THE NINE ESSAYS in this volume are coherent in content and of a consistently high quality: the topics covered are population growth (Finlay and Shearer) and immigration (Kitch); the social topography of the city (Power); the approach of the city governors to sickness (Pelling), plague (Slack) and poverty (Macfarlane); and the generation of wealth by manufacturing (Beier), by internal trade in England (Chartres) and by overseas trade (Dietz). As the editors point out in their introduction, there are aspects of metropolitan life which are almost completely ignored in this collection of essays, for example religion, culture (whether high or low), City companies and City government and the interaction of London and national politics. Slack does however write interestingly about the divergent views of the Royal Council and the Court of Aldermen as to what were practicable and desirable solutions to the plague epidemics in the city. But no volume, even one of nearly 300 pages, can be expected to deal with every aspect of a metropolis as large as London; and this volume, at a modest cost, provides not only original and, on occasion exciting, essays but also a wealth of documentation including over a hundred notes of useful historiographical references provided by the editors in their introductory survey. All the essays are based on source material: some contributors have continued to mine rich seams which they have already made their own. For example Finlay and Shearer have extended the use of parish registers as a fruitful source for population studies along the lines already developed by Finlay in his Population and Metropolis: the demography of London 1580-1650 (1981). Power has continued his study of the Hearth Taxes of the 1660s as indicators of wealth or poverty and in this essay extends his earlier study of 'East and west in early modern London' (published in 1978 in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays presented to S. T. Bindof!) to include the whole metropolitan area. Some source material is here exploited for the first time. Dietz has used the Privy Seal books in the P.R. O. to chart the rapid development of the Thames-side ship building industry between 1558 and 1618, and Beier exploits the burial registers as a hitherto neglected source for the occupations of Londoners. As Beier points out (p. 145) the burial registers list the occupations of females and adolescents, 'groups ignored by most other sources', and although not all burial registers record occupations it has been possible to use those of 15 parishes which cover a reasonably wide range in size, prosperity and location (eleven within the walls and four outside). In all, the trades of nearly 27,000 Londoners dying in the period 1540-1700 are analysed and classified into 13 different categories such as 'building' or 'miscellaneous production'. As Beier admits, the classification is bound to involve anomalies and arbitrary decisions (e.g. is a skinner more properly a leatherworker or a merchant?), but his new analysis opens up interesting lines of enquiry and his conclusion that three-fifths of the city's work force was engaged in production rather than service or trade, does lend convincing support to his assertion (p. 151) that 'the capital as market thesis is misleading where London is concerned.' The novelty, or interest, of the various essays will strike different readers differently. In his analysis of the City's responses to the recurrent problem of plague Slack effectively demonstrates the difficult position of the aldermen who were caught between the rigorous demands of the Royal Council and the sense of social community which prevailed in the local parish. Macfarlane detects in the different solutions to the problem of poverty in the late seventeenth century, a difference of politics. Whereas the Corporation of the Poor which attempted to centralise poor relief and link it to education and 'retraining' was largely supported by Whigs like Sir Robert Clayton, the Tories favoured the more traditional, less directed, parish system of relief which, indeed, finally triumphed. This renewed anxiety about the poor in London in the late seventeenth century may be linked to a change, effectively analysed by Dietz, in the source of London's wealth. The great trading prosperity of London, based as it had been on the import of luxury goods and the monopoly of trade with the