For two or three decades, economic historians have responded eagerly to the calls of macro-economics and have thus greatly improved our knowledge and understanding of modern economic growth, especially of the industrial revolution. However, sometimes much effort and ingenuity has been devoted to goals which have proved somewhat elusive. Such has occurred in the field of capital and capital formation: in computing national investment proportions the essential spade-work of collecting and interpreting new data has been sometimes neglected.

It is therefore refreshing when a scholar of the new generation, like Dr Pat Hudson, brings back the debate to earth, to the workshops and mills spread among the bleak hills and the green valleys of the West Riding of Yorkshire, in a study which is solidly built upon a large quantity of archival material especially business records. The preparation of this work has involved an impressive labour input and it contains a great deal of original information.

On the other hand, this book is not the kind of myopic monograph, with a narrow outlook, which ‘old economic history’ has been charged with overproducing (not quite unfairly). Readers of Dr Hudson's book will soon realise that she has mastered the theoretical and semitheoretical debates concerning ‘the genesis of capital’ during the industrial revolution and the vast literature which has accumulated around this theme. In her analysis, she has used skilfully, and with an open, undogmatic mind, various tools provided by earlier writers from Karl Marx to Franklin Mendels. At the same time she has avoided getting bogged down in semantic or scholastical controversies.