James Samuelson (April 1829-14 April 1918) was a Liverpool industrialist, magazine founder and editor, barrister of the Middle Temple and prolific British non-fiction author known for his works on the history of the Balkans and on social and philosophical topics.

James Samuelson was born in Liverpool in 1829^[1] to Samuel and Sarah Samuelson.^[2] His older brother, Bernhard Samuelson, became a Member of Parliament.

Samuelson's early career was as a science teacher and writer on microscopy about which he published several books in 1860. In 1861 he founded the quarterly Popular Science Review which he sold to the medical writer Henry Lawson in 1864. He then immediately co-founded and edited with William Crookes the more academic Quarterly Journal of Science which was innovative in breaking with the tradition of anonymous content of similar journals. This he sold to Crookes in 1870.^[3]

Around this time he decided to study law and became a barrister of the Middle Temple. He became increasingly involved with social and political topics and wrote books on The German Working Man (1869) and Work, Wages, and the Profits of Capital (1872), and continued to produce works on labour and social topics such as temperance for the rest of his life. In 1869, he was the president of the Liverpool Operative Trades Hall.^[4] In 1882, he was living at Claughton, Birkenhead.^[5]

Samuelson stood three times for Parliament, as a Liberal-Labour candidate: in Birkenhead at the 1874 general election, and in Liverpool Kirkdale at the 1885 general election, and in East Renfrewshire at the 1886 general election, taking third place on each occasion.^[6]

Samuelson also ran a seed crushing business, and in the mid-1890s he started a profit sharing scheme with his employees.^[6] In 1890, he launched Subjects of the Day, which included commentary on current affairs and whose contributors included William Gladstone, but it was closed by the publishers after only four issues.^[3]

Samuelson died in 1918.^[3] In 2018 it was discovered that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897), had consulted a copy of Samuelson's Roumania Past and Present (1882) in the London Library as research when writing his book.^[7]