ABSTRACT
I If the members of a profession fail to produce their own historians they must take the consequences when outsiders rush into the breach. This, I trust, is sufficient justification for this paper, which is designed to arouse interest in an unduly neglected aspect of the development of agricultural economics. It is a by-product of a larger study of the changing role of economists, statisticians and agricultural economists in Whitehall, especially since 1945,1 and it is necessarily somewhat biased by my preoccupation with the government sector. However, this background has certain advantages, as well as limitations. Some valuable work has already been done on the history of this Society, the Provincial Agricultural Economics Advisory Service, and the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford, and I have drawn freely upon these sources without making detailed acknowledgements (Thomas, 1954; Murray, 1960). But the development of the agricultural economics profession within the Civil Service has, I believe, largely been overlooked, even though government has played a larger part in this subject than in the case of any of the other social science disciplines. In the following paragraphs, subject to limitations of space and my knowledge, I shall try to provide a modest corrective to the previous imbalance, while at the same time offering a perspective which I hope will strike you as both unfamiliar and fruitful. There is obviously no single correct standpoint from which to treat a topic of this kind. As with my own subject, economic history, agricultural economics is the uneasy offspring of a liaison between two mature parent disciplines, and it can legitimately be approached from either side. If I appear to slight the agricultural sciences it is simply an unavoidable consequence of my ignorance, and the fact that I have a special interest in the history of economics and the sociology of the professions. However I must add, in self-defence, that an approach from the side of economics, rather than agriculture, is more appropriate now than it would have been in pre-war days.
