This book is first and foremost about the role of international trade in the process of economic development over the very long run. There have been only two distinct models of successful industrialization processes in the history of the world – a private enterprise, market-based model and a state enterprise, command-based model. England's industrialization was the first of the former model, while the Soviet Union was the first of the latter. The command model entails considerable pains and sacrifices, precisely because structural and technological changes are forced by the state, changes that international trade helps to bring about with less pain. The import of the arguments in this study is that the market-based model of industrialization cannot be successfully completed without an intensive involvement in international trade, particularly for a small country like England. This has been the bitter lesson learned rather late by the countries of the non-Western World, which embarked on industrialization after World War II.

It is argued in this book that the lessons of England's industrialization have been made inaccessible to policy makers because the role of international trade has been discounted in the more recent studies of the Industrial Revolution. Despite the very large volume of literature on the subject, it is hard to understand that this book is the first lengthy study of the role of international trade in the industrialization process in England. That literature, particularly post–World War II scholarship, is dominated over-whelmingly by what may be described as inward-looking explanations.