Eighteenth-century Political Economy Research Articles

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Frans De Bruyn

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought</i>, ed. Frans De Bruyn

Entre influencia ilustrada europea y necesidades de un espacio periférico: el Consulado de Comercio de Buenos Aires como ámbito de experimentación y difusión de la Economía Política a fines del siglo XVIII

Este trabajo parte de la importancia de los consulados de comercio en el mundo hispanoamericano del siglo XVIII. El propósito es evaluar el rol del Consulado de Comercio de Buenos Aires, entre el discurso ilustrado que comenzaba a difundirse en el Río de la Plata y una realidad local que exigía la resolución de problemas cotidianos propios de un espacio en construcción con necesidades puntuales diferentes de las europeas. Para ello, se realiza una comparación entre las reflexiones de Manuel Belgrano que circularon por la institución y temas concretos que el Consulado atendió en los últimos años del siglo XVIII para demostrar su intención de adherir a lineamientos de la Economía Política dieciochesca.

Colonial emulation: sinophobia, ethnic stereotypes and imperial anxieties in late eighteenth-century economic thought

ABSTRACTIn 1799 Dirk van Hogendorp published a Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies, a document that has garned comparisons to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) for its condemnation of the Dutch East India Company and for its insistence on the importance of property rights to economic growth. The text is also an anti-Chinese diatribe, castigating the supposedly inveterate avarice of Java’s Chinese minority. Hogendorp’s advocacy of colonial reform and sinophobia intertwine in his use of the term ijver, then the standard Dutch translation of ‘emulation’, a keyword of eighteenth-century political economy. Read against the status of emulation in European thinking, Hogendorp’s employment of the ijver offers an opportunity to re-examine emulation’s fraught, ambivalent quality, which has been noted by scholars like Istvan Hont and Sophus Reinert concerned primarily with a division between benevolent domestic emulation and dangerous international emulation. The colonial sphere, neither wholly domestic nor wholly foreign, was a discursive site wherein the tensions of emulation were worked out in new ways.

The Second Jansenism and the Rise of French Eighteenth-Century Political Economy

The insufficiently criticized story of a secularized pre-Revolutionary France has led historians of economics to consider French political economy as free from the influence of religion from the 1730s through the 1780s. On the contrary, through a study of the “second Jansenism,” the most powerful and intellectually the richest Christian movement in the French Enlightenment, this article shows that religion played a pivotal role in the emergence of French political economy. Having established the theoretical richness of the movement, this article aims to show, through two case studies, in what different ways it affected economics. The first explores the resonance of the Jansenist culture of several members of the Gournay circle on their methodological approaches and their promotion of agriculture and trade. The second case study focuses on the loan at interest. This article shows that the major authors on this issue in the second half of the century were all deeply influenced by Jansenist thinking on the subject.

Translating empire: emulation and the origins of political economy

Historians have traditionally used the discourses of free trade and laissez faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. But from Sophus Reinert's perspective, eighteenth-century political economy can be understood only in the context of the often brutal imperial rivalries then unfolding in Europe and its former colonies and the positive consequences of active economic policy. The idea of economic emulation was the prism through which philosophers, ministers, reformers, and even merchants thought about economics, as well as industrial policy and reform, in the early modern period. With the rise of the British Empire, European powers and others sought to selectively emulate the British model. In mapping the general history of economic translations between 1500 and 1849, and particularly tracing the successive translations of the Bristol merchant John Cary's seminal 1695 Essay on the State of England, Reinert makes a compelling case for the way that England's aggressively nationalist policies, especially extensive tariffs and other intrusive market interventions, were adopted in France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia before providing the blueprint for independence in the New World. Relatively forgotten today, Cary's work served as the basis for an international move toward using political economy as the prime tool of policymaking and industrial expansion. Reinert's work challenges previous narratives about the origins of political economy and invites the current generation of economists to reexamine the foundations, and future, of their discipline.

“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...

‘What Edward promises he will perform’: ‘How to do things with words’ in Sense and Sensibility

A recent denigrating essay on Jane Austen1 rehearses charges more or less forgotten in her recent recrudescence as an ironic icon of ‘popular culture’. The tally of points against suggests that if ...

Economy and Polity in Bentham's Science of Legislation

Author(s): Lieberman, David | Abstract: The article examines the account of human nature and social action which Bentham adopted in his legislative theory, or what might be considered the sociology informing Bentham's jurisprudence. I first explore what for numerous scholars has seemed the single most important feature of Bentham's thought: his reliance and valorization of "rational economic man" in his legislative program. Drawing on recent scholarship on Adam Smith and eighteenth-century political economy, I counter these interpretations by emphasizing Bentham's frequently limited and pragmatic use of economic theory. Economics did not furnish Bentham with a master-sociology, and market-oriented conduct was not taken to be characteristic of social action in general.The final part of the article takes up a neglected element of Bentham's legislative program: his reliance on publicity and critical public opinion to ensure the operation of responsible government in the Constitutional Code. I argue that the past preoccupation with Bentham's "economic presuppositions" has prevented scholars from recognizing his no less fundamental and contestable assumptions concerning the active, political orientation of social actors.

