Cultural and business traditions

The Scottish chapter begins rightly with that country’s Enlightenment, with nascent political economy one product of the ‘enlightenment philosophy’ associated with David Hume (1711—76) and then Adam Smith (1723—90).

Certainly, relative to Scotland and to continental Europe, England’s universities were under­developed — there was the duopoly of Oxford and Cambridge before the 1820s — with clear evidence that graduate production per thousand of population was significantly lower than these comparators, and geared more towards aristocratic/clerical priorities than intellectual enquiry. On schooling, Daniel Defoe's observation of 1708 that England was a land ‘full of ignorance' whilst in Scotland even the ‘poorest people have their children taught and instructed' is still often cited, not least because nearly three centuries later the Scottish school system seems still to have the upper hand. These differences were reflected not just in England's lower literacy rate (though recent scholarship, Melton (2001, 82), has the gap closed by the mid-eighteenth century), but in the narrow ambition that underlay education which, in any case, was character­ised by class-based, differential access, and significant religious discrimination against Catholics and dissenters (from the established Church of England). Nonetheless, between the 1850s and 1870s Oxford and Cambridge were both reformed to remove religious discrimination, though religion remained an important aspect of the story of nineteenth-century English economics as many leading figures were clerics (Thomas Malthus, 1766—1834) or turned to economics after having initially set forth on a clerical career, most famously Marshall.

Meanwhile, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries many dissenting academies were established (Ridder-Symoens, 1996, 260); those desiring a higher education often went to Scotland or abroad; the East India Company established in 1806 its college in which the teaching of political economy was provided by inter alia Malthus; and new universities were established, beginning with University College London (1826). Political economy, commerce and latterly economics were central to the development of these and subsequent higher education institutions (Kadish and Tribe, 1993). By the First World War, England had 17 universities (plus five colleges as constituents of a federal University of Wales) with all major cities embracing higher education, including the two significant industrial population centres of Birmingham (1900) and Manchester (1880), but with a concentration in London, notably University College and the London School of Economics (1895). By this point, the rise of the professions was very well established and the universities were transformed — if far from wholly for Oxbridge — from aristocratic and clerical preserves to effective, independent institutions for training an elite fusing upper and middle classes; additionally, they were also secularizing and, thereby, raising their scholarly standards. A century later, England has 91 universities (out of a UK total of 109).

Whilst an educational laggard, in most other respects England was in the vanguard of modernity as it experienced the great currents of change that were associated with commercialisation, cultural reorientation and the rise of the nation state. England, as Melton (2001) shows, was no laggard in the development of the ‘public sphere' that is associated with the Enlightenment and which has an obvious resonance for both the demand and the supply side of the market for economic knowledge. Coffee houses, penny universities in eighteenth-century parlance, a well-developed press and intense public interest in Parliament — from 1707 London was the centre for politics — were all the marks of strong civic and political culture from an early point.

Indeed, seventeenth-century England has been described as an ‘age of great intellectual vigour, scientific curiosity and inventiveness' (Stone, 1997, 5), with Hutchison (1988, 12) claiming that leadership in what came to be the discipline of political economy lay with the English from 1662 to the early eighteenth century, with the work of William Petty (1623—87) the ‘notable' advance from whom others followed. Petty, considered by Karl Marx (1818—83) as the ‘founder of political economy' (McCormick, 2009, 1), has a central role in our historical account which emphasises a long-running practical, problem-solving imperative to English economics that is distinctive. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain was an age of deep and rapid change that was both stimulating and congenial to the further development of economic knowledge. Thus the traditional constraints upon rational thought, feudalism and religious fundamentalism, were both waning, though very far from being spent forces. Even so, the contemporaneous European ‘scientific revolution' posed a broad challenge: confronting the ‘dead hand and dead mind of orthodoxy'; provoking an ‘intense struggle between rival natural philosophies... [which sought] liberation from hidebound orthodoxy' (Ridder-Symoens, 1996, 537); and, for figures like Petty, offering a vision of the potential of empiricism and rational enquiry — here the influence of Bacon is key (Stone, 1997, 18) — which was to prove profoundly fertile.

In governance and thence geo-political competition, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is a conventional — albeit now somewhat contested (O'Brien, 2011) — waypoint, but certainly important as the developing fiscal-military state inter alia underpinned the growing demand for economic knowledge. With much English-language theorizing originating in Ireland and Scotland, suggesting that ‘economic conditions underdetermine the content of economic theory' (Schabas, 2003, 173), it was nonetheless the case that the backdrop to these early English contributions was economic, social and political modernisation across a broad front (Mokyr, 2009).

Amongst economic historians debate remains lively about why Britain was the first to experience an industrial revolution and the Great Divergence. For institutionalists, at least part of the answer lay with British superiority in matters of constitution and property rights. Recently, Mokyr (2009, ch. 16) has provided a persuasive analysis of how secure property rights and enhanced trust amongst economic agents (‘politeness and manners') underpinned this further commercialisation of Britain. Of course, by further proclaiming the primacy of the market the challenge for nascent political economy was to reconcile sympathy and self-interest, the needs and rights of the individual and of society: cue the synthesis provided by Adam Smith and classical economics, albeit at the expense of his reading of mercantilism that gave it more coherence and unity than was warranted (Winch, 1996, 92—3).

With the old mercantilist-free market axis now discarded by serious historians of pre-Smithian economic thought, recent work, for example Dudley (2013), offers a construction of early eighteenth-century political economy as an ideological battle about the sources of wealth and appropriate degree and form of government regulation, this between a Whig party-inspired manufacturing and consumption version which triumphed over a re-exporting version associated with the Tory party. Appropriately, this brings us back to English/British distinctiveness: a concern about rent-seeking, the public role of economics and the characteristics of the market for economic knowledge.