ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how data about population can unpick the shape of past societies, while the methods of economic history can add significantly to our historical knowledge. It focuses upon the contribution by economic historians to the understanding of wealth and poverty over centuries. The chapter is concerned with the role of luxury and luxury goods in the modernizing process and the way that historians have dealt with pessimistic and optimistic approaches to industrialization, that is, economic understandings of industrialization that argue whether the Industrial Revolution benefited the economic lives of contemporaries. Business history is concerned with how production and the delivery of goods and services was organized in the past, by an individual, a sole trader, a group of individuals, a partnership or a joint stock limited liability concern – the modern company. As an adjunct to economic history, business history has in recent years reached a degree of maturity.
