ABSTRACT
TRADITIONALLY, an inaugural lecture should be used by the new occupant of a University Chair to expatiate upon the nature, methods and significance of the subject which he professes. But those are matters which my predecessors at the London School of Economics have so illuminated, both by precept and by example, that I am forced to choose a more modest theme. My purpose is merely to offer some comments upon the present state of the study of modem economic history in this country and, in particular, to draw attention to a tendency which has recently developed for modem economic history to be split, somewhere in the eighteenth century, not merely into two periods but almost into two separate SUbjects.
