ABSTRACT After William Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania from King Charles II, he deliberately promoted immigration of non-English speaking peoples to his province through promotional tracts that circulated throughout England and, after translation, on the continent. Over time, as the number of immigrants increased to almost one-third of the colony’s population, both Parliament and the Pennsylvania Assembly passed naturalization laws that granted them the same rights as native-born English migrants: the right to own property, to participate in the mercantilist system, and to vote and hold political office. This article explores the impact of naturalizing immigrants on colonial Pennsylvania.

The article makes an incursion into Smith’s perception of America, according to his many approaches to the new continent in The Wealth of Nations and in Lectures on Jurisprudence. Smith’s perceptions about the population – immigrants, indigenous population, slaves – are under review. Smith’s treatment of ‘colonies’, as well as his commitment to combating the ‘mercantile system’ determine his approach to America. Contrasts between slave labor and free labor colonization are also under review, as well as the contrasts among the European nations in their American colonial adventures. Given the many recent studies on the diffusion of the Wealth of Nations in American colonies and countries, especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the article tries to invert the focus, showing that ‘Smith on America’, instead of the reception of the Wealth of Nations in America (‘Smith in America’), may add to our understanding of nuclear points of Smith’s approach to historical realities.

In recent decades, scholarly work on Adam Smith clarified important aspects of his multi-faceted account of human agency. However, the relevance of his view of knowledge and agency for political economy as science of the legislator has not been clarified sufficiently. It is contended here that Smith’s view of human agency in socio-economic contexts is linked to a kind of pragmatic pluralism, emphasizing the role of the knowledge made available by scientific “systems”, but also their limitations and incompleteness. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his discussions of the mercantile system and honesty in commerce are considered as examples of pragmatic pluralism reflecting such limitations, while opening up horizons of reasonable disagreement and problem-responsive reform avoiding technocratic fallacies and reckless experimentation.

This paper examines Adam Smith’s use of counterfactual reasoning in his analysis of the “process of civilization” and its implications for modern economics. Smith, influenced by Isaac Newton, Robert Simson, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume, employed counterfactual reasoning to critique the Mercantile System by comparing actual economic developments with the “natural course of events.” His physiocratic bias limited his engagement with emerging industrial advancements, yet his methodological contributions remain significant. Smith’s focus on “what if?” questions in policy discussions continues to shape modern economic thought, despite some limitations in fully realizing his theoretical framework.

According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

The contradiction in Adam Smith’s views on human nature, as outlined in his works published during his lifetime, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) and “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776), prompted economists to study the development of the ideas of the Scottish economist. Representatives of the Old German Historical School in the mid-19th century were the first to suggest that Smith’s acquaintance with the physiocrats’ ideas during his travels in France significantly influenced his economic theory and explains the differences between “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” and “The Wealth of Nations”. This hypothesis became known as the “French Connection Theory”. Significant development in understanding of the evolution of Smith’s ideas comes from his previously unpublished works. Thus, the lecture notes that Smith delivered as part of his course on moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow were first published in 1896. Those “Lectures on Jurisprudence, Police, Revenue, and Arms” also included the early version of his economic theory. This paper studies the development of Adam Smith’s economic ideas based on the “Lectures on Jurisprudence”. The analysis results in a clearer distinction between Smith’s original ideas and those he drew from physiocrats, thus refining the “French Connection Theory”. The paper shows that even before becoming acquainted with the physiocrats’ theory, Smith formulated the main theses on division of labor, pricing, and critics of the mercantilist system. However, the study confirms a significant influence of the physiocrats on the development of Smith’s theory. The reception of French ideas resulted in formulation of theories of natural value, distribution, and capital in “The Wealth of Nations”. Thus, we cannot completely refute the “French Connection Theory” hypothesis.

In Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, prescriptive and descriptive analysis are intertwined. While incentives analysis is strictly descriptive, the motivation of the analysis is prescriptive as are the motivations for its prescriptions. For Smith, wealth tends to promote justice; it also tends to be a consequence of justice. Poverty tends to create injustices instead, and to be a consequence of injustice. Understanding how to increase the wealth of a nation is thus understanding how to increase its justice. The perverse incentives of special interests are destructive forces of both wealth and justice. Smith called “Wealth of Nations” a violent attack against the British commercial system because, in the interpretation offered here, the entire apparatus of the British Empire was the results of those perverse incentives of special interests groups that not only generated inefficient monopolies, but also, and especially, generated gross injustices for the weakest members of society. For Adam Smith, wealth tends to promote justice; it also tends to be a consequence of justice. Poverty tends to create injustice and be a consequence of injustice. The first section of the article analyzes the traditional interpretation of “The Wealth of Nations” as, among other things, a treatise on the inefficiency of monopolies in particular, and the mercantilist system in general. It is shown that Smith analyzed manifestations of lobbying and nepotism, largely from the standpoint that is currently accepted in public choice theory. The second section emphasizes that the idea of justice precedes the consideration of economic phenomena from the standpoint of efficiency. Thus, Smith’s condemnation of the various consequences of the dominance of special interest groups in certain spheres of social and economic life, often manifested in an increase in human suffering and poverty, is based on the normative moral attitude of the inadmissibility of violating freedom and the principles of distributive justice. The third section is devoted to a generalization of Smith’s criticism of systems that are both inefficient and unfair. The perverse incentives of special interests are destructive of both wealth and justice. Smith called “The Wealth of Nations” a vicious attack on the British commercial system because, in the interpretation offered here, the entire apparatus of the British Empire was the result of these perverse incentives of special interests, which not only produced inefficient monopolies but also produced gross injustices for the weakest members of society. The key thesis the article makes is that understanding how to increase a nation’s wealth also means understanding how to promote justice.

ABSTRACT Between 1765 and 1789, the Spanish crown issued a series of comercio libre decrees that liberalised trade between Spanish America and peninsular Spain. What was the crown attempting to do by relaxing trade restrictions within the empire? Because the comercio libre decrees only authorised free trade within the confines of the empire, it may be easy to conclude, as the extant scholarship has, that these decrees were a delayed attempt to revitalise an increasingly obsolete mercantilist system. Indeed, Spain’s new imperial system of free trade appears to be little more than an outmoded form of protectionism centred on hoarding bullion. This article pushes against this perspective and shows that Spain’s decrees of comercio libre were part of an attempt to erect a peculiar interconnected system of free ports within the empire. Even though Spain’s free trade system excluded international trade, its intellectual architects deployed Enlightenment political economy to dynamize and integrate the imperial economy while avoiding the increasingly bellicose competition for international markets that was ascendant among European empires.

