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The Great Depression of 1873–1896 and Price Fluctuations: British Forerunners of the Long Waves Perspective

Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology

ISBN: 978-1-78560-960-2, eISBN: 978-1-78560-959-6

Publication date: 23 July 2016

Abstract

This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Giorgio Colacchio, Francisco Louçã, Sonya Marie Scott and the journal’s referees for helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter. The usual disclaimers apply.

Citation

Besomi, D. (2016), "The Great Depression of 1873–1896 and Price Fluctuations: British Forerunners of the Long Waves Perspective", Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 34A), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 247-292. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-41542016000034A008

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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