author
Gilbert Slater
1864–1938
An English economist and social reformer, he wrote with unusual range—moving from the English countryside to the village economies of South India. His work is especially remembered for close studies of poverty, rural life, and social change.
1 Audiobook
The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields
by Gilbert Slater
About the author
Born in Plymouth in 1864, he became one of the early scholars of economics in Britain and was among the first doctoral students at the London School of Economics. He later served as Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1909 to 1915.
In 1915 he went to India to become the first Professor of Economics at the University of Madras and led its new economics department. There he helped carry out detailed surveys of villages in the Madras Presidency, work that fed into Some South Indian Villages and reflected his practical interest in poverty, rural development, and everyday economic life.
He was also known as a social reformer and as a writer with broad interests, including English social history and Dravidian culture. Gilbert Slater died in Oxford in 1938.