The Wealth of Nations has long been an economized text. I mean this in two senses of the term. First, it is a text that has been all too vulnerable to foreshortening, oversimplification, and being quoted out of context. Attempts to abridge, condense, and extract the essence of The Wealth of Nations extend almost as far back as when Smith first published the work. One of the earliest “commentaries,” published in 1778, was John Gray's The Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations, Illustrated, in Opposition to Some False Doctrines of Adam Smith, and Others. In the nineteenth century, the proliferation of economics textbooks in the anglophone world cemented Smith's reputation as the discipline's founding father. In 1937, Nashville's Parthenon Press published their Synthetic Wealth of Nations, described—albeit somewhat oxymoronically—as “condensed and extended.” In 1948, the Great Books Foundation published a “simplified, shortened, and modernized” version of The Wealth of Nations, whittling it down to the first nine chapters of book 1 only. A 1957 publication of Selections from “The Wealth of Nations,” edited by none other than the Nobel Prize–winning Chicago economist George Stigler himself, amounted to a mere 116 pages of reprinted excerpts from book 1, book 4, and book 5. This historical pattern reveals a second way in which The Wealth of Nations is often “economized.” It is a text whose language, primary contribution, and legacy is in modern economics. One might argue that, ironically, these past attempts at understanding Smith by way of economizing The Wealth of Nations have arguably contributed more to misunderstanding the totality and complexity of his thought. It hardly needs restating that much of Smith scholarship for at least the last three or four decades has been to challenge the “economization” of Adam Smith.Maria Pia Paganelli's latest volume upends this paradigm of economization. A leading Smith scholar and historian of economic thought, Paganelli's book expands rather than narrows the definition of what it means to publish a condensed “guidebook” to Smith's Wealth of Nations. It is not, as many of examples discussed above are, an abridgment or compilation of passages, sliced and diced to the server's liking. It is also not a commentary on key themes or interpretive problems (for instance, Samuel Fleischacker's seminal 2004 philosophical companion, or Christopher J. Berry's more recent Very Short Introduction, the latter of which covers the wider Smith corpus). Nor is it a traditional economic analysis of Smith's thought, the gold standard being something like Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect. Rather, it is book-by-book, chapter-by-chapter translation of The Wealth of Nations. Relying on plain, terse prose, Paganelli enables Smith—whose writing Thomas Jefferson once described as “prolix and tedious”—to speak more clearly and directly. Lest one think that more is lost than gained in this pocket-size volume, Paganelli is quick to put those worries to rest. Every chapter of every book of The Wealth of Nations is discussed and distilled into clipped and concise sections that not only adhere to but also bring into focus the overall organization of Smith's original work. She has an unrivaled ability to render some of the most challenging aspects of Smith's thought into clear, compelling, and accessible terms without sacrificing technical rigor or skimping on historical context. In terms of structure, it most closely resembles Jerry Evensky's 2015 volume, Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations”: A Reader's Guide, but there are key differences. Whereas one can sense a stronger rehabilitative project in Evensky's Guide—he attempts to recover a “Kirkcaldy Smith” in contrast to a “Chicago Smith” or even a “Marxist Smith”—in Paganelli's volume that objective is even more in the background. And while Paganelli does offer an overarching argument of sorts, what distinguishes her Guidebook is less the substance of the argument and more the interpretive and analytical tools with which she equips the reader.The book opens with an overview of Smith's life, followed by a very brief survey of the economic, political, and intellectual context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to book 1 of The Wealth of Nations. (Readers who might be surprised at the volume of these discussions would be reminded that book 1 is one of the longest books of the Wealth of Nations.) Chapters 6 and 7 cover books 2 and 3, respectively; this is also a departure from Evensky's Guide, which compresses the discussion of the two shorter books into one chapter. Chapters 8 and 9 cover book 4, followed by two chapters on book 5. It closes with a brief discussion of Smith's legacy. Over the course of the Guidebook, Paganelli advances two key arguments about how to read The Wealth of Nations. The first is that “Smith offers a moral justification of wealth, and prioritizes morality over efficiency in his justification of wealth,” a mildly contentious but not wholly novel claim. The second is a more interesting insight into Smith's method: that Smith “emphasizes what we commonly see is not necessarily what is” (12).Chapters 1 through 3 do the most work to support the first claim. Smith's important “Introduction and Plan of the Work” highlights labor, consumption per capita, and production per capita as the essential conceptual tools for understanding why some nations are rich and others are poor—Smith's central question. Any discussion of markets and prices, Paganelli reminds us, is conspicuously absent. The succinct and unadorned style of the work lends itself well to the stark nature of some of Smith's claims. “But why should consumption be so fundamental in understanding wealth?” Paganelli anticipates, “because if we cannot consume, we die” (15). This is what Smith tells us in the fourth paragraph of the whole work. This is not a crude mantra of “capitalism or death” (again: readers would be reminded that Smith did not use the word capitalism), but rather, one of the overarching themes of the whole work: that economic growth, for Smith, is not measured in coin or balances of trade, but “through the ability of a country to support an increasing number of people” (15). Another effect of the Guidebook's style is that it makes the reader more comfortable with Smith's mode of analysis and argumentation, one that often blends matter-of-fact scientific analysis with normative judgments. Paganelli's verbal “signposts” offer critical support structures that help the reader understand what Smith is up to. On the subject of apprenticeships in book 1, chapter 10, for example, Paganelli tells the reader exactly how to separate out Smith's argument: “Smith does not like apprenticeships. They are ‘a manifest encroachment of just liberty.’ . . . Here again notice Smith's move: justice is the primary motivation. Apprenticeship is a violation of just liberty. And it happens to be inefficient too” (65).The second claim—that not everything is as it seems—is made more consistently throughout the work, and, on my reading, an underappreciated and critical aspect of Smith's writing. Here, the presentation of Smith's notorious digression on silver is exemplary in this respect. Not many read this part of The Wealth of Nations, few venture to write about it, and even fewer manage to do so with such consistent clarity. As it turns out, Smith's digression on silver is the culmination of the central argument in book 1: we are often misled by what we see—whether about the extent of the division of labor, or about the value of silver in relation to increases in wealth. Changes in relative prices—not nominal prices—is where we need to look to understand the relationship between the value of silver and wealth. As Paganelli shows, it is Smith's four-century history that reveals “their disconnection, and therefore the error that is commonly believed” (81). Smith's reliance on history to test hypotheses and challenge reigning presuppositions comes into play again in chapter 7 (in book 3), which is styled in this instance as a “strange,” “impersonal,” and “unheroic” economic history that shows how “economic growth and development cannot be separated.” It is not, as we might think, the price signal but a messy history of human passions mixed with our rational desire to improve our condition that drove the “silent revolution of commerce” (123, 137).That correlation is not causation—something that the digression on silver clarified—resurfaces again in the discussion in chapters 8 and 9 (covering book 4). Paganelli draws her reader's attention to places where Smith is normally cautious and hesitant, and others where he “drops all hesitations” in excoriating the mercantile system. Take, for example, the moment where Smith exposes the flawed logic of the argument that Great Britain's Corn Laws are the sole reason for its prosperity. “Correlation is not causation, Smith again seems to warn his readers,” she writes. “Prosperity came at the same time as the Corn Laws, but it came at the same time as national debt too” (163). This attentiveness to how Smith unspools his arguments—where he hesitates, where he anticipates, where he is loud and clear—is extremely valuable for readers new and old. Chapters 10 and 11 (on book 5) contain additional guideposts for reading and understanding the structure of Smith's arguments. To provide another example, whenever Smith begins a section, paragraph, or sentence with “It has been said” (or “commonly said” or “commonly believed”), it should immediately set off a warning light: reader, something is wrong in the argument ahead (200, 201).The Guidebook delivers a style that is mostly curt and candid but also playful at times. Tackling Smith's refutation of bounties (subsidies), Paganelli writes, “If exports increase, the balance of trade would increase too. Win. Not” (156). Paganelli turns on a dime, just as Smith often does; just as one begins suspecting that Smith is arguing for one thing, he in fact argues the opposite, or at least offers a counterintuitive argument. These twists and turns in Smith's prose are substantially less dizzying in Paganelli's reconstruction. She also manages to capture the wit, irony, and sarcasm (yes, Adam Smith had a sense of humor) in twenty-first-century English. She lingers on points of ambiguity, such as the meaning of our “natural inclinations” in book 3 (124–25), encouraging the reader to embrace the complexity and pluralism of Smith's own thought. The final section on public debt and the North American colonies throws into high relief the way in which Smith was able to treat a polemical and delicate subject with such systematic and deliberate consideration. The last few paragraphs of this volume are point-by-point reconstructions of an objection, followed by Smith's response in straightforward terms. This way of “translating” each chapter of The Wealth of Nations makes it abundantly clear that Smith's book is surprisingly conversational and intended to guide statecraft. It reveals how deeply engaged Smith was in dissecting the arguments of his contemporaries, but also how carefully and methodically he refuted them and anticipated their objections. What Paganelli's volume offers, then, is a masterclass in crafting Smithian-style arguments.Though one can hardly call this new guidebook an economistic reading of The Wealth of Nations, its economistic tendencies occasionally come up. Smith's naive account of money is a problem without marginal utility theory, and his subsequent theory of value is near untenable (30–31); his analysis of tax incidence is inconsistent at best and incorrect at worst (224). These are “problems” with Smith's account insofar as they are judged against a contemporary (read: correct) understanding of value, price elasticity, and so forth. The majority of references included in the “further readings” at the end of each chapter, especially the chapters on book 1, are publications by economists or about the economics—as opposed to the philosophy or politics—of The Wealth of Nations. My view—perhaps an unorthodox one among political theorists—is that this is not so much a problem as it is a function of the economics profession's grip on Smith scholarship for so long. To her credit, Paganelli dexterously weaves in references to The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the “History of Astronomy” essay without making grandiose claims about the consistency or coherence of Smith's entire oeuvre. Rather, she draws out the more nuanced, intertextual, and theoretical connections in Smith's analysis of religious sectarianism (214–15), the role of the imagination (28), or the aesthetics of systems-building (147–48), to provide a few examples.However, the overarching claim—inspired by the economist James Buchanan—that The Wealth of Nations “can be read as a book about justice, about a just system that could also be an efficient system” (256), still rings partly hollow. On the one hand, the Guidebook's summation of book 5 shows how human institutions, especially the ones for the administration of justice, coevolve with human society. In my view, the Guidebook is at its strongest in revealing how Smith saw the design of distinctly political institutions embedded the alignment of incentives of different actors; moreover, these institutions could be designed to promote not only economic growth but human happiness. On the other hand, it is an altogether different claim that The Wealth of Nations is centrally concerned with the problem of justice. There is no question that normative language is scattered throughout The Wealth of Nations. But it is not clear to me that the normative tone of certain statements or even the choice of questions that Smith asks implies that he was principally concerned with defending commercial society on the grounds of justice. This is not a fault of Paganelli's exclusively. Rather, I think it is indicative of the shifting circumstances, demands, and meanings that we bring to bear on a text as timeless as Smith's Wealth of Nations.

