Prompted by reading Richard Overy's The Morbid Age, one of whose themes is the intense public interest in understanding the gloomy state of the world in the inter-war period, I dusted down an old copy of John A.Hobson's The Science of Wealth. Published in 1911 (by Williams and Norgate in London and Henry Holt in the US), it's a book I picked up when I was at university. Hobson is best known for his analysis of imperialism, which influenced Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin, and for his theory of 'under-consumption' which was cheerfully borrowed by Keynes.

My volume is one of the Home University Library, a series of short, accessible but serious minded analyses of current affairs aimed at the general public – a bit like the famous Left Book Club but without the ideological slant. Pigou wrote a volume about Unemployment, F.W.Hirst, then editor of The Economist one about the Stock Exchange. G.E.Moore contributed the volume on Ethics, Hilaire Belloc the one on the French Revolution, G.K.Chesterton wrote about The Victorian Age in Literature. Not only is the series impressive for this distinguished set of authors, but the book is also a delightful physical artefact – smaller than a modern paperback, easily pocket sized. It's in marvellous shape for a 99 year old item, with its good quality paper and stitched pages. (Once on holiday we rented a cottage from a bookbinder, by then an exotic craft like being a blacksmith or handloom weaver.)

Anyway, Hobson sets out a description of the way the economy as a whole functions. In those pre-macroeconomic times, he describes supply chains and market structures, and talks about the circulation of money and credit with a degree of specificity modern monetary economists would do well to note. The book highlights two industries as being of special importance in sophisticated economies: transport and finance (and I'm sure he'd include communications under the heading of transport were he writing today):

“As industry becomes more complex, materials and labour are drawn from more distant and numerous places to take part in more delicate and complex processes of co-operation, and the commercial working of the system depends more and more upon rapid and reliable information about their movements. For this reason transport is found in every civilized country to play a larger and more imposing part in industry.” Control of transport becomes a critical matter, he goes on, requiring the government to intervene to prevent its power over industry becoming 'despotic'.

As for finance, he describes it as even more 'authoritative' in its general control over industry. “A great banking crisis paralyses all industrial activities as surely and even more completely than a breakdown in the railway system.” Indeed.