The British economy leaped forward after 1500: cities grew, London's wages were high, agriculture improved, and manufacturing spread across the countryside. The specifics of change suggest that cities and commerce were the responsible agents. High wages, for instance, were maintained in London in the sixteenth century while they were collapsing elsewhere; in the seventeenth century, the rest of the country began to catch up as provincial cities began to grow rapidly. London's growth unleashed the flood of northeastern coal as wood prices soared.

This chapter will develop the idea that the growth of the urban, commercial economy drove the English economy forward in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. The matter is complicated by two issues. The first relates to ultimate causation. The growth of cities may have pushed the national economy forward, but what made the cities grow? I will shift the analysis back a stage by attributing city growth to other factors.