Introduction

Piero Sraffa is notorious for having published very little during his life. As Amartya Sen (1974, p. 331) once put it: ‘Sraffa finds it immoral to write more than one page per month.’ What is less well known is that he left an enormous amount of manuscripts, notes and comments to Trinity College, Cambridge, which document in detail his intellectual interests and curiosities and the progress of his work. For several years now, scholars have had access to this material, which is kept at Trinity College Library, the ‘Wren’.