Sir James Steuart's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9725640 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samar Ranjan Sen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1947 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 53 |
| Pages | 19 |
| Publication date | 1947-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Economica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0427 • E-ISSN: 1468-0335 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2549967 |
| OpenAlex | W2334336521 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
WHILE rummaging through the old papers of the East India Company at the India Office, I came across some very interesting correspondence between Sir James Steuart and certain important officials of the Company. These letters, which deal with the problem of currency in Bengal, should be interesting to any student of monetary history, but they were of special interest to me because Sir James Steuart was the first of the long series of British economists who have been called upon from time to time to advise upon the economic problems of India. I intend to deal with these letters more fully elsewhere in the background of the monetary history of the period. But some of Sir James' ideas appear to me to have so much resemblance to some modern theories and yet he has always been such a neglected author that as a first step I feel it necessary to acquaint the modern reader, whose knowledge about this illustrious Scotsman goes little beyond that he was one of the first to use the term Political Economy , with some of his ideas on money and banking. It is, indeed, strange that this pioneer, who published his treatise nine years before Adam Smith's and in some respects may be said to have provoked the latter to write his Wealth of Nations by way of a reply, has not received more than a passing reference from any of the important British writers on the history of economic thought. And even the few German and American writers like Hufeland, Herrenschwand, Rehberg, Roscher, Feilbogen, Stangeland, Monroe and Johnson who have written about him have merely tried to evaluate him in the light of Smithsian doctrines and have almost completely failed to appreciate the true significance of his economic, especially monetary, ideas, which were on an absolutely different plane. The most surprising thing, however, is that even Lord Keynes, whose monetary ideas have some resemblance to Steuart's, should fail to mention him, although he rakes up from oblivion a fairly large number of earlier writers who professed views similar to his. While there is much chaff among the grains of Steuart's writings, and this is only to be expected in a pioneer writing in the sixties of the eighteenth century, his work cannot but be considered a classic of deductive analysis combined with inductive study. Steuart's ideas on money and banking are developed in his three books
Aesthetics · Currency · Economic history · Economic Thought · Economics · German · Linguistics · Neoclassical economics · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Classics · Economic Theory and Policy · History · Law · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,06 |
| Citation span | 1978 - 2025 (48) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |