A very useful source of historical national accounts is hosted by the Maddison Project at Groningen University, as well as the book British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 discussed in Box 4.4 in Chapter 4.

Mokyr, Joel provides an innovative and influential view of technology and economic development. His ideas were first developed in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990). His A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the emergence of industrial enlightenment.

An encyclopaedic survey of the technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is provided by Smil, Vaclav in Creating the Twentieth Century: Technological Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

The changes in consumer behaviour and market involvement preceding the Industrial Revolution are explored in Vries, Jan de, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Crafts, N. F. R. has changed our view of the Industrial Revolution: see his British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Clarendon Press, 1985). Allen, R. C. provides a new look at the same subject and suggests that one unique characteristic explaining the Industrial Revolution was the fact that Britain was a high-wage economy. See his The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017). Allen’s hypothesis has come under critical scrutiny by Kelly, Morgan, Mokyr, Joel and Ó Gráda, Cormac in ‘Precocious Albion: a new interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution’, Annual Review of Economics 6 (2014), 363–89 and by Kelly, M., Mokyr, J. and Ó Gráda, C., ‘The mechanics of the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Political Economy 131(1) (2023), 59–94. For other theories of the Industrial Revolution see Clark, G., A Farewell to Alms (Princeton University Press, 2008) and McCloskey, Deirdre’s trilogy The Bourgeois Era (University of Chicago Press, 2006, 2010, 2016).

On convergence, a classic is Gerschenkron, A., Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Harvard University Press, 1962). See also Abramovitz, M., ‘Catching up, forging ahead and falling behind’, Journal of Economic History 46(2) (1986), 385–406, which helped us start thinking about the conditions and mechanisms of catching up. The chapters ‘Western Europe: convergence and divergence’ by Sharp, Paul and ‘The socialist experiment and beyond: the economic development of eastern Europe’ by Dennison, Tracy and Klein, Alexander in Broadberry, S. N. and Fukao, K. (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, vol. 2, 1870 to the Present (Cambridge University Press 2021, 48–99) provide in-depth discussion of convergence and divergence in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century.

Crafts, N. F. R. and Toniolo, G. edited a very useful collection of country-specific studies with a well-considered introduction in Economic Growth in Europe since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The German case is explored in depth in a recent collective volume edited by Pfister, U. and Wolf, N., An Economic History of the First German Unification: State Formation and Economic Development in a European Perspective (Routledge, 2023). For the Irish case, see Gráda, C. Ó and O’Rourke, K.H., ‘The Irish economy during the century after partition’, Economic History Review, 75(2) (2022), 336–70.