Wouldn't it be nice to have a bird's eye view of the past, to grasp interrelations in the early modern economy over space and time? E. L. Jones thought so, in examining the relations between industrialization and deindustrialization in the eighteenth century. But the economic history of early modern England is marked by the patchiness of its sources. Time series cannot be easily constructed, for any one variable; it is hard to map variables over space.

The challenge compounds when time and space must be considered together, to see change whole, to observe the relation of parts to the whole, over time. Linked spatial and temporal coverage is important to many historiographical pursuits, such as the investigation of the diffusion and timing of technological change, or of enclosure (on both of which the study is largely mute). Spatially wide and temporally deep coverage is decisive in other areas of exploration; regional specialization and market integration are classic problems of the relation of parts to the whole, over time; so are the temporally and spatially related processes of industrialization and deindustrialization with which Jones was concerned. It makes a difference to our interpretation of any one period within the long run to know that the transformation we are examining was concentrated in that period rather than another, or in that period alone rather than extending over the whole of the long run.