Charles Davenant Research Articles

Paris’s Choice (1670) by Charles Davenant: A Seventeenth-Century Play Preserved in a University Manuscript Miscellany

The purpose of this article is to analyse and discuss a seventeenth-century University play, Paris’s choice by Charles Davenant, and provide bibliographical information about the only manuscript copy extant. The piece has been preserved in a miscellany of poems and songs, MS Rawlinson poetical 84, held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Based on its contents, the miscellany seems to have been compiled at New College, Oxford, and it may have been originated by a member of the Paulet family. The manuscript then came into the possession of an Oxford student named Giles Frampton, who was at Balliol College at the same time as Charles Davenant. The manuscript play is preceded by a sort of title-page, featuring a cast of actors and the date 1670, which might be the date of the original performance. Whereas the MS Rawlinson poet. 84 has drawn the interest of some scholars, Paris’s choice has hitherto received minor attention. Thus, this paper contains a detailed description of the miscellany, a discussion of its compilation and ownership, the play’s context of composition and stage history and a semi-diplomatic transcription of the play-text. My study is intended to contribute to our knowledge of Charles Davenant’s literary production and will also be relevant to scholars working on the contents of the miscellany or on university amateur drama.

The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in Charles Davenant’s An Essay Upon The Ballance of Power (1701)

In the 17th century – especially in the period after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) – more and more treatises were published about the European balance of power, which clearly appeared against the concept of universal monarchy (monarchia universalis) by this time. The balance of power principle became a prominent element of 18th-century state politics and political journalism, as well as one of the key concepts of the emerging theory of interstate relations. The term became part of the official language of diplomacy with the Peace of Utrecht (1713), becoming part not only of political thought, but also of the official political practice, and developed into one of the fundamental milestones of English foreign policy and political thought in the 18th centuries. This paper analyses the contemporary incorporation of the balance of power concept into English political thought with the analysis of English economist and political writér Charles Davenant’s (1656–1714) An Essay Upon The Ballance of Power (1701). The analysis is trying to point out how the principle of balance of power began to play an increasingly important role in European great power politics as well as in English domestic and foreign policy in the decades before the Peace of Utrecht (1713), and how Charles Davenant’s political pamphlet can fit in this context.

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

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

Charles Davenant on the Accession of Strangers

Population and Development ReviewVolume 47, Issue 4 p. 1207-1210 ARCHIVES Charles Davenant on the Accession of Strangers First published: 29 November 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12459Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume47, Issue4December 2021Pages 1207-1210 RelatedInformation

Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age by William Deringer

Reviewed by: Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age by William Deringer Lina Weber William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age ( Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 445. $45.00 cloth. In Calculated Values, William Deringer tells the story of how numbers gained in authority and became considered to be disinterested and reliable tools to know about society. The book traces the origins of the "Quantitative Age" to England and Britain after the Glorious Revolution. Although numbers had been regarded with suspicion in the seventeenth century, Deringer notes, they became widely used in Britain's political debate after 1688. Disagreeing with the scholarly claim that numbers were important instruments to find the truth or to control the resources of a state, Deringer maintains that quantitative data and the practice of calculating were tools of partisan conflict. It was not the state, but "outsiders" that assigned numbers political value. To criticize the government, republican Country critics started a transformation in Britain's "civic epistemology" that Deringer reconstructs from 1688 to the late eighteenth century. Calculated Values won the Kenshur Prize for the best book in eighteenth century studies, recognizing its value for scholars from a range of disciplines. Deringer's science- and cultural-studies approach produces interesting evidence. From the perspective of intellectual historians like the reviewer, however, it is not without problems. Deringer defines calculation as a practice and an active and ongoing activity (xix), yet he traces it only in relation to particular controversies. Each of the seven chapters focuses on a specific moment of transition in what he calls Britain's "new calculating age," "quantitative culture," or "civic epistemology." As a consequence, large time spans are treated very cursorily, which raises the question of how representative the chosen case studies are. For the particular controversies that he does investigate, Deringer relies on a wide range of kinds of sources, including well-known publications, lesser-known pamphlets, and unknown archival manuscripts. Overall, the book is well-written and the argument well-explained, even as Deringer's inventive jargon is often confusing and unnecessary. He describes his protagonists as "calculators," "calculating personalities," and "numerical lives," yet repeatedly emphasizes that they did not function as experts (see, for example, 158). Chapter 1 deals with "Parliament's numerical awakening" (49). The constitutional arrangements of the Glorious Revolution assigned Parliament new responsibilities in public finance. The collective body of the members of Parliament, however, had little knowledge about public accounting. Because the numeracy of [End Page 467] Britain's population was growing and the printing press liberated, republican Country critics were able to introduce calculation as a tool of party-political dispute. Of particular importance was Charles Davenant, who transformed Petty's political arithmetic into a "calculative strategy" to overcome the absence of information about money and criticise the government (70). Chapter 2 explores the "Equivalent," that is, the compensation paid by England to Scotland for accepting higher taxes after the Union of 1707. This payment is crucial, Deringer explains, because its calculation was thought to solve the political, social, and economic problems that the Union had created. Although the number itself was more powerful than the people who had calculated it, two of the six members of the group assigned with the task are treated in detail: William Paterson, who had a commercial background, and David Gregory, who had a background in academic mathematics. Although both were Scots who had made careers in England, Paterson and Gregory spoke "two different quantitative idioms" because of their different experiences (82). In Chapter 3, Deringer investigates a discussion between Whigs and Tories about the balance of trade in the early 1710s. The two parties had two completely different "computational styles" (119). Tories considered numbers to be incisive instruments to undeceive the people. Since they were in power at the time, they had access to data and could produce more intricate calculations. In contrast, Whigs considered numerical data to be clear and accessible by common sense. This difference was not just rhetorical but reflected long-standing disagreements about civic epistemology. Despite their differences, Deringer writes, Whigs and Tories agreed implicitly about the value of calculation as a highly adaptable instrument in party...

