Economic thought and policy in nineteenth-century less developed Europe

The renaissance of the history of political economy in the last decades of the twentieth century has not only witnessed the multiplication of journals devoted to research on the subject, the establishment of scientific societies, at the national and international levels, and a growing number of dissertations, monographs and edited volumes of symposia and conferences. It has also stimulated a series of comparative research projects, international in scope and multidisciplinary in character. Historians of economics are familiar with the so-called ‘institutionalization project’ that led to six important separate publications (Le Van-Lemesle, 1986; Augello et al., 1988; Barber, 1988; Waszek, 1988; Sugiyama and Mizuta, 1988; Kadish and Tribe, 1993) and the ‘internationalization project’ initiated by Bob Coats (Coats, 1996; Coats, 2000) that extended his former inquiries (Coats, 1981; Coats, 1986). The authors in Steedman (1995) have addressed the evolution of socialism and marginalism in seven, whereas those in Albertone and Masoero (1994) have explored aspects of the interaction between political economy and national realities in ten European countries. Furthermore, a series of national histories of economic thought have appeared (Morris-Suzuki, 1989; Groenewegen and McFarlane, 1990; Sandelin, 1991; Neill, 1991; Boylan and Foley, 1992; Almodovar and Cardoso, 1998).1 Economic historians, for their part, are known to have followed a similar path of enquiry, as well (see Porter and Teich, 1988; Teich and Porter, 1996; among their many joint ventures of a similar kind).