Alfred Marshall(1842–1924)

Alfred Marshall was born at Bermondsey on the south bank of the Thames on 26 July 1842, second son of a Bank of England cashier. He won an entrance scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge in 1861 to read mathematics, on his own initiative and against his father's plan of the church.

He came out of Cambridge in 1865 as Second Wrangler, was elected a fellow of St John's, and turned from metaphysics through John Stuart Mill into political economy, deciding by 1868 that the questions he cared about were better answered through the technical study of economic life. He was twenty-six, and he turned the next twenty years onto the problem.

The technical core was done between 1868 and 1890. He took the central problem of how prices are determined under competition and built the apparatus of partial equilibrium: the supply-and-demand diagram every student now learns in the first week, price elasticity of demand, consumer surplus, the short run and the long run, and ceteris paribus analysis. Principles of Economics, eleven complete rewrites in the making, appeared in July 1890 and was the foundation text of what economists now call the neoclassical synthesis. It ran through eight editions over the next thirty years.

He held the chair of political economy at Bristol from 1877, briefly at Oxford, and returned to Cambridge in 1885 as professor, holding the chair to 1908. From it he founded the Cambridge tripos in economics and politics in 1903, the foundational British university degree in the discipline, and trained the generation that ran British economic policy and academia after him: John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Cecil Pigou, Dennis Robertson. The Cambridge that produced the General Theory was, institutionally, the Cambridge Marshall built.

He retired to a small house at Madingley Road on the Cambridge outskirts in 1908 and worked there for sixteen more years, writing Industry and Trade (1919) and supporting the publication of Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace. He died at Madingley Road on 13 July 1924, eighty-one years old. The Marshall name, the office of mareschal scaled up from horse-servant to royal court rank, carries him alongside William Marshal as the other foundational figure of the surname, the man who built the discipline of modern economics.