History of the Laboratory of Political Economy
The Laboratory of Political Economy was founded at the beginning of the 1893-94 academic year by Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis (1844-1901), who had been professor of political economy at the University of Turin since 1878. At the beginning the Laboratory was as a separate branch with a special arrangement of the political economy section of the Institute for Legal and Political Exercises of the Faculty of Law.
Subsequently, it was associated with the Reale Museo Industriale di Torino, a complement to the Scuola d'Applicazione per Ingegneri - the institutions that, merged in 1906, gave rise to the Polytechnic of Torino. Thanks to public and private funding, the Laboratory was able to provide itself with a library, the holdings of which have steadily expanded over time, today constituting one of the most important Italian library collections in economics.
Inspired in its organisation by the Seminaries of State Science of Germany, the Social Museum of Paris, the London School of Economics, and the Economic Colleges of the United States of America' the Laboratory intended 'to promote and facilitate the scientific study of the phenomena of economic life and of the issues that relate to it.'
Since the beginning the Laboratory was very active: the scientific researches of students and members - initially mainly on applied economics, with a focus on the issues of labour, emigration, industry and local finance - were publicly presented and discussed in seminar form.
