Economic Growth In Britain And France 1780 1914 Routledge Revivals

First published in 1978, Professor O’Brien’s Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France’s path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

First published in 1978, Professor O’Brien’s Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France’s path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

First published in 1979, The Transformation of England discusses the creation in late eighteenth century England of the industrial system and thereby the present world. Professor Mathias poses questions about the nature of industrialization, social change and historical explanation, issues that are his principal scholarly concern. This series of essays is divided into two groups. The first group of essays focuses upon general themes such as the 'uniqueness' in Europe of the industrial revolution, capital formation, taxation, the growth of skills, science and technical change, leisure and wages, and diagnoses of poverty. In the second section, Professor Mathias focuses on the social structure in the eighteenth century, considering the industrialization of brewing, coinage, agriculture and the drink industries, advances in public health and the armed forces, British and American public finance in the War of Independence, Dr Johnson and the business world.

First published in 1962, this book challenges the notion that the later Middle Ages failed to sustain the economic growth of earlier centuries, suggesting that historians have been preoccupied with absolute levels of output over more important questions of output per head. It also argues they have ignored the disastrous fall in living standards in the thirteenth century and the astonishing rise that occurred later. Using national taxation records and records of urban government, as well as research from fields ranging from parliamentary history to statistics of foreign trade, the author attempts to establish that the later Middle Ages has also been wrongly defamed in political affairs.

Originally published in 1981, French Cities in the Nineteenth Century analyses large-scale processes of social change, and looks at how this affected the growth of towns and cities of nineteenth century France. The book addresses how this change affected the politics of life in France during the nineteenth century, as well as how the city was organised. Urbanization created new uses of space, and new concerns for the people that lived among them and the book looks at how social change was a collective experience for the people of France and how this transformed the societies in which they lived.