Oscar Wilde expected to be met at the Pearly Gates by St Peter bearing an armful of sumptuously bound volumes and declaring, ‘Mr Wilde, these are your unwritten works.’ I have often felt that The European Miracle would turn out to be among St Peter's armful for me. As a narrative task the subject calls for unbounded reading; as an analytical challenge it inspires awe. Yet as a research topic there is a compensation that has been useful to me on my travels, that some pertinent material may be found anywhere, even in the mobile vans of rural library services. I am indeed indebted to assistants in many sorts of library in three continents, and especially, since all the material is never in any one place, to those who engaged in slow-motion wrestling with inter-library loan schemes for me.

Beyond portability, it seems to me important for the health of economic history that more of its practitioners should try to build houses with the bewildering variety of bricks baked in our individual researches, at the risk of dropping a few bricks on specialist toes. Recent works by a number of authors have indicated some renewed interest in universal and very long-term history (the term was first used by Hartwell (1969)). Not many of these writers have been professional economic historians, and I think that we too should try to reach the wider audience, if we believe that taken all together our work has something to say.