Charles Davenant (1656-1714) – English pamphleteer and politicians

The subject of this research is the biography of the English thinker, pamphleteer and politician Charles Davenant (1656-1714). The author examines Davenant’s life and activity, as well as factors that affected his career and determined the peculiarities of his writings. Different stages of his biography, particularly participation in the political struggle of England of the late XVII – early XVIII centuries are reviewed. Special attention is paid to the role of Davenant as the author of pamphlets and political treatises. The evolution of his views throughout a lifetime is being traced. In the course of this research, the author applies historical-biographical method, reconstructs his life circumstances, specifics and results of activity of the thinker in the context of his era. The novelty is defined by the relevance of studying C. Davenant’s heritage within the framework of English culture of the turn of XVII – XVIII centuries. The biography of Charles Davenant is still not covered within the Russian literature; as well as foreign authors did not give due attention to his career. The conclusion is made that Davenant’s career significantly influences the content and theme of his works. The acquired knowledge and experience from working in the departments of commerce and finances led him to development of the technique of “political arithmetic”. It is also noteworthy that Davenant’s political alignment shifted in accordance with his career pursuits, which should be taken into account in further analysis of his views.

Charles Davenant on the objectives and principles of “political arithmetic” as an instrument of public administration

In the late XVII century in England has establishes the school of “political arithmetic”, which goal consisted in the analysis of social phenomena on the basis of quantitative indicators. Its main representatives became William Petty, John Graunt and Charles Davenant (1656-1714). The latter left a mark in the history of England as a philosopher, politician and publicist, who made a significant contribution to the development and implementation of the methods of “political arithmetic”. The object of this research is the views of the English thinker, reflected in his pamphlets and treatises of the 1690’s. The subject is the Davenant’s views on the principles and tasks of “political arithmetic” in the context of his political theory. Special attention is given to correlation between Davenant’s views on the development of “political arithmetic’ and his concept of public administration. The scientific novelty lies in the comprehensive examination of the political and economic views of Charles Davenant within the framework of his attitude on the method of “political arithmetic”. The author delivers a thesis on the importance of the political and epistemological context, which formed Davenant’s views on the quantitative indicators. Grasp of quantitative data Davenant correlated directly with the practice of administration. According to the philosopher, a public official having the capacity for “evaluation” and proper interpretation of data could avoid many mistakes in decision-making and reliance on “bad” advices. The thinker suggested that possession of quantitative data and their competent interpretation could increase the efficiency of administration.

Challenging the Historical Paradigm: Tories, Whigs, and Economic Writing, 1680–1714

This essay challenges the paradigm that depicts Whigs as progressive champions of free-market economics doing battle against the land-based and regressive economic policies of the Tories. Particularly in the period after the Glorious Revolution, Tory economic writers such as Charles Davenant, Nicholas Barbon, and Sir Dudley North argued for free trade and the relaxation of government tariffs, particularly as exercised against luxuries imported by the East India Company. Whig economic writers such as John Locke, John Pollexfen, Sir Francis Brewster, and John Cary continued, on the contrary, to equate wealth with the accumulation of bullion, arguing that England must curtail the import of luxuries in order to protect domestic manufacture. This debate reached its climax during the controversy over the commercial pact attached to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Tories argued for free trade in their journal the Mercantor while Whigs continued to urge for protection against imports in the British Merchant. A revised understanding of the economic policies of Tories and Whigs should lead to a reinterpretation of poems such as Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest (1713) as well as to a reconsideration of the economic debate between Whigs and Tories after 1714.

