Contextual political economy, not Whig economics
主张用情境政治经济学方法研究经济思想史，强调政治经济学家的实际问题解决努力，而非仅关注分析技术进步；并指出两位意大利学者早在18世纪前就理论化了资本主义增长的基本特征，同时将殖民主义和帝国主义置于资本主义发展的核心。
The paper has three objectives. First, it seeks to resuscitate a methodology of the history of economic thought that takes account of the problem-solving efforts of political economists rather than concentrating entirely on the putative advances in techniques of analysis, detaching them from their political and social context. Second, it seeks to establish the priority of two Italian savants in theorising some basic features of capitalist growth long before its prime movers had been conceptualised in the eighteenth century. Third, it puts colonialism and imperialism as the ever-present components of capitalist development on centre stage. Contextual political economy would be a study of the capitalist system as it has really operated, i.e. as a system characterised by enormous turbulence superimposed on growth, in which formal and informal colonialism and speculation have played major roles.