Conversations on Political Economy

Conversations on Political Economy is a popular educational book by Jane Marcet, first published in 1816. It is one of the most influential of her many Conversations books and one of the earliest sustained popular presentations of the new science of political economy in English. The book had a substantial influence on the early Victorian generation that learned its economic ideas from it before going on to read Smith and Ricardo and Mill at greater length.

The book uses the format Marcet had perfected in her Conversations on Chemistry and her Conversations on Natural Philosophy. There is a teacher named Mrs B and a young pupil named Caroline, and the substance of political economy as Marcet understood it is delivered through a long series of conversations between them. The subjects covered include the basic concepts of value, labour, capital, rent, wages, and profit. There are chapters on money and the banking system, on free trade and protection, on the theory of population, and on the various practical economic questions that were being debated in the years just after the Napoleonic Wars.

Marcet was working within the classical economics tradition that had been established by Adam Smith and that was being developed in her own time by Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill. She had personal acquaintance with several of the leading economists of the period through her London social circle and the book reflects the consensus of that group on most major questions. The treatment is more sympathetic to free trade and free markets than the average reader of the period would have been, and Marcet uses the conversational format to walk Caroline through the various practical objections to those positions and to explain why she believes those objections should be set aside.

The book runs about four hundred pages and is best read in chapter sized pieces. The economics is in many places out of date, since classical political economy itself was substantially revised across the nineteenth century, but the book remains a useful historical document of how the new science was being presented to general readers in its first generation. It pairs naturally with Marcet’s other Conversations books and with the popular economic writings of her younger contemporary Harriet Martineau.