Philip J. Stern, Carl Wennerlind - Mercantilism Reimagined - Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire-Oxford University Press (2013)

Mercantilism Reimagined
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Political Economy in Early
Modern Britain and Its Empire
Edited by Philip J. Stern

and
Carl Wennerlind
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mercantilism reimagined : political economy in early modern
Britain and its empire / edited Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-19-998853-2 (alk. paper)
1. Mercantile system—Great Britain.
2. Great Britain—Commercial policy.
I. Stern, Philip J. II. Wennerlind, Carl.
HB91.M427 2013
382c.3094109042—dc23 2013009336
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
contents
Contributors vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind
Part One: Circulation

1. Population: Modes of Seventeenth-Century Demographic Thought 25
Ted McCormick
2. Labor: Employment, Colonial Servitude, and Slavery in the
Seventeenth-Century Atlantic 46
Abigail Swingen
3. Money: Hartlibian Political Economy and the New Culture of Credit 74
Carl Wennerlind
Part Two: Knowledge

4. Epistemology: Expertise and Knowledge in the World of Commerce 97
Thomas Leng
5. Natural History and Improvement: The Case of Tobacco 117
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
6. Cameralism: A German Alternative to Mercantilism 134
Andre Wakefield
Part Three: Institutions

7. Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy 153
Henry S. Turner
8. Companies: Monopoly, Sovereignty, and the East Indies 177
Philip J. Stern
9. The Church: Anglicanism and the Nationalization of Maritime Space 196
Brent S. Sirota
10. Pirates and Smugglers: Political Economy in the Red Atlantic 218
Niklas Frykman
Part Four: Regulation

11. Polycentric States: The Spanish Reigns and the “Failures” of Mercantilism 241
Regina Grafe
12. Financial Markets: The Limits of Economic Regulation
in Early Modern England 263
Anne L. Murphy
13. Consumption: Commercial Demand and the Challenges to Regulatory
Power in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 282
Martyn J. Powell
Part Five: Conflict

14. War and Peace: Trade, International Competition, and Political Economy 305
John Shovlin
15. Neutrality: Atlantic Shipping in and after the Anglo-Dutch Wars 328
Victor Enthoven
16. Rivalry: Greatness in Early Modern Political Economy 348
Sophus A. Reinert
Afterword: Mercantilism to Macroeconomics 371

Craig Muldrew
Index 385
contributors
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.

He is the author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins
of Environmentalism (Yale University Press, 2013).
Victor Enthoven is assistant professor of history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
He is the co-editor, with Johannes Postma, of Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch
Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Brill, 2003).
Regina Grafe is professor of Early Modern History at the European University
Institute, Florence, Italy. She is the author of Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and
Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Niklas Frykman is assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. He
is currently working on a monograph exploring maritime radicalism in the revo-
lutionary Atlantic around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Thomas Leng is lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield. He is the author
of Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in Revolutionary
England (The Royal Historical Society, 2008).
Ted McCormick is associate professor of history at Concordia University. He is the
author of William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University
Press, 2009).
Craig Muldrew is reader on the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.
He is the author of The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social
Relations in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), and Food, Energy
and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England
(Cambridge, 2011).
Anne L. Murphy is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of
Hertfordshire. She is the author of The Origins of the English Financial Markets:
Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
Martyn J. Powell is senior lecturer and head of department in the Department of
History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University. He is the author most re-
cently of Piss-Pots, Printers, and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Four
Courts, 2009).
vii
viii Contributors
Sophus A. Reinert is assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard

Business School. He is the author of Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins
of Political Economy (Harvard University Press, 2011).
John Shovlin is associate professor of history at New York University. He is the author
of The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French
Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Brent S. Sirota is assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University. He is
the author of the forthcoming book The Christian Monitors: The Church of England
and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (Yale University Press, 2014).
Philip J. Stern is associate professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of
The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the
British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Abigail Swingen is assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. She is the
author of Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British
Atlantic Empire (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Henry S. Turner is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the au-
thor of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial
Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Andre Wakefield is professor of history at Pitzer College. He is the author of The Dis-
ordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (University of Chi-
cago Press, 2009).
Carl Wennerlind is associate professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia Uni-
versity. He is the author of Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution,
1620–1720 (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Acknowledgments
Mercantilism Reimagined emerged from a workshop held at Barnard College in the