Interest, Trade and ‘Character and Circumstances': John Campbell's (1708–1775) Earlier Work

SUMMARYJohn Campbell's (1708-1775) commercial theory in his early work demonstrates that he held more sophisticated views on British colonialism than previously thought. Campbell draws upon complex influences, which include Charles Davenant's notion of free trade and his ‘Old Whig’ arguments against corruption; Daniel Defoe's ‘new Whig’ arguments for progress and John Locke's arguments on industry and property; and Bolingbroke's Tory arguments for emphasizing common interest. By blending these ideas, Campbell offers a distinctive commercial theory that prioritizes the recognition of the interest and circumstances of all nations and peoples within an unconstrained and reciprocal exchange of commodities in order for the home nation simultaneously to resist corruption and flourish.

Money and Political Economy in the Enlightenment

The seven contributions to this interesting collection of essays cover a somewhat more limited range of subjects than its title indicates. All but one examine the thought of British writers, and five of the seven cover periods preceding 1755, the date of the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's article ‘Économie politique’ in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the subject of money plays a bigger part in the collection than that of political economy. It forms the core of the first essay, by Johann Sommerville, on Sir Robert Filmer's 1653 pamphlet on usury, which, perhaps surprisingly, Filmer was willing to defend, and makes up the main body of the essays by Daniel Carey on John Locke's philosophy of money and Charles Larkin's examination of Charles Davenant's monetary theory. Political economy features more prominently in Justin Champion's discussion of land and credit in neo-Machiavellian or Commonwealth political economy, but the monetary theme dominates the essays by Patrick Kelly on George Berkeley and the idea of a national bank, and by Ryan Patrick Hanley and Maria Pia Paganelli on Adam Smith and money, mercantilism, and the system of natural liberty. Only Thomas Hopkins, in an essay on how the late eighteenth-century French politician Pierre-Louis Roederer reacted to Adam Smith's examination of the problem of inequality, takes up some of the broader questions about the relationship between money and political economy broached by Carey in his wide-ranging Introduction to the collection. Even here, however, further questions about the relationship between money and political economy in eighteenth-century thought remain. One, raised very prominently in the works of the circle of mid-eighteenth-century French writers known as the Gournay group, centred on the question of what exactly money was supposed to add to the political economy of a state. It was possible, wrote the French political economist François Véron de Forbonnais, to imagine a political society with no money at all, but which was still able to house agriculture, trade, and industry as well as the range of legal and governmental institutions supported by a state such as France. The same idea, but with a more negative inflection, was also a feature of Locke's much earlier Two Treatises of Government, where the advent of money became one of the reasons for establishing and maintaining governmental accountability. Interestingly, a third inflection of this idea resurfaced in Rousseau's preference for supporting public institutions by labour services rather than monetary payments. There were, in short, aspects of the relationship between money and political economy that were, arguably, more central to eighteenth-century thought than is immediately apparent in this collection. Each contribution is absorbing in its own right, but a great deal remains to be learned by studying the broader question of the relationship between money and political economy in the eighteenth century.

Finding the Money: Public Accounting, Political Arithmetic, and Probability in the 1690s

Abstract“Finding the money”—whether money lost, hidden, or needed—became a defining practical and epistemological problem in the decade after the 1688 Revolution. It was a problem that linked together actors in fiscal administration, parliamentary politics, and economic theory, and drove innovative new applications of numerical calculation to political reasoning. In the debates on monarchical revenues that arose in 1689, a crisis of knowledge engulfed Parliament as MPs discovered how few among them had any insight into the nation's fiscal well-being. A parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts, formed in 1690, learned that even a basic financial assessment was extraordinarily difficult. Yet the commission's travails also revealed numerical calculations to be a potent political tool, which empowered relative outsiders to make incisive criticisms without complete information. Such combative political computation was systematized in the “political arithmetick” of Charles Davenant, who provided a novel political rationale for the value of “probable” knowledge.

