The Market as Moral Law: Providence, Starvation, and Liberal Empire

Abstract

A counter to Whig histories of economics which trace an abstract genealogy of economic ‘thought’ to nineteenth-century ‘classical liberalism’, this chapter presents a history of British political economy as a ‘moral science’ of unrestricted greed. The account is grounded in a historical context often ignored by standard histories of economic thought: the sovereign violence of the land appropriations which established Britain as a liberal Empire on a world scale. As attributable to the political economy of Smith and Ricardo as to Evangelical movement, the ‘moral science’ of ‘free trade’ presented economics as a science of the natural laws through which Providence unfolded as progress in world history; a precursor to the contemporary faith in infinite growth that justifies the neoliberal constitution of world order. This critique is developed through two case studies in ‘laissez-faire’ policy: the responses of colonial governors to the Irish famine of the 1840s, and to the even more severe famines of British India in the 1870s and 1890s, putatively ‘natural’ disasters which resulted in the deaths of millions of colonial subjects. Colonial territories functioned as experimental ‘laboratories of modernity’ from which political economists developed an account of the natural order of commercial society.