It is to be regretted that Nikolai Kondratiev's 1928 paper on long cycles—“The price dynamics of industrial and agricultural commodities: the theory of relative dynamics and conjuncture”—was omitted from the Pickering and Chatto English language edition of his works published in 1998. This is one of the two most important papers excluded from this edition, the other being the full text of his plan for agriculture and forestry, 1924–28. In response, this note discusses some modifications that occurred in Kondratiev's explanation of long cycles between 1925 and 1928, and puts to rest the suggestion that these changes might have taken place as the result of political factors rather than a genuine change of mind. I also counter some ofmy critics who have taken issue with my presentation of Kondratiev's conception of long cycles (most notably Jan Reijnders (2001) in this journal), and link this with a more general discussion of some of the methodological issues involved.

Henry Martyn's Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, published anonymously in 1701, stands out as a major contribution to the field of political economy that took root in Britain in the eighteenth century, and to the demonstration of the gains from free trade (Martyn 1701). Martyn provided one of the earliest formulations (and by far the clearest) of what Jacob Viner termed the “eighteenth-century rule” for the gains from trade, that “it pays to import commodities from abroad whenever they can be obtained in exchange for exports at a smaller real cost than their production at home would entail” (Viner 1937, p. 440). The numerical examples that Martyn used to illustrate it went even beyond the case for free trade advanced seventy-five years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Martyn's tract contains other remarkable insights that became important features of classical political economy, such as the nature and advantages of the division of labor, the dependence of the latter on the extent of the market, the workings of a market economy, the role of money, and the impact of international trade on resource allocation, on productivity, and on economic welfare.

It is not every literary novice, blushing diffidently over her first manuscript, who easily finds a publisher, still less one prepared to pay an advance of several million pounds. But not every first author has such a story to tell as Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century. It was the previous record holder, Asquith, who first established the notion that retired prime ministers write their memoirs, and he did so under a twin motivation which was not peculiar to himself. He sought vindication and he was after the money.

Students of economics no longer study the history of economic thought for the simple reason that it is much too difficult. It requires a lot of reading of books that do not have convenient introductions and summaries, and so it takes up far too much time. As a consequence, most economists are not familiar with the great names of the past and are unable to place modern analyses in historical, or any other, perspective.