The Kyoto University Economic Review (1926-44) as importer and exporter of economic ideas: Bringing Lausanne, Cambridge, Vienna and marx to Japan

Robert W. Dimand and Masazumi Wakatabe1 10.1 INTRODUCTION The Kyoto University Economic Review (KUER) provided an outlet for English (and occasionally German) translations of articles by members of the Economics Department of Kyoto Imperial University, one of the two interwar Japanese imperial universities that had independent economics departments. Published twice a year from 1926 and then quarterly from 1939 until publication was suspended in 1944 (resumed 1950), it was based on translations of articles from a monthly scholarly journal in Japanese, Keizai Ronso (founded in 1915, superceding earlier, short-lived Kyoto academic journals), which gave considerable attention to the Western economic tradition, publishing substantial supplements to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Robert Malthus in 1916 and the bicentenary of Adam Smith’s birth in 1923.2 The Review was the first, and except for short-lived journals published by the Osaka College of Commerce from 1933 to 1937 and by the Kobe College of Commerce from 1938 to 1942, the only foreign-language economics journal in interwar Japan. It was also the first English-language economics journal founded, written and published by people whose native language was not English, followed a year later by the Chinese Economic Journal (founded in 1927: see Trescott, 2007). The Indian Journal of Economics began publication in 1916, but its founding editors, both at the University of Allahabad, were British: H. Stanley Jevons (son of William Stanley Jevons) and C.D. Thomson. Beginning with its 73rd volume in 2004, the Kyoto University Economic Review changed its name to….