Volume I contains a biographical study of John Rae, a brilliant economist and scholar who lived in Canada for a period in the early part of the nineteenth century, an analysis of Rae's contributions to economics, and a collection of his articles and essays on a variety of topics. These miscellaneous writings, many of which originally appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, reveal the broad range of his intellectual interests as well as his polemic and literary skill. Volume II is a reprint of Rae's book Statement of New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy which was originally published in Boston in 1834. As a result of the reissue of this book, which has been scarce for some years, modern students of economics will be better able to appreciate Rae's fundamental contribution to the development of economic thought, particularly the theory of capital.

Much of Rae's analysis of economic development and behaviour was based on a first-hand knowledge of the Canadian economy in the early nineteenth century, but his theory has a surprisingly modern flavour, and is completely relevant to the problems of primitive or emerging economies today. Rae, personally, has been a neglected and obscure figure and one of the main objects of this work is to throw additional light on his career. There were a number of gloomy and disappointing episodes in his life, but, despite them, his devotion to scholarly pursuits remained unimpaired, and his literary output continued throughout his life.

This work should appeal to all those interested in the history of ideas, particularly to those concerned with the economic, political and religious controversies of the first half of the nineteenth century. For his contributions to economic theory John Rae is entitled to a place in the first rank of economists anywhere in the world, and for this reason he deserves the attention of all students of economics and sociology. His work is sprinkled with profound insights into human behaviour and, in addition, he displays a literary style which has seldom been surpassed in the literature of economics.

R. Warren James (1916-2004) was a graduate of the University of Toronto and of the University of Chicago. He was employed as a civil servant in various government departments in Ottawa. He was appointed Chief Secretary of the Department of National Defence in 1961.

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John Rae was a Scottish doctor and explorer born on September 30, 1813, in Orkney. As a child, he enjoyed sailing, climbing, hunting, and fishing—skills that would serve him well in his future exploits. In 1833, shortly after graduating from medical school, Rae was appointed surgeon of the Prince of Wales, a Hudson's Bay Company ship bound for Moose Factory, Ontario, where he remained for the next ten years. He had great respect for the peoples native to northern Canada and adopted many of their survival skills. He learned to hunt caribou, store meat, construct shelter, and walk using snowshoes. He was particularly known for this last skill, once walking 1,200 miles in snowshoes through winter forest in order to learn how to survey, earning him the Inuit nickname Aglooka, "he who takes long strides."

Rae embarked on his first expedition in 1846. Over the next decade, he explored much of northern Canada's coastline and, in fact, discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage. However, his achievements have gone largely unrecognized due to the discovery he made in 1854. While exploring the Boothia Peninsula, Rae obtained the first information about the fate of the Franklin expedition, which had been missing since 1845. He met a group Inuit who claimed to have seen the missing men four years earlier. Through their reports, Rae concluded that the last survivors of the Franklin expedition had resorted to cannibalism, before perishing in 1850. Upon his return to England, he was heavily criticized by Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, and the author Charles Dickens, and shunned by the British establishment.

John Rae retired from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1856 but retained his love of exploration. In 1860, he was hired to explore Iceland and Greenland in an effort to establish a telegraph line to America. And in 1884, at the age of seventy-one, he was hired by the HBC to survey another telegraph route, in the west of Canada, from Red River to Victoria.

John Rae died in London on July 22, 1893. He was the only major explorer of his time not to receive a knighthood.

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