Raymond de Roover
economic historian
Raymond Adrien Marie de Roover (August 28, 1904 – March 18, 1972) was an economic historian of medieval Europe, whose scholarship explained why Scholastic economic thought is best understood as a precursor of, and wholly compatible with, classical economic thought. In contrast, many mid-20th-century economic historians, such as R.H. Tawney, taught that Karl Marx was the last and greatest of the Scholastic economists.
Life
De Roover was born in Antwerp on 28 August 1904. He studied commercial and financial science at the Higher Institute of Commerce Saint-Ignace (the origin of the University of Antwerp) and began working as a bookkeeper while spending his free time studying the history of bookkeeping. In 1928 he published a study of Jan Ympijn, who had written the first Flemish treatise on double-entry bookkeeping (published 1543). In 1929 he came across the accounts of the exchange merchants Colaert van Marke and Willem Ruweel in Bruges city archives, their records having been sequestered by the city at their bankruptcy in 1369. This led to a number of publications, including a 1937 article in Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.
In 1936 De Roover married the American historian Florence Edler, and emigrated to the United States. He studied for a Master of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1938, and in 1943 obtained a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. In 1940 he was naturalised as a US citizen.
The public source identifies “Raymond de Roover” as economic historian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Raymond, Roover and economic.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q254113. VIAF identifies the subject as 113935169. The Library of Congress control number is no97010225. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1972, 1928 and 1543.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raymond de Roover” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.