The Assyrian written sources comprise different types of texts, including royal inscriptions, letters from the royal archives, loyalty treaties, and administrative texts. These sources can be analysed in order to investigate the history of the kingdom of Israel and of Phoenicia during the first half of the first millennium BCE, when Assyria gradually expands its hegemony »beyond the river« Euphrates, over the territories of modern Syria, southern Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. In the present article, I will focus in particular on the relationships between Israel and Phoenicia in the Neo-Assyrian period. On the one hand, it will be analysed whether (and under which circumstances) Israel and Phoenicia took part in the numerous anti-Assyrian military coalitions formed, in ninth and eighth century BCE, with other great Levantine states, like Hamath, Arpad and Damascus. On the other hand, I will investigate the role of Israel and Phoenicia in the framework of the Assyrian grand strategy in the Levant, which was aimed at controlling and investing in a vast network of maritime and inland trade routes that crossed the entire region. It will be seen how, in the political landscape under Assyrian hegemony, some Phoenician cities maintained, in force of their well-established mercantile system, a privileged position, with effects in the long term on the relationships between Phoenicia and the kingdom of Israel.

Operating within the established traditions and broad parameters of social history and historical sociology, Ponce Vázquez’s original and deeply archival work will be relevant to anyone whose interests extend to economic anthropology, political economy, the operation of power in racially and ethnically complex societies, and state-society relations in early modern imperial settings.How did a thriving contraband trade come to define society and shape political culture in seventeenth-century Hispaniola (today, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and how did the island’s elites gain control over governing institutions designed to advance imperial interests? This innovative sociopolitical history details islanders’ resistance to Spain’s mercantile system and the reason for their turn to smuggling to survive. In response to royal neglect and indifference, elites increasingly turned governing institutions into vehicles to advance their self-interests. The rapid decline of its sugar economy and the re-routing of the imperial fleet turned Hispaniola into a periphery; islanders responded by engaging in trade with Spain’s enemies and rivals.Ponce Vázquez brings the understudied period of this colonial periphery to life, using a rich array of sources housed in Spain’s Archivo General de las Indias. He uses the framework of moral economy to explore how islanders rationalized their defiance of imperial authority, and he expands the concept to account for the behavior of Hispaniola’s elites and its racially mixed popular classes. Taken together, the range of responses by locals, though rarely undertaken in concert, turned the island into a relatively vibrant hub for contraband trade. Ponce Vázquez analyzes more than a century’s worth of correspondence sent to Spain’s Council of Indies from a broad cross-section of Hispaniola’s population in order to reconstruct islanders’ social and political responses to imperial policy. He supplements these fragmentary materials with documents generated by royal officials, including cases brought before the regional court (Audiencia) that survived only because they were sent to Seville on appeal, and records of official inspections and judicial proceedings (visitas and juicios de residencias).The creative discipline that Ponce Vázquez brings to his analysis of these challenging sources allows him to reconstruct the social worlds of the island’s diverse and fractious inhabitants. He concludes that the enduring patronage networks that took shape in this period subverted imperial rule throughout the Caribbean; that alliances across conventional boundaries of faith, status, race and “national” loyalties were common (if unstable); and that residents’ involvement in contraband trade provided the basis for the island’s economic growth.Smuggling shaped governance and determined the limits of Spanish imperial authority; Hispaniola’s residents survived by engaging in contraband trade with Spain’s rivals and enemies. Lightly inhabited regions and remote ports became thriving centers of illicit commerce. Slavery and a racialized social hierarchy did not prevent Afro-descended peoples—free or enslaved—from contributing to a political economy based on contraband trade and creating elaborate social networks that included agents of other European powers. These networks may well have outlasted the people who created them. Ironically, this widespread defiance of imperial law and policy, typically covert rather than openly confrontational, structured the island’s precarious stability and defined the contours of its politics and its economy within a broader, trans-imperial setting. The actions of residents operating outside the law, by continuously challenging imperial authority in ingenious ways, turned an imperial periphery into a trans-imperial center in the broader context of the Atlantic world. Hispaniola became a hub for a contraband trade that provided its poorer residents with a livelihood, its elites with increased authority, and members of both groups with greater access to European and regional markets.This rich and detailed portrayal of social relationships and economic encounters that transcended distinctions in doctrine, status, and race deserves a broad audience. It reinforces the value of bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives and analytical techniques to archival research. It illustrates that even though the challenges of the archive should never be underestimated, recalcitrant documentation can be made to reveal the complex lives of both the elites and the marginalized subjects of empire. Relevant to scholars with interests outside colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, this book’s significance extends to global history, comparative politics, and the historical sociology of colonial societies.

