I first met Bill Barber in 1975, when I came to interview for a position in economics at Wesleyan University, where Bill had taught for almost twenty years. I’d shown some interest in interdisciplinary work, so my hosts made sure my tour included the College of Social Studies, an unusually intensive undergraduate program that combined three years of close study in economics, government, history, and philosophy with a relentless regime of weekly essays and tutorial meetings. Bill had his office there, across the campus from the other economists, and taught half his courses in the college, which he’d helped to found. It was, my skeptical hosts cordially informed me, modeled on the way philosophy, politics, and economics were taught together at Oxford, and had little to do with "real" economics, the kind they did, with its high theory and, even then, its commitment to econometrics. As I soon learned, the college was the brainchild of a group of tweedy Oxonians with a mission: to teach these subjects together in a way that recognized the essential unity of the social sciences and history and, in the teaching of each, drew insights and context from all the others. This wasn’t how I’d been taught economics, or anything else. I knew nothing about Oxford, and next to nothing about history and philosophy. But in the two hours I spent that day at the College of Social Studies with Bill and his collaborators in the mission, all of them subjects of the same cordial skepticism in their own departments, I became one of them myself.

The paper shows how William Barber’s background as a development economist influenced his research agenda in the history of economic thought, in terms of the questions he asked and the way he approached them. The links between the history of economic theory and of policy-making are highlighted, as well as Barber’s investigation of the engagement of British economists with India’s economic matters throughout the time span of the British East India Company.

The history of economics, properly read, is very much a history of economics in the public sphere. Sir William Petty developed his most important insights in the process of providing advice on taxation to the monarch. Adam Smith wrote with a view to influencing the habits of thought of both the educated layman and policy makers. Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau brought early classical political economy to the masses. David Ricardo formulated foundational elements of the nineteenth-century classical system writing policy pamphlets and then entered Parliament with a view to putting policy making on a solid economic footing. Karl Marx’s intended audience was anything but the practitioners of the emerging science of political economy. Alfred Marshall buried his technical analysis in appendices to maximize the exposure of his work. John Maynard Keynes’s influence can be ascribed, without too much injustice, as much to his effectiveness outside the walls of Cambridge as within them and to the use by others of his ideas in that same public realm. Yet, despite this lengthy history of economists’ engagements with various publics, including those pulling the levers of policy, those writing on the history of economics have focused far more intently on the history of theory and the implications for the construction of a body of thought known as “economic analysis” than on the interplay among economists, economic ideas, and the public realm. It is as if the economic conversation went on solely within the space of academic departments of economics, even though those spaces are very recent creations.

The eminent scholar William J. Barber made three great contributions to the history of American economic thought: on the institutionalization of political economy in US universities in the nineteenth century, on the interplay between economic ideas and events in US policy-making from 1921 to 1945, and on the contributions, writings, and career of Irving Fisher.

Otto Hübner’s (1818–1877) international bestseller introduction to political economy, Der kleine Volkswirth, appeared in Turkish in 1869 in two different editions. Two Ottoman officials translated the book into Turkish with different linguistic styles and pedagogical objectives. Beyond being an exceptional case in Ottoman-Turkish economic literature in this respect, the Hübner translations heralded the dawn of popular political economy in the Ottoman Empire. Economic literature before 1869 consisted of works written exclusively for the elite to introduce this new science as an instrument of state administration. Starting with the Hübner translations, we observe the burgeoning of a popular economic literature in the empire aiming at changing the economic mentality and behavior of the masses. This study is a comparative examination of the two Ottoman-Turkish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth in historical context.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain’s East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm’s charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith’s friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation’s legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers’ respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

John Richard Hicks proposed an endogenous theory of money from the 1960s until his final book, A Market Theory of Money (1989). He developed a theory of credit and a theory of short-term rates of interest that had been neglected in his earlier writings such as “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’” (1937). In that early article, Hicks concentrated on the market for cash balances and the motives for the demand for money, while leaving aside the money market and the clearing function of banks. In the 1960s, Hicks was largely inspired by Henry Thornton (1802) and Ralph George Hawtrey (1913, 1919). The originality of this paper is to interpret the short-term rates as the price of liquidity and to examine Hicks’s fight against restrictive monetary policies in the 1960s to the 1970s in Britain.

Allen V. Kneese is called the “father” or “pioneer” of the field of environmental economics but, despite his contributions to that field and the importance of his works, Kneese has not been acknowledged sufficiently in the history of environmental economic thought, and differences between his research and that in the Pigouvian tradition have been obscured over time. This article focuses on his research in the 1960s on water quality management and inquires into differences between his work and that in the Pigouvian tradition. Kneese alternated between theoretical and empirical work and revised the Pigouvian framework pragmatically. The Kneesian framework consists of a two-stage approach, and its substructure is the institutional form of policy agents. To understand the historical meaning of the Kneesian approach, it is useful to compare it to John Krutilla’s “evaluation of non-market value,” Ronald Coase’s “comparative institutional approach,” and Elinor Ostrom’s “Commons.”