The history of economic thought first became established in Britain as a recognisable field in the emergent discipline of economics during the early decades of the twentieth century. Edwin Cannan's Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy from 1776 to 1848 (1893), his editions of Smith's Lectures (1895) and Wealth of Nations (1903) all established new scholarly standards in the historical treatment of economics that greatly influenced his teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE), while W. R. Scott in Glasgow and Alexander Gray in Edinburgh maintained an allegiance to an older Scottish historical tradition of political economy. During the immediate post-war period, the work of Terence Hutchison, Maurice Dobb and Bob Black among several others continued the association of the history of economics with mainstream economics in Britain. The last British economist to be appointed to a professorial chair largely on the strength of a specialised interest in the history of economics was Denis O'Brien, who became Professor of Economics at Durham in 1972. Donald Winch was appointed to a chair in the History of Economics at Sussex in 1969; and so he was one of the very last survivors of two overlapping generations of senior British economists for whom an interest in the history of economic thought was not a positive disqualification from employment in a department of economics.Footnote1 By the later 1970s, there was little prospect of even a junior appointment in a university department of economics for someone specialising in HET (History of Economic Thought); what funding there had been for research students migrated to history, so that the link that Winch had represented between an understanding of modern economics and an understanding of its history was broken. This marginalisation of a historical and contextual understanding of economic ideas was one that troubled him, although he continued to be active in the Royal Economic Society, in recent years establishing an online database of economists’ papers. Nonetheless, he anticipated the dwindling interest among economists in a historical perspective, and his most productive and influential work was a positive response to this – beginning with Adam Smith's Politics in 1978, but underwritten by a turn to intellectual history fostered by his association with the University of Sussex.
Winch was born in South London, the son of shopkeepers at a time when the school-leaving age was 14 and academic opportunities limited. However, his schooling coincided with the post-war reform of secondary education, giving him opportunities that enabled him to enter the London School of Economics in 1953 – for someone living in London interested in economics, the obvious place to go, since he could also live at home with his parents. His personal tutor, Vera Anstey, provided a link to the older history of the school; his decision to opt for a course in “Logic and Scientific Method” brought him into contact with Karl Popper, whose seminars he described as diatribes by Popper against all those who disagreed with him, beginning quietly and building to a crescendo. In his final year, he chose International Economics, taught by James Meade; and when Meade was on leave for one term, Harry Johnson visited from Manchester in his place. Under Meade's influence, international trade theory and its applications became his specialism, and this created the route to Jacob Viner at Princeton for postgraduate study – in 1956 on both counts unusual moves in Britain, since postgraduate study was not then a necessary requirement for bright undergraduates nor even for academic appointment, and the idea of studying in the USA distinctly exotic. Prompted by Brinley Thomas's Migration and Economic Growth (1954), Winch studied the relation of labour migration, empire and colonisation, later noting how historical topics presented themselves via a knowledge of contemporary thinking in both theoretical and applied economics.Footnote2
At Princeton, his studies united the common interests of Meade, Johnson and Viner in the development of the international economy with Viner's interest in the history of economics. Winch was at Berkeley during the academic year 1959–1960, among other duties teaching a course on the history of economic thought for the first time. During that year, he was also awarded his PhD degree, so that when he then returned to a lectureship in economics at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 he was by the standards of the day, when many senior staff possessed no graduate qualifications at all, a young and highly qualified economist: aged 25, with a BSc degree from the LSE and a PhD degree from Princeton. Edinburgh itself had received a makeover in 1956 with the appointment of the former LSE Reader in Public Finance, Alan Peacock, to the chair of economics. Alexander Gray's political economy had been purged and the key textbook became Paul Samuelson's Economics; Edinburgh was in the later 1950s no backwater. This period in Edinburgh was also associated with his publication in 1966 of the selected writings of James Mill in the “Scottish Economic Classics” series, signalling a growing interest in the history of economic thought and foreshadowing his long service, from 1971 to 2016, as publications secretary of the Royal Economic Society. His first book, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies (1965) also marks this growing interest, developed from his Princeton dissertation and engagement with trade theory and the international economy.
On his appointment to the University of Sussex as a Lecturer in Economics in 1963 – Peacock had moved into the new chair at York the year before – Winch therefore had a background in contemporary economics, and at the age of 28 was especially suited to the new university. Sussex had admitted its first 50 students in 1961, and was one of the new post-war greenfield universities, all of which were primarily intended to innovate in teaching. At Sussex this took the form of a university structure that did away with departments in favour of Schools of Study; and so while Winch was a member of the School of Social Studies, there was no particular reason why there might not also be economists in the School of European Studies or the School of African and Asian Studies. When this structure was eventually abandoned in the early 2000s in favour of an orthodox faculty/departmental model, one of the reasons cited was the difficulty that, e.g., economists had in working together on teaching and research. This had of course been the explicit intention of the original model, forcing staff into new forms of collaboration; Winch therefore spent most of his academic career at an institution that deliberately fostered the broad shift into intellectual history with which his later work is associated. Promoted to Reader in Economics in 1966, and then appointed Professor of the History of Economic Thought from 1969, this was a position that he already saw more in terms of a historian's, rather than an economist's, sensibility. While he continued to teach regular courses in undergraduate economics, this perspective would become increasingly important to him. He remained at Sussex for the remainder of his academic career, retiring in 1998; with a year at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton in 1974–1975, visits to Cambridge and Australian National University (ANU) in the 1980s, and giving the Carlyle Lectures in Oxford in 1995. Already apparent in the mid-1970s was his detachment from the conventional economist's appraisal of the history of the subject, and his growing commitment to a broader historical and cultural perspective upon it.
