Thirty years ago, Max Hartwell gave new life to the historical study of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. This was rather surprising, because he had grown up a world away from industrial Britain. However his homeland, the New South Wales tableland, had been opened up, a century earlier, in order to supply wool, food and minerals to industrializing Britain. Max Hartwell's interest in the Industrial Revolution stemmed from his initial research on the early economic development of Australia. This led him to study the woollen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire when he was a graduate student at Oxford. Since then, he has concentrated his historical attention on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, although he has recently published a biographical study of Australian businessmen.

Max Hartwell studied economics in his youth and has a greater understanding of economic theory than most historians. His knowledge of economics stood him in good stead in the 1960s, when he wrote his seminal studies of the Industrial Revolution and was engaged in the Standard of Living debate with Eric Hobsbawm. His command of economics also facilitated his editorship of the Economic History Review and his subsequent teaching at the Universities of Virginia and Chicago. But Max Hartwell is not ‘a new economic historian’ who believes that statistics and cliometrics are a substitute for more traditional historical skills.