Economic Controversy in the British Reviews, 1802-1850

Abstract

The professional journal is comparatively new in the history of economics. Most of these journals are the product of the twentieth century, and many, including Economica, began only after the First World War. The Economic Journal started in 1891, when the great issues that had provoked the flowering of economic controversy in the first part of the century either had been laid to rest, or had been revived in a new setting and with new protagonists. The Economist, which one might call a professional journal, although not an academic journal, was founded in 1843, in the twilight of the controversy over tariffs and monetary and banking policy that had sprung from the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath. By then the stage had already been set for the repeal of the Corn Laws and for the Bank Act of 1844, and opposition to the gold standard had almost died out. To find out what British economists were thinking in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to trace the development of modern ideas in an earlier setting, the economist of today turns to the classics of the period-Malthus,iRicardo, Henry Thornton, the Mills; to the books and pamphlets of that tireless salesman of Ricardian economics, John Ramsay McCulloch; to the works of the minor prophets, such as Torrens, Senior, Whately, and Richard Jones; to the extensive pamphlet literature; and to that gift of British government to economists, the minutes of evidence and reports of Parliamentary committees. But comparatively little use has been made of the reviews of the period as a source for the analysis of doctrine, the political setting of economic debates, or for perspective on those perennial issues of economic policy: international trade, banking and the monetary standard, and the care of the unemployed, the incapacitated, and the aged. Individual articles, like Francis Horner's review of Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain in the first number of the Edinburgh Review, Malthus' discussion of the bullion controversy in the Edinburgh Review or his treatment of demand in the Quarterly Review, one of Colonel Peronnet Thompson's powerful pleas for free trade in the Westminster Review, or a blast in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine against the gold standard, occasionally are read by economists. But such articles are frequently regarded as somewhat out of place, as economic intrusions in a literary and political journal. Yet the British reviews in the first half of the nineteenth century carried on a continuous debate on economic theory and on economic policy, in which many of the great figures in economics, or in the political guidance of economic