Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, worked out the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to mid-Victorian times. Beyond scholarship, his life subsumed a longer arc: the quest for an equitable South Africa in his youth, and its resumption in his final years. The economics that appealed to Feinstein were those of Karl Marx, and he submitted an honours dissertation on the labour theory of value. He was attracted to the University of Cambridge by the presence there of the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and the two remained close for...

Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, worked out the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to mid-Victorian times. Beyond scholarship, his life subsumed a longer arc: the quest for an equitable South Africa in his youth, and its resumption in his final years. The economics that appealed to Feinstein were those of Karl Marx, and he submitted an honours dissertation on the labour theory of value. He was attracted to the University of Cambridge by the presence there of the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, and the two remained close for years afterwards. In 1958, Feinstein took a research position in Cambridge's Department of Applied Economics, where he adapted national income series for immediate use. In 1963, he became an assistant university lecturer in economic history, and fellow and director of studies in economics at Clare College. Feinstein published a book entitled National Income towards the end of the heroic phase of historical national accounting.