Review: Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century

Other| September 01 1994 Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in Colonial Ireland Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley London: Routledge, 1992. 160 pp. $68.50. W. D. Sockwell W. D. Sockwell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1994) 26 (3): 521–523. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-26-3-521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation W. D. Sockwell; Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in Colonial Ireland. History of Political Economy 1 September 1994; 26 (3): 521–523. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-26-3-521 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of Political Economy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1994 by Duke University Press1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley. Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. 1992. Pp. xiv, 208. $68.50. - Volume 25 Issue 2

Political economy and colonial Ireland: the propagation and ideological function of economic discourse in the nineteenth century. By Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley. Pp xiv, 208, London: Routledge. 1992. £35.

Book Review: Political Economy and Colonial Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

`I believe that next to good Religious education, a sound knowledge of Political Economy would tend as much to tranquilize this country, if not more, than any other branch of knowledge that can be taught in schools.' - Cork Schools Inspector, 1853 In a nineteenth century Ireland that was divided socially, economically, politically and denominationally, consensus was sought in the new discipline of political economy, which claimed to be scientifically impartial and to transcend all divisions. The authors explore the ideological mission of political economy, and the reasons for the failure of that mission in the wake of the crisis induced by the great famine of 1846/47.

Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind

T. A. Boylan and T. P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland-The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1992, xiv+208p.

Introduction: Edmund Burke and the colonial sublime Part I. The Politics of Pain: 1. 'This King of Terrors' Edmund Burke and the aesthetics of executions 2. Philoctetes and colonial Ireland: the wounded body as national narrative Part II. Sympathy and the Sublime 3. The sympathetic sublime: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and the politics of pain 4. Did Edmund Burke cause the great Famine? Political economy and colonialism Part III. Colonialism and Enlightenment: 5. 'Tranquillity tinged with terror': the sublime and agrarian insurgency 6. Burke and colonialism: the enlightenment and cultural diversity Part IV. Progress and Primitivism: 7. 'Subtilised into savages': Burke, progress and primitivism 8. 'The return of the native': The United Irishmen, culture and colonialism.

This chapter returns to the lessons of the eighteenth century in discussing risk, in particular exploring the role of liberalism in early modern Britain's preoccupation with risk. Preoccupation with uncertainty, a view of risk as hazard, and profound feelings of insecurity marked eighteenth-century efforts to understand the present and imagine the future. While this perspective, which frequently elides the difference between risk and loss, would go on to find firmer footing in the nineteenth century, it gained a toehold in the eighteenth century, as shown by work on probability, risk, and political economy. The chapter also argues that the in this study who accept uncertainty are also the ones who are able to embrace and develop a notion of risk as central to politics and political economy.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics? Nineteenth Century Crime Statistics for England and Wales as an Historical Source

1. Economic Thought and Policy in Nineteenth Century Less Developed Europe: Issues and Aspects of their Interaction 2. Economic Theory and Economic Development in Denmark, 1849-1914 3. Norwegian Economic Policy and Economic Thought in the Nineteenth Century: A Survey 4. The Influence of the German Historical School in Finnish Economic Thought Around the Turn of the Century 5. B. N. Chicherin: Some Liberal Aspects on the Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia 6. Liberal Ideas and Slavonic Community: Tomasz Potocki's Programme for Poland 7. Resisting Liberalism: Theorizing Backwardness and Development in Romania before 1914 8. Ottoman Economic Thought and Economic Policy in Transition: Re-thinking the Nineteenth Century 9. Aspects of Economic Thought and Policy in Serbia, 1850-1900 10. Monetary Theory and Policy in a European Backward Century: The Case of Nineteenth Century Greece 11. Political Economy in Italy: Competition and Civil Society in the Milanese School, 1750-1850 12. How Are We to Become Like Them? Political Economy as a Political Agenda in Early Nineteenth Century Portugal 13. Friedrich List and Oliveira Marecca: Some Odd Coincidences 14. The Western Periphery: Irish Agriculture and Irish Political Economy in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Specific areas are highlighted in which demography can be shown to have benefited the conduct of sociological research, and the sociology departments in Canadian universities housing demography programs and courses from the 1960s. These specific areas include: demography's empirical, statistical and methodological features, its international reach, its interdisciplinary dimension, its planning and policy-making realms, and lastly, the initiatives taken to enhance demography's role as a national discipline in Canada. Despite the effects of the 1990s economic recession and what appeared to be a drop in student interest, it is to be hoped that demography will continue to inform Canada's social sciences in general and sociology in particular as the twenty-first century unfolds. Resume: Certaines composantes specifiques de la demographie, lorsque mises en evidence, servent a demontrer combien la demographie a ete benefique aux recherches sociologiques et aux departements de des universites canadiennes qui, depuis les annees soixante, offrent des programmes et des cours en demographie. Ces composantes comprennent: les aspects empiriques, statistiques et methodologiques de la demographie, sa portee intemationale, sa dimension inter-disciplinaire, son influence sur l'elaboration et la mise en oeuvre de politiques et, finalement, les initiatives visant a promouvoir le role de la demographie comme discipline nationate au Canada. -- Malgre les effets de la recession economique des annees quatre-vingt-dix et une diminution apparente d'interet chez les etudiants, il est a souhaiter que la demographie continue d'alimenter les sciences sociales canadiennes en general et la en particulier au cours du vingt et unieme siecle. The more remote and recent past. L'histoire d'une discipline en dit souvent beaucoup plus sur la nature qu'un long discours (Leridon et Toulemon, 1997, 1). These days, it is a truism to say that in order to see the future clearly, we must be knowledgeable about the past. [2] But in aiming for clarity about the future, how far back in the past must we go? Demography and its connections with sociology in twentieth century Canada is a subject focussed on the recent past, the proverbial tip of the iceberg. To discern the legacy of the last century's events and patterns, we must reach further back in the past for both fields ... to first origins, to pioneers' earliest investigations and discoveries, to the predisciplinary era, and to the corresponding history and evolution of related fields like statistics and political economy, all of which take us back to the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Information from that more remote past tells us that the history of demography in all important respects -- origin, earliest pioneers, data, methods -- is inextricably interwoven with the history of statistics. Long before they were known as such, both demography and statistics existed in fact and evolved in practice, within the context of political arithmetic, which was born in the mid-seventeenth century, about one hundred and seventy-five years before sociology appeared on the scene. [3] Demography is historically older than sociology; and the interdependence of demography and statistics from the mid-seventeenth century stands in sharp contrast to demography's much weaker relationship with sociologie when the latter first appeared in 1839, as Auguste Comte's positive science of society. Comte's dislike and distrust of statistics has been well documented. Despite Quetelet's work in the nineteenth century, and later, that of scholars like Durkheim and Halbwachs, early twentieth-century sociologists did not seem particularly drawn to their population and statistical interests, nor interested in pursuing their approach (Nam, 1982). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demography had finally expanded beyond its initial, early focus on deaths (mortality), to include the study of births (fertility), population movement (internal and international migration) and vertical or social mobility, and, thanks to Lotka, the analytic relations between the fertility and mortality components and population structure. …

