Official Papers of Alfred Marshall

This book constitutes a supplement to Alfred Marshall's Official Papers, which were edited by John Maynard Keynes for the Royal Economic Society in 1926. It presents material which Keynes did not include, along with editorial notes and introductions to the various pieces. It represents, therefore, a further step towards completing in published form the collected writings of one of the great modern economists. Material included covers the following: Marshall's 1880 evidence as Principal of Bristol University College to the Committee on Higher Education in Wales and Monmouthshire; comments on a paper by J. S. Nicholson prepared for the Gold and Silver Commission in 1888; sections of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Labour (1891-4) dealing with trade unions, irregularity of employment and other matters attributed to him by his widow together with selections of his questioning of witnesses who appeared before the Commission (including Sidney Webb, Charles Booth, Robert Giffen, Tom Mann); and last, by way of an appendix, the alleged first version of his famous Memorandum on the Fiscal Policy of International Trade prepared for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1903 (of which the final version of 1908 was included by Keynes in 1926), but which cannot really be ascribed to Marshall. The contents facilitate the enhancement of understanding Alfred Marshall, the doyen of British economics in the nineteenth century and founder of the Cambridge School of Economics. The topics covered include education, the role of women, trade unions, unemployment, public enterprise, the quantity theory of money, inflation and trade, the benefits of free trade and the dangers of protection. The materialoffers valuable insights into policy thinking a century ago, much of which has a surprising degree of relevance to the pressing policy issues at the end of the present century.