretherton, with memorable encouragement in the spring of 1938 from M. M. Postan and the late Eileen Power; and then, in New York, my collaborators A. D. Gayer, Isaiah Frank, and Anna Schwartz. In the excursion into politics, of Chapter VI, I hope to have profited from the friendly and occasionally sceptical observations of colleagues in the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford, and from the fellowship of the Stubbs Society.

Chapters III and IV, the former having been somewhat extended, and the latter elaborated in the Appendix, first appeared in the Economic History Review, the editors of which have kindly permitted their republication. The author is similarly indebted to the courtesy of the Journal of Economic History, where Chapter V was published; and to Economic History, for permission to reprint Chapter VII. Chapter VIII, here re-edited, formed part of the volume The Economist 1843-1943, published by the Oxford University Press in 1943. The substance of Chapters I, II, and VI was delivered before the London School of Economics in May 1947

A special debt is owed to those who encouraged the pursuit of this field when its shape was only dimly perceived: R. M. Bissell, E. V. Rostow, and my mother.