STUDIES ATTEMPTING to explain the origin of the Industrial Revolution in England usually go no farther back than the late seventeenth century. There were a few attempts in the 1960s to take the story to the medieval period. A. R. Bridbury tried to demonstrate that the economic growth that led to the First Industrial Revolution can be traced to the late Middle Ages. In 1968 Sidney Pollard and David Crossley made such an attempt. Then in 1969, in a rather provocative paper, Max Hartwell invited historians to take a long-term view of the thousand years of English economic history that preceded the Industrial Revolution, in part, to mitigate the parochialism arising from, “the tendency of each historian to elevate his period, his growth factor, his depression or crisis, to a status of prime importance, either in the history of capitalism or of industrialization … ” More recently, in an intellectual effort covering more than 20 years and devoted to the development of an institutional theory of economic history and economic performance, Douglass North has traced the rise of the Western World from the era of the hunters and gatherers to the Industrial Revolution in England. North's central focus is to identify the critical long-term institutional changes that determined the direction of long-term economic change and performance, the central factors responsible for major institutional shifts over long periods of time, and the mechanisms by which change was effected.