He attended Sandford Park School and then Trinity College Dublin, where he read commerce alongside economics and political science; he studied under George Alexander Duncan and Charles Bastable.
He then spent two years producing a PhD thesis on the Irish economist Mountifort Longfield, which he submitted in 1943.
He was appointed an assistant lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, in 1945; colleagues there included Duncan Black, Tom Wilson and Bruce Williams.
The seven volumes of Papers and Correspondence were published by the Royal Economic Society between 1972 and 1981; Black edited them all, the first with Rosamond Könekamp and the rest alone.
[8] He was the subject of a Festschrift: Contributions to the History of Economic Thought: Essays in Honour of R. D. C. Black, edited by A. Murphy and R. Predergast (2000).