This book is largely concerned with the varying fortunes of a mediumsized cloth-making town of Lower Languedoc, Clermont-de-Lodève (renamed Clermont-l'Hérault in 1789) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The choice both of subject and of period requires explanation.

The decision to work in the field of French economic history was a consequence of studying British economic history as an undergraduate. It was a reading of François Crouzet's celebrated comparative article on English and French economic experiences in the eighteenth century which not only helped me in disentangling the complex question of the causes of Britain's early Industrial Revolution, but also fired my interest in the similar but subtly distinct economic experiences of France in this period. The idea of carrying out research in French economic history was all the more exciting a prospect in that it was evident that the source material was immensely abundant (the regulative system established by Colbert may have made the French economy inflexible but it had also ensured that much of economic significance that had gone unrecorded in Britain was abundantly documented in France) and also in that French economic history (in contrast to British) was little studied — a discontinuity, or what was believed to be a discontinuity, of another type had clearly attracted far more interest than the industrialization process.