Commercial Society Research Articles

Slavery and the Dutch economy, 1750–1800

ABSTRACT This article presents the first methodologically grounded calculation of the weight of Atlantic slave-based activities in the Dutch economy of the second half of the eighteenth century. In this period, the Dutch Republic was one of the most developed commercial societies in Europe. The import, processing and export of slave-produced goods such as sugar, coffee and tobacco played an important role in this economy. In 1770, 5.2% of the GDP of the Dutch Republic and 10.36% of the GDP of its richest province Holland was based on Atlantic slavery. In this year, 19% of Dutch imports and (re-) exports consisted of goods produced by the enslaved in the Atlantic. These high percentages were dependent on the prominent role that the Dutch Republic and the province of Holland in particular played in Atlantic slavery-based commodity chains. These chains ran from the provisioning of slave ships in the Dutch Republic, through the slave trade, to the plantations, the transport of tropical products to Europe, their processing in the Dutch Republic, to their final export to the European hinterland. As much as 40% of all the growth of the economy of Holland in the decades around 1770 can be traced back to slavery.

Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria ed. by Peter Garnsey

Reviewed by: Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria ed. by Peter Garnsey Germano Maifreda Peter Garnsey, translator and editor, Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 226. $35.00 cloth. The interest of Anglophone historiography in late eighteenth-century Italian intellectual life has markedly increased in the last two decades. The recent publication of philologically rigorous critical editions—which stand on the shoulders of Franco Venturi's tireless commitment in the second half of the twentieth century—have contributed significantly to this recuperation. These include new and ongoing editions of the complete works of Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri, which, with path-breaking tomes such as Sophus A. Reinert's The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (2018) and The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe, coedited by Reinert and Steven L. Kaplan (2019), indicate the important and expanding field in which Peter Garnsey's Against the Death Penalty is a welcome and valuable addition.1 Garnsey's recent interest in the Italian Enlightenment developed from his previous work on the ideology of slavery and related debates about property among philosophers, jurists, and theologians from classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century. His insightful book Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (2007) highlighted the historical interrelation of the ideas of slavery and property crimes. His interest in the ways that property crimes were punished in the early modern era has developed into Against the Death Penalty, both a study of imprisonment as a punishment and a history of the concept of penal servitude, with particular attention to both Cesare Beccaria's conceptualization [End Page 116] of it as a form of slavery and his proposal that hard labor replace capital punishment in his pioneering On Crimes and Punishments (original publication 1764, definitive edition 1766). This stance against the death penalty underlies Garnsey's term of reference in the book—abolitionist—for both Beccaria (1738–1794) and Giuseppe Pelli (1729–1808). Garnsey emphasizes that the aim of Against the Death Penalty is not to draw comparisons between the writings of Pelli and Beccaria. In fact, their differences, reflective of their different intellectual traditions, are certainly more interesting than the similarities: Pelli's thought was shaped by Catholicism and the natural jurists, and Beccaria, by French Enlightenment philosophers. The book instead aims, first, to offer translations of the relevant texts, including the first English translation of Pelli's works. Against the Death Penalty additionally explores the historical and intellectual contexts in which Pelli and Beccaria lived and wrote. In both of these aims, the volume succeeds admirably. The book is bipartite. Its first section sees the translation of Pelli's Against the Death Penalty, some fragments on the punishment of talion and on vengeance, and Pelli's correspondence with Beccaria of 1766–67. This material is followed by a contextualization and analysis of Pelli's argument. The book's second section contains Garney's translation of both the chapters of Beccaria's On Crime and Punishment in which the founding father of modern criminal-law reform pronounced himself against the death penalty and for forced labor, and the Opinion ("Voto"), written in opposition to the death penalty by Beccaria, his pupil Francesco Gallarati Scotti, and the judge Paolo Risi as part of the 1792 imperial Commission for Legal Reform in Lombardy. Garnsey's analysis of the political-cultural context in the second half of the eighteenth century Lombardy follows, together with his critical reconsideration of Beccaria's argument against death penalty. The volume is closed by a postscript that closely considers the significance of Beccaria's advocacy of life imprisonment and that describes the reception and revision of these views by successors including Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Jefferson. Contemporaries and near neighbors, Pelli and Beccaria were unaware of each other's existence and intellectual activities: Pelli was a minor aristocrat from Florence who pursued a career within the Austrian Habsburg administration in the Gran Duchy of Tuscany, finally rising to the position of director of the Uffizi Gallery. He wrote...

