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...

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...

This paper examines the literature on the periodical recurrence of economic crises up to the 1840s, illustrating how the awareness of this phenomenon was far more widespread than the few existing histories of business cycle theories indicate, and also that early writers were more interested in...

This article examines the contribution of Clément Juglar to the theory of periodic crises in the context of the evolution of the doctrine towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Juglar's original contribution (1862) and its evolution to the final form of his doctrine are described in...