Cunynghame, Henry Hardinge (1848–1935)

Abstract

Soldier, lawyer, civil servant, polymath and amateur economist, Sir Henry Cunynghame was born of distinguished forebears on 8 July 1848 at Penshurst. He died at Eastbourne on 3 May 1935, having been knighted in 1908. In 1870 he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, to study law, throwing over a promising military career. There he became a favourite of Alfred Marshall and was infected by an enthusiasm for ‘geometrical political economy’, a topic on which he was eventually to publish one of his many books (1904). There too he invented for Marshall a machine (now lost) for drawing a grid of rectangular hyperbolae (Guillebaud 1961, Vol. II, pp. 37–8).

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman