Nicholas Curott attempts to correct some misrepresentations of Adam Smith’s monetary and banking analyses. However, failing to recognize Smith’s adoption of David Hume’s quantity theory of price levels and the price-specie-flow mechanism, Smith’s distinction between money and credit and their sources, and Smith’s suggestion of real, rather than “fictitious,” bills as safer for private bank lending, Curott denigrates Smith’s theory of money and banking as inferior to some modern writers’. Curott also mischaracterizes Smith’s money demand function, which is best represented as a rectangular hyperbola. I draw from the Wealth of Nations to correct Curott’s misrepresentations of Smith’s analyses.

Otto Hübner’s (1818–1877) international bestseller introduction to political economy, Der kleine Volkswirth, appeared in Turkish in 1869 in two different editions. Two Ottoman officials translated the book into Turkish with different linguistic styles and pedagogical objectives. Beyond being an exceptional case in Ottoman-Turkish economic literature in this respect, the Hübner translations heralded the dawn of popular political economy in the Ottoman Empire. Economic literature before 1869 consisted of works written exclusively for the elite to introduce this new science as an instrument of state administration. Starting with the Hübner translations, we observe the burgeoning of a popular economic literature in the empire aiming at changing the economic mentality and behavior of the masses. This study is a comparative examination of the two Ottoman-Turkish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth in historical context.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain’s East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm’s charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith’s friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation’s legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers’ respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

John Richard Hicks proposed an endogenous theory of money from the 1960s until his final book, A Market Theory of Money (1989). He developed a theory of credit and a theory of short-term rates of interest that had been neglected in his earlier writings such as “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’” (1937). In that early article, Hicks concentrated on the market for cash balances and the motives for the demand for money, while leaving aside the money market and the clearing function of banks. In the 1960s, Hicks was largely inspired by Henry Thornton (1802) and Ralph George Hawtrey (1913, 1919). The originality of this paper is to interpret the short-term rates as the price of liquidity and to examine Hicks’s fight against restrictive monetary policies in the 1960s to the 1970s in Britain.

Allen V. Kneese is called the “father” or “pioneer” of the field of environmental economics but, despite his contributions to that field and the importance of his works, Kneese has not been acknowledged sufficiently in the history of environmental economic thought, and differences between his research and that in the Pigouvian tradition have been obscured over time. This article focuses on his research in the 1960s on water quality management and inquires into differences between his work and that in the Pigouvian tradition. Kneese alternated between theoretical and empirical work and revised the Pigouvian framework pragmatically. The Kneesian framework consists of a two-stage approach, and its substructure is the institutional form of policy agents. To understand the historical meaning of the Kneesian approach, it is useful to compare it to John Krutilla’s “evaluation of non-market value,” Ronald Coase’s “comparative institutional approach,” and Elinor Ostrom’s “Commons.”