First published in 1978, Professor O’Brien’s Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France’s path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

First published in 1978, Professor O’Brien’s Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France’s path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.

Originally published in 1981, French Cities in the Nineteenth Century analyses large-scale processes of social change, and looks at how this affected the growth of towns and cities of nineteenth century France. The book addresses how this change affected the politics of life in France during the nineteenth century, as well as how the city was organised. Urbanization created new uses of space, and new concerns for the people that lived among them and the book looks at how social change was a collective experience for the people of France and how this transformed the societies in which they lived.

First published in 1980, this compact and useful book uses the earliest volumes of government-published statistics, and with the aid of computer-generated cartography, transforms the numbers there reported into an arrondissement-by-arrondissement comparative picture of French agriculture in the mid-1830s. Clout reviews problems of rapid population growth, scarcely adequate domestic food supplies and primitive systems of transportation, while attention is drawn to spatial variations in agricultural activity and productivity. Commercial, high-yielding farming was best developed in a northern multi-nuclear region, comprising of Ile-de-France, Normandy and Nord, with smaller foci of commercial orientation along an eastern axis from Alsace to Marseilles and in western areas from the Loire to the middle of the Garonne valley. Clout concludes that the revolutionary promise of national economic unity was far from being realised in the 1830s and was not to be achieved until national systems of transport and education were firmly established later in the nineteenth century.

The main purpose of the book is to introduce the work of Alan S. Milward and to acknowledge the full magnitude of his scientific contribution to contemporary British and European history. The book is a collection of essays which provide a better understanding of Alan Milward’s extensive intellectual work for future scholars and facilitate the knowledge and transmission of his published work to present and future generations of students, scholars in the various disciplines concerned, and the general public. The series of original contributions which this book contains are related to or reflect critically upon Milward’s own contributions to the fields of political, diplomatic, and socio-economic history, political science, economics, international relations, and European Studies in general. This book honors Alan Milward through a better understanding of his many pioneering contributions in the fields of contemporary European history in general, and the history of European integration in particular. Although the volume does not aim to be a substitute for Milward’s work itself, it illuminates and assesses his creative process along fifty years of continued and intense work, as well as the impact of his main work, and the continuing relevance of his main theses today.