Edgeworth on Trade and War

Francis Edgeworth has a very good claim to have been the greatest ever Irish economist. John Hicks would perhaps have disagreed with that statement: when I was an undergraduate, like Edgeworth, at Trinity College Dublin, Hicks came to give a lecture which started by doubting whether Edgeworth was an Irish economist at all. “It is true”, Hicks admitted, “that he (Edgeworth) was born in Ireland, and brought up in Ireland; but he rarely speaks of Ireland in his works.”i That seems a pretty demanding criterion by which to judge the Irishness of an economic and statistical theorist, and the empirical claim isn’t even true: Ireland makes an appearance in Mathematical Psychics, for example. What we do know is that Edgeworth holidayed often at the Royal St George Yacht Club in Dunleary, or Kingstown as it was then known, and that he frequently visited the family home in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford. That is where, as his cousin Harriet informs us, he looked forward to spending “a happy old age in the home of his forefathers”.ii Sadly that never happened, since he died rather suddenly in Oxford, after only a brief illness, on February 13, 1926.