This Dictionary brings together new essays on over six hundred individuals. It also includes coverage of individuals who are not normally thought of as economists but who nonetheless made penetrating and original contributions, these include writers such as H. G. Wells, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens; astronomers and mathematicians such as Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley and Isaac Barrow; the chess grandmaster Augustus Mongredien; the mountaineer Albert Mummery; the inventor of the machine gun, George Puckle; and many others from the fields of medicine, religion, politics, banking, science, agriculture and the East India Company employees. Writers on issues such as population, poverty, socialism, monetarism, finance and banking and many other fields are included, in one of the most comprehensive biographical surveys of the field yet undertaken.
Individually, the entries capture important and often overlooked contributions to the development of economic thought in Britain; collectively, they encapsulate the rich diversity of that thought and the influences that have been at play on British economic thinking over nine centuries.
Contributors are leading international scholars in economics and economic history and members of the editorial advisory board include Geoffrey Harcourt, Peter Groenewegen, Forrest Capie, Roger Backhouse, E.H. Lloyd, Noel Thompson, Tony Brewer, Geoffrey Gilbert, Keith Tribe, Leslie Clarkson and Walter Eltis.