STUDIES IN ECONOMIC HISTORY : THE COL- LECTED PAPERS OF
GEORGE UNWIN. Edited with a Memoir by R. H. Tawney. (Macmillan, for the Royal Eco- nomic Society. 15s.)—The late George Unwin, Professor of Economic History at Manchester from 1910 to 1924, was a very remarkable man, whose influence on the study of his subject was far greater than his published work would suggest. The Royal Economic Society has done a service in collecting some of his scattered articles and lectures, and adding to them certain unpublished fragments, for all that Unwin wrote was extraordinarily vivid and suggestive. His five lectures on the Merchant Adventurers' Company in Elizabeth's reign are brilliant though controversial, and recall his early and incisive monograph on the City Companies at that time and later. Mr. Tawney's memoir is sympathetic, but shows undue anxiety to claim Unwin as a political ally. The truth is that Unwin, who began life as a humble boy clerk at Stockport, and worked his way up by winning scholarships first at Cardiff University College and then at Oxford, was too sturdy and self-reliant in character to have-much patience with academic Socialism. It was his honesty and independence that made his work in economic history so valuable and inspiring, for the study has too long and too often been perverted to political ends, as it was in particular by Karl Marx.
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