Coping With City Growth assesses British performance with city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian. What emerges is an exciting and provocative new account of a very old problem. The debate over Third World city growth is hardly new, and can be found in the British Parliamentary Papers as early as the 1830s, in treatises by political economists, and in the British Press. This book should change the way urban history is written in the future and influence the way we think about contemporary Third World cities.