The essays collected in Economy and Culture in North-East England, 1500–1800 give readers a rich history of the development of overlapping cultural, social, and economic practices in the region before the Industrial Revolution. Together these pieces demonstrate that early modern northeast England experienced “an early industrial revolution … accompanied by agricultural and consumer revolutions—all of which turned on the exploitation of coal” (1). That said, one of the major contributions of the book is to decenter the role of coal in the regional economy of northeast England in the period in the interest of highlighting other commercial developments. The essays offer accounts of transformations in both the agricultural economy and in the emergence of other important industries to the region, such as lead, glass, and shipbuilding. It also follows the development of complementary commerce and trade in the region, as well as the formation of important local and global trade links. As a result, the essays give us a picture of a complex and diverse political economy in the northeast. But this is not the only contribution that Adrian Green and Barbara Crosbie's volume makes. It also gives readers a fine-grained account of the formation of different groups of participants in this new political economy, with a focus on “the middling sort” and their social and cultural relations and practices. Lastly, Economy and Culture in North-East England advocates for the value of regional history, both in the essays and in the explicit gestures it makes toward new avenues for further research.

From the outset, most of the essays acknowledge that coal was central to the early industrialization of the northeast, but more important still were the crosscutting relationships between agriculture and industry that gave the region its economic and cultural shape (6). This is especially evident in Green's own essay, “Durham Ox: Commercial Agriculture in North-East England, 1600–1800,” in which she argues that the agricultural transformations in the region were “akin to industrial achievements and seen as an equivalent form of commercial advance” (54). Green traces a turn to more industrialized modes of commercial food production grounded in new ways of marshaling human and animal activity and spurred by an expanding food market driven by coal production in local urban centers. Green's effort to demonstrate the interdependence of coal and a burgeoning food industry is just one example of how the volume builds on the traditional focus on the rise of the coal industry to tell a more varied and complex story about the political economies of Durham and Northumberland. Other essays also show how the coal industry gave way to new industries and trades. These essays vary in method and scope. For example, John Brown explores one family's foray into lead mining to tell a complementary story about the growth of lead extraction and trade in the region, whereas Peter Wright uses evidence from Exchequer port books to draw a picture of the breadth and depth of trade via Newcastle in the eighteenth century (180–81).

These treatments of a growing commercial political economy—based on but not limited to industrial innovation in the coal industry—open into the volume's account of cultural and social change. Andy Burn's “Work before Play: The Occupational Structure of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1600–1700,” gives the reader a full picture of the diversity of employment and “cultures of work roused by the coal trade” in one urban center in the region, as well as a critical picture of patterns of migration structured by a growing industrial economy shaped by fluctuating demand (135). Burn's story is an economic one, to be sure, but with overtones that link it to some of the essays that are more explicitly social and cultural in focus. Barbara Crosbie's “Provincial Purveyors of Culture: The Print Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne” depicts the growing print culture and emerging literate public of the northeast region, detailing its specificity without papering how deeply regional printing was integrated into national trade (229). Likewise, in a particularly interesting environmental history of waste management in early modern Berwick, Leona Skelton traces how a changing industrial economy presented material challenges that were integral to projects of self-government; as she argues, how Berwick's residents and governors managed local waste was key to its “regional status and self-perception as a well-governed—and therefore civil as well as civic—urban town” (96). Although radically different in topic, chapters by Crosbie and Skelton show how communities’ cultural self-understandings and economies were imbricated, thus satisfying one of the major aims of the book.

Although it is impossible to address every facet of a collected volume such as this, one more dimension deserves mention. Although the authors work in tandem to give a rich interpretation of the northeast of England as a region and to argue for the value of regional history, they also situate their study of the northeast in national and international contexts. In particular, this volume paints a clear picture of commerce—understood as the circulation of goods and ideas—within the region itself, between the region and other parts of England, and with Scotland and European partners.

Economy and Culture in North-East England is thus valuable to scholars of early modern England for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it offers a deeper understanding of the cultural implications of economic transformation in the region through deploying a range of methodological approaches and innovations. It also generously welcomes readers into the practice of regional history by posing new questions and drawing attention to new sources pertaining to the economy and culture of northeast England.