This volume of essays, humbly offered by a few of his many pupils, colleagues and friends, celebrates the contribution to historical scholarship of Donald Coleman, a contribution happily still in full flow, despite, or perhaps even because of, his retirement in 1981 from his teaching post as Professor of Economic History in the University of Cambridge. The range and scale of that contribution can be glimpsed from the bibliography of his writings.Its quality is no less remarkable. Essential features of the latter are its incisiveness, its humanity and above all its good sense. In work after work he has brought an acute economic perception to history without ever losing sight of the fact that the past was made by people not processes.These qualities are perhaps most vividly displayed in what is arguably his greatest work, the mammoth three-volume study, Courtaulds: An Economic and Social History (1969–80), where his alchemical touch transformed the all too frequent base metal of business history into an enthralling analytical narrative stretching over two and a half centuries. That great work confirmed his leading position among the world's historians of modern business, rivalling his eminence as an economic historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is perhaps significant that Donald's working life began in the business world and his academic career rather late. In 1939, at the age of seventeen, he left Haberdashers' Aske's School for the City world of insurance. Two years later he enrolled at the University of London. Hardly had he done so, however, when he was called away by the war.