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Today the economic diagram is employed universally in teaching and research by professional economists. Yet the history of its construction shows that much that has been regarded as distinctive of twentieth-century visual culture was prefigured in the nineteenth. This paper will place the construction of the first economic diagrams by Alfred Marshall in the context both of contemporary visual technologies developed in other moral sciences, and of his wider theory of industrial production. The paper will argue that an understanding of the background to the historical graphs, constructed by the Cambridge political economist from the late 1860s onwards, will necessitate a revision of the narrative of modern visual reasoning, as recently advanced by Lev Manovich.

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Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the changing status of history within political economy. This article illustrates that claim by way of a survey of the place of history in the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall. It identifies a sea change in historical thought after the French Revolution, such that Smith's basic contrast of modern with ancient society was replaced in the thought of both Marx and Marshall by a contrast between the modern and the traditional, where the latter consisted of agrarian societies of one sort or another, distinguished according to their particular form of social bond and land ownership. But the discovery of human prehistory in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the historical presuppositions shared by Marx and Marshall, leading both to revise not only their earlier historical accounts but also their conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the economic. While the discovery of prehistory can be seen as returning Smith's ``primitives'' to the historiographical stage, it also played an important part in fostering the twentieth-century separation of economics from history.

In the last third of the nineteenth century an older model of folk migration was challenged and ultimately gave way to a new model of racial invasion. Where the first was associated with comparative philology and an evolutionary account of social institutions, the latter was associated with physiological ideas of race and a quasi-diffusionist idea of institutions. The debate began over the newly discovered pre-Roman prehistory of the British Isles, but was most bitterly fought over ethnological and agrarian interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Resolution of the debate saw a redefinition of the nature and scope of English history.