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith’s frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This article argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith’s anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies’ evidentiary significance for his “system of natural liberty.” Smith’s embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans. Smith navigated this problem by, first, predicating colonial “injustice” on conquest, slavery, and destruction and, second, describing American land as res nullius. Together, these conceptual definitions made it possible to imagine settler colonies as originating in nonviolent acts of “occupation without conquest” and embodying “commerce without empire.”

The article aims to analyze how customs in Portuguese America were created in the beginning of the colonization process, when the General Government and the Public Treasury Administration were formed in 1548. We show that local Brazilian customs had their own specificities as compared to Portuguese customs, since the Portuguese state had to control mercantile groups carrying out trade regionally and with Lisbon. And this also meant controlling the colonial production output. In terms of organization and inspection, the Lisbon customs were a model for other metropolitan and colonial customs within the mercantilist system of the Portuguese Empire. In Brazil, however, the custom structure was still in an early stage, if compared with the existing structure in mainland Portugal. We show that there was an unsuccessful attempt in the first half of the 18th century to enact a new Customs Code in Brazil. Finally, we point out that the customs institution in Rio de Janeiro was essential for controlling trade in the South-Central region, seeking to the guarantee trade exclusively with the mainland, and, by doing so, to materialize the colonial system.

Gracias a las reflexiones desarrolladas a partir de la obra History Zero de Stefanos Tsivopoulos mostrada en la Bienal de Venecia de 2013, en relación con el análisis de Bourdieu acerca del sistema del arte, nos adentramos en las ambigüedades de conceptos tales como valor y precio para entender que lo que obtenemos de nuestra labor es la consecuencia de monetizar nuestra fuerza de trabajo dentro de un sistema mercantil. Este es un aspecto que debemos aprender a manejar, ya que no es algo dado dentro de un marco perfectamente regulado, sino una potencia de la que extraer rentabilidad, un espacio donde se establecen relaciones mutantes entre agentes diversos que atraviesan vida y praxis artística. A partir del propio lenguaje del arte, así como de la investigación en arte y la gestión cultural, tocando aspectos del derecho y la economía, se muestran una serie de obras que reflexionan acerca de la relación entre arte y trabajo.

There is hardly any dispute that the Eastern Indian Ocean like its historical past is once again emerging into a ‘cosmopolitan’ maritime arena underpinned by long stretches of peaceful exchange of commodities, energy and other maritime accessories. It has witnessed a new constellation of ‘inward-looking’ regional powers with a ‘bazaar nexus’ (for mercantile goods and energy supply) with Asian and non-Asian powers. Economically, small and middle powers of this region do share and accommodate all to draw the benefits of a highly globalised ‘closely-knit’ mercantile system. Problems relating to trade hazards—‘maritime mugging,’ ‘sea piracy,’ ‘illegal transfer of arms and ammunition, maritime terrorism, has already been addressed adequately by the collective effort of member nations under the aegis of ASEAN. This goodwill effort in the maritime zone awaits response from the cultural domain as well, which still lacks its frequency and luster of the glorious past. Although loads have been talked about, there has been little in action. The present paper is an attempt to study the community building efforts of ASEAN in connivance with emerging powers like India and China; and efforts at building up an Indian Ocean community as it existed in its past—sans feuds, sans fight—but unhindered exchange of culture and trade

