Tom Crook has produced something of a tour de force, finding an original take on a subject already much traversed by accomplished scholars such as Anne Hardy and Christopher Hamlin. The result is a pleasure to read: the writing lyrical and lucid, and the text moving easily between theoretical frames and rich empirical exposition.
Cultural and Social History
Crook presents a sophisticated new interpretation of the English route to modernity... this is a very stimulating book that takes a series of traditional urban history debates and casts them in a very different light, both renaming and re-thinking many of the old problems.
Social History of Medicine
This book should inspire a good debate in the urban history and the public health subfield over Crook's argument for a revolutionary discourse of systems.
American Historical Review
Crook has done much... [his] fine book gives me hope that historians will come back to (or, more properly, discover for the first time) a kind of research immensely important to the understanding of the present and the recent past, and long neglected.
Reviews in History
The value of the book lies in its impressive command of detail.
Journal of Modern History