This book presents an economic historian's way of generalizing the sweep of modern history. The form of this generalization is a set of stages-of-growth.

I have gradually come to the view that it is possible and, for certain limited purposes, it is useful to break down the story of each national economy—and sometimes the story of regions—according to this set of stages. They constitute, in the end, both a theory about economic growth and a more general, if still highly partial, theory about modern history as a whole.

But any way of looking at things that pretends to bring within its orbit, let us say, significant aspects of late eighteenth-century Britain and Khrushchev's Russia; Meiji Japan and Canada of the pre-1914 railway boom; Alexander Hamilton's United States and Mao's China; Bismarck's Germany and Nasser's Egypt—any such scheme is bound, to put it mildly, to have certain limitations.

I cannot emphasize too strongly at the outset, that the stages-of-growth are an arbitrary and limited way of looking at the sequence of modern history: and they are, in no absolute sense, a correct way. They are designed, in fact, to dramatize not merely the uniformities in the sequence of modernization but also—and equally—the uniqueness of each nation's experience.

As Croce said in discussing the limits of historical materialism: ‘…whilst it is possible to reduce to general concepts the particular factors of reality which appear in history … it is not possible to work up into general concepts the single complex whole formed by these factors’.