Aaron Director taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1934 and from 1946 to 1965. Both periods corresponded to crucial stages in the development of Chicago monetary economics under the leaderships of Henry Simons and Milton Friedman, respectively. Any impact that Director may have had in the development of those stages and on the relationship between the views of Simons and Friedman has been frustrated by Director’s lack of publications. I provide evidence, much of it for the first time, showing the important role played by Director in the development of Chicago monetary economics, including his role as a transmitter of Simons’s ideas to Friedman.

Like other Progressive Era reformers, Thomas Nixon Carver promoted a form of biology-infused social science that included both eugenics and a strong version of hereditarianism. Carver was also a charismatic teacher who trained several generations of economists and sociologists at Harvard. In this paper we will focus on the contribution of three of them: James A. Field, Norman E. Himes, and Carl S. Joslyn. These authors differ in terms of style, method, and emphasis—with Field and Himes more interested in population and birth control issues, and Joslyn in the dynamics of social stratification. As it will be shown below, however, all of them reveal an explicit commitment to hereditarianism and eugenics, which can be directly traced back to Carver’s influence during their student days at Harvard.

This article examines a hitherto neglected aspect of the expansion of international trade in nineteenth-century East Asia—that of how ordinary people understood changing trade patterns. Rather than the political debates and imperial competition that have been the focus of existing research, I use the diary of Sim Wŏn’gwŏn (1850–1933), a farmer from Ulsan, southeastern Korea, to assess how knowledge shaped Sim’s perception of, and response to, the international grain trade. Sim used his diary to develop an economic world view based on his observation of cyclical, seasonal changes in the weather, harvests, and prices. While this enabled Sim to anticipate some fluctuations, the international rice trade posed a challenge as local market prices began to reflect events beyond Sim’s sphere of information. I argue that uneven access to knowledge influenced Sim’s participation in international trade, which in turn cannot be understood without reference to Sim’s existing understanding of the economy.

The repeal of the British Combination Laws in 1824 is generally considered by historians as the landmark of modern trade unionism, and has been attributed to the contributions of classical political economists. In the sole article that addressed this issue in the field of the history of economic thought, William Grampp reached the opposite conclusion, according to which the influence of the economists (John Ramsay McCulloch, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, Robert Torrens, and Nassau William Senior) on repeal was actually small. Resituating the debates over the Combination Laws in their political context, we try to show, despite the relatively reduced volume of the classical economists’ direct contributions, that the economists were clearly favorable to the measure, and how “political economy” played a significant role in the achievement of repeal. In doing so, we offer a reflection on the methodology used by Grampp to study the influence of economic ideas on political debates and public policy.

Adam Smith allegedly offers a model of economic development in both his Lectures on Jurisprudence and the Wealth of Nations—the so-called four stages of development model. The model presents a linear unfolding view of economic development from primitive to advanced stages. But Smith’s own historical examples systematically contradict this model. I thus question whether Adam Smith actually endorses and uses the four stages model of development to illustrate development and suggest that if he does, he does it to discredit it instead. For Smith, history teaches that development is more accidental than fitting deterministic models.

The early Methodenstreit (1871–1883) between Gustav Schmoller and Carl Menger is one of the defining moments in the development of today’s discipline of economics. However, recent interpretations of the debate no longer identify a substantial point of controversy. I reconstruct the debate to show that the pivotal topic was the scope of economics. Menger claims that his marginalist Principles of Economics more or less captures the entire subject matter of the discipline, which Schmoller denies. I also discuss recent scholarship, which follows Friedrich Hayek to situate Menger at the edges or even outside the marginalist mainstream. I show that support for this reading is weak and in parts based on a misrepresentation of the available sources, putting into question Menger’s status as a forbear of today’s Austrian school.