(born Nov. 30, 1880, Calcutta, India—died Jan. 16, 1962, London, Eng.) English economic historian.
He was educated at Rugby School and at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his first major work, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). From 1913 he taught at the London School of Economics. An ardent socialist, he helped formulate the economic and moral viewpoint of the Labour Party in the 1920s and '30s. In his most influential book, The Acquisitive Society (1920), he argued that the acquisitiveness of capitalist society was a morally wrong motivating principle. His Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), which built on the work of Max Weber, also became a classic.
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