Economic Ideas series

We are in the midst of marking the centenary of the First World War, which was fought from 1914 to 1918.

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was one of the most influential economic theorists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Not too surprisingly, for over two hundred and fifty years these ideas of Hume’s have both been highly controversial in philosophy, yet immensely influential across many social and scientific disciplines.

Scotland would seem a strange place for the emergence of center of intellectual development that would influence the stream of ideas throughout the world. Scotland had been unified with England near the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was considered a “backwater” of European civilization.

In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two schools of thought emerged, one in France and the other in Great Britain that were critical of Mercantilism, the government system of economic planning and regulation in the 1700s.

The Feudal System had resulted in the disintegration of the unity that much of Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe had known under the Roman Empire.