The research in the present volume originated as papers given at two of the annual ESRC Quantitative Economic History conferences (Newcastle and Birkbeck). Since they all concerned the same relatively short period of British history, I thought it would be important and interesting to see what they added up to. Normal academic practice is to scatter such papers among a number of scholarly journals. How they affect our interpretation of the past in total then depends upon individual scholars' sampling of this literature or has to wait upon the work of a synthesising textbook writer. For those not primarily concerned with this particular mode of enquiry, the findings could easily be overlooked or underestimated.

The following chapters provide a more rigorous analysis of a number of established historical questions, present new evidence, and identify new problems for the maturing industrial economy of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Readers are likely to have different interests; some will be more concerned with the methods, others will focus on the history. For those interested in the methods, but without a great deal of practice in them, each of the three parts of the book is preceded by a brief statement of the unifying economic concepts. To facilitate an appreciation of the techniques, a glossary is combined with the index.

In the introductory chapter, for stylistic reasons, I have used the terms Britain and British to refer to the United Kingdom. I have taken a similar licence with the term ‘Late Victorian’, here assumed to be a period beginning in 1860 and ending in 1914.