Abstract
James Edwin Thorold Rogers is a largely forgotten member of the English Historical School of economists, historian and politician who was closely associated with Oxford, first as an undergraduate and then as the holder on two separate occasions of the prestigious Drummond Professorship of Political Economy. Rogers’ most important work was the multi-volume A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, which appeared between 1866 and 1902. Despite the achievement represented by A History, Rogers did not attain the recognition he may have perhaps deserved in his lifetime or subsequently. Various reasons can be identified which help to explain this, among them Rogers’ fiery character, his tendency of belittling the work of other economists, and his failure to make any significant contributions to economic theory.
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Notes
- 1.
One of Rogers’ elder brothers was the well-known physician and campaigning medical officer, Joseph Rogers. Thorold edited Joseph’s Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer, which appeared in 1889.
- 2.
Being in a hall rather than a college at Oxford counted against Rogers as very few fellowships were ever awarded to members of the former (see Kadish 1989: 19).
- 3.
Rogers contributed to the publications of the Club, one example being his Free Trade and Fair Trade: What Do the Words Mean?, which appeared in 1885 as leaflet number 28. Apart from claiming the superiority of free trade over fair trade, Rogers at one point also makes what might perhaps be interpreted as a pre-Keynesian comment in the leaflet: ‘If everything is dearer, there must be stint [less spending]. If everyone is stinted, he has less to spend. If he has less to spend, he can buy less. If he buys less, he causes less employment to be given’ (Rogers 1885a: 2; italics added).
- 4.
A few years later, Rogers also edited Public Addresses by John Bright (Rogers 1879a).
- 5.
A number of Rogers’ historian contemporaries at Oxford were also attracted to Tractarianism, amongst the most notable being William Stubbs and Edward Augustus Freeman.
- 6.
Their daughter was Annie Rogers, who went on to become a well-known pioneer of women’s education. One of their sons was the mathematician Leonard James Rogers, notable for, amongst other things, discovering and proving the Rogers-Ramanujan identities.
- 7.
As noted above, for the first part of his academic career, Rogers’ main focus was on the classics, one of his earliest publications being an edited edition of Aristotle’sEthics (Rogers 1865a). However, he would have been disappointed by a decision by the Clarendon Press to not meet the costs of publishing his Aristotelian dictionary. As a private tutor who had been successful in Literae Humaniores, Rogers probably made a reasonably good living. To get a sense of this, Kadish (1989: 19) cites the example of the naval historian Montagu Burrows, who would eventually become the first holder of the Chichele Professorship in Modern History at Oxford. Before taking up this post, Burrows was able to earn up to £600 a year through the private teaching of undergraduates, the equivalent of around £60,000 today. For a time starting from 1872, Rogers also delivered history classes to candidates for the Indian Civil Service examinations at the celebrated crammer school of Walter Wren in Bayswater, London. Edgeworth would later teach at the same establishment.
- 8.
Originally, an individual could occupy the Drummond for a single period of five years and would only become eligible for re-election after an interval of two years. However, this was changed by statute in 1867 to allow for consecutive terms of five years to be served.
- 9.
Price had stood as a candidate for the Drummond in 1862, but lost out to Rogers.
- 10.
Many years later, Rogers was a champion of the Representation of the People Act 1884 (the Third Reform Act), which gave to people residing in the countryside the same voting rights that existed for people living in towns. Rogers’ backing for the legislation along with that of some other Liberal MPs attracted the ire of Queen Victoria, who wrote a number of letters on the issue to Prime Minister William Gladstone, the main theme of which was her view that the House of Lords had every right to reject the Bill. In fact, Rogers wanted Gladstone to go further by granting the vote to all women, this proposal being rebuffed on the grounds that its inclusion would threaten the whole legislation.
- 11.
If the recollections of John Neville Keynes are anything to go by, the fact that Phelps, much like Price before him, was even in the running for the Drummond is something of a surprise. In 1885, Keynes dined with Phelps when he was lecturing at Oxford, noting in his Diary that Phelps ‘does not profess to know a great deal of Political Economy’ (John Neville Keynes quoted in Tullberg 2017: 417, fn. 38).
