First published in 1989, Alon Kadish’s study re-examines the standard view held by historians of economic thought whereby economic history emerged from the historicist criticism of neoclassical economic theory. He also demonstrates how the discipline evolved as an extension of the study of history. The study will appeal to students and scholars in historiography, the development of higher education and in the history if economic thought in general, as well as all those interested in the evolution of Oxford and Cambridge.

J. A. Hobson was one of the most influential social, economic and political theorists of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. In this volume, first published in 1990, eight scholars reassess the importance and relevance of his work today and affirm him as a major British thinker. These original studies place Hobson in context by explaining his intellectual antecedents: Cobden, Ruskin, nineteenth-century social and psychological theories and economic thought. The book provides an overview of the novelty and incisiveness of Hobson's contribution to British liberal theory and radical practice. Historians, economists, social and political theorists and students of international affairs will find this an important book for a fuller understanding of early twentieth-century British progressive thought.

The book, first published in 1977, contrasts new and older approaches to the history of transport and outlines a critical exposition of the methods used to quantify the contribution of railways to economic growth by means of counterfactual speculation and the measurement of social savings. The author also outlines and appraises an alternative measure of the impact of railways, namely the social rate of return on capital invested in railways. The final chapters are concerned with the effects on growth generated by the construction and diffusion of railways through expenditure on labour, capital goods and industrial inputs and through their effects on the integration of markets, and patterns of location.

This book provides a study of the forces underlying the development of economic thought at Cambridge University during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The primary lens it uses to do so is an examination of how Arthur Cecil Pigou’s thinking, heavily influenced by his predecessor, Alfred Marshall, evolved. Aspects of Pigou’s context, biography and philosophical grounding are reconstructed and then situated within the framework of Ludwik Fleck’s philosophy of scientific knowledge, most notably by drawing on the notions of ‘thought styles’ and ‘thought collectives’. In this way, Knight provides a novel contribution to the history of Pigou's economic thought.

First published in 1921, Problems of a New World deals with the economic and political issues that arose from the First World War. The first three parts of the study consider the world before the war, and the interests, purposes and ideals which influenced the national psyche during the years which followed. In the final two parts, Hobson assesses the political and economic conditions confronted by the post-war world, with a particular focus on the impact of war on industry, labour and the ideals of nationhood. This is an important work, of great interest to modern European and economic historians and students.

The financial crisis and the economic crisis that followed triggered a crisis in the subject of economics, as it is typically being taught today especially in macroeconomics and related fields. A renewed interest in earlier authors, especially the classical economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes, developed. This book may also be seen as a response to this interest. What can we learn from the authors mentioned, what we could not learn from the mainstream? This volume contains a selection of essays which deepens and widens the understanding of the classical approach to important problems, such as value and distribution, growth and technical progress, and exhaustible natural resources. It is the fourth collection in a row and reflects an on-going discussion of the fecundity of the classical approach. A main topic of the essays is a comparison between the classical approaches with modern theory and thus an identification of what can be learned by elaborating on the ideas of Smith and Ricardo and Marx above and beyond and variously in contradiction to certain mainstream view. Since the work of Piero Sraffa spurred the revival of classical economic thought, his contributions are dealt with in some detail. The attention then focuses on economic growth and the treatment of exhaustible resources within a classical framework of the analysis.