Sho Okochi, Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Imagination in Commercial Society

Sho Okochi, <i>Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Imagination in Commercial Society</i>

Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Origin of Languages

Adam Smith’s major works are widely, though not universally, thought to constitute a powerful rebuttal to the critique of civilized life and commercial society in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. This article examines Smith’s few explicit references to Rousseau, all of which denigrated Rousseau without coming to grips with his arguments. The analysis focuses on the only topic that elicited a specific substantive criticism of Rousseau: the origin of languages. This topic, which was seriously pursued by both authors, has the advantage of being unburdened with the normative controversies generated today by their different assessments of commercial society. On this topic at least, Rousseau was more daring and ambitious, which suggests that Smith’s avoidance of a direct confrontation with the radical analysis of human nature and civilized life in the Discourse on Inequality may have been motivated in part by an aversion to Rousseau’s philosophic relentlessness.

URBAN PLANNING AND URBAN VALUES: A JACOBSIAN ANALYSIS

AbstractThe great urbanist Jane Jacobs details how urban planning impacts the social interactions and social networks responsible for the economic death or life of a city. How might urban planning impinge on the moral values that underlie that development? I draw on Jacobs’s work on the moral foundations of commercial society to identify two “urban values” (tolerance and innovation). I then examine how these values support the social networks and processes that facilitate urban-based innovation and how urban planning can strengthen or undermine those values. I use the examples of urban planning in the 15th Ward of Syracuse, New York and of city building in the private development of Cayalá in Guatemala City to illustrate these points.

Sophus A. Reinert. The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy.

S<scp>ophus</scp> A. R<scp>einert</scp>. <i>The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy</i>.

Sieyès and republican liberty

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance.

Satisfaction in action: Hume's endogenous theory of preferences and the virtues of commerce

Hume's theory of preferences would, from a contemporary point of view, be labelled an endogenous theory. He sees preferences largely as comparative desires that are formed and affected by the psychological process of sympathy. His view of preferences relates to his economic philosophy. Despite his understanding of preferences, Hume is, unlike some other thinkers with related perspectives like Thorstein Veblen, optimistic about the prospects of commercial society, claiming in one of his essays that the ages of commerce and refinement are both the happiest and the most virtuous. An important reason for his optimism lies in the fact that he understands happiness or well-being to largely consist in the process of actively pursuing one's preferences, not simply in the state of having one's preferences satisfied.

The Transformation of Debt: The Paper State and Paper Economy in Early America

Debt underpins the modern global economy. Debt is also intimately tied to the function and form of the modern state. As a form of capital, debt is a combination of several legal modules and legal qualities that allow holders of debt to secure a future pecuniary return. The development of these legal modules and legal qualities may be observed in the emerging commercial society of the United States of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By tracing the transformation of debt over this time period in the USA, we may gain insight into how debt, the economy, and the state could be re-envisioned for the future.

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK II OF PRUSSIA

AbstractFrederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

Adam Smith: Radical Neo-Roman and Moderate Realist

AbstractThere is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel’s work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith’s thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today.

The bellbird's horn

The bellbird's horn

Adam Smith and Dying Peacefully

Commerce brings about material wellbeing, a new set of values, and also a new way to die peacefully. For Adam Smith, “savages” may die calmly, in the midst of torture, without expressing any fear or pain. They are able to achieve this calm death through a life-time of forced-training in life-threatening conditions. In commercial societies, one can also die peacefully, but without having to experience the life-long suffering of a “savage”. In a commercial society, the comfort of luxury allows for a freer expression and exchange of emotions. One can die peacefully amidst the comfort and affections of friendship.

Adam Smith’s view of economic inequality

Abstract Adam Smith has usually been seen as an economist who had a positive view of economic inequalities and who was more concerned with diminishing absolute poverty rather than inequalities. Recently though, Rasmussen (2016; ‘Adam smith on what is wrong with economic inequality, American Political Science Review, vol. 110, no. 2, 342–52’) argued that Smith worried about the effects of extreme inequalities on the morality and happiness of commercial societies. While we do not deny Smith’s worries on this front and provide new evidence here, the aim of this paper was to show that Smith cared more about the causes of inequalities than their level per se, or independently of the former. Interestingly, Smith seems to reconcile fairness with economic efficiency in his plea for the system of natural liberty in which inequalities arise from the efforts, talents and risk-taking of individuals and ultimately benefit the least well-off. Moreover, and contrary to what Rasmussen claims, Smith addresses several contemporary issues such as the links between inequalities, economic growth, social mobility and politics.

