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.

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.

[6] Samuelson also ran a seed crushing business, and in the mid-1890s he started a profit sharing scheme with his employees.

[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.