Alfred Marshall was born on the 26th of July 1842 in Bermondsey, a district within London. His father William worked as a clerk and cashier at the Bank of England while his mother Rebecca inherited property from her butcher father Thomas Oliver.
Alfred Marshall served as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University from 1885 until retiring in 1908. He previously held appointments as first principal at University College Bristol and tutorial fellow at Balliol College Oxford before returning to Cambridge.
Alfred Marshall developed the scissors analysis combining demand and supply like two blades of a pair of scissors to replace the theory of value with the theory of price. He popularized use of supply and demand functions as tools for price determination discovered independently by Cournot and presented price elasticity of demand as an extension of these ideas.
Marshallian industrial districts refer to geographically clustered firms common in late nineteenth-century Britain that formed patterns based on high degrees of vertical and horizontal specialization. These districts featured small firms focusing on single functions within production chains that relied on market mechanisms for exchange to reduce transaction costs.
The first volume of Alfred Marshall's treatise appeared in 1890 to worldwide acclaim establishing him as a leading economist. He later published Industry and Trade in 1919 at age 77 followed by Money Credit and Commerce in 1923 which contained ideas stretching back half a century.