Concise and comprehensive analysis of the European economy and of the evolution of Europe's social structures in the early modern period. The author has been prominently involved in the debate on 'proto-industrialisation'. In this book he relates the emergence of rural manufacturing to the expansion of European commerce overseas. He looks at the interconnections between population change, movements in demand and supply of both agricultural produce and manufactured goods and changing labour relations in the rural as well as in urban areas. These key aspects of the internal development of Europe are then skilfully linked with the opening-up of the colonial world, especially in the Americas, as suppliers of raw materials and as markets for finished goods from Europe. The great value of this study lies in the fact that it is genuinely comparative and includes material not only from England, Holland, France, Spain and Italy, but also on Central and Eastern Europe.