“…a remarkably clever book, the result of close thought, much observation, and some research. Yet, after having read the book with attention, we are disposed to ask, why has it been written?” (<italic>The Athenaeum</italic>, May 1865).

It has been claimed that references to ‘Giffen behaviour’ constituted a single research project, driven by attempts to establish whether an initial ‘conjecture’ by Alfred Marshall had empirical validity. There is, however, no stable basis for that claim, in part because Marshall produced...

In his 1936 memoir of W. Stanley Jevons, J. M. Keynes argued that Jevons's pronounced hostility to the dominance of J. S. Mill's political economy was due, in large part, to the imposition of Mill's work on Jevons's teaching at Owens College (subsequently the University of) Manchester. Keynes...