ABSTRACT
It is widely assumed, by historians and economists, that England's growth in the eighteenth century was unbalanced in the sense that general and sustained growth was stimulated by concentrated investment in a few leading industries. The terms balance and unbalance were devised by the economists; controversy about balance and unbalance has been, largely, an economists' and policy-makers' controversy. Basically, the controversy has been concerned with the composition of investment which will best promote growth, and the appeal by the economists to history has been to demonstrate that actual growth in the past conformed to contemporary prescriptions of balance or imbalance in investment planning for underdeveloped economies. The organization of archives and libraries, the demands of graduate training, the limitations of time and energy which confine any individual to a relatively small academic task, have all reinforced the sectoral (UG) bias of economic history. Agricultural investment was even more widespread than industrial investment, and so, increasingly, was investment in communications.
