James Edwin Thorold Rogers

Rogers, James Edwin Thorold 

Born 1823, in West Meon, Hampshire; died Oct. 12, 1890, in Oxford. English historian and economist. Originator of the historical economic orientation in English historiography.

From 1859, Rogers was a professor of statistics and political economy at the University of London, and from 1862 to 1867 and 1888 to 1890, at Oxford University. In his political views he was a bourgeois radical. He was a member of Parliament from 1880 to 1886.

Rogers wrote many works on the economic and particularly the agrarian history of Great Britain. K. Marx, who had a great deal of respect for Rogers’ conscientiousness, made extensive use of his studies in Das Kapital. Rogers was one of the first to reveal several crucial aspects of England’s social development during the Middle Ages, including the evolution of the manor, the mass shift from the corvée to cash rent in the 14th century, the subsequent stratification of the peasantry, and the growth of pauperism during the Reformation. However, Rogers’ work was characterized by a tendency to gloss over the class antagonisms in English society.

Rogers stressed the paramount role of the economic factor in history, but in his conception of the historical process he did not transcend the limitations of positivist philosophy, with its idealist interpretation of economic evolution as the result of the gradual perfection of man’s spiritual nature. Rogers attributed decisive importance in the development of the economy not to production but to exchange and to money relations.

WORKS

History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vols. 1–7. Oxford, 1866–1902.
Economic Interpretation of History. London, 1888.
Industrial and Commercial History of England. London, 1892.
In Russian translation:
Istoriia truda i zarabotnoi platy ν Anglii s XIIIpo XIX vv. St. Petersburg, 1899.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vols. 23, 31, 38. (See Index of Names.)
Gutnova, E. V. “T. Rodzhers i vozniknovenie istoriko-ekonomicheskogo napravleniia ν angliiskoi medievistike vtoroi poloviny XIX v. (60-e-90-e gg.).” In the collection Srednie veka, issue 17. Moscow, 1960.
Gutnova, E. V. Istoriografiia istorii srednikh vekov. Moscow, 1974. (See Index of Names.)

L. I. GOL’MAN [22468–4]