Harmonizing sentiments: the Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian idea of self government

Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government introduces the reader to the major issues concerning America's statement justifying independence. It covers the first controversy between loyalists and patriots, explores the document's intellectual sources, evaluates the degree to which the Declaration's ideals were fulfilled or rejected by the Constitution, and concludes by investigating its current political and legal implications. Readers will be intrigued by the author's argument for approaching the Declaration with an understanding of eighteenth-century political economy and ideas about a natural social order. The importance of Jefferson as a conduit through which these ideas were expressed is defended against recent attempts to de-emphasize the centrality of the Declaration's author. The work concludes that the Declaration's focus upon the abuses of power is still relevant for understanding American political institutions.

Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. James Thompson

<i>Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel</i>. James Thompson

Book Rreview: Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century

Reviewed by: Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century Sandra Sherman Colin Nicholson. Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+219. $54.95. Colin Nicholson’s Writing and the Rise of Finance is one of several recent studies integrating imaginative production and the machinery of public finance in the early eighteenth century. It is joined by James Thompson’s Models of Value: Eighteenth Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996), Patrick Brantlinger’s Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (1996), Thomas Kavanagh’s Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Early Eighteenth-Century France (1993), William Dowling’s The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (1991), and my own Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (1996). Of course, it is plain why scholars of eighteenth-century literature in the 1990s are drawn to a period of soaring government debt, failed expedients, and epic stock market losses. Nicholson argues that the transition to a credit economy, inimical to traditional measures of worth based on landed property, produced a milieu of moral and financial uncertainty resonant with our own time. He reads works by Swift, Pope, and Gay as registering the deracination of the self implicated in market relations, detached from sources of autonomy and concrete value imputed to older modes of proprietorship. In The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), J. G. A. Pocock established that the politics of emergent financial credit entailed a backlash against “moneyed men” dependent on paper profits, ultimately allied with the City and Walpole. Ideologues opposed to government’s expansion asserted that its insatiable demand for funds promoted “corruption,” the civic ascendancy of mobile property lacking fixed, determinable value. Committed to hierarchies based on claims of perceptual transparency, they denounced what to them was a politics of perceptual derangement, a regime that floated on financial simulacra, subordinating “intrinsic” value to speculation, opinion, imagination. Pocock’s analysis, now classic, examined contemporary polemics, but said little concerning the engagement of imaginative literature with antimarket ideology. Howard Erskine-Hill’s explorations, especially of Pope, provided a stimulus, but until Nicholson no one comprehensively mapped this terrain in its most prominent feature, satire. His scrupulously historicized study recovers formerly vibrant resonances; demonstrates the imbrication of Scriblerian satire with opposition discourse; and establishes the necessity of a an informed economic hermeneutic. Unlike, for example, Christine Gerrard in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (1994), Nicholson approaches opposition discourse specifically through literary/economic relations. The crux that animates his analysis is the Scriblerians’ dissociated sensibility: while Swift, Pope, and Gay join with the Opposition, stung by their own marginalization from centers of power, they are playing the market they attack, buying stocks, risking their fortunes, giddy at the rise of South Sea shares. They enact, indeed embody, the liminality of the emerging order, satirizing its avatars while seizing its opportunities. As Nicholson comments, “the ego is itself compromised when what was once a classically derived and coherent moral structure based on terra firma is called into question by new forms of capital liquidity increasingly held and passed in paper pledges of credit that were by definition and practice uncertain and socially unstable” (89). The essential interest of this observation is its ramification in Nicholson’s analyses of Scriblerian texts, which emerge, both in subject matter and form, as implicated in fracture and fragmentation. Clearly influenced by Lukacsian models of reification in emergent capitalism, Nicholson argues that Gulliver disorients the reader: “Gulliver and those who read him are subjected to discomfiting permutations of perception and construction, so that the threat to individual integrity and self-knowledge which corruption had always implied and which was reinforced by the rise of forms of property seeming to rest on fantasy and false consciousness becomes [End Page 144] both a central topic and a structural principle of the text” (109). Long ago, critics cited “reader entrapment” in Gulliver, but never linked it to broader, ontological dilemmas posed...

Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994. Patrick Brantlinger.Models of Value: EighteenthCentury Political Economy and the Novel. James Thompson.

<i>Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994</i>. Patrick Brantlinger.<i>Models of Value: EighteenthCentury Political Economy and the Novel</i>. James Thompson.

Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (review)

REVIEWS 501 could be radically transformed in two or three decades from the unifying force Cook sketches to the subversive force Favret describes. This said, however, Epistolary Bodies is certainly one of the best books of its kind. It should permanently alter our understanding of the ways epistolary fictions "mean" in the eighteenth century. And it should establish Cook as one of the most promising scholars of her generation. Elizabeth Wanning Harries Smith College James Thompson. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1966. viii + 271pp. ISBN 0-8223-1711-7. Money is not just the root of all evil, it is the root of all novels, as well, according to James Thompson. While other theorists have talked abstractly about the relation between the development of capitalism and the novel, Thompson's new work, Models of Value, has the virtue of anchoring these discussions in specific and particular developments regarding capital in the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in this brilliant contribution to the history of the novel, Thompson argues that both the novel and political economy are parallel responses to a crisis in the way English society measured, embodied, and exchanged value. Ian Watt has discussed this change in sociological rather than economic terms, and Michael McKeon in generalized abstractions, but finally in the work of Thompson , we have the refreshing synthesis of theoretical discussion combined with concrete and discrete historical detail. The book begins by challenging a regnant myth. Literary critics have a selfeffacing way of adopting the business world's positivism in thinking of narrative as "fiction," that is, as less important than the clink of hard cash, while the world of finance or trade is regarded as "real"—as in the opposition between the fantastic world of art and the "real world" out there. What Thompson shows us by his painstaking historical work and close readings of monetary theorists is that the world of money and finance is as "unreal" or "fictional" as any other kind of narrative. When England began a shift from precious metals and coin to credit and paper money, according to Thompson, a crisis arose in how value was to be embodied. He reminds us of the "constructed" nature of precious metals minted as coins, which, while having the virtue of being solid, also had the liability of being scraped, clipped, and thereby pilfered of their full value. In the world of money, everything that is solid melts into the air of signification and representation. So it becomes logical, as Thompson claims, to see that the emergence of "two new literary forms or discourses that preeminently handle or manage this crisis [in the representation of value]—political economy and the 502 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 novel—are at the same time produced by this crisis and are inseparable from it" (p. 3). Considering John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, and others, Thompson details the shift in money from the mere accumulation of wealth to the credit-driven dynamo of capitalism. The book pays attention to events like the Recoinage Act of 1695-96, which occasions discussions on the nature of money and how it can be controlled. When John Lockejoins the fray, he asserts that money is valuable because of the precious metal contained in coins—a conservative point, given the new dynamics of credit, that Thompson sees as linking Locke with conservative novelists such as Fielding for whom property's value is traditionally determined and is never lost or transmuted, no matter how confusing his plots get. As opposed to Locke, other rationalizers of capitalist monetary policy suggest that the value of money is socially determined by supply and demand rather than the inherent value of precious metals. This view is more reflective of the opinions of novelists such as Defoe or Austen, for whom all meaning comes from social interaction. Adam Smith furthers these ideas by insisting that money is a "representation " of the nation's wealth and labour. In this sense, as Thompson puns, "money talks" (p. 86). The discussions around money create in effect a new subjectivity . Rather than the older space left by traditional hierarchies of value, the new...

Models of value: eighteenth-century political economy and the novel

James Thompson examines the concept of value as it came to be understood in eighteenth-century England through two emerging and divergent discourses: political economy and the novel. By looking at the relationship between these two developing forms - one having to do with finance, the other with romance - Thompson demonstrates how value came to have such different meaning in different realms of experience. A highly original rethinking of the origins of the English novel, Models of Value shows the novel's importance in remapping English culture according to the separate spheres of public and domestic life, men's and women's concerns, money and emotion. In this account, political economy and the novel clearly arise as solutions to a crisis in the notion of value.Exploring the ways in which these different genres responded to the crisis - political economy by reconceptualizing wealth as capital, and the novel by refiguring intrinsic or human worth in the form of courtship narratives - Thompson rereads several literary works, including Defoe's Roxana, Fielding's Tom Jones, and Burney's Cecilia, along with influential contemporary economic texts. Models of Value also traces the discursive consequences of this bifurcation of value, and reveals how history and theory participate in the very novelistic and economic processes they describe. In doing so, this book bridges the opposition between the interests of Marxism and feminism, and the distinctions which, newly made in the eighteenth century, continue to inform our discourse today. An important reformulation of the literary and cultural production of the eighteenth century, Models of Value will attract students of the novel, political economy, and of literary history and theory.

Gender and the Guild Order: The Garment Trades in Eighteenth-Century Paris

This article concerns female labor, guild organization, and eighteenth-century political economy. The first half of the article analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Parisian clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations, and the social and economic forces that reshaped them. The second half focuses on pre-revolutionary petitions from the guilds, which illustrate dramatically the different ways in which guildsmen and women interpreted the rules of gender in the corporate order. The guildswomen's distinctive perspective reflected their history, experience, and changing currents of economic thought.

Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company's Rule in India*

Abstract The East India Company in India during the period of “indirect rule,” has so far been seen as a trading corporation drawn unprepared into the exigencies of warfare and rule. Early colonial rule, however, entailed much more than the quotidian problems of maintaining trade and commerce in the colonies. Its ideology and objectives derived from reigning notions of eighteenth century political economy, and it shared crucial aspects of nation‐state formation in Georgian England. Through an exegetical reading of contemporary political economic texts, pamphlets and tracts, this essay attempts to elicit a sense of accepted ideas and articulations pertaining to the equations between nation, commerce, law and the state ‐ especially as they were seen on the colonial front in eastern India.