17 3. Marshall at Cambridge Carlo Cristiano * In the 50 years that followed his inaugural lecture in 1885, the place that Marshall occupied in Cambridge economics underwent a series of modifications. At every turn, the change reflected the evolution of the Marshallian school, from the publication of Principles, through the era of Pigou and the ‘years of high theory’ (Shackle 1967), to the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s. This chapter is an overview of this period from the standpoint of the reception of Marshall’s thought by his pupils and the second generation of Cambridge economists. CAMBRIDGE IN THE ‘AGE OF MARSHALL’ The years 1885–1914 are known as the ‘Age of Marshall’ (Jha 1973). This is also the period in which Marshall won his battle for the establishment of an independent economic Tripos (Tribe in this volume; Groenewegen 1988) and in which the Marshallian ‘old school’ of economics (Becattini 1990, 2006) was created, put in motion, and delivered into the hands of A.C. Pigou and a few other pupils. When Marshall was in direct control at Cambridge, the guidelines that he imposed gave centre stage to industrial economics, encouraged applied research, and banished pure theory nearly altogether. Becattini (ibid.) noticed that this choice was not obvious, for his school was filled with high-ranking mathematicians; yet Marshall actively impeded any digression in the direction of excessively abstract reasoning, and oriented his fellow workers towards more concrete issues. The circumstances of the day favoured such an approach. Many of the most highly-debated issues in British policy during this period, and especially those connected with fiscal policy and industrial relations, were a good opportunity for application of economic analysis, which, as Keynes would remind students in the introduction to the Cambridge economic handbooks, was intended ‘as an engine for the discovery of concrete truth’. As Whitaker (1990) has shown, however, the same circumstances also contributed to the definitive abandonment, in 1907, of the projected second volume of Principles, marking a watershed in Marshall’s authorial biography. From this date onwards, Marshall proceeded very slowly to