europe was an innovative, decentralised, yet stable, aberration. Our aim has been to try to understand what there was about it that promoted very long-term economic change, as well as what thwarted change in the productive and initially promising lands of Asia. This may seem an abstract, aggregative sort of goal, to which we can only reply, first things first. We tackled the analytical problems by a comparative approach. The colligation problem, that is the problem of when to begin, we resolved by glancing back to the Mesolithic past, but put most weight on the period from about a.d. 1400 to 1800. That was when Europe underwent those political, technological and geographical upheavals which were to make it the birthplace of the industrial world.

The aim has not been to find a specific trigger of industrialisation, which was in any case not a thunderstorm that suddenly arrived overhead but a growth deeply rooted in the past. To deal with the onset of industrialisation we should have needed to write national and regional economic history, and to discuss the rise of domestic industry within the agricultural sector, followed by the rise of factory industry within the domestic industrial sector (Jones 1982). This is not the present purpose, which is to do with context, with the influences of the environment and political action on the genesis and spread of the market system.