This chapter examines the features of the six earliest articles on commercial crises published in economic dictionaries and in encyclopedias, 1835-42. It is noted that they offered the very first definitions of ‘crises' found in the literature, although the conception was still rather trivial,...

This chapter surveys the classificatory approaches of business cycles and crises theories found in dictionary articles. These are found to belong to a surprisingly small number of types. At first, dictionary writers only cited the theories they wanted to disprove. Then (especially in Germany in...

In a paper read in 1848 before the Dublin Statistical Society, James Anthony Lawson propounded a theory of commercial crises based on a credit – overtrading – speculation mechanism. This view was quite widespread at the time, but it was couched in an original reinterpretation of the causal...