With the banking crisis having shaped much of the history of the past two years, now seems a good time to ask some searching questions about the relationship between the financial sector, governments, and the productive parts of the world's economy. But who is asking them? The assumption remains firmly in place that the prosperity of the modern world is based upon the capitalist system that has grown up over the past three centuries or so. Poverty, on the other hand, is widely associated with older systems of production; and its survival into the modern world is often seen as crying out for the wider implementation of more progressive systems. It is, of course, a highly commendable object to "Make Poverty History"; but is the link between poverty and history really what it is made to appear? This book is about England, birthplace of the financial system, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It examines the deteriorating conditions of life for the majority of people, and the controversy about the causes of poverty which resulted. Its conclusions cast serious doubt on the doctrine of underdevelopment upon which our modern views of poverty and its alleviation seem to be based.