Of British Representational Practices in the Age of Capitalism/Territorialism (1743-1776)

Abstract

The issue addressed in this essay is how the notion of history was altered by the embedding of commerce into the discursive field of eighteenth-century Britain. Even though current eighteenth-century, and Enlightenment, studies draw attention to historiographic questions challenging traditional modes of periodization, the methods by which we acquire and organize knowledge, or the extent to which accounts of the eighteenth century have been driven by the imperatives of the times, this project argues that one historiographic issue that has been significantly underplayed is a different concept of history produced in eighteenth-century Britain by the fundamental operation of mercantile society, its logic of exchange, and the predominance of trade within it. David Hume and Adam Smith’s historiographic trajectory was obscured (and, ultimately, eliminated) by the scientific or materialist notion of history advanced in nineteenth-century historiography.