Ven. William Cunningham, 1849-1919.

Accomplished Scottish scholar, clergyman, economic historian and statistician.

William Cunningham was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His sickly disposition meant much of his time was spent in a family rural estate. In 1865, Cunningham enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, intent on a clerical career in the (free) Presbyterian church.  In 1868, Cunningham sojourned abroad, studying for a brief time at the University of Tübingen, then a bastion of the German Historical School.  Upon his return to Britain, Cunningham changed his plans, and (much to family disappointment) decided on a career in the (Episcopalian) Church of England. 

William Cuningham enrolled in Casius College, Cambridge, studying moral sciences under Henry Sidgwick.  (Cunningham was also a pupil of Alfred Marshall, then only a few years older, who was a lecturer at St. John's at the time).  His main interest was philosophy, and he ended up writing a thesis on Descartes.  Lured by a scholarship, Cunningham transferred from Caius to Trinity College in 1872.  Later that year, he achieved a first (together with F.W. Maitland) in the Moral Sciences Tripos.  However, he was unable to secure a fellowship at a Cambridge college.  Partly as consolation, after his ordination as an Anglican priest in 1874, Cunningham was offered the title of vicar of Horningsea, just a few miles outside of Cambridge.

As Cunningham would later confess to his daughter, economic history was not a subject he was very interested in.  His passion was for philosophy, but he stumbled on to economics, and then economic history, quite by accident.  For several years, while still hoping to find a chair in philosophy at another British university, Cunningham signed up as a Cambridge Extension Lecturer.  He ended up lecturing principally on political economy, but also history and literature, in various lecture tours in Yorkshire and Lancashire (Liverpool was his home base for three years)..  His travels through the industrial north, and interaction with working class audiences and parishioners (he often assisted at local churches), brought Cunningham into direct contact with the plight of industrial laborers and trade union movements, as well as the complaints and worries of industrialists about excessive competition.  It was here that Cunningham first got the impression that all was not well with British industrial capitalism and laissez faire.  In 1876, Cunningham married his first cousin, and they gave public cooking lessons together at various venues. 

In late 1878, Cunningham was appointed assistant secretary to the Extension Syndicate, and moved permanently back to Cambridge.  Shortly after, he was appointed examiner in Cambridge University's History Tripos, and was saddled with the papers on economic history, which no one else seemed interested in. Cunningham quickly delved into the field.   Cunningham also dabbled in journalism on the side, serving as an occasional correspondent for The Guardian newspaper and contributing several book reviews to the Cambridge Review.  In 1881, Cunningham was appointed chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge, and duly celebrated with a long winter's vacation to India. 

Upon his return in 1882,  Cunningham decided to compose a textbook on English economic history.  The field was almost virgin territory in the English-language literature. The result was the Growth of English Industry and Commerce. It initially came out as a single volume in 1882, covering the span from the ancient Britons to the late 18th Century. Later editions were greatly expanded to include more detailed treatments of Mercantilism (a neglected literature, which Cunningham did much to revive) and encompassing 19th C. industrial developments.  As Cunningham would later confess, he bit off more than he expected - the lack of secondary literature led him to believe economic history could be briefly dealt with, only to find troves of untouched primary materials waiting for him.  The Growth duly grew in subsequent editions, and he produced several side-monographs (e.g. on usury, 1884) in the course of his research.

The textbook was well-received, and in 1884, Cunningham was appointed university lecturer in history and economics.  That same year, Henry Fawcett died, opening up the vacancy of the Professorship of Political Economy at Cambridge.  Having just produced some well-regarded books, Cunningham fancied his chances and threw his hat into the ring, but the appointment ended up going to Alfred Marshall instead (although having fewer publications than Cunningham, Marshall had a better track record as a teacher). 

In early 1885, Cunningham  attended the celebrated Industrial Remuneration Conference in London, bringing economists, businessmen and trade union leaders together, to mull over the matter of income distribution.  Cunningham reported back to Section F of the BAAS that quantitative economic arguments, while convincing to "middle class intellects", nonetheless  "failed to make any impression on the minds of working men" (p.12)   The problem, he insinuated, was with economics - in particular the tendency of economists to regard labor as a passive factor of production, rather than an active one, and ignoring it had concerns, like constancy of employment and working hours, that were not addressed by economics.

