Abstract
Nicholas Barbon’s A discourse of trade presents, in its construction, substance, and rhetoric, an early outline of a new science of the legislator for the new politics of commerce. Barbon drew together economic and political arguments, applying insights from the latter to a new understanding of the political potential of the former. His accounts of the aspect of infinity in economic growth, his attack on analogical theorizing, and his endorsement of prodigality all served a larger political purpose. While he is primarily remembered for these individual economic contributions, it is the larger project, the envisioning of a new politics of commerce and commercial empires that marks out his A discourse of trade as groundbreaking. Almost a century before Adam Smith’s famous definition of economics as a branch in the larger science of the legislator, Barbon offered an early account of the vital connection between economic thought, political philosophy, and statecraft.
Highlights
Nicholas Barbon’s A discourse of trade presents, in its construction, substance, and rhetoric, an early outline of a new science of the legislator for the new politics of commerce
In The prince, Machiavelli suggests only that social and political location colors how we evaluate the actions of an individual, especially a prince
The essay begins with Machiavelli and Livy, whose vision, lacking an account of trade, remains incomplete
Summary
Barbon wrote political theory for the emerging age of commerce. He sought to understand the moral, political, and economic changes that occur as a result of commerce’s ever increasing sweep. In the first section of A discourse of trade, Barbon asserts that the principles which inform the economic conduct of individuals are different from, even at odds with, the principles that inform the economic conduct of nations He illustrates this claim by contrasting the annual expenditures of an individual and a state. Its avoidance, rests on a fundamental difference in the character of their respective resources This sheweth a Mistake of Mr Munn, in his Discourse of Trade, who commends Parsimony, Frugality, and Sumptuary Laws, as the means to make an Nation Rich; and uses and an Argument, from a Simile, supposing a Man to have 1000 l. Like Machiavelli’s political recovery of history, Barbon’s economics provides new insights into the fuller nature of the political Barbon values this new field of inquiry for quintessentially Machiavellian reasons. A discourse of trade possesses a larger purpose than disproving the confining economic moralism of Thomas Mun; it entails adding economics to the Machiavellian account of politics.
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