Many readers of this first English translation of Jean Lescure's Des crises générales et périodiques de surproduction will have limited access to the two-volume French fifth edition, and even less so to the earlier editions of the work. A brief account of Lescure's revisions in each successive edition is a necessary beginning to any attempt to orient the reader toward appreciating Lescure's lifelong commitment to grappling with the issues he first raised in his groundbreaking and prize-winning doctoral thesis of 1906.

Lescure's doctoral thesis centred on the Crisis of 1900; the second edition (1910) contained the most information on the Crisis of 1907; the third (1923) presented the most thorough discussion of the crises before and shortly after the First World War; the fourth (1932) provided Lescure's first appraisal of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the first years of the global depression that followed it; and the fifth and final edition of 1938 gave a fuller account of the 1929–30 crisis and what would come to be known as the Great Depression. The fifth edition included a new section on the global recovery of 1933–37, which gave an account of the somewhat similar paths toward recovery followed by the major European states and the United States in the 1930s. Lescure also expanded the theoretical section with each new edition to include his criticism of the latest ‘doctrines’ and statistical methods, which were shaped not only by the changing course of events but also by the development of economics as a specialized discipline and the increasing number of statistical services that informed its research.

Incorporating new material on subsequent economic crises and including the latest statistical evidence and theoretical approaches entailed changing the balance between narrative and analysis, ultimately necessitating the reorganization of the work into two volumes. In effect, each successive edition enacts the conceptual model of crises that the early editions first described, with the aim of illustrating the analytical purchase of the author's ongoing theoretical and methodological commitments. The best-known modern example of the resulting intertextuality of successive editions can be found in Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (1978), which is now in its eighth edition, four of which appeared posthumously. There are more than superficial similarities in their methodological approaches to crises and in their conceptualizations of international economic relations.