This monumental work, published posthumously in a limited edition of 350 copies available only from the publishing society, is the most important book on the early modern European iron industry to appear for many years. Probably its greatest strength is that it avoids the narrowly Anglo-centric tradition of studies of the industry in the British Isles. It does this partly by tracing the diffusion of the indirect process from its continental origins (rather than starting the story with the first blast furnace in the Weald), and partly by continuing the account from Britain to North America.

The book achieves these objectives in a highly original way, by discussing not merely the spread of the new technology but also the men who transferred it from France to England. Not only was Brian Awty effortlessly familiar with the German and French literature – ancient and modern, national and local, historical and technical – in a way that no other recent British historian of the subject has been, but he worked assiduously in French as well as English local archives, tracing families who were involved in the industry on both sides of the Channel. No one has attempted this before. The outcome is not merely a path-breaking study of the iron industry in Britain and on the Continent, but also a major contribution to the wider question of the diffusion of technology in Europe between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.

Awty did not particularly try to revise the chronology of early blast furnace construction in England. Most furnaces in this period were in the Weald, where a generation of scholarship, initially led by the late David Crossley and continued by the Wealden Iron Research Group, has established when almost all the furnaces and forges were in use and by whom they were operated. Less work has been done on other regions for the period before 1660 and here Awty in general relied on published sources. The novelty of his study lies in his prosopographical approach, showing how mobile skilled iron-workers were. In a few cases, his identification of men with common surnames active as late as the early nineteenth century, with others mentioned much earlier, is perhaps less convincing than his demonstration of the close links between France and the Weald at the beginning of the period. The final section, which traces the migration of iron-workers from England to the American colonies, seems more soundly based.

Awty effectively completed this study twenty years before he died in 2013. He seems to have accepted that it would be difficult to publish, because of its length (about three-quarters of a million words) and specialised interest. Only after he died did the Wealden Iron Research Group take on the task, in circumstances that were never going to be easy. Computer files had been lost; archives had migrated or been re-numbered; bibliographical references in at least three languages (and some very obscure journals) had to be checked; and indexing a book with so many personal and place names (spread over several countries) would itself be a major task. The main burden of this work fell on Jeremy Hodgkinson, of the Wealden Iron Research Group, Christopher Whittick, of the East Sussex Record Office, and Ann Hudson, an experienced indexer based in Sussex.

The text has been set in a single block on an A4 page, with footnotes on each page. The result is reasonably easy to read, although an average of eighteen words to a line is more than most typographers would recommend, the paragraph indents are rather deep, and the headings might have been laid out more economically. Setting in two columns would have shortened the book by about 10 per cent and produced a better line length. By contrast, the footnotes cannot be faulted and the copy-editing and indexing would do credit to a major university press, never mind a voluntary society. For just over a thousand pages the price is very reasonable. Overall, the end result is a huge achievement that reflects great credit on all concerned. The book should be an essential purchase for all major academic libraries in Britain, and those in iron-making regions on the Continent and in North America.