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British political economists invented the “doctrine of rent” to explain how the limited powers of the soil are turned into the returns of property ownership. “Rendering Empire” is a literary history of this political economic concept. It shows how writers of the British romantic period both contributed and responded to a new conception of nature and value that arose from a series of crises in Britain’s domestic and colonial territories. Whereas eighteenth-century sciences of wealth had conceived value to be rooted in nature’s providential gifts, the classical political economists of the nineteenth century saw rent as a product of nature’s declining capacity to sustain human communities. Reading across the archives of Romantic literature and the political economy of imperialism, I argue that Britain’s transition from an empire of “improvement” to a global rent-collector coincided with this broad shift in the relationship between nature and value. My title “Rendering Empire” points to the representational and poetic implications imbedded in the word “rent,” which derives from the Latin “reditus” to signify both a profitable “return” and a tributary “rendering.” As a category of economic surplus that is not simply made, but rendered from a tenant to an owner of land, rent both activates and re-inscribes a relationship of power across a hierarchy of property and possession. As such, it reveals how the creation of value depends on the impositions of law over the natural powers of the land. “Rendering Empire” shows how romantic-era writings in and about Britain’s agrarian peripheries trace the complex dynamics of natural and imperial power that give rise to rent. In doing so, these texts reimagine the political, ecological, and epistemological forms embedded in landed property. I argue that the global-regional literatures of British romanticism innovated received literary genres—especially romance—in order to demonstrate the contradictions of liberal political economy when applied to Britain’s colonial territories. Literary scholars have demonstrated the role of commerce and labor in the development of novelistic and poetic form, but they have neglected the force of landed property on the literary imagination. In focusing on the third term of classical political economy’s tripartite conception of wealth (stock, wages, and rent), “Rendering Empire” shows how the writing of imperial rent demanded a radical reinterpretation of the genre of romance. Romance had been theorized during the enlightenment as a genre rooted in the landed economies of ancient feudalism. Whereas the popular appeal of eighteenth-century gothic romance novels derived from the window they were supposed to provide into ancient manners, I show how the key tropes of romance were redeployed after the 1790s in narratives of the colonial periphery, in ways that disordered progressivist notions of civilizational development rooted in the improvement of the land. If romance is the preeminent genre of the ruin, I argue that its “romantic” displacement throughout the spaces of imperial rent reveal empire as a system that turns ruination into value. The four chapters of “Rendering “Empire” are arranged geographically, each focusing on a distinct region of liberal-imperial transformation (Ireland, America, the West Indies, and India). Chapter One, “Development, Romance, and the Fiction of Feudalism,” looks at how Maria Edgeworth’s treatment of absentee landlordism in her Irish Tales upsets the distinction put forward in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations between “natural” and “unnatural” development. Chapter Two, “The Geography of Atlantic Capital and the Romance of Accumulation,” reads William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) with John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) to show how the figurative ideal of America as natural ground of Republican virtue was challenged by a theoretical and poetic linkage between European enclosure and frontier slavery. In Chapter Three, “Annihilated Property: Slavery and Reproduction After Abolition,” James Montgomery’s The West Indies (1809), Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor (1815-19/1834), and Cynric Williams Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) reveal the decline of West Indian property following the Slave-Trade Abolition Act (1807) as the result of an incompatibility between tropical fecundity (of land and of slaves) and liberal political economy. Chapter Four, “Bare Possession: Property and History in a Liberal Empire,” pairs James Mill’s History of British India (1817) with Walter Scott’s The Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) to explore how a liberal-imperial conception of sovereignty (premised not on the “romance of property” but on the global management of scarcity and subsistence) demands the invention of new genres of historical fiction.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)