There is today a resurgence of interest in the history of economics, but students often lack the opportunity of taking a systematic course that introduces them to the ideas, policies and writers who played a part in the development of economic thinking from the seventeenth century up to the present day. This book offers a partial solution to this problem by providing a template for students and teachers seeking orientation in the subject. It is based on the material that we have taught to third-year undergraduates at the University of Birmingham for several years, augmented with some material that one of us has covered with graduate students at the University of Oporto and at Erasmus University Rotterdam, expanding it a little beyond our 20 two-hour lectures. We have structured it in such a way that shorter courses could be based on a selection, and we make some suggestions regarding this below.

That this is not a conventional textbook will be apparent from the formal presentation of each lecture, beginning with aims, then providing an annotated bibliography and the relevant chronology before moving on to the subject matter of the lecture. Each lecture ends with a series of questions for discussion that could provide a framework for class discussion or individual reflection. In scope and presentation, then, there is a clear difference here from Roger Backhouse’s Penguin History of Economic Thought (published in North America by Princeton University Press as The Ordinary Business of Life), the textbook we recommend our students to read for initial orientation and which covers the history of economic thought from the ancient Greeks onwards. Likewise, chapter 2 of Keith Tribe’s Economy of the Word provides an extended overview of the transformation in the use of the word “economy” from the Greeks to the 1960s that provides a more discursive initial orientation.

From the 1920s onwards economic argument rapidly became more formalized and academic, so that what had hitherto largely been public economic debate increasingly becomes debate between academic economists. Before the 1920s economic thinking was both more diverse and less institutionally defined; indeed, part of the story we tell here is the conversion of a broad tradition of political economy into the new university discipline of economics.