ABSTRACT
It is most unfashionable in economic history to draw up laundry lists, i.e. to enumerate all sorts of factors, some ‘favourable’, others ‘unfavourable’, to the growth of an economy. The ‘new’ method is to resort to econometrics, in order to measure precisely the role in growth of certain variables. This task unfortunately remains to be completed for nineteenth-century Britain by practitioners of the New Economic History. So we have to make do with a traditional approach, despite its conceptual weaknesses.
