This collection of essays explores the economy and culture of North East England, a region traditionally studied for its connection to coal and to the creation of an exploited working class during industrialization. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the real story is so much richer than the history of coal alone. Building off of an earlier work in the North East England History Institute's “Regions and Regionalism in History” series, the authors in this book move beyond questions of regional identity to explore the economic culture more deeply. A case study of a distinct region allows us to study that region from multiple perspectives and provides a more thorough understanding of people's lives and the political, economic, and social contexts that shaped their choices at a particular point in time.

In the introduction, editors Adrian Green and Barbara Crosbie outline the organization of the essays: the first four chapters deal with aspects of agriculture, chapters 5 through 8 investigate a range of trade practices and the demographic changes that occurred alongside, and the last two chapters track changes in ideas and power structures. Of these three categories, only the middle group of essays, concerning trade and geographic mobility, are clearly linked. The other two categories are less clear. The use of the term “agriculture” to include lead mining and urban life in the first group of essays is curious, while the final chapters—one on print culture and the other on political authority—seem even less directly connected. Nevertheless, every contribution brings an important piece of the history to light.

The first group of articles opens with A. T. Brown's piece exploring how different forms of land tenure on Durham Cathedral's estates either facilitated or prevented the rise of a rural elite class. It is followed by Green's study of commercial livestock breeding that led to the introduction of the Durham Ox, reminding us that many of the inhabitants of this region were intimately connected to providing food to support the growing population of nonagricultural laborers. John Brown tracks the ups and downs of the Bowes family as they alternatively exploited and neglected their lead mining concessions, sometimes gaining but also often losing fortunes in the process. In the last chapter in the agriculture category, Leona Skelton describes how the governors of Berwick-upon-Tweed sought to shed their border-country-town identity and cultivate an explicitly English, urban status in order to attract royal support and commercial activity. These essays make clear that a region best known for early coal and industry was still very much involved in rural endeavors that shaped the whole economy.

Andy Burn starts off the second group of articles, linking trade with a variety of demographic, economic, and cultural changes. Burn's piece traces the unique migration of workers to, in, and around Newcastle and shows the reader how coal may have been central to the area's development but it carried with it a number of related trades and businesses. In what may be my favorite essay in the collection, Lindsay Houpt-Varner outlines the business ethics and social networks of North East England's Quaker communities. Peter D. Wright's essay makes sense of a staggering array of developments in shipping and shipped goods, as the shipment of a large, cheap cargo of coal had to be matched with the import of merchandise or ballast. Matthew R. Greenhall's chapter is a perfect complement to the preceding piece as he explores coastal and overland trade between North East England and Scotland and the impact on these trades of shifting Union and central politics. Taken together, the essays in this category illuminate several pieces of an ever-changing puzzle.

The last two chapters in the collection, identified as representing the histories of ideas and power, seem to have little in common on the surface. Crosbie investigates the extent to which print culture may have promoted central, national culture at the expense of local communal or regional identities. In the end, she concludes that print culture was not the culprit, but that local culture changed nevertheless. The final essay in the collection, by Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, follows the active role played by elites on the River Wear in achieving their demands on the central state while cooperating, to an extent, with state interference into local matters such as taxation and policing contraband trade. Both of these essays explore examples of the tension between regional needs and the demands or the dominance of the center, and both provide eye-opening examples of the agency of regional actors in the face of national institutions of power.

The collection opens with a foreword by Keith Wrightson and includes a list of contributors with biographical information about each. Though all contributors are naturally linked to the study of North East England, they nevertheless represent a range of expertise, experience, and place of origin. Thus, the collection offers broad perspectives in a number of ways. The essays are a bit uneven in terms of prose and clarity, but that is to be expected in a collection of work by a large group of individuals. My only complaint, which is fairly minor, is that occasionally some sloppy editing distracts from the arguments in the essays. In John Brown's chapter, for example, there is more than one version of birth, marriage, and death dates for key members of the Bowes family. Apart from this, the collection is fairly accessible and truly fascinating. The most obvious audience would be specialists on the region, but I could see this text working with advanced undergraduates or graduate students in economic or business history courses.