Daniel Tagle Zamora

The issue of urban solid waste management (grsu) in León, Guanajuato, has various pending issues, essentially defining a strategy aimed at gradually reducing the generation of waste in the municipality for the decade that begins in accordance with the physical limits and environment of the landfill. The communication and environmental education components, from the public agency as pillars aimed at promoting less waste generation and adequate separation at source, present serious problems of articulation and operation to generate synergies with producers, merchants and consumers. In the institutional, financial, as well as infrastructure part, the para-municipal presents points considered as weak to carry out immediate processes of reduction, separation, treatment and use of the city's waste. In this research, the various programs directed by the municipal public administration in terms of urban solid waste reduction are analyzed from the perspective of the circular economy. Within the methodological approach, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the actors responsible for the various reduction programs of the municipality, as well as the review of various statistical indicators on waste. Within the approach considered for the analysis, the circular economy was selected, especially due to the broad link it has with the field of generation and final disposal of waste. The results found in the investigation indicate that the paramunicipal is initiating a process of collecting and separating waste that they are paying to reduce the income to the landfill; however, the foregoing is not associated with generating new practices of commercial producers and society in general focused on eliminating the generation of waste from origin. The reduction programs therefore represent a mere environmental palliative that pays limitedly to the 2030 sustainable development agenda.

Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit. What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. (Histories of Economic Life.) Woodstock, Princeton University Press 2019

Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit. What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. (Histories of Economic Life.) Woodstock, Princeton University Press 2019

Measuring the Stomach of a Gentleman with the Heart-Mind of a Pipsqueak

This article seeks to historicize the affinity between narrative fiction and the cognitive function known as theory of mind. The author believes this affinity holds true mostly in modern commercial societies structured by stranger sociality, cosmopolitanism, and social mobility. Elsewhere, both temporally and culturally, theory of mind is certainly present and useful but not always prized in social life and does not animate expressive culture to the same extent. Such societies are structured by kinship sociality that presumes relatively stable identity and valorizes guileless “characters” who effortlessly embody socially shared values. The hierarchical structures of these societies also place a greater premium on theory of mind for subordinates than for the powerful, hence attaching a tinge of opprobrium to its exercise. In literature this translates into the moral ambivalence concerning “crafty” figures. The author presents her arguments with reference primarily to premodern Chinese literary classics. For comparative purposes she also brings into discussion the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and a King Solomon legend. In the coda, she asks if the importance of theory of mind is overstated when in social life we resort to a much wider range of folk psychological heuristics.

The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. By Francesca Trivellato. Histories of Economic Life. Edited by Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+408. $45.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society. By Francesca Trivellato. Histories of Economic Life. Edited by Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+408. $45.00.Francesca BregoliFrancesca BregoliQueens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 92, Number 2June 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708556 Views: 96Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A Sequenced 'TreasuryDirect' and 'FedWallet' Plan for the Democratic Digital Dollar

I propose means of immediately converting the Department of Treasury's existing 'TreasuryDirect' system of freely available transaction accounts into a publicly administered digital savings and payments platform. A platform of this type is an essential public utility in any commercial society such as our own. It is additionally growth-promoting inasmuch as growth-tracking GDP is a measure of transaction volume, while transaction volume is a function of more efficient and inclusive transacting. As Congress seeks means of streamlining the payments infrastructure in a time of pandemic-induced crisis, the Treasury route recommends itself as the fastest way to digitize payments for 95% of our citizens and business enterprises. I also map means of migrating the Treasury architecture to the Fed over time once the crisis is past – as the ‘Greenback’ paper dollar itself did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – and include my draft Treasury Dollar Act as an Appendix.

In Adam Smith\u2019s Own Words: The Role of Virtues in the Relationship Between Free Market Economies and Societal Flourishing, A Semantic Network Data-Mining Approach

Among business ethicists, Adam Smith is widely viewed as the defender of an amoral if not anti-moral economics in which individuals’ pursuit of their private self-interest is converted by an ‘invisible hand’ into shared economic prosperity. This is often justified by reference to a select few quotations from The Wealth of Nations. We use new empirical methods to investigate what Smith actually had to say, firstly about the relationship between free market institutions and individuals’ moral virtues, and secondly about the further relationship between virtues and societal flourishing. We show with more quantitative precision than traditional scholarship that the invisible hand reading dramatically misrepresents both the nuance and the sum of Smith’s analysis. Smith paid a great deal of attention to a flourishing society’s dependence on virtues, including the non-self-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence, and he worried also about their fragility in the face of the changed incentives and social conditions of commercial society.