REVIEW OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE: 1977: (iv) Since 1850 (Book).

This article presents information about various articles related to the economic history of Great Britain since 1850. Economic history, one is often told, is losing its attraction to students. As it becomes more mathematical, a branch perhaps of applied economics, so it loses its adherents, while social history gains those who seek empathy with people in the past, and who disdain quantification as an abstraction from historical reality. In the article "Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain," published in the journal "Past and Present," W.D. Rubinstein shows that traditional generalizations about the rise of manufacturing wealth in the nineteenth century do not survive painstaking counting of probate valuations. These demonstrate that the holders of large wealth at death, other than landowners, had amassed their fortunes predominantly in commerce, finance, and transport, rather than in cotton, engineering, or steel. Rubinstein is clearly right to emphasize the importance of the tertiary sector as a wealth-creator. Even the apparent simplicity of landed wealth based on broad acres does not survive David Cannadine's "The Landowner As Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire," published in the journal "Agriculture History Review."