Greatness often comes from the most unlikely corners. Chi-Yuen Wu began this treatise while a student at LSE during the Great Depression, then returning to an anxious China, on the verge of war, and in the throes of economic instability, finished it from the remoteness of Western China after being displaced from his home.
Wu looked at the history of economic thought as a way to explain what was happening and why. Lionel Robbins, in the Preface, says “Few, can read his penetrating commentaries without feeling that he has added substantially to knowledge, both in his elucidations and in his presentation of the general perspective of development.”
Murray Rothbard considered Outlines of International Price Theories to be a seminal contribution to the theory of price and international trade.