Book excerpt: Long neglected, the Eighteenth Century is now the focus for much of the most exciting work in history today. This new research has so altered and expanded our understanding of the Georgian economy that some historians now question the very idea of an `Industrial Revolution'. John Rule uses the latest scholarship for a comprehensive and magisterial review -- of population, output, agriculture, manufacture, labour, communications, towns, finance and domestic and overseas markets -- through which he reassesses the `vital century' in which the contours of the modern economy first emerge to view. An analytical survey which offers the first comprehensive economic history of the C.18th.