The first volume in this beautifully illustrated and highly acclaimed economic and social history of the world from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution covers the richness and complexity of everyday life - food, drink, dress, housing, money, the development of towns - with the technique of a pointilliste.

The second volume covers the markets and exchanges that, from the start have been the real motors of change. Pedlars, merchants, fairs, market-stalls, the first stock-exchanges, provide the human and economic subject matter.

The concluding volume of the trilogy charts the growth of the world economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century concentrating on the human activity that underlies the business of life - the bustle of the market, the great manipulators of capital, the labour of the slave, the peasant and factory workers, the fashions of the rich and the rise of the great financial centres of Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam and London.