ABSTRACT
The reasons why economists study (or teach) the history of economic thought are manifold, varying with the economic vision and immediate aims of the individual student (or expositor) as well as with the progress of the subject as a discipline. In the nineteenth century, for example, serious students of political economy began naturally enough by reading the writings of past masters and some went on to publish commentaries on what they had read. J. R. McCulloch, the first English historian of political economy, had written various articles on this theme (e.g. for the Scotsman newspaper and the Encyclopaedia Britannica) before he published his Historical Sketch of the Rise of the Science of Political Economy (1826), and in 1845 he produced the first annotated bibliography of economics (McCulloch 1938).
