Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order. By John Shovlin

Abstract

John Shovlin presents a significantly researched, clearly written work on a question of pressing actuality and historiographical durability: commercial relations between France and England. Having written previously on noble culture in Ancien Régime France, in which context he explored the meaning and operation of ‘court capitalism’ (The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), he turns here to a broader geopolitical and historiographical question: ‘the political competition for commercial wealth in Franco-British relations’. Shovlin argues trade was ‘strategic’, precisely because commercial wealth was central to both state power and the ‘balance of power’ between states (pp. 26–27). Drawing on the insights of post-revisionist French Revolutionary historiography, this book shows that ‘capitalism’ provided the intellectual framework of ‘political economy’ for ‘states and chartered companies and the officials who managed them’ (p. 29). Moreover, underscoring the enduring influence of John Brewer’s work on the Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin, 1989), the book demonstrates how concern for English state power framed how social and political elites perceived and pursued their economic interest. The book is not a narrative of trade treaties or trade relations, though the treaties of 1713 and 1786 are discussed in detail. It is also not a history of the major trading companies, though the South Sea Company, the East India Company, and the Compagnie des Indes all figure prominently. Rather than a narrative or institutional history, the book is structured as a series of thematic essays. This choice necessarily involves some repetition and can result in some confusion for the non-specialist reader, which is mitigated by capsule biographies and a timeline of events in the preface. The length of the text may also have guided the decision, presumably of the publisher, to include only a select bibliography, referencing all primary sources solely in the endnotes. The benefit of the author’s strategy is the detailed, and original, analysis Shovlin offers of specific concepts in eighteenth-century political culture, including mercantilism, physiocracy, Law’s system, the asiento, the exclusif, American free ports, and, above all, free trade. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that concepts of market development and competition were not incompatible, for wholesale traders, commercial financiers, and government officials, with concepts of restraint, stability, and peace. Shovlin thereby offers us a much more contextualized and subtle understanding of eighteenth-century free-trade advocacy. Yet, the most profound lesson Shovlin’s book may teach us is implicit: how little concern policy-makers had for retail consumers. For all their engaged discussion of free ports, public debt, and international peace, the sources appear to mention retail sugar prices only in passing, and the price of wheat, bread, or tea not at all. Likewise, outside of their efforts to obtain and retain the right to profit from enslavement, his sources show little interest in fluctuations in wages or consumer purchasing power. One could almost imagine them assuring their respective political constituencies that free-trade negotiations would readily produce ‘oven-ready’ agreements, which in turn would lead their countries to ‘sunlit uplands’.