Introduction: Roads to Economic Knowledge: The Epistemic Virtues of Travel across the History of Thought.

The two last substantive essays by Maria Bach and by Mauro Boianovsky and Gerardo Serra deal with the expectations of the Indian political economist Romesh Chunder Dutt and the well-known British economist Joan Robinson that were challenged on their respective travels westward and eastward. In order to examine the historical relations between travel and economic knowledge, we, as editors of this special issue, decided in 2019 to organize a conference at the University of Lausanne to contribute to a growing literature in the history and philosophy of economics that examines the manifold relations between economists, their travels, and the development of the economic discipline.[1] A master course on the international diffusion of economic ideas at the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Lausanne, for which Harro Maas consulted Mauro Boianovsky and some of the contributors to this special issue, was the direct impetus for a dedicated conference. Robinson - the only woman economist discussed in this special issue - traveled to China from the 1950s to the 1970s to study the Chinese socialist economy and signal her support for an economic regime that raised extensive controversy and criticism not only in Western states, but also among many of her economist colleagues and in the end also by herself. In contrast, secretary of the Anti-Corn Law League, William Cooke Taylor, strengthened the bad reputation of economists' travel by evoking the rhetoric of the quintessential travel format of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the I Grand Tour i , in a series of letters addressed to Richard Whately on his firsthand observations on the factory system in Lancashire. [Extracted from the article]