- 12.
Despite his hostility to Ricardo, Rogers did occasionally lapse into Ricardianisms. For instance, in the later The Economic Interpretation of History he stated that: ‘If the ownership of land remains in private hands, and it would be an evil time should it cease to be in private hands, the inexorable law which limits profits to an average on the calling would develop rent’ (Rogers 1888a: 165–166; italics added). Earlier in the same volume, he insisted that all economists agreed that profit is made up of interest, insurance and wages of superintendence and that the purpose of capital was to equalise prices and profit (see ibid.: 17, 19).
- 13.
Even though these predecessors laboured in the same field as Rogers, they did not escape his wrath. To take one example, Rogers tells us that Young was a ‘careful and diligent collector of facts … But he was [also]…an exceedingly bad reasoner, and his economical inferences are perfectly worthless’ (Rogers 1866–1902, 1: 690).
- 14.
As alluded to above, a strong statement of Rogers’ views on rent can also be found in A Manual of Political Economy. Saying this, Schumpeter (1954: 822, fn. 21) referred to the volume as ‘not very brilliant’, even if it did reach its third edition very quickly as a result of its use in schools and was, according to Ashley (1889: 384) at least, ‘a little…idealized’ by Henry Sidgwick.
- 15.
As Rogers acknowledged, raising the productivity of land may not be the only factor behind higher rents. Lower wages for labourers (Rogers 1884, 2: 482) and higher prices as a result of food scarcity (ibid.: 486) can also play a part. These points were made by Rogers in Six Centuries of Work and Wages, a popular account of the first four volumes of A History.
- 16.
- 17.
In another criticism, Brentano asserted that ‘as long as the regulations of the Statute…were maintained, the position of the workmen was secure’ (Brentano 1870: 103–104). Brentano also argued, however, that it was the non-observance of the regulations contained in the Statute that led directly to the creation of the trade union movement (see ibid.).
- 18.
A villein was a type of serf in the Middle Ages who paid dues to a landlord in return for the use of land. In terms of rights, a villein was between a freeman and a slave.
- 19.
For a study contemporaneous with A History but which only examined the development of British prices between the 1850s and 1880s, see Mulhall (1885).
- 20.
However, the wider recoinage programme failed due to difficulties in maintaining a financial system based on bimetallism, in this case gold and silver.
- 21.
In The Economic Interpretation of History, Rogers also dismissed the wages fund doctrine, the classic statement of which was presented by Mill in his Principles ofPolitical Economy. He accused Mill of being in ‘total ignorance’ (Rogers 1888a: 308) of the history of labour and wages. This aside, there is some debate about whether Mill later recanted his support for the doctrine (see, for example, West and Hafer 1978).
References
Main Works by Thorold Rogers
Bright, J. and J.E.T. Rogers (eds) (1870). Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, MP. Two volumes. London: Macmillan.
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Rogers, J.E.T. (1861). ‘Facts and Observations on Wages and Prices in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and More Particularly During the Thirty-Nine Years 1582–1620’. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 24(4): 535–585.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1864). ‘On a Continuous Price of Wheat for 105 Years, From 1380 to 1484’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 27(1): 70–81.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1864a). Primogeniture and Entail: Letters of J.E.T. Rogers and Henry Tupper and Others on the History and Working of the Laws of Primogeniture and Entail in Their Moral, Social and Political Aspects. Manchester: Alexander Ireland.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1864b). ‘The Laws of Settlement and Primogeniture’. Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, York Meeting. London: Longman Green: 117–129.
Rogers, J.E.T. (ed.) (1865a). Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea, by Aristotle. London: Rivington.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1865). ‘On the Statistical and Fiscal Definitions of the Word “Income”’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 28(2): 242–260.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1866a). ‘England Before and After the Black Death’. Fortnightly Review, 3(December): 191–196.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1866). ‘On the Social and Local Distribution of Wealth During the First Half of the Fourteenth Century’. Macmillan’s Magazine, 13(January): 249–259.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1866). ‘Opening Address of the President of Section F (Economic Science and Statistics) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Thirty-Sixth Meeting, at Nottingham, August 1866’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 29(4): 493–503.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1866–1902). A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, From the Year After the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War (1793), Compiled Entirely from Original and Contemporaneous Records. Seven volumes: Volume I (1866): 1259–1400; Volume II (1866): 1259–1400; Volume III (1882): 1401–1582; Volume IV (1882): 1401–1582; Volume V (1887): 1583–1702; Volume VI (1887): 1583–1702; Volume VII, Part 1 (1902): 1703–1793; Volume VII, Part 2 (1902): 1703–1793. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1867). ‘On the Funds Available for Developing the Machinery of Education in England’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 30(4): 557–561.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1867). ‘Bribery’. Essay IX in F.H. Hill et al. Questions for a Reformed Parliament. London: Macmillan: 259–276.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1868). The Free Trade Policy of the Liberal Party. Manchester: Guardian.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1868). A Manual of Political Economy for Schools and Colleges. Second edition, 1869; third edition, 1875. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rogers, J.E.T. (ed.) (1869). An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by A. Smith. Oxford: Clarendon.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1869). Historical Gleanings: A Series of Sketches—Montagu, Walpole, Adam Smith, Cobbett. London: Macmillan.
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Rogers, J.E.T. (1870). ‘On the Incidence of Local Taxation’. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 33(2): 243–263.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1871). Social Economy. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1872). ‘The Colonial Question’. In Cobden Club Essays: Second Series, 1871–1872. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin: 399–455.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1873). Cobden and Modern Political Opinion: Essays on Certain Political Topics. London: Macmillan.
Rogers, J.E.T. (ed.) (1875). Complete Collection of the Protests of the Lords, With Historical Introductions. Three volumes. Oxford: Clarendon.
Rogers, J.E.T. (ed.) (1879a). Public Addresses by John Bright. London: Macmillan.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1879). ‘English Agriculture’. The Contemporary Review, 35(May): 303–323.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1879). ‘Review of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, by T.E. Cliffe Leslie’. The Academy, 7 June: 489–491.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1879). ‘Causes of Commercial Depression’. The Princeton Review, 1(January–June): 211–238.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1879). ‘Labour and Wages in England’. The Princeton Review, 55(July): 1–26.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1880). ‘The History of Rent in England’. The Contemporary Review, 37(April): 673–690.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1881). ‘Parliament and the Higher Education’. Fraser’s Magazine, 24(July): 68–83.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1883). Ensilage in America: Its Prospects in English Agriculture. London: W. Swan Sonnenschein.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1884). Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour. Two volumes. London: W. Swan Sonnenschein.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1885a). Free Trade and Fair Trade: What Do the Words Mean? Leaflet Number 28. London: Cobden Club.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1885). Eight Chapters on the History of Work and Wages. London: W. Swan Sonnenschein.
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Rogers, J.E.T. (1885). The British Citizen: His Rights and Privileges—A Short History. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1886). Local Taxation, Especially in English Cities and Towns. London: Cassell & Company.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1887). The First Nine Years of the Bank of England: An Enquiry into a Weekly Record of the Price of Bank Stock from August 17, 1694 to September 17, 1703. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1888a). The Economic Interpretation of History. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1888). Holland. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
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Rogers, J.E.T. (1890). ‘The Four Oxford History Lecturers’. The Contemporary Review, 57(March): 454–456.
Rogers, J.E.T. (ed.) (1891). Oxford City Documents: Financial and Judicial, 1268–1665.
Rogers, J.E.T. (1892). The Industrial and Commercial History of England. Edited by A.G.L. Rogers. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
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Cord, R.A. (2021). Thorold Rogers (1823–1890). In: Cord, R.A. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_10
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