Introduction

This chapter introduces the rationale of the book and presents conceptual history as an approach to intellectual history of economic growth. It reviews the major works in the field and addresses the gap that exists both in periodization of growth ideas and analyses between capitalist and non-capitalist economies. The chapter seeks to present a middle ground between growth as an unchangeable unit idea and extreme historical contextualism by using growth conceptions as an analytical category to describe what kind of growth was conceptualized before economic growth emerged as a dominant paradigm after the Second World War.