1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Robbins refuses the grand definitions: development, for these expanded 1966 Chichele Lectures, means neither national grandeur nor moral progress but change in real income per head and the productive capacity behind it. He traces how that question passed through economic thought—posed energetically by mercantilist pamphleteers yet rarely theorized, made central by the Physiocrats though wrongly confined to agriculture, given classical structure by Smith's division of labour and capital accumulation. The causal conditions of growth follow: population, saving, the growth of usable knowledge, monetary institutions, and a Smithian natural liberty that is legal order rather than anarchy. The marginal revolution, he argues, narrowed economics toward allocation, while Marshall and Schumpeter kept a developmental imagination alive. A final lecture weighs whether growth should be desired, setting it beside liberty, education, and amenity.