This study has a long history. It goes back to 1954, when Professor M. M. Postan asked me to write a chapter on technological change and industrial development in western Europe for the Cambridge Economic History. The subject was vast and I was soon caught up in the seamless web of the historian s history; so that by the time I had reached what seemed to me to be a convenient stopping place—that point, around 1870, when the leading industrial nations of continental Europe had effected their own breakthroughs to a modern economic system and were prepared to compete with Britain on even terms—I had far exceeded the space originally allotted to me. Even so, the editors of the Cambridge Economic History felt that it was not a good idea for my chapter to deviate in this manner from the general pattern of the larger volume, which was to take the story into the twentieth century; and they asked me to add a section on the period from 1870 to World War I. This was in 1958. I submitted a draft of the additional material in 1960, revised it somewhat in 1961–2, and the entire essay finally appeared in Volume VI of the Cambridge Economic History in 1965. Publication is a long and painful parturition.

By his time, what had begun as a chapter was as long as a book, and I thought, as did a number of readers, that it ought to appear as such.