Politics and Money

“Of all Beings that have Existence only in the Minds of Men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit,” opined Charles Davenant in his Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (1698); “’Tis never to be forc’d; it hangs upon Opinion; it depends upon our Passions of Hope and Fear; it comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without Reason; and when once lost, is hardly to be quite recover’d.”1 Davenant’s observations may well have reflected bitter personal experience. As a young man he loaned money to the crown, receiving public appointments and a parliamentary seat in Saint Ives as repayment, but no money. In the 1680s he traveled widely across England’s southern and western counties in his capacity as an excise commissioner, developing an interest in the relationship between provincial commerce and the emerging national state. Following the Glorious Revolution he lost this public position and, still deeply in debt, pursued a career writing about politics, economics, and public finance. Davenant contributed to debates urging the expansion of international commerce and the financing of England’s war against France, as well as the recoinage of English currency and establishment of the Board of Trade. His enthusiasm for overseas trade and the imperial state sat uneasily with his Tory associates’ determination to preserve land and agriculture as the foundation of national well-being. Characteristic of the time, some accused him of compromising his principles in pursuit of sinecures under Whig control, while others suspected him of being a Jacobite. The accession of Queen Anne restored Davenant to favor and office. As inspector general of exports and imports he earned £1,000 a year, still not sufficient to save him from falling further in debt. He died a poor and frustrated man. reviews of books 591

Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon

Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon Katherine Mannheimer Doctor: What was that struck me? Scaramouch: Struck you, sir? Imagination. Doctor: Can my imagination feel, sirrah? Scaramouch: Oh, the most tenderly of any part about one, sir! The Emperor of the Moon, II.iii.103-6 This essay reads Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687) as a playful examination of two modes of representation: namely, theatrical and print-based fictions. In many ways the two modes seem to constitute two opposite epistemological approaches: theatricality is invested in public, performative, and communally-arrived-at methods of apprehending our world; while prose narrative prioritizes private, absorptive, and intensely individual forms of perception. Behn explores these contrasts but ultimately implies that the most internal, subjective forms of mental imaging—the kinds of enraptured fantasizing usually associated with acts of reading—can give rise to the most external, demonstrative forms of spectacle. Moreover, by thus obscuring the boundaries between the public and empirical on the one hand and the private and empathic on the other, The Emperor of the Moon begins to "re-gender" these modes of experience. I end the essay by exploring the literary-historical significance of the fact that Behn was detaching drama and print from the epistemological paradigms usually ascribed to each (and reconsidering the position of women within these) at just the moment when this female author—in tandem with larger literary-historical developments—was making a crucial move from stage to page. [End Page 39] I. Colliding Epistemologies: Theatrical Spectacle and Textual Interiority The Emperor of the Moon stands at the crossroads of two opposite trends in the history of representation. On the one hand, the play belonged to a series of productions known as the "Dorset Garden spectaculars," staged under the direction of Thomas Betterton between 1673 and 1692. Described by Judith Milhous as "extend[ing] the technical capacities of the Restoration theatre to their utmost," these works included the opera-versions of Macbeth and The Tempest, Thomas Shadwell's Psyche, Charles Davenant's Circe, and John Dryden's King Arthur. The trend could be said to have reached its height in the 1680s, with what Milhous calls the "machine-farce boom." This flowering of pageantry—in which Milhous sees Behn's Emperor as a key participant—was characterized by such productions as Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches and William Mountfort's Doctor Faustus. In its embrace of the supernatural, the trend pushed theatrical spectacle to phantasmagorical, cataclysmic extremes (Milhous 43). This increased emphasis on spectacle, however, seems to defy longer-term narratives of literary history. For during this same period, most scholars agree, theatre as a medium was gradually losing ground to prose fiction. J. Paul Hunter describes this transition as a "shift of artistic energy from dramatic to narrative modes": culturally, "communality" had become "thoroughly debased," and authors felt that "the route to influence" was instead "a private and subjective one, to be found only in private converse between a fixed book and the response of an individual reader, deciding silently and alone"("Stage and Closet" 286). Laura Brown, Rose Zimbardo, Ian Donaldson, John Loftis, and Julie Stone Peters chart similar transitions; thus Brown notes that once a new interest emerged in portraying "protagonists' gradually unfolding consciousnesses," prose fiction had an advantage: for such narrative "has easier access to the private life and to the interiority of its characters than does a verbal construct destined for the more public world of the stage"("Drama and Novel" 301). 1 When it came to seem that the movements of the individual mind might contain more "truth" than outward passions or political displays, the newer medium came to seem more relevant, more revealing. Less consensus has formed around the question of when exactly this reprioritizing occurred. Because Hunter is most interested in the moment at which prose fiction finally claimed dominance in the form of the novel, he calls it a "phenomenon of the 1740s"("Stage and Closet" 286). Other scholars have focused on the moment when the drama itself became "affective" or "interiorized" and have thus seen the watershed period as the 1690s, when playwrights like...

