Richard Jones, 1790-1855.

Often regarded as the founder of the English Historical School, Richard Jones was a Cambridge-trained Anglican clergyman. 

The son of a lawyer from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, of Welsh descent, Richard Jones was initially groomed to become a lawyer.  But health considerations led to a reassessment and he decided on a clerical career.  Jones entered Caius College, Cambridge in 1812, at an age older than most students.  While at Cambridge, he fell in with the scientific circle around Charles Babbage, William Hershel and William Whewell and proposed to apply its inductivist methodology to political economy.   Jones received his degree in 1816 and, in 1817, Jones was ordained into the Church of England.  He was assigned to various ministries in Sussex, but kept up his wider interests and contacts with the Cantabrigians (Whewell dedicated his famous History to Jones).

In 1831, Richard Jones published his Essay, the first volume ("Rent") of a never-completed multi-volume treatise, in which Jones attacked the Ricardian theory of rent. Drawing on a much larger span of historical data, Jones showed that rising rents were not correlated with the extension of cultivation on to ever-worse soils, as the Ricardians asserted.  He did not deny that it could happen that way, but that it was perhaps the least important of causes.  The primary cause of rises in rent, Jones argued, came from rising surplus on already-cultivated fields -- due primarily to the sheer increase in capital applied to existing lands and improvements in the techniques of production.  

As for the Ricardian explanation of the fact of rent -- i.e. as a "mechanism" to equalize differing fertilities of land -- Jones has only contempt.  Instead, Jones notes that "in the actual progress of human society, rent has usually originated in the appropriation of the soil, at a time when the bulk of the people must cultivate it on such terms as they can, or starve; and ... are chained ... to the land by an overpowering necessity; the necessity then which compels them to pay a rent .. is wholly independent of any difference in the quality of the ground they occupy, and would not be removed were the soil all equalised." (Jones, 1851: p.11).  

It is in passages such as these that Jones reveals his historicist credentials.  Jones derided the Ricardians for their lack of empirical content and sensitivity to historical fact, their pretensions to a mechanical "scientific" universalism and the political-apologistic tones of their wages-fund and rent doctrines.  Karl Marx would adopt several of Jones's more pregnant ideas.

In 1833, Richard Jones was appointed to succeed the scandal-ridden Nassau William Senior as professor of political economy at King's College (London).  His introductory lecture at KCL (delivered February, 1833) was a methodological piece, a manifesto of the inductive-empirical method.   In 1835, he left King's to take up Malthus's old chair as Professor of Political Economy and Modern History at the East India College of Haileybury, which he held until his death.  (After Jones's departure, the KCL chair was left vacant for decades thereafter; the Tooke Professorship was not created until 1859).

Richard Jones had a large part in forging the 1836 Commutation of Tithes Act (6 & 7 Will IV c.71), converting tithes-in-kind with cash payments ("corn rent") and served as one of the three commissioners charged with implementing the conversion, undertaking the survey and identifying the affected properties.  His position on the tithe commission took up most of his time in the 1840s, although Jones still retained his chair at Haileybury.  The tithe commission was dissolved in 1851, upon which Jones joined the Charity Commission.

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