Economic Thought and Political Economy
Thorold Rogers opens The Economic Interpretation of History (1888) with a limpid exposition of Smith's early doctrine of reciprocity as motivation. Toynbee's Industrial Revolution engaged polemically with Ricardo and Mill.
Ashley, Cannan and Gonner published outstanding editions of Mill, Smith and Ricardo respectively. L.L. Price wrote a popular Short History of Political Economy in England (1891) and included the history of thought as one of three equal components in the first Oxford diploma, together with economics and economic history. Lectures in vintage economic thought have been offered continuously at Oxford since before the First World War, and during the 1960s were given by John Hicks, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics soon afterwards in 1972. G.D.H. Cole wrote a much-cited five-volume History of Socialist Thought (1953-1960). Walter Eltis (Economics Fellow, Exeter College, 1958-1988) published a neoclassical interpretation of The Classical Theory of Economic Growth (1984) and other studies in that vein. Hartwell’s History of the Mont Pelerin Society (1995) has already been mentioned. More recently, James Forder (Economics Fellow, Balliol College) has shed light on the Friedman-Keynesian debates of the 1960s in Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth (2014) which shows that an inflationunemployment policy trade-off was not part of the original reception of the Phillips model, and that the expectations argument on the Friedman side was a commonplace in economics two decades earlier. Avner Offer wrote on Smith, Ricardo and Hayek, and published a book-length political and policy interpretation of the Nobel Prize in Economics.The political economy of taxation, tariffs and war is a constant preoccupation, ever since the Edwardian tariff reform controversy. Free trade came to be associated with Cambridge. Price, like most of the late-Victorian cohort, was a protectionist.
G.D.H. Cole published a book in 1923 on labour regulation in coal mining during the First World War. WK. Hancock was Chichele Professor from 1944 to 1949 and during his short tenure he published the British War Economy (1949) with Margaret Gowing, the first volume in a series of “civil histories” on the United Kingdom that had been authorised in 1942 by the war cabinet. However, most of his prolific writing took place elsewhere. Peter Dickson’s The Financial Revolution in England (1967) is the foundational modern study of the origins of public debt in Britain (History Fellow, Reader and Professor at St Catherine’s, 1960-1996). The political economy of the British fiscal state in the eighteenth century was the subject of Patrick O’Brien’s Oxford DPhil (Lecturer, then Reader, St Antony’s College, 1970-1992) and also of several of his most cited contributions. Offer wrote a book on war and empire (1989) before returning to Oxford, and several articles afterwards. Tim Mason (co-founder of History Workshop Journal, History Fellow at St Peter’s, 1971-1984) published mostly in German. He argued that Hitler was forced into the Second World War by the pressure of working-class material expectations which he had stoked up previously. Patricia Clavin (History Fellow at Jesus from 2003) wrote Securing the World Economy: The Re-invention of the League of Nations, 1920-1946 (2013). Kevin O’Rourke (Chichele Professor, 2011-2019) is renowned as an authority on growth and international trade. At Oxford, he wrote most notably on the economic determinants of political extremism between the wars, on currency unions, and A Short History of Brexit (2019). Mary Cox, a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose, combined demographics and war in Hunger in War & Peace:Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924 (2019). Finally, Nicholas Dimsdale wrote on taxation and its economic effect between the wars, and Gregg Huff (Senior Research Fellow, Pembroke, 2014-2018) has brought together years of work for his definitive World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (2020). Catherine Schenk, Jane Humphries’ successor (Professor of Economic and Social History, St Hilda’s, since 2017), specialises in financial history.
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