David Hume and Adam Smith were friends, but their friendship does not imply that the two authors shared the same ideas, or should have shared the same ideas. Money is an example of a subject of disagreement between David Hume and Adam Smith that has either been ignored or interpreted as a puzzle, given their friendship. I suggest that Smith did not replicate or cite Hume’s exposition of the quantity of money in his Wealth of Nations because Smith thought Hume was wrong. For Smith, Hume fell into the mercantilist fallacy of considering the accumulation of money as wealth. Rather than accumulating money through market restrictions, as other mercantilists would, Hume advocated the accumulation of money through commerce and hoarding, but Hume’s goal was still the accumulation of gold and silver. Smith saw through Hume’s mistakes and addressed each of them, thus rejecting Hume’s theory of money, while maintaining their friendship.

Standard models of the price specie flow do not consider credit. Yet Hume and preceding authors were reacting to the implosion of Law’s financial bubble. We delineate the anti-credit thesis contained within the evolution of eighteenth-century balance of payments analyses. A string of eighteenth-century authors argued over whether the balance of payments constituted a binding constraint on credit creation. As part of their analysis they considered how changes in the money supply might alter output, prices, employment, capital, and population. How new money entered the economy was often critical. We start with Law and then consider Melon, Gervaise, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Montesquieu, Hume, Steuart, Forbonnais, and Smith. In closing we pay particular attention to the idea that Hume and Smith effectively displaced preceding, often “mercantilist,” analyses of credit and the balance of payments.

Classical political economists developed several different explanations for what they saw as an inherent tendency for the rate of profit to decline over time. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, some British advocates of colonization developed a corollary to those theories, suggesting that exporting capital to colonies could help arrest and reverse the decline. That argument was championed by the English political economist and promoter of colonization projects Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and it was systematized by John Stuart Mill. Ironically, the view that capital export and colonization played crucial roles in sustaining the rate of profit in advanced economies was later adopted by some Marxist theorists. Parallels between Karl Marx and J. S. Mill may help explain the remarkable theoretical continuity on this topic between nineteenth-century British advocates of colonization and early twentieth-century Marxist critics of colonialism.

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university’s first 100 years, 1892 to 1992. Many people associate Chicago’s views with Milton Friedman’s advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was much more than that, including the work of J. Laurence Laughlin on bimetallism, Jacob Viner on the balance of payments, Lloyd Metzler on transfers, Harry Johnson on trade and currencies, Lloyd Mints on exchange rate regimes, Robert Mundell on optimal currency areas, and Arnold Harberger on shadow exchange rates, among others. The analysis shows that, although different scholars emphasized different issues, there was a common thread in this research, anchored on the role of relative prices’ changes during the adjustment process.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings’s views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.

The literature on John Maynard Keynes’s activity as an investor has substantially grown in the last decade (e.g., Chambers and Dimson 2013; Accominotti and Chambers 2016; Chambers and Kabiri 2016; Cristiano, Marcuzzo, and Sanfilippo 2018; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2018; Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016, [2020] 2022). The contribution of the present paper is to investigate a specific feature of Keynes’s investment activity on his own account: his preference for American rather than British Investment Trusts. While this feature has also been observed in his investments on behalf of King’s College (Chambers and Kabiri 2016), we focus here on his personal portfolio, and we also provide a set of possible explanations for his preference. We maintain that some reasons have to do with the different structure and characteristics of the Investment Trusts in the two countries. Others relate more closely to the kind of investment policy typically adopted by the American Investment Trusts, which was much more in line with Keynes’s own approach to investment—especially regarding the stocks selection. We also attribute a role to his epistemological approach, i.e., the view that, although a full and perfect knowledge is not reachable by individuals due to the radical uncertainty characterizing the environment (“we simply don’t know,” Keynes 1937) and to the limitations of the human mind, reliable information remains, however, a guide for rational decision making, also in financial markets. Following this approach, as we will show, Keynes preferred to delegate his investment choices in the US stock market to those professionals—the managers of the Investment Trusts—who possessed, in his opinion, the wider set of reliable information on that market, while keeping for himself the investment choices in the UK stock market.