spring of 2009. We gratefully thank The University Seminars at Columbia University
and the Barnard College Provost Office for generously providing financial support for
this event, as well as the Barnard College Special Events staff for logistical assistance.
As this volume has been long in the making, we have incurred numerous intellectual
debts to scholars with whom we have discussed the issue of mercantilism at our respec-
tive institutions and at various academic conferences, a list too long to reproduce here.
We would like, however, to thank especially the anonymous readers from the press,
Lisa Tiersten for helpful suggestions about the introduction, our editor, Sonia Tycko,
for her perceptive advice, as well as Carolyn Arena, Andrew Ruoss, and Pierre-Etienne
Stockland for valuable support and assistance.
ix
Introduction
Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind
The concept of mercantilism ironically owes a far greater debt to its foremost critic
than to any of its supposed advocates.1 Throughout the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
painted a deceptively coherent portrait of his predecessors and the commercial regula-
tions their ideas engendered. This “mercantile system,” as he called it, after the work of
the physiocrat Marquis de Mirabeau, was characterized by monopolism, a close con-
spiracy between merchants and politicians, and a confusion as to what constituted the
true nature of wealth. For Smith, this resulted in the retardation of commerce, the
hindrance of further specialization, the diminishment of state revenues, and a disre-
gard of the welfare of the “poor and the indigent” in favor of the “rich and the pow-
erful.” This account of early modern economic ideas and behavior served as a powerful
straw man for Smith’s own arguments, which understood labor as the essence of value,
economic behavior as largely self-regulating, the public good as served by the pursuit
of private interest, and wealth as dynamic rather than fixed.2
That the word “mercantilism” itself appeared nowhere in Smith’s writings, nor for
that matter in the works of his predecessors or interlocutors, has not stopped it from
becoming the standard shibboleth for discussions of early modern political economy.3
Indeed, mercantilism has become a principal lens through which historians have
viewed early modern European history and especially the expansion of European
empires. At the same time, mercantilism has become increasingly unfashionable as a
tool for understanding those ideas and programs more deeply. Thus, our dilemma:
mercantilism persists, particularly in undergraduate classrooms, as a convenient and
ubiquitous shorthand for a set of ideas and programs common to early modern Europe,
but, paradoxically, scholars at the same time just as often dismiss it as an incoherent
frame of analysis.4 In the end, we seem to know that there was something quite distinct
about early modern political economy, but what it was—let alone what to call it—
remains obscure. As a result, for lack of a better term, mercantilism has taken on a life
of its own. It has been declared dead multiple times over only to be resurrected just as
frequently as scholars continue to “revisit,” “revise,” and “rethink” the concept.5
3
4 Mercantilism Reimagined
This ongoing debate has offered great insights, but the scholarly literature’s preoccu-
pation with defining mercantilism or determining the extent to which it existed as an
ideology or practice has in some sense served to distract us from the ways its compo-
nent parts and underlying concepts also may need to be reimagined. Scholars’ ten-
dency to search for mercantilism directly—that is, to look for a discrete set of economic
ideas or practices that can be identified and taxonomized as mercantilist—has been a
bit like staring directly into the sun instead of approaching it, with greater clarity and
illumination, from its various reflections. Investigating what use mercantilism might
still hold for both scholars and teachers of the period thus requires a different set of
tactics: namely, an inductive rather than deductive approach, concerned less with de-
termining what mercantilism was and more sensitive to the ways in which the various
and sometimes even conflicting categories it conjures up could be approached differ-
ently, revised, or dispensed with altogether to produce concepts that help us under-
stand early modern economic thought and practice. In some cases, supposedly
economic notions arose from a range of discourses and practices that appear on the
surface to modern eyes to be non-economic, while conversely, those ideas and institu-
tions that have been conventionally understood as economic were in fact inseparable
from a host of scientific, cultural, social, or political forms.
Starting from this perspective, this book is bound together by a principal guiding
question: How do all of the traditional constituent parts of mercantilism—power and
plenty, wealth and money, balance of trade and balance of power, private and public
good, labor and land, free trade and monopolism, populationism and emigration, state
and commerce—appear when measured against the revisions those concepts have
experienced in the last decades’ scholarly literature? Accepting that many of those old
questions about mercantilism, when properly refracted and contextualized, are still
valuable lenses through which to see early modern political economy not only frees the
debate from the strictures and assumptions of historiography reaching back to the
Scottish Enlightenment but also avoids the normative assessment inherent in viewing
the period through the lens of modern economics.
In this sense, the goal of this book is neither to praise nor bury mercantilism but
rather to reimagine it. In so doing, a couple of general principles emerge. First, rather
than driven primarily by self-evident and narrow economic self-interest, theorists and
policymakers’ approach to economic problems was inseparable from its seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century European ideological context, characterized by radical trans-
formations and controversies in ways of thinking about the universe, the natural world,
