The essays published in this volume reflect my main research interests over the past dozen years. They fall under three main heads: economic history, urban history, and population history. Described in this fashion, it might seem that they must be disparate, and indeed it is true that, say, investigations into the reasons for a rise in marital fertility in the eighteenth century must seem to have little in common with Malthus's discussion of the causes of the high price of provisions in England in 1800–1, or the latter with the nature of the relationship between urban systems and their rural hinterlands. Yet, though some of the essays may, like planets towards the edge of the solar system, seem far removed from its centre, it remains the case that all are subject to the pull of a single central force. Since my days as a research student, I have always been ultimately more preoccupied with the wish to achieve a better understanding of the industrial revolution than with any other issue, with gaining a clearer insight into the circumstances in which the world learned how to produce goods and services on a scale which would have astonished and bemused anyone born before the nineteenth century. This is an issue to intrigue an historian in any country, but with a particular fascination for one living in England since, although every continent was rapidly suffused by some or all of the changes which ensued, much of the early story was played out in an English setting.