Cunningham elaborated on his position more clearly in his Politics and Economics (1885), calling for a reconciliation between economic theory and historicism, to enable economics to regain its practical usefulness. Already suspicious of  laissez faire, which he blamed on the excessive dogmatic influence of utilitarianism (to which he was philosophically opposed), Cunningham still held out hope that economics could be re-cast in a more practical, socially-relevant form, compatible with Christian principles. It is here that Cunningham first outlines his nationalist Tory vision of economic policy, replacing the doctrines of free trade liberalism with what he calls "National Husbandry".  With a neo-mercantilist (one can almost say proto-fascist) tinge, Cunningham ranks the interests of "the nation" above both individual interests and class interests and criticizes current economic policy as narrowly self-interested, sacrificing future generations. He identifies the "national interest" only in broad ideological terms  ("making the future of our nation as great and noble as lies within our power", p.273). National power subtly replaces the wealth or happiness of its citizens as the goal. He sees an active role for the State in fostering this (esp. via national monopolies), but notes that it must be conceived and implemented correctly, and that this requires a sensitivity to historical and social context rather than precise principles.  He reviews past economic policy, and condemns almost all of it.  He does not lay the blame squarely on economists - if anything, he believes economists have simply made themselves irrelevant and abdicated actual economic policy to narrow interest groups.

A methodenstreit quickly developed between Cunningham and Marshall inside Cambridge,  Hving stumbled into economic history almost by accident, Cunningham was not, from the outset, as confrontational a historicist as Cliffe Leslie had been, but he was soon to take up the cudgels. Marshall's ascent to the chair, and his determination to make his kind of Neoclassical economics prevail on Cambridge, put him on a collision course with Cunningham.   Cunningham perceived Marshall's economics to be a restoration of the bad habits of the Ricardians - abstract out-of-touch theory, unabashed utilitarian ethics (now more explicit than ever) and free trade apologetics..  Cunningham took personal offense to Marshall's combative inaugural lecture, which acknowledged but dismissed the historicist challenge to economic theory.  But more grating was the fact that, ensconced in his new position, Marshall had supervisory authority over what Cunningham taught, and was determined to enforce it more readily than Fawcett had.  The faculty board sided with Marshall, and ordered Cunningham to teach at least one term of pure economic theory - the very theory Cunningham could not brook.  Cunningham only managed to rid himself of this obligation in 1888, when he resigned his university position to become a college lecturer in history and economics at Trinity.

Cunningham was appointed Vicar of Great St. Mary's in 1887, a significant parish in rural Cambridgeshire.  Compounded with lectureship and chaplaincy at Trinity College, Cunningham was quite busy. Nonetheless, Cunningham was not yet prepared to surrender economics to Marshall.  In 1888, Cunningham made a bid for the Drummond Chair at Oxford, which would give him at least equal status (his bid failed, it went instead to Thorold Rogers).  Cunningham finally came out with guns blazing in a series of methodological articles in the Economic Review and the Economic Journal in 1891-92. 

Cunningham finally left Cambridge in 1891 to to succeed Edgeworth as the Tooke Professor of Statistics at King's College London.  Cunningham held the Tooke chair until his resignation in 1897.  He taught briefly as a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1899, relieving Ashley.  He continued to serve as vicar of Great St. Mary's until 1908, when he was made Archdeacon of Ely, a post which he held until the end of his life.

Cunningham was a vocal opponent of the nascent Neoclassical economics, particularly as propounded by his colleague, Alfred Marshall and the Cambridge School.  In economics, he sought to promote the historical method, making him one of the most leading advocates of the English Historical School.  Despite the sustained attacks levied by Cunningham, Marshall was sufficiently influenced by his pleas to try to include some more historical content in his work and operate more "inductively" in the derivation of his economic principles.  However, he refused to accept Cunningham's main charge -- that the validity of economic laws is conditional on historical, social and cultural context.

Cunningham's opposition to Neoclassicism was not only one of method, but also of politics.  A vigorous neo-imperialist, Cunningham resurrected much interest in old Mercantilist thought.  He was deeply opposed to utilitarian philosophy and laissez-faire politics, and penned several tracts defending labor unions and protectionism.  He also contributed several tracts to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK).

Top

Top

Top

All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca