Economics was called political economy until the name quietly flipped around 1910
For most of its history the study of money, markets and trade went by the name political economy. Book-frequency data show plain economics overtaking the older label around 1910 and becoming the standard name by 1920, a change that marked a deeper split in how the subject was done.
The root word is domestic. The Greek oikonomikos described running a household or family estate, and political economy scaled that idea up to a whole state, covering its production, trade, taxes and food supply. The French phrase économie politique first appeared in 1615, in a treatise by the soldier-economist Antoine de Montchrétien. Adam Smith later framed the subject as part of the science of a statesman, meant to supply income for both the people and the government.
Credit for founding it is disputed. British names such as Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo usually get top billing, but the French physiocrats, including François Quesnay and Turgot, came first. Some scholars reach back further still, to the 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddimah linked prosperity to people's efforts on their own behalf. Universities caught on in the 18th century: the first professorship was created at Naples in 1754 for Antonio Genovesi, Vienna followed in 1763, and Malthus became England's first professor of the subject in 1805, at the East India Company's college.
The rename came with mathematics. William Stanley Jevons, whose marginal utility theory sparked what became known as the marginal revolution, pushed for the shorter word economics, hoping it would become the recognised name of a science. Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics called the older term narrower. Critics such as Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine argue the shift stripped the field of its social and historical context, separating it from the other social sciences just as political science was also breaking away.
The old name survived by changing meaning. Political economy now labels the interdisciplinary study of how states and institutions shape markets and how wealth and business interests shape politics in return, with branches that compare countries or examine global ties.
Source: Political economy