Privilegiando el gobierno peruano, el desarrollo como factor económico indispensable en el mejoramiento de las condiciones económicas de los más necesitados en el ámbito rural, se ha creado una ola de transformaciones dentro del sistema de subsistencia en las comunidades rurales, las cuales han generado una mayor pobreza y sobre todo situaciones inequitativas de vida entre los comuneros. La subsistencia basada en la producción y consumo de las familiascomuneras, gira en torno a la unidad domestica y la zona de producción; tiene como factores para su permanencia y reproducción el proceso de combinar elementos andinos como la reciprocidad, la redistribución, el equilibrio y control de pisos ecológicos; mediante formas particulares que responden a sus propios contextos, donde se dan interactuaciones, articulaciones y dinámicas propias; además de asumir elementos foráneos como el sistema mercantilista(siglo XIX) que permitió conjugarlo, adaptarse y seguir reproduciendo la subsistencia. Los impactos “desarrollistas” tanto en la minería como los proyectos de desarrollo, han generado una transformación en la subsistencia y en la representaciones de las comunidades altoandinas ya que estas se han articulado mediante el trabajo o prestación de servicios a las mineras y en otros caso han asumido los proyectos de desarrollo que han cambiado sus orientaciones ypercepciones en torno a la producción y consumo. La comunidad Salinas Huito se encuentra enmarcado en esta transformación, primeramente de ser una sociedad pastoril paso hacer una comunidad campesina, que al ser parte de la Reserva Nacional Salinas Aguada Blanca, tuvo impactos de proyectos para ser sostenible esta ANP; además, el ingreso de la minera INKABOR, permitió su articulación mediante la prestación de servicios y bienes a esta empresa, lo que condujo a una radical transformación en el modo de subsistencia tradicional. Justamente esta investigación trata de reconocer estas transformaciones en el seno de las familias comuneras, además de evidenciar las nuevas representaciones que han provocado estos impactos, en sus formas de vida, orientaciones, símbolos y diferenciaciones al interior de la comunidad, además de presentar una “nueva familia comunera”, donde la ciudad-campo es indiferenciado, que busca la producción y reproducción del modo de subsistencia, de manera permanente.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain’s East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm’s charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith’s friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation’s legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers’ respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

Behavior of consumers consists of a series of psychological and physical activities in individual process of selecting, purchasing and consuming the products. The purpose and scope of this paper is to investigate the essence of aspects and functions by which merchandising affects the improvement of business in retail environments. The aim of this paper is to determine to what extent the proper product positioning has a direct impact on the improvement of sales results, as well as how to draw attention to a particular product in addition to large number of competing products. On the basis of the aforementioned subject of research, this research presents the possibility of organizing merchandising activities as a kind of cooperation between producers and traders. The research was carried out in such a way that the following hypothesis can be examined on the selected sample: H0- that consumers make the purchasing decision within a moment, which means in front of the shelves where the products are exposed, as well as the auxiliary hypothesis H1- the introduction of a mercantile system into the modern retail business facilities influences the increase in the company’s business results. After the completion of the survey research, the empirical data were processed by the statistical program package for social sciences SPSS 22 and StatPlus 2009.

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

ABSTRACT Adam Smith famously declared that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. Although Smith’s hostility to the merchants and the mercantile system is well known, what has not hitherto been appreciated is the full extent to which Smith believed such a ‘conspiracy’ to obtain, how he believed that it came about, and why it would likely prove highly resistant to effective political control. To appreciate this, it is necessary to situate The Wealth of Nations in relation to Smith’s wider assessment of the origins of modern European commercial societies, connecting his critique of mercantilism to his history of law and government, as well as to his late interventions regarding the problematic centrality of political judgement to managing affairs of state. Once this is done, we see that the famous attack on mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations must ultimately be read as Janus-faced, given Smith’s wider assessment of modern European conditions as revealed in the student lecture notes of the 1760s, and the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments.