Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education. The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in all four of these "interrelated roles".

In one of the truly great classics of twentieth-century political economy, R. H. Tawney addresses the question of how religion has affected social and economic practices. He does this by a relentless tracking of the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages.