The North-East of England, as a reporter from the Guardian recently portrayed it, is still characterised by its struggle to cope with de-industrialization and structural change after the end of the mining industry. One of the beacons of the region, however, was the fine academic standard upheld in its institutions.1 Before all else, the collection of essays gathered in the volume under discussion certainly proves the latter point. And it goes beyond focusing on the coal industry and its workforce which have hitherto been centre-stage but engages with a wide variety of economic and cultural practices, showing there is a lot more to discover than just “coal and class”.

The aim of the book is twofold. First, it aims to shed light on economic, cultural, and social change in north-east England during the early modern period, the region experiencing an “early Industrial Revolution” (p. 1). Second, it aims to establish further the notion that “regions lie at the heart of historical processes” (p. 19) and that studying interconnections within and among regions will allow us to understand historical change better than a national perspective. In this volume, regions are not regarded as fixed geographical entities, but, as the editors put it, “viewed as socially negotiated networks of relationships in geographical context” (p. 2). In accordance with this regional outlook, the volume’s introduction and contributions also chose to downplay the metropole, aiming to “regionalize London” and to disfavour the “Tyne-Thames”-link. Instead of attributing the economic growth of Newcastle upon Tyne and its surroundings to being fuelled solely by the metropole’s need for coal, they aim to point out economic and also cultural development within the region which in turn contributed to larger, national developments.

Several economic sectors are scrutinised. Alex Brown explores agriculture, specifically the relationship between tenurial structure and commercial impulses, while Adrian Green highlights both agricultural innovation as well as the related migration of the labour force from the primary towards the secondary sector. Migration is also at the heart of Andy Burn’s chapter on the occupational structure of Newcastle upon Tyne in the seventeenth century. Burn shows that migration was male-dominated, as the rising labour sector in the port town was engaged in the loading and shipping of coal. Even though he concludes that the economic logic underpinning social transformation was fuelled by the coal industry, he is careful to highlight the variety of trades in Newcastle, thus in keeping with other contributions. John Brown presents his findings on the engagement of a particular landed family in the lead industry and how economic and cultural forces interplayed with individual agency.

Taking on more explicitly cultural issues, Leona Skelton describes in the ensuing chapter how Berwick’s governors sought to establish a distinctively urban identity and civic culture in a borderland town by curtailing the presence of livestock in the city and by introducing waste disposal regulations. The interplay between more general features and regional peculiarities are also featured in Barbara Crosbie’s chapter on the print trade in Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as in the chapter on the Sunderland networks of power, jointly investigated by Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton. Whereas Crosbie can show that distinguishing between “local” and “national” printing obscures the extent of the provinces’ integration into the national trade and overplays London’s importance, Morgan and Ruston demonstrate how fluid civic identities remained on the Wearside, with elites looking for parliamentary support on the one side, but trying to maintain local authority on the other side.

Somewhere in between are also the Quakers which are featured in Lindsay Houpt-Varner’s contribution. Arguing for the integration of cultural factors, such as religious associations, into the narrative of economic change, Houpt-Varner demonstrates how Quaker meetings helped to underwrite sound commercial practice and to further economic development. But she also shows that for some friends the exacted moral standards collided with business interests, making them choose business over religion. The contributions by Peter D. Wright and Matthew R. Greenhall are more firmly entrenched in the general history of trade, while not neglecting cultural factors, such as changing patterns of consumption. They consider Newcastle’s seaborne trade and the trade between North-East England and Scotland respectively. Wright demonstrates that Newcastle’s shipping industry had many other interests than simply shipping coal to London, with the former serving as a stimulus for a diversified coastal trade as well as the establishment of trading links across the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Greenhall’s scrutiny of the Scotland trade of North-East England reveals furthermore that their commercial relations became increasingly complimentary, extending far beyond the exchange of coal against cattle and herring; rather, regional specialisation, central politics, and fiscal relations all sculpted the inter-regional trade beneficial to both sides.

An outstanding feature of the volume is the fact that all the contributors have been part of the North-East England History Institute, and many of them have written their doctoral theses within the context of that research centre. The chapters of the volume are therefore based on original research, often summing up particular aspects of the theses which have not (yet) been published in all instances. Several of the authors provide detailed tables of data, including Burn who went through the records of 31,000 baptisms to establish data on the occupational structure in early modern Newcastle, and Peter D. Wright who analysed several volumes of the extensive port books of the said town. Overall, the volume certainly benefited from the contributors’ close working relationship which can also be seen in the frequent cross-referencing between the chapters, a feature unfortunately not always present in edited volumes.

A shortcoming of the volume, however, is the neglect of non-Anglophone literature. While it might be argued that a volume dedicated to presenting primary research on the economy and culture of a particular English region does not need to take into detailed consideration literature on other European regions, it is nevertheless striking that many of the authors maintain a rather insular point of view (with the notable exception of the British colonies). This is even more palpable in the introduction which does not even acknowledge the fruitful continental scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s regarding regions and regionalisation in which, however, the British protagonists cited (Pat Hudson, Norman McCord) did engage.2

Notes:
1 Andy Becket, The North-East of England. Britain’s Detroit, in: The Guardian, 10.5.2014, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/10/north-east-avoid-becoming-britains-detroit (last accessed March 14, 2019).
2 See for example the edited volumes Sidney Pollard (ed.), Region und Industrialisierung / Region and Industrialization. Studien zur Rolle der Region in der Wirtschaftsgeschichte der letzten zwei Jahrhunderte / Studies on the Role of the Region in the Economic History of the Last Two Centuries, Göttingen 1980; Stefan Brakensiek / Axel Flügel (eds.), Regionalgeschichte in Europa. Methoden und Erträge der Forschung zum 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert, Paderborn 2000, to which both Hudson and McCord contributed.