On the other hand, this positive impulse was accompanied by a negative one, also a feature of the early days at Sussex. Not only did Sussex do away with departments, in the early days it also did away with lectures, favouring a tutorial mode of teaching then feasible because of the very small numbers of students. All the same, whatever the limitations of lecturing as a mode of teaching, it does at least compel the conscientious teacher to channel a conventionalised form of modern economics to successive intakes of students, something that Winch had himself experienced as an undergraduate with Meade and Johnson at the LSE. While lecturing was eventually revived, the lack of a departmental structure tended to detach it from the imperatives of the mainstream, from which Winch, from his later twenties, became increasingly detached. His contact with economists did continue, through his work for the Royal Economic Society, acting as Reviews Editor for the Economic Journal from 1976 to 1983; and he published two important contributions to the understanding of the twentieth century economy policy, Economics and Policy: A Historical Study (1969) and, with Susan Howson, The Economic Advisory Council, 1930-1939: A Study in Economic Advice during Depression and Recovery (1976). After this period, however, his engagement with the routine of academic economics became increasingly remote, at a time that the discipline was rapidly changing.
Whether Winch would have seen this as a loss is, however, very questionable. In 1969, Sussex became the first university in Britain to offer a degree in Intellectual History, following on from the appointment of John Burrow (1935–2009) in 1968; and a new lectureship in the subject was created in 1972, Stefan Collini occupying the post from 1974. The university in which he worked positively encouraged his collaboration with Burrow (an intellectual historian) and Collini (a literary historian), enabling Winch to follow his interests and move towards an emerging practice of the history of economics which was more explicitly historical. It was this context which enabled him to write Adam Smith's Politics and, in his early forties, make a major contribution to the subsequent reorientation of the study of Adam Smith and the early development of political economy. This represented a development of the study of the history of economics as he had learned it from Jacob Viner, but one which led him progressively into the new field of intellectual history, and away from his roots in the modern discipline of economics. The presence of Burrow and Collini at Sussex productively reinforced this movement, leading to a focus upon the nineteenth century and their major joint study, That Noble Science of Politics (1983). This work was dedicated to a consideration of the nature of politics that was most definitely not a “history of political thought” in the conventional sense, but rather an attempt to reconstitute the shifting political culture of Britain during the nineteenth century. Written as a joint monograph rather than a collected set of individual essays, it began with the “System of the North” as transmitted by Dugald Stewart to his pupils, proceeding through Philosophic Radicalism to the work of John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot and Henry Sidgwick, terminating with Alfred Marshall's Cambridge.
Winch's later work emphasised this movement back to the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, his Riches and Poverty (1996) being a major study of the manner in which Smith's Wealth of Nations became the canonical text of political economy, and demonstrating how Malthus can be reconstituted as a “political moralist.” This reorients our understanding of the origins of classical economics in a quite decisive manner, and prepared the ground for a long-overdue reassessment of the work of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Some of the implications of the work he developed in this book are taken up in his more recent Wealth and Life (2009), which includes essays on Mill and the responses to Mill, as well as essays on later Victorian political economy: Mallet, Sidgwick, Foxwell, Marshall and Hobson. In many ways, this represents an extension to the work that he had done with Burrow and Collini, focusing not on the conventional figures of the history of political economy, but instead repopulating the history of economic thought with its contemporaries.
Together with election to the British Academy in 1986 (serving as Vice-President in 1993–1994), and to the Royal Historical Society in 1987, Winch was active in university administration; but for this journal, one of his most significant initiatives was the initiation of an annual British HET conference. Having discussed the prospects with Bob Black, a conference was organised at Sussex in January 1968 with the support of Lionel Robbins and which was attended by many notable British economists (John Hicks, Richard Sayers and George Shackle) as well as the group that would become the mainstay of the history of economics in Britain – Bob Black, Mark Blaug, Bob Coats, Bernard Corry, Ronald Meek, Denis O'Brien, Andrew Skinner and others. Craufurd Goodwin, then in the process of establishing History of Political Economy as a dedicated journal, also attended; and out of this connection there developed in the 1970s and the 1980s a distinctive Anglo-American basis for the study of the history of economic thought. This Atlanticist perspective, nurtured from his student days by the work of Brinley Thomas and his own time in Princeton, would eventually give way in the 1990s to broader European developments, marked in 2012 by his election as an Honorary Member of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.
Books
Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, London School of Economics, London 1965.
James Mill: Selected Economic Writings, Oliver and Boyd, Oxford 1966.
Economics and Policy: A Historical Study, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1969.
The Economic Advisory Council, 1930-1939: A Study in Economic Advice during Depression and Recovery (with Susan Howson), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1976.
Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1978.
That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History (with Stefan Collini and John Burrow), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983.
Malthus, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987.
Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996.
Wealth and Life. Essays in the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848-1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009.
Secret Concatenations: From Mandeville to Malthus, Rounded Globe, ebook.
Notes
1 The senior figures in the British HET landscape died in quick succession – Bob Coats and Terence Hutchison in 2007, Bob Black in 2008, Mark Blaug and Andrew Skinner in 2011.
2 See his comments in “R. D. C. Collison Black, 1922-2008: A Personal Tribute”, History of Political Economy Vol. 42 (2010) p.5.