Modern European economic history is marked by an endeavor to transcend the traditional national case study approach, to use comparisons and to deploy economic theory in order to draw the manifold and diverse experiences of the regions, countries and multicultural empires of Europe onto a unified frame of reference. These two volumes exemplify this modern approach. This Volume 5, of the eleven part set entitled Industrial Revolutions contains thirteen papers, with an introduction, which adopt and apply a conceptual and explicitly comparative approach to European economic history as a whole. Volume 5 includes sixteen national case studies, again organized around or set within the context of theoretical principles and ideas derived largely from macroeconomic theory, social accounting, productivity measurement and regional analysis.

Patrick O'Brian, CBE, born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish-Catalan physician Stephen Maturin.