ABSTRACT

THERE exists a venerable tradition that a newly appointed professor should begin his inaugural lecture by heaping laurels upon his predecessor. As the first occupant of this Chair of Economic History I am exempt from this often hypocritical exercise, but it would be churlish of me not to refer with sincerity to the long and productive line of economic historians in this City, a line stretching back through Scott to Adam Smith and vigorously sustained in recent years by Professor Checkland and his Department of Economic History within the University of Glasgow. Similarly the occupant of my Chair cannot avoid a keen consciousness of the historical background of the Royal College, an institution which had arrived at full manhood when the University of Manchester was but a conception in the brain of John Owens, and when the University of Durham was no more than a gleam in a bishop's eye.