¹ Of course, the boundaries of what I have called “economico-business literature” are also shadowy—boundaries between economic and sociological, between business and technological, between “political economic” and political, etc. For the present essay I believe no loss to occur in leaving these boundaries fog-draped. Attention to the literature that may be thought to lie on or near these bounds would, for the most part, merely strengthen the arguments adduced here.

² Posthumus, Nicolaas W., Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1946), p. xxxGoogle Scholar.

³ Price, Jacob M., “Notes on Some London Price-Currents, 1667–1715,” Economic History Review, 2d. ser., VII (1954–1955), PP. 240–50Google Scholar.

⁴ Schumpeter, Joseph A., History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). PP. 194–99Google Scholar.

⁵ Ibid., p. 183.

⁶ Ibid., p. 189.

⁷ Houghton, John, Husbandry and Trade Improved (2d. ed.; London: Woodman and Lyon, 1728), IV, 5–6Google Scholar.

⁸ Ferrier, François L. A., Du gouvernement considéré dans ses rapports … (3d. ed.; Paris, 1822), p. LGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Marperger falls in the baroque period of German literature, and his prolix, complicated title pages seem grotesque today. Here is a specimen, relating to the Mississippi bubble, undated but probably printed in 1721 or 1722:

Kurtze Remarques über den jetziger Zeit weitberuffenen Mississippischen Actien-Handel in Paris/ und andere grosse Unternehmungen des Herrn Laws, Welche derselbe zum Profit seiner neu errichteten Indianischen Compagnie, vormehmlich aber Verbesserung der Koenigl. Financien und des Frantzoesischen Commercii Biss heiher Ziemlich fortgefuehret/ wobey Zugleich von der Natur der Actien insgemein und was es mit solchen in dergleichen grossen Compagnien vor eine Bewandniss habe/ auch welches di vesten Laender/ Insuln/ Vestungen und See-Porten seyn/ Welche in America Septentrionali der Frantzoe-sischen Neuen Indianischen Compagnie zu ihrem Handels-Gebrauch und Nutzen zugeeignet worden/ gehandelt wird.

¹⁰ Two current pieces of research may well lead to modification of some conclusions outlined in the foregoing section. One is that of Dr. Fritz Redlich on the early ideas of business education, which will appear as an essay shortly in the Business History Review. The other is an unfinished doctoral dissertation of Thomas A. Nelson, Jr., of Minneapolis. He has developed an interpretation of economico-business literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that will add significantly to anything that I have said. I hope he will find it possible to put together his ideas in a book, at least in essays.

¹¹ Westergaard, Harold, Contributions to the History of Statistics (London: P.S. King & Sons, 1932), pp. 11–15;Google Scholar cited by Funkhouser, H. G., “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data,” Orisis, III (Nov. 1937), 292Google Scholar.

¹² Ibid., pp. 291 ff.

¹³ A periodical somewhat imitative of the London Economist was launched in this country about the same time, specifically in 1846. It was called the United States Economist and Dry Goods Reporter and was really an almost direct competitor of Hunt's Merchants' Magazine.

¹⁴ Unlike the foregoing material, that published by Pauli, Reinhold in the Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (bd. 23, 1878)Google Scholar was made up of documents that had never before been printed. As will appear below, this type of action was already begun in Germany, but this particular instance must be one of the very earliest of international movement.

¹⁵ Redlich, Fritz, “The Beginnings and Development of German Business History,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, Supplement (Sept. 1952), p. 30Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Heckscher, Eli F., An Economic History of Sweden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 212Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Funkhouser, “Historical Development of … Statistical Data,” Orisis, p. 287.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 330.

¹⁹ Rogin, Leo, The Meaning and Validity of Economic Theory: A Historical Approach (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 11Google Scholar.

²⁰ Say, Discours préliminaire, cited by Charles Gide in Robert H. I. Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy (London: The Macmillan Co.), III, 358.

²¹ Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 164.

²² At the same time that political economy was turning more recherché, there came a contrary movement—at least an attempt to simplify the statement of its principles for common consumption. Marcet, Jane in her Conversations on Political Economy (London, 1816 and later issues),Google ScholarMartineau, Harriet in her Illustrations of Political Economy (Boston, 1832–1833 and later editions)Google Scholar, and others made efforts (not including William Enfield's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Containing the Elements of Commerce and Political Economy, which he published in 1809 and which consists merely of Adam Smith's Inquiry with the sentences reversed. Enfield does succeed in boiling Smith's two volumes down to 350 small octavo pages.) Even Charles Knight's Penny Magazine of the 1830's and 1840's incorporated essays on the subject, such as “The Political Economy of our Ancestors.”

Such endeavors to make economics understandable by the “man in the street” or his equivalent persisted through the nineteenth century. They have become less common in the twentieth, the latest to come to my attention being Belloc's, HilaireEconomics for Helen (London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924)Google Scholar and Upgren, Arthur and Edmunds, Stahrl, Economics for You and Me (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1953)Google Scholar.

²³ Flynn, May Belle, “Development of Business Papers in the United States” (Ph.D. Thesis, New York University Graduate School of Business Administration, 1944), pp. 29, 33, 62Google Scholar.

²⁴ The issuance of many periodicals in the United States—by private enterprises, trade associations, and the like—has been aided by low postal rates. A considerable reduction was made in 1879, and they have been held low.

²⁵ I venture to call attention to the number of privately devised and maintained indexes of price or volume or other business data that the Jenness, Misses Virginia and Lindfors, Grace V. helped me to find and record in our Measures of Business Change (Chicago: R. D. Irwin, 1952)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, VIII (1945–1955), 99–107Google Scholar.

²⁷ It is symptomatic of the change that, a decade or more ago, Harvard began to accept mathematics through calculus as a “language” in satisfaction of the requirements of die Ph.D. degree—on a par with French or German. Perhaps it is also symptomatic that, not having had a mathematical training, I dropped my subscription to the journal of the American Statistical Association fifteen years ago when its pages became cluttered with mathematical formulae, and now must avoid many of the articles printed in current issues of the Quarterly Journal of Economics or the American Economic Review. A recent number of the latter journal—a periodical intended to serve the whole of the profession—gave forty out of its ninety-odd pages of text to formulae and their explication.

²⁸ Future writers will owe a continuing debt to the Harvard group, and surely no less a debt to individual risk-bearers such as Nevins, Cochran, Overton, and Williamson, who have endeavored by their own venturesomeness to smooth the path for those who might come after. Probably no less courageous was the action of Charles Wilson of Cambridge University in pioneering modern scholarly work in English business history through his Unilever volumes.

²⁹ A notable development in England, loosely connected with business history, has been the publication of the histories of London “livery companies,” and occasionally of gilds elsewhere in the country.

³⁰ In fact, an old friend of mine, Professor E. Baldwin Smith of Princeton, gave for years a course in the history of art that was constituted along the lines suggested above. He concerned himself with everything from the state of international commerce and of technology that yielded to painters particular pigments of particular quality, to the character of the societies that could yield to variant products of a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, and a Rivera.