William Petty in Boston: Political Economy, Religion, and Money in Provincial New England

Transformations in Puritan ideas about God's rule in the world, or Providence, spurred the reception of formal economic theories in New England from 1680 through the 1720s. English political economists such as William Petty and Charles Davenant critiqued customary notions of money and credit as they promoted England's competition with European powers. New Englanders turned to these thinkers to inform provincial monetary policy. They imported political economy through serial accounts of parliamentary debates about the Bank of England, the South Sea Bubble, and trade policies, as well as through merchant handbooks and literary accounts of merchants. Religious convictions informed this receptivity. Boston clergy such as Cotton Mather and civic leaders such as Samuel Sewall understood the British Empire to be a bulwark against Catholic hegemony. Taking the works of Petty and Davenant to be descriptions of an economic order that abetted Protestant empire, they reshaped Puritan moral convictions. Once hostile to treating credit as a commodity and money as a fungible good, they embraced the latest techniques for exchanging credit and abandoned prohibitions against usury. In this sense, changes in Puritan theology were integral to the development of a market culture in provincial New England.

The Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1713: Tory Trade Politics and the Question of Dutch Decline

The aim of this essay is to survey the logic behind the Tory ministerial decision to bring a quick end to the hostilities with France in the early 1710s by looking at a tri-weekly journal called The Mercator (1713–14). Founded by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, and his economic advisor Charles Davenant, with a view to justifying their grandiose plan to liberalise the Anglo-French trade relationship as part of a new European order initiated by the Peace of Utrecht, this periodical shows us how the so-called neo-Roman synthesis of libertas and imperium was exploited by the Tory administration not only to defend its isolationist outlook, but more interestingly, to reprove the pro-Dutch policy of the previous Whig government.

“Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men”: State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination

“Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men”: State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination Robert Mitchell (bio) Nearly a decade ago, Robert Markley positioned “the new economic criticism” as one of the most significant recent theoretical developments in eighteenth-century studies, describing a series of now classic studies—James Thompson’s Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy of the Novel, Sandra Sherman’s Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, and Patrick Brantlinger’s Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 —that emerged from the “current scholarly fascination with debt and credit.”1 Since Markley’s assessment—and no doubt assisted by the subsequent fin de siècle collapse of the dot-com and biotech speculative bubbles—scholarly fascination with debt and credit has persisted, producing a new series of studies on relationships among eighteenth-century finance, material culture, and literature. Focusing in even more depth and detail than their predecessors on the specificities of eighteenth-century finance, accounting, insurance, and monetary instruments, and often linking finance to questions of colonialism and labor, scholars of this newest wave of the new economic criticism have interrogated “Whig” modalities of emotion and affect, the postcoloniality of the eighteenth century, and epistemological structures that linked slavery, finance, and modern historicism, among other topics.2 In the spirit and wake of these recent studies of eighteenth-century debt and credit, this essay focuses on a theoretical category that has been central to both the older and newer waves of new economic literary criticism: the “collective imagination.” Intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock was the first to highlight the importance of the term imagination for the Financial Revolution of post- Restoration England, arguing that speculative financial instruments developed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries fundamentally transformed the relationship between individual psychology and the state. Pocock argued that within a state increasingly reliant on annuities, lotteries, [End Page 117] and other speculative sources of capital, “[g]overnment was maintained by the investor’s imagination concerning a moment [i.e., the return of an investor’s principle] which will never exist in reality.”3 Pocock also noted that the importance of imagining for the functioning of state finance was not lost on contemporary observers such as Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe, who explicitly attributed fluctuations of public credit and the stability of the state to the fickleness of the imagination. New economic literary criticism has drawn heavily on Pocock’s claims about the central role of the imagination in eighteenth-century finance, even as it has also developed more nuanced analyses of the relationships, and differences, between economic and literary modes of imagining.4 For both Pocock and literary critics who have taken his approach as a starting point, eighteenth-century finance is important in large part because it was a key mechanism in transforming the British state into an “imagined community”—both in the sense that the imagination served as the faculty of temporal projection that committed individuals to the state to which they had lent their money, and in the sense that the imagination bound national investors to one another in “real time” by facilitating contagious investment panics. Yet even as these readings of the roles of the imagination in eighteenth-century investing culture have significantly deepened our understanding of the relationships among finance, literature, and culture, there is something a bit uncanny about the way in which more or less the same theory of imagination has functioned as both an object of analysis and a methodological resource in these studies. When Pocock, for example, explained why Defoe and Davenant attributed financial phenomena to the imagination, he appealed to essentially the same understanding of the imagination deployed by his eighteenth-century authors; Defoe and Davenant, in other words, apparently got it right when they attributed fluctuations of stock prices and public confidence in government institutions to the workings of the imagination. Such a convergence of object of study and theoretical tool is arguably consistent with Pocock’s explicit attempt to explain past beliefs in terms that would be recognizable to those historical actors, rather than attempting to “unmask” the ideological...

