ABSTRACT
James Mill is known among economists chiefly for his rôle as midwife in the birth of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817), and for his efforts as a Ricardian propagandist. But Mill did not meet Ricardo until 1808, by which time he had already written two pamphlets and a number of review articles on economic questions, while Ricardo had hardly begun his career as an economist. Apart from the two pamphlets and the extract from one of Mill’s articles which are reprinted and introduced below, much of Mill’s early economic journalism suffers from the fact that he relied exclusively on such work to support himself. 1 Nevertheless, it is of considerable value to those interested in the development of economic thought in the neglected period between Adam Smith and Ricardo. Mill’s original contact with the science of political economy probably came when he attended Dugald Stewart’s lectures while a student at Edinburgh. Stewart had studied under Adam Smith, and lectured on political economy in a Smithian vein, though with some physiocratic deviations. James Mill, therefore, has some claim to be considered as a link, albeit indirect, between the founder of classical economics and Ricardo, its next great exponent.
