Hostage to Fortune: Edward Chamberlin and the Reception of The Theory of Monopolistic Competition Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes Chamberlin’s Problem of Precedence In February 1933, Edward Chamberlin published The Theory of Monop- olistic Competition. The book was a revision of his Harvard PhD disser- tation, written between 1924 and 1926 under the guidance of Allyn Young and successfully defended in 1927. At the beginning of 1933, it seemed History of Political Economy 43:3 DOI 10.1215/00182702-1346896 Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press Correspondence may be addressed to Nahid Aslanbeigui, Department of Economics, Mon- mouth University, West Long Branch, NJ 07764 (e-mail: naslanbe@monmouth.edu); or to Guy Oakes, Jack T. Kvernland Professor, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ 07764 (e-mail: goakes@monmouth.edu). We gratefully acknowledge research support from the Busi- ness Council and the Jack T. Kvernland Chair of the Leon Hess Business School, Monmouth University, and helpful suggestions from Roger Sandilands and two anonymous referees. In this article we draw on materials in the following archives: the Edward Chamberlin Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Harvard University; the Joan Violet Robinson Papers, Modern Archives, King’s College, University of Cambridge; the Joseph Alois Schumpeter Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Harvard University; the Jacob Viner Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; and the Richard Ferdinand Kahn Papers, Modern Archives, King’s College, University of Cambridge. For permission to quote unpublished material, thanks are due to Monique Chamberlin Spalding (Chamberlin Papers, courtesy of Harvard University Archives), the Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge (unpublished writings of Joan Robinson copyright 2011), David Papineau (Kahn Papers), and Tony Thirlwall (Nicholas Kaldor Papers). Segments of this article were presented at the Cambridge Seminar in the History of Economic Analysis, Clare Hall, Cambridge Univer- sity, in February 2010.