Money in the “Body Politick”: The Analysis of Trade and Circulation in the Writings of Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmeticians

This article discusses the analysis of trade and circulation in the writings of seventeenth-century political arithmeticians. Political arithmetic was in its way an anatomy of the social body. William Petty titled his 1672 book The Political Anatomy of Ireland. In his preface he explicitly claimed to be following Francis Bacon, highlighting the experimental method and the idea that analytical methods can be transposed from one discipline to another. He thus drew a parallel between the natural body and the body politic. It was a widely held idea that money guaranteed the nation's health; conversely its poor state of health could lead to the wasting away of the body politic. Accordingly, the events of the last decade of the seventeenth century saw many publications on the nature of money and credit and the specific role of banks in this field. While it seemed obvious to many observers that money was beneficial to trade, the mechanisms by which money was part of the economy still had to be clarified. The connection between political arithmetic and a conception of money as an accelerator of trade and of business is particularly evident in the works of Petty and Charles Davenant. Both authors took the same approach: from an evaluation of the national wealth they looked at the conditions of circulation of money in the national body and insisted on the need for better management of its flow. It is not the substance that cash is minted from, its metallic content, that matters, but the way credit is able to stimulate business and increase employment. This was not just a question of quantity, but also of quality. The needs of commerce called for ingenuity on the part of merchants and financiers to sustain the level of activity.

THE DUBLIN SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.

The capacities of the state: Charles Davenant and the management of the Excise, 1683–1698

This paper considers the historical geography of a key moment of state formation: the late seventeenth-century development of the administration of excise taxation—taxes on the producers of commodities, especially beer—which would generate the revenue necessary to enable Britain to become an imperial power in the eighteenth century. This political process is considered through the lens provided by the work and works of Charles Davenant, a commissioner of excise and political arithmetician. Interpreting Davenant's writings (from the 1690s) and his active participation in the management of the Excise (in the 1680s) in terms of the economic and political exigencies of taxation makes it possible to problematize the construction of the spaces, knowledges and powers which were necessary to enable the collection and legitimation of excises in England and Wales. Understanding Davenant and the administration of the Excise in this way reveals the making of the planned, rationally ordered, heirarchical, routinized and scrutinized roles, practices and spaces of the modern state, and the ways they were tied into intricate networks of power, knowledge, instruments, documents and people. Finally, it shows how small spaces and mundane routines can speak to the larger issues of the historical geography of empire and the constitution of space and time.

Neo-Mercantilism and The Wealth of Nations: British Commercial Policy after the American Revolution

Few works of economic thought have such a close association with the intellectual and economic history of their period as Adam Smith's An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Three recent careful assessments of the ‘influence’ of Smith's work, however, have found little direct evidence for its positive significance for economic policy in the 1780s and 1790s. Parliamentary debate seldom referred to the Wealth of nations, and then usually negatively unless by Smith's friends, or ‘radicals and Foxite whigs’. John Locke, David Hume, Charles Davenant, Sir Josiah Child, William Petty, Josiah Tucker and Arthur Young were all cited more frequently. A wide range of parliamentary leaders read Smith carefully, and several ministers knew him well and sought his advice, but with the exception of Shelburne they appear to have applied Smith's thought eclectically. Salim Rashid has noted that in 1776 there were already influential economic authorities, notably Arthur Young and Josiah Tucker, who advocated freer markets. Conversely, for over a decade after the publication of the Wealth of nations, articles on economic matters in the major periodical reviews made scanty reference to Smith's work, while the protectionist views of Sir James Steuart, whom Smith had ignored, were often authoritative. Smith's views became respectable among the political after negotiation of the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, but it was this liberal economic policy which gave the wealth of nations currency, not the reverse.