Biography

James Bonar (1852-1941), civil servant and economist, was educated at Glasgow Academy from the age of ten to fifteen. He then joined Glasgow University, where he graduated MA in 1874 with first-class honours in mental philosophy. Bonar spent short periods at the universities of Edinburgh, Leipzig, and Tübingen, before proceeding with a Snell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in October 1873. There he took up fencing and skating, and in 1877 obtained a first-class degree in Greats. In 1881, after a year as a private tutor in Oxford, he was appointed a junior examiner in the civil service commission, and fourteen years later he became a senior examiner. In 1890 he was one of the founders of what became the Royal Economic Society, which in 1930 elected him as a vice-president. In 1898 he was president of the economics section of the British Association. An honorary member of the Political Economy Club, he served numerous terms of office as vice-president of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1907 he accepted the post of deputy master of the Ottawa branch of the Royal Mint. In 1929 Bonar delivered the Newmarch lectures at the University of London, published in 1931 as Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young. He was elected FBA in 1930 and a foreign member of the Reale Accademia dei Lincei in 1932. Having been granted the honorary degree of LLD in 1887 at the early age of thirty-four, he was made honorary LittD of the University of Cambridge in 1935 as part of the centenary celebrations of Malthus, a Cambridge graduate.

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