¹ The other papers are entitled: “Economic Growth in England, 1550-1750”; “Capitalism: A Critical and Historiographical Survey”; and “The Use of Economic Theory in the Economic History of Preindustrial Economy.”

² Kuznets, S., Economic Change (London: Heinemann, 1954), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

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⁴ Sombart, W., Die Ordnung des Wirtschaftslebens (Leipzig: Enzyklopadie der Rechts- und Staatswissenschaft, 1925)Google Scholar; and “Capitalism,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 195–208Google Scholar.

⁵ Ashley, W. J., The Economic Organization of England (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914), pp. 35–6Google Scholar; see also, Bücher, C., Industrial Evolution (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1901), pp. 89 ffGoogle Scholar.

⁶ For an account of obvious confusion about the term “capitalism,” see Hilton, R. H., “Capitalism—What's in a Name?,” Past and Present, 1 (1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ By very long-term here I mean several centuries. For a shorter-term background of the industrial revolution, see: Hartwell, R. M. (Ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London: Methuen, 1967)Google Scholar; Jones, E. L. (Ed.), Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650-1815 (London: Methuen, 1967)Google Scholar, and Flinn, M. W., Origins of the Industrial Revolution (London: Longmans, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁸ See, however, Higgins, B., Economic Development: Principles, Problems and Politics (rev. ed.; London: Constable, 1968), p. 161Google Scholar, who declares, “the acceleration of economic development in Europe after 1500 … culminated in the industrial Revolution … [and] has been labeled ‘the rise of capitalism.’”

⁹ Gill, R. T., Economic Development: Past and Present (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 40Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See, however, Dobb, M., Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1946)Google Scholar and Landes, D. (Ed.), The Rise of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1966)Google Scholar.

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¹² For example, Sée, Modern Capitalism, chs. V, VI, and VII.

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¹⁴ Cunningham, , Progress of Capitalism, p. 21, andGoogle ScholarWestern Civilization, Vol. II (Cambridge, [Eng.]: The University Press, 1913), p. 162Google Scholar.

¹⁵ To the classical economists, economic progress depended on, first, the rate of growth of population, and, second, capital accumulation which allowed technological improvements and greater productivity. The emphasis on capital continued in economic as well as in historical literature. See, for example, Cairncross, A. K., “The Place of Capital in Economic Progress,” Factors in Economic Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), for a skeptical voiceGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Pirenne, H., Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 49Google Scholar; Stephenson, C., Borough and Town (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 205 ffGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Weber, , Protestant Ethic andGoogle ScholarTawney, , Religion and CapitalismGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ E. J. Hamilton, “American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism (1500-1700)”; “Profit Inflation and the Industrial Revolution, 1751-1800,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LVI (1941–1942)Google Scholar; “The History of Prices before 1750,” XI Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports, Vol. I (Uppsala, 1960)Google Scholar.

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²³ This discontinuity is also linked with cultural change. As Herlihy, D. writes: “Some historians have dared to see in these transformations of the central Middle Ages a major turning point in Western history, marking the emergence of ideals, attitudes an d traditions of behaviour which have since remained a permanen t part of our ‘modem civilization,’” Medieval Culture and Society (New York: Harper, 1968), p. XiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁷ For example, N. S. B. Gras entitled his history of industry, Industrial Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1930), while admitting (p. 90) “in the whole recorded part of industrial history there has apparently occurred but one great break in evolutionary development. That break is called the Industrial Revolution.”Google Scholar

²⁸ See, for example, Black, C. E., The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), which has an extensive bibliographical essay (pp. 175–99) on modernizationGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ A clear recognition of this can be found in Cipolla, C., The Economic History of World Population (London: Penguin, 1962)Google Scholar.

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³¹ See Deane, P. and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth, 1688-1959 (Cambridge University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, for detailed statistics, which, although criticized, have been accepted generally as indicating long-term trends in the structure and output of the British economy since the late sixteenth century.

³² Many obstacles to growth are both a cause and consequence of poverty, so that there is “a vicious circle” which perpetuates the low rate of growth. See, for example, Nurkse, R., Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 5Google Scholar, where he shows that low real incomes account for both low savings and lack of investment incentives on the one hand, and low demand and low investment on the other.

³³ Rostow, w. W., “The Take-off into Self-sustained Growth,” The Economic Journal, LXVI (1956), p. 261Google Scholar.

³⁴ On the development of the English economy by 1750, see Hartwell, , Causes of the Industrial Revolution, pp. 22–3. On growth before 1750, see my forthcoming articleGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ See Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, for estimates of rates of growth of population and capital formation, and for other growth indexes.

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³⁹ Eric Jones has suggested to me that whereas subsistence needs (food, shelter, and clothing) had been satisfied by small-scale industries in which technical change was slow and in which the economies of scale were relatively unimportant, the more sophisticated and complex demands of the second half of the eighteenth century could be satisfied only by the development of new techniques, and, in some cases, by a larger scale of industrial unit.

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⁴¹ This point has not been stressed enough by economic historians. See, however, Habakkuk's, H. J. comment, “The Historical Experience of the Basic Conditions of Economic Progress,” Economic Progress, ed. L. H. Dupriez (Louvain: Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, 1955), p. 150Google Scholar, “It is probable that the most important of the conditions which made Europe the cradle of economic advance originated very far back in her history.”

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⁴³ For Marx, history consisted of a series of stages in an inevitable evolution of society and economy towar d socialism; each stage had its characteristic technology, and its uniquely induced class struggle which led to the breakdown of the system and to the emergence of a new and higher form of social and economic organization. Technological chang e was the prime mover; the class struggle was the means of “progress.” For Malthus, population pressure was the prime mover of history, an d although he had his own version of the classical theory of development, it is the long-term relationship between population and resources, as he envisaged it, which has ha d a profound influence on historical thinking. See, for example, Bath, B. H. Slicher van, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500-1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), p. 89Google Scholar, for a discussion of European economic growth, 1150-1300, where he argues that agricultural expansion had not kept pace with population: “The result was relative overpopulation.”

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