He is most well known for his publication of The First Industrial Nation: an Economic History of Britain 1700–1914 (1969), which discussed not only the multiple factors that made industrialisation possible, but also how it was sustained.

However the college demanded that those coming up from school should have done military service before they arrived so he spent two years in the army as a conscript.

[6] He was elected a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, when he published his first book on the brewing industry in England.

Mathias also became a member of the Datini Institute in Prato, Italy in 1967, under the direction of Fernand Braudel and Federigo Melis.

Another Festschrift was published in 2018 entitled Asia and the history of the international economy : essays in memory of Peter Mathias, edited by A. J. H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu.