The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain

INTRODUCTION

As we explain in the corresponding chapter in Volume I, it is important for economic historians to be familiar with the broad contours of the economic ideas of those who lived through the periods they are studying. This chapter deals with a period when both the economics profession (a term that hardly makes sense before 1870) and its relationship to the rest of British society altered considerably (for a broader perspective, see Backhouse 2002). Perceptions of the nature and status of economic knowledge changed in academia, in government and among the public at large. Economic ideas cannot be understood apart from the institutions and structures in which those ideas are generated and employed. During the early twentieth century economics became an academic subject, and for most of the century academic economists determined what counted as legitimate economic argument and policy. This position was challenged in the closing third of the century, and differences between arguments advanced by academics, journalists, civil servants, think tanks and economists employed in business became more pronounced.

The appointment of William Stanley Jevons at Owens College, Manchester, in 1863 marked the real beginning of the process by which economics became a university discipline in Britain. Marshall's Cambridge Economics Tripos was established some forty years later, and during the intervening period the formal study of economics was sporadic and localised. Nonetheless, from the 1870s the University Extension movement broadened the base for the teaching of economics, while establishing the idea that the subject was one that had to be studied systematically. Discussion in a public sphere made up of an evolving network of academics, policy-makers and journalists now took place in the context of more specialised debates among economists, which were accessible only to those who had a more systematic schooling in the subject.

Jevons was the first in Britain to publish a book devoted to the new marginalist approach to economic theory; but his major initial academic impact was on a group of students and tutors in Oxford, who during the 1880s formed the centre of British economics.