ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century, Manchester was the market centre of the Lancashire cotton textile industry and dominated the world of international commerce. It was also an intellectual centre and mill-race of ideas. In a paper read to the Manchester Statistical Society on 13 April 1870, J.C. Ollerenshaw first raised the issue of the link between fluctuations in rice prices and fluctuations in purchasing power. He drew attention to the relationship between rice prices in India, and the demand there for Lancashire cotton textiles. India was a major market and he said ‘In proportion that grain is cheap and plentiful, or scarce and dear in India, will our trade in Lancashire be flourishing or depressed’ (Ollerenshaw 1869-70: 114; see also Latham 1978). Little is known of Ollerenshaw, although Ollerenshaw is an old Lancashire name, but his well-argued paper caught the eye of Liverpool-born W. Stanley Jevons. Jevons had studied meteorology as assayer in the Sydney Mint 1854-9. He graduated from University College, London, in 1860 and in 1866 was appointed Professor of Logic and Cobden Lecturer in Political Economy in Owens College, Manchester. From 1876 to 1881 he was Professor of Political Economy in University College, London, and in 1879 published in Nature a famous (or infamous) paper on sun-spots and commercial crises. In this he specifically refers to Ollerenshaw’s paper (Jevons 1879: 588). There was a follow-up paper in 1882, the year of Jevons’s death in a drowning accident (Jevons 1882: 226-8). In the 1879 paper he refers to the recurrent economic crises which came every ten or eleven years: ‘I feel sure the explanation will be found in the cessation of demand from India and China occasioned by the failure of harvests there, ultimately due to changes of solar activity’ (Jevons 1879: 590). In the 1882 paper he says ‘The theory of the solar-commercial cycle and of the partially oriental origin of decennial crises has received such confirmation as time yet admits of’ (Jevons 1882: 228).
