ABSTRACT
I The year 1890 has long been acknowledged as an important turning-point in the history of British economic thought because it witnessed the publication of Marshall’s epoch-making Principles of Economics, a volume that quickly gained international recognition as a major contribution to the subject, and which was rightly regarded as marking the recovery of British economics from the stultifying influence of Mill’s Principles and the debilitating methodological controversies of the 1870s and 1880s. Yet, if one attaches importance to the activities as well as the ideas of economists, the inauguration of the British Economic Association (later the Royal Economic Society) at University College London on November 20-a few days after the climax of the Baring financial crisis-demands recognition as a more significant indication of the state of the subject.
