National Network for Equitable Library Service

Principles of Economics is a leading economics textbook by Alfred Marshall (1842-1924). Marshall began writing the treatise in 1881 and he spent much of the next decade at work on it. His plan for the work gradually extended to a two-volume compilation on the whole of economic thought; the first volume was published in 1890 to worldwide acclaim that established him as one of the leading economists of his time. It brought the ideas of supply and demand, of marginal utility and of the costs of production into a coherent whole, and became the dominant economic textbook in England for a long period.