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James Edwin Thorold Rogers is a largely forgotten member of the English Historical School of economists, historian and politician who was closely associated with Oxford, first as an undergraduate and then as the holder on two separate occasions of the prestigious Drummond Professorship of Political Economy. Rogers’ most important work was the multi-volume A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, which appeared between 1866 and 1902. Despite the achievement represented by A History, Rogers did not attain the recognition he may have perhaps deserved in his lifetime or subsequently. Various reasons can be identified which help to explain this, among them Rogers’ fiery character, his tendency of belittling the work of other economists, and his failure to make any significant contributions to economic theory.

Cord looks at the work of Arnold Plant. After an examination of Plant’s life and career, the focus is on the seminal contributions that he made in the 1930s to the economics of copyright on books and patents for inventions, and how his views on these issues reflected his wider dislike of monopoly. Cord then considers Plant’s work on Africa, in particular the South African economy, this interest resulting from the time he spent at Cape Town University in the 1920s. Following on from this, there is an examination of Plant’s deep involvement with the Department of Business Administration at LSE, before a concluding section highlights the significant influence he had on generations of students at the School, including Ronald Coase and Arthur Lewis.

The aim of this paper is to throw light on the neglected London and Cambridge Economic Service, a collaboration starting in the early 1920s between the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. We find various results. First, the Service was pioneering in its collection and interpretation of British economic data. It was aided in this by the involvement of a host of noted economists from London and Cambridge. That this collaboration took place at all goes against the traditional view that these two institutions were always at loggerheads during the 1920s and 1930s. Second, the Service carried out important theoretical work in many areas, the focus here being on the construction of indices of industrial production. Finally, an examination of the Service’s forecasting record in the period leading up to the US stock market crash in October 1929 finds that it did not match up to the promises made at its launch.