Beginnings

Despite our intentions, in the long early decades which stretch from 1860 to 1930 it is more convenient to follow individual scholars: the themes took a while to get going. The discipline of economic history at Oxford began at one of its pinnacles.

Arnold Toynbee was a precocious young Lecturer at Balliol in the late 1870s and a favourite of the Master, Benjamin Jowett.

Toynbee inspired a group of students at Oxford to take up economic and social research. Like their teacher, they wanted to confront classical political economy with historical evidence. One of their models was the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, a German academic association whose historical and institution­alist approach provoked a “battle of the methods” with more analytical Austrian economists. Like their mentors in Germany, these Oxford aspirants combined archival narratives with current developments and government policy in a neomercantilist vein. It was difficult to obtain an Oxford position in those years and some of them embarked on University extension lectures in the industrial North before going on to posts in other universities (Goldman 1995; Kadish 1982, Kadish and Tribe 1993; Koot 1987; Tribe 2002).

The most accomplished of this group was William James Ashley who pub­lished an important Introduction to English Economic History and Theory (1888). His work extended from the Middle Ages to current politics and policy, recognised by a succession of chairs in Toronto, Harvard and Birmingham. Another member, Edwin Cannan, led economics at the London School of Economics (LSE), edited a landmark edition of The Wealth of Nations and wrote a profound critique of classical economics. E.C.K. Gonner in Liverpool edited Ricardo and wrote a history of Common Land and Inclosure (1912) while in 1910 the younger George Unwin obtained in Manchester the first chair in economic history not only in Britain but also the first in the British Empire (Corley 2002: 16).

L. L. Price, the one who returned to Oxford, established the first qualifica­tion in economics and political science, a one-year diploma (1904), and became the first University Lecturer in Economic History (1907; Reader 1909-1921). Oxford had already offered a Political Economy module in both Modern History and Literae Humaniores (Classics) since the 1870s, with lec­tures in political economy, the history of economic thought and economic history (the latter from 1898). This anticipated the separate Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) undergraduate degree which Price helped to start in 1921. The discipline deepened its affinity with adult working-class learners in the Edwardian period. Ruskin College opened in Oxford in 1899 to take in such students, and the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) for extra-mural teaching was also founded there in 1903, supported in part by the colleges. The University economics diploma was taken by some Ruskin stu­dents and extension lecture graduates. In 1908, All Souls College contributed £1,200 (enough to support four or five extension tutors) and appointed

R.H. Tawney, a Classics graduate of Balliol, to lecture two terms a year to working men in the North West, and one term in Oxford. Workers ‘wanted to know something of the forces which had made them what they were' (Goldman 1995: 130) and economic history was their favourite subject. Thus began an illustrious career, and also an enduring association of All Souls with the discipline. Sir William Anson, Warden of the College and Liberal Unionist MP, was once seen at a WEA party near to midnight keeping time to “Auld Lang Syne” ‘with hands clasping those of burly trade unionists on either side of him' (ibid.: 145).

Also at All Souls was its chaplain, A.H. Johnson, ‘a country gentleman in holy orders...a hunting, shooting and fishing don' (ibid.: 33), a tutor at many colleges and author of many books. In 1909, he gave the prestigious James Ford Lectures in British history on The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909) from the Middle Ages to his own time, deftly defining a central issue in agrarian history.

Tawney followed some of his 1880s forerunners into LSE, but, unlike them, he was on the left. His landmark book Religion and the Rise ofCapitalism (1926) inspired a classic debate which largely took place in Oxford. In 1941, Tawney identified some sources of the English Civil War in the “rise of the gentry” as a capitalist class in the countryside. In 1948, he received able sup­port from Lawrence Stone, a Lecturer at University College. Tawney was chal­lenged by Stone's former tutor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, soon to be elected Regius Professor of Modern History, with statistical evidence provided by J.P Cooper of Trinity. Contemporaries thought that Trevor-Roper had won, but that is not the view of posterity. Stone became a History Fellow at Wadham (1950-1963), and capped the debate with a magnum opus, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965). It is the most highly cited Oxford work named here and was published shortly after Stone left for a distinguished career at Princeton.

Retracing our steps, Ephraim Lipson (Reader in Economic History after Price, 1922-1931) graduated from Cambridge and came to Oxford initially as a private tutor. His The Economic History of England (1915-1931, three volumes) extended from the Middle Ages to the onset of the Industrial Revolution in thematic style, by industry and sector. This comprehensive and detailed text, highly cited and last reprinted in 1964, became a standard work and is still worth dipping into. It was an early statement of the view that the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century was not a sharp break in eco­nomic development. The style is that of German historical economics and the narrative builds on the foundations laid by Rogers and Cunningham. Lipson, together with Tawney, founded and edited the Economic History Review.

Labour wage rigidity is central to interpretations of inter-war unemploy­ment. Christina Violet Butler, an early social investigator and Director of Barnett House, Oxford (now the Department of Social Policy and Intervention), taught classes in labour and urban history in the 1920s and 1930s. G.D.H. Cole brought industrial relations into the centre of Oxford economics teaching. He graduated from Balliol like Tawney, also in Classics. At the age of 24, he published The World of Labour (1913) which held out a vision of guild socialism, that is, worker control of industry for the public good by means of occupational guilds. During the war and afterwards, he built up a large reputation on the political left. In 1925, Cole obtained a Readership in Economics (like Lipson's, at New College). A prolific and much-translated author, he also wrote (with his wife, Margaret Cole) twenty- nine detective novels. It is customary to think of Cole as a political theorist, and indeed in 1944 he was appointed to the Chair of Political Theory at All Souls. Of his fifteen most cited works, ten are historical, the top one being a social history of The Common People, 1746-1938 (1938, with Raymond Postgate). His economics was institutional and inductive, in defiance of cur­rent economic theory. From time to time, he also lectured on economic his­tory, and on the adult education circuit. He published a great deal on the history of socialist thought, the labour movement, and consumer co- operatives and his elegant biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen are of lasting value.

At the end of the 1920s, All Souls put up housing on some of its North London farmland and conferred part of the windfall on a new Chichele Chair of Economic History (named after the College founder). Lipson, who had a strong claim, was passed over and left Oxford in a huff. The person appointed was George Clark (in post from 1931 to 1943). Like Tawney and his own friend and contemporary Cole, Clark was a Balliol Classics graduate and had lectured to the WEA. He was a safe pair of hands: a lucid writer of broad surveys, successively editor of the English Historical Review, the Oxford History of England, the New Cambridge Modern History and the Home University Library. He moved on to become Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Provost of Oriel College and President of the British Academy. Clark was a distinguished historian, no more and no less. He wrote a great deal over a long career, but his research contribution to economic history at Oxford was mod­est: a great facilitator but less of a pacemaker. Between the wars, Oxford had no economic historians of the stature of John Clapham and Michael Postan at Cambridge. In consequence, it had to import much of its talent from Cambridge after 1945.

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