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...

John Wade formulated, in 1826 and 1833, two models of cyclical fluctuations most likely to be the first in the literature. They are fully endogenous, based on a cobweb-like mechanism affecting not agricultural production, as was customary at the time, but manufacture. Wade's earlier model relies...

In a paper read in 1848 before the Dublin Statistical Society, James Anthony Lawson propounded a theory of commercial crises based on a credit – overtrading – speculation mechanism. This view was quite widespread at the time, but it was couched in an original reinterpretation of the causal...