This second essay in memory of the exemplary historian of economics and Marshall scholar Tiziano Rafaelli is devoted to Marshall’s Red Book. It is concerned with Marshall’s struggle to understand history in its manifold details – what John Stuart Mill referred to as «facts in the concrete». Towards the end of his life, Marshall refected on «his attitude towards the analytical and the historic sides of economic study». He described his relation to empirical statistics from the days of his earliest experience with economics as one of wonder. He felt himself as «a wanderer in the land of dry facts», struggling with the relation of analytical theory to data. This essay traces Marshall’s attitude towards empirical statistics back to 1875, when he began
drawing empirical diagrams in a red hard-backed folio volume of some 300 pages. Marshall used this volume for his lectures in Bristol and then in Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes in combination with spectacular large charts of statistics which he pinned on the wall of the lecture room. Marshall’s Red Book was not only important for his lectures, but also played a crucial role in his attitude to and understanding of empirical statistics and their connection to economic theory. I discuss Marshall’s Red Book against Tiziano Rafaelli’s work on Marshall’s evolutionary economics, drawing a comparison between Jevons’s and Marshall’s struggles with facts in the concrete.