Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution

Description

Coping With City Growth assesses British performance with city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian. What emerges is an exciting and provocative new account of a very old problem. The debate over Third World city growth is hardly new, and can be found in the British Parliamentary Papers as early as the 1830s, in treatises by political economists, and in the British Press. This book should change the way urban history is written in the future and influence the way we think about contemporary Third World cities.

"Coping with City Growth is packed full of important research findings...it is an important piece of work that deserves to be read carefully by all scholars working on nineteenth-century British industrialization and urbanization." Journal of Economic History "The methods of enquiry are ingenious and stimulating, and some of the proposed answers to specific questions deserve careful consideration...a work of such intelligence and ingenuity..." Victorian Studies "He presents old questions in new ways, offers many interesting and innovative new answers, and provides an important work for both British historians and economists of the contemporary Third World. Scholars working on nineteenth-century British cities, as well as on such topics as public health and labor history, will be both informed and challenged by Williamson's study." Janet Roebuck, American Historical Review "...no one can doubt the book's value in raising crucial questions about the British urban experience." Robert L. Fishman, Albion