ABSTRACT
Ronald Lindley Meek was bom in Wellingron, New Zealand, in July 1917. Here he studied first law and then economics, and joined the Communist Pany, under whose auspices he published a well-meaning but (for modem tastes) rather patemalistic pamphlet on Maori Problems Today (1943). In 1946 he moved to Cambridge, where he wrote his Ph.D. on "The Development of the Coneept of Surplus in Eeonomic Thought From Mun to Mill". Booth Piero Sraffa and Mauriee Dobb1 encouraged Meek in his work on the "surplus tradition" in the histary of economics, which he saw as running parallel with - and antagonistic to - the supply and demand tradition which eulminated in neoclassical theory. In 1948 Meek taok up a leetureship in the Depanment of Political Eeonomy at the University of Glasgow, leaving Seodand in 1963 on his appointment as Tyler Professor of Eeonomics at the University of Leicester. He died suddenly in August 1978, at the age of 61.
