Twiss, Travers (1809–1897)

Abstract

In economics, Twiss’s reputation rests primarily upon two contributions: one on the machinery question and the other a View of the Progress of Political Economy in Europe since the Sixteenth Century (1847) of some 300 pages. Both of these works originated in lectures during his tenure as Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford (1942–7). The latter numbers with McCulloch’s much shorter Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Science of Political Economy (1926) as being among the first significant histories of the discipline published in English. The only works of comparable significance in the area which predate it appeared in French: Blanqui’s Historie de l’économie politique en Europe (1837–8) and Jean Paul Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemon’s Historie de l’économie politique (1836–8 and 1841). Twiss acknowledges his debt to the abovementioned authors, but has been criticized (for example, by Cossa) for a tendency to rely too heavily upon second-hand sources in the construction of his argument.