The economic reader [electronic resource] : textbooks, manuals and the dissemination of the economic sciences during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries / edited by Massimo M. Augello and Marco E. L. Guidi.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

1. The making of an economic reader : the dissemination of economics through textbooks / Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi -- 2. Economic manuals and textbooks in Great Britain and the British Empire 1797-1938 / Keith Tribe -- 3. Cours, Leºcon, Manuels, Prãaecis and Traitãaes : teaching political economy in nineteenth-century France / Philippe Steiner -- 4. Economic textbooks in the German language area / Harald Hagemann and Matthias Ráeosch -- 5. Educating the nation : textbooks and manuals of political economy in Italy 1815-1922 / Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi -- 6. Teaching, spreading and preaching : textbooks of political economy in Spain 1779-1936 / Salvador Almenar -- 7. Textbooks and the teaching of political economy in Portugal 1759-1910 / Antãaonio Almodovar and Josãae Luãais Cardoso -- 8. 'A powerful instrument of progress' : economic textbooks in Belgium 1830-1925 / Guido Erreygers and Maarten van Dijck -- 9. From ruminators to pioneers : Dutch economics textbooks and their authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century / Evert Schoorl and Henk Plasmeijer -- 10. Political economy textbooks and manuals and the roots of the Scandinavian model / Johan M. Láeonnroth -- 11. The emergence of the economic science in Japan and the evolution of textbooks 1860s-1930s / Tamotsu Nishizawa -- 12. The evolution of US economics textbooks / David C. Colander.

"In the nineteenth century and still in the early decades of the twentieth century textbooks of economics were quite different from those over which thousands of undergrads sweat blood today to prepare their exams. They pedagogical tools, rich of moralistic overtones and of practical indications addressed to policy makers. They were made to persuade both students and the ordinary layman about the benefits of the market order. They also indicated the rules of behaviour that were considered consistent with the smooth functioning of economic mechanisms. The book studies the origins and evolution of economic textbooks in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, up to the turning point represented by Paul Samuelson's Economics (1948), which became the template for all the textbooks of the postwar period. The case studies included in the book cover a large part of Europe, the British Commonwealth, the United States and Japan. Each chapter examines various types of textbooks, from those aimed at self-education to those addressed to university students, secondary school students, to the short manuals aimed at the popularisation of political economy among workers and the middle classes. An introductory chapter examines this phenomenon in a comparative and transnational perspective. This study on the archaeology of modern textbooks reveals the massive effort made by governments and academic authorities to construct and disseminate a system of economic representations and regulations that could be instrumental to establish and consolidate what Michel Foucault called a new type of governmentality, based on natural market laws and on Malthusian population mechanisms"-- Provided by publisher.

Also available in print edition.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.