Industry has been at the centre of some of the most formidable political and economic debates of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores the pivotal decades of the eighteenth-century in which the modern concept of industry was, for the first time, at the heart of heated debates in France and other European countries. The close reading of contemporary debates illuminates the origins of an economic key concept and suggests a fresh perspective on the rise of industry in the eighteenth-century.

FLORIAN SCHUI is a historian of political and economic thought at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 2004 and is a Junior Research Fellow at St. Edmund's College. He has studied economics at the New School for Social Research in New York and history at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. He is currently working on international exchanges of ideas about taxation in Europe and the Atlantic world, 1750 - 1848.