ABSTRACT
Herbert Somerton Foxwell’s expertise as an economist and scholar proved useful to the Macmillan family firm in extending its reputation as one of the leading publishers of works on economics, theoretical and applied. Especially during the final two decades of the nineteenth century, when the firm was still operating from its Cambridge as well as its London base, he provided a regular flow of advice on manuscripts and other proposals, probably taking books and journals as his main reward. Among other subjects, he offered opinions on theoretical works by J.B. Clark, Böhm-Bawerk, Walras, Bastable, Wicksteed, Pantaleoni, and Loria that were, by turns, shrewd, quizzical and trenchant. In 1894 he was sent a manuscript in a field more readily associated with one of his main research interests, John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith. Reading his report on Rae’s book amid others preserved in the Macmillan archive at the British Library prompted this bibliographic comment on the state of Smith scholarship in the 1890s.1 What might simply be a footnote to the more systematic work on Smith’s fortuna that has appeared in recent years could also say something about a less well-cultivated field, the historiography of the history of economics.2