and the body politic. As such, the study of the “age” of mercantilism cannot be merely
a subject of the history of economic thought or understood as the moment in which
“economic thought” was divorcing itself from other concerns. Instead, mercantilist
thinkers wrestled with such common problems as the nature of wealth, population,
5 Introduction
money, and commerce, but they did so for a variety of reasons and from various dif-
ferent perspectives, some of which looked for inspiration as far back as Aristotle, while
others anticipated much more modern approaches.
Second, given the latest scholarship about the nature of early modern politics, the
common vision of a mercantile system premised upon a coherent, strong, and expan-
sive nation-state is simply unsustainable. Certainly many early modern thinkers pos-
ited a mutually dependent relationship between merchants and political institutions,
and wrote about the role commerce played in state power. However, the authority and
legitimacy of that state to follow through on such prescriptions, and to regulate and
manage commerce and economic life, was often both aspirational and restricted.
Instead, despite its own protestations, we now know the early modern state to have
been rather weak, decentralized, and amorphous, while its competitors—from
churches to corporations to corsairs—were extremely vibrant. Though having its foun-
dations in the so-called financial and military revolutions of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, something like a British “military-fiscal” state would not become
coherent enough as an institution and an idea to exercise consistent and supreme au-
thority over its subjects, at home or abroad, until the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries.6 Even then, the extent of such power was still limited by a variety of
factors and competing forms of political authority and allegiance.7 The fact that recent
research has exposed a variety of political communities in shaping public life recom-
mends not abandoning mercantilism wholesale but asking which bodies politic mer-
cantilism sought to serve, and vice versa, at any given time.
Such insights do not force us to dismiss the main tenets of what we generally under-
stand to be mercantilism. They do however reframe our perspective significantly. Thus,
while attempting a different approach to the problem, this volume inevitably partici-
pates in a long tradition of attempts to revise or revisit the concept of mercantilism, all
of which have been products of their time, inspired by their theoretical, historical, and
historiographical contexts. The first serious effort to engage mercantilism commenced
with Gustav Schmoller and Eli Heckscher, who were arguably drawn to seventeenth-
century views on the relationship between the economy and the state as a foil for dis-
cussing how Europe would negotiate liberalism, socialism, and capitalism at a moment
when international conflicts ran high.8 While Schmoller and Heckscher emphasized
the importance of state power in defining mercantilist objectives, critics, most notably
Jacob Viner, countered that economic and commercial wealth were each as important,
suggesting that “power” and “plenty” went hand-in-hand.9 For another group of eco-
nomic historians, including E. A. J. Johnson, William Grampp, and T. E. Gregory, the
concept of mercantilism was useful to think about the situation prevailing during and
after the Great Depression, particularly the prolonged unemployment condition. Most
notably, John Maynard Keynes’s sympathy with pre-Smithian economic thought
enabled him to address not only the issue of unemployment but crucial concerns about
money, interest, and expenditures.10
Up until this point, much of the debate over mercantilism had not been about the
extent to which it existed but whether it constituted a legitimate economic theory and,
if so, whether it was generally applicable or only relevant to the period in which it was
formulated. Much of this debate was a thinly veiled argument between Keynesians and
Monetarists. By the 1950 and 1960s, a number of scholars began querying the coher-
ence of the historical notion of mercantilism itself. Instead of investigating the correct-
ness of mercantilism as a theory, they questioned whether the concept was analytically
useful to the study of early modern political economy. This is most famously repre-
sented in a series of essays collected by D. C. Coleman, titled Revisions in Mercantilism,
which collaboratively sought to undermine the very existence of the concept as an
historically identifiable practice, program, or ideology.11 As one of the contributors,
A. V. Judges, pointed out, mercantilism “never had a creed; nor was there a priesthood
dedicated to its service.”12
Despite these efforts, the concept of mercantilism never went away.13 Drawing on the
interpretive tradition in political thought spearheaded by Quentin Skinner and J. G. A.
Pocock—the so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history—Lars Magnusson set
out to unify the disparate strands of early modern political economy as a form of dis-
course. Beginning in the seventeenth century, he argues, a set of shared terms, cate-
gories, and concepts emerged in the seventeenth century, characterized by systematic
and logical argumentation centered on material wealth instead of morality, the crea-
tion of wealth rather than its distribution, and the perception that the economy consti-
tutes a separate system in which forces of supply and demand dictated economic
conditions. For Magnusson, “mercantilism” was a product of its age, in that it was
characterized by Hobbesian-like preoccupations with the self-interested, materialist
individual and the mechanistic notion of an economic system. Moreover, it was fueled
by the inductive “Baconian” approaches associated with the scientific revolution and
applied to a discernable discursive field that today would have been called economics.14
Joyce Oldham Appleby similarly envisions the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury as the moment when the “economy” came into its own as a discrete field of knowl-
edge, although she, like Andrea Finkelstein later, widens the field of vision somewhat,
looking not just to the “scientific” method but to a range of substantive preoccupations
and problems of knowledge embedded in broader scientific, religious, and moral dis-
courses. Unlike Magnusson, doing so leads Appleby not to embrace but rather largely
to eschew the term “mercantilism.” While Finkelstein posits a specific taxonomy of
what she calls a “mercantile . . . body of thought,” she nonetheless remains agnostic as
to whether we ought see this as a worldview, an ideology, or whether “the word mer-
cantilism might best be avoided” altogether.15 The most recent in this line of “rethinkers,”
7 Introduction
Steve Pincus further contributes to this interpretive tradition by highlighting the fun-
damental importance of the party-political dimension to the debate regarding com-
merce and politics. He argues that there was no such thing as an ideological consensus,
which can be captured by the term mercantilism. Instead he suggests that the early
modern English discourse was “a profound and highly politicized debate” between two
irreconcilable poles, Whig and Tory, offering conflicting views about the nature of
wealth and its proper management.16
Thus, generally speaking, there have been two distinct ways of critiquing mercan-
tilism: defending or questioning its soundness as an economic theory, either univer-
sally or in historical context, which in some ways required assuming its existence; or
historicizing its existence, which necessarily renders irrelevant whether it is valid as an
economic theory. Our starting point has been to set aside both of these questions for
the moment and begin by rejecting the notion that the economy was itself a distinct
field of operation, not least because this is not, until perhaps the nineteenth century,
the way theorists regarded it.17 The vision that emerges among the chapters here is
therefore not of a system of thought in which “moral implications” of economic behav-
ior were “kept in the background,”18 but rather one in which morality, politics, and
science were front-and-center in people’s minds.
This follows on the insights of the more recent scholars who have shown that inno-
vations in the period’s scientific and moral discourse deeply inspired, influenced, and
informed political economic thinking. Yet, the inductive approach adds a different
perspective to those interventions. For example, Finkelstein’s work has offered great
insights into the ways economic thought was embedded in intellectual and social con-
texts, but her focus on case studies of particular theorists nonetheless reinscribes the
notion of a canon of political economists. The chapters in Mercantilism Reimagined,
while certainly engaging familiar names like Thomas Mun, Edward Misselden, Josiah
Child, and Charles Davenant, also attempt to broaden significantly our conception of
who “counts” as an economic thinker to other intellectual communities, such as the
Hartlib Circle, as well as naturalists, colonial officials, directors of joint-stock com-
panies, politicians, preachers, and even pirates.19 Additionally, Pincus helpfully points
us toward seeing mercantilism as a form of debate rather than a consensus; many of the
chapters of this volume however identify a range of axes, perhaps not mutually exclu-
sive, on which that debate may have turned beyond national party politics—from rival
conceptions of the natural world to competing visions of colonial commerce, sover-
eignty, and authority—as well as some of the basic premises those parties may have
shared in common.
Whether waging war or conducting diplomacy, managing free or unfree popula-
tions, intervening in the market or conceiving of questions of credit, understanding
the natural world or the very nature of understanding itself, early modern thinkers and
policymakers do seem to have been engaged in some venture we might still produc-
tively understand as mercantilism. After all, as Charles Wilson pointed out more than
a half century ago, “Mercantilism was always something more and something less than
‘economic.’”20 The task here has not been to reinvent yet another notion of mercan-
tilism, but rather to consider how we might reinterpret, and use productively, the var-
ious different features commonly understood as mercantilism, through fresh
perspectives across a wide swath of political, cultural, social, and intellectual life. The
hope of this book is thus to offer tools to deal both with mercantilism’s unavoidable
inadequacy and seemingly inevitable ubiquity, and to think broadly about its political,
social, cultural, and intellectual elements in ways that could be cross-applied to the
wide variety of definitions it has been given over time. Put another way, to paraphrase
Steven Shapin’s well-known opening to his overview of the scientific revolution: there
was no such thing as mercantilism, but nonetheless this is a book about it.21
Eschewing a closed-form definition of “mercantilism,” most contributors here set out
to explore the extent to which a discernable set of economic conditions or concerns
was embedded within a range of political, intellectual, social, and cultural practices not
explicitly or primarily identified as economic. Authors were asked to engage broad
thematic categories (e.g. “population,” “labor,” “epistemology”) but to address them
through particular case studies and examples. No chapter supposes to be a complete
synthesis of its topic nor the final word in defining its subject; instead, the goal was to
pose a set of questions and concerns that could serve not only to suggest but perhaps
shape further research and analysis. We hope that the chapters in this book, despite
primarily focusing on Britain and its overseas experience, can nevertheless be of use to
scholars working across early modern Europe; some of the chapters offer direct models
for how to do this, reflecting this analysis of the British empire through analogous
histories to be found in Prussia, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.
The book begins by looking at different ways of understanding mercantilism in the
context of contemporaries’ understandings of the problems facing England, and par-
ticularly its relationship to the circulation and movement of people, goods, and ideas.
Part 1 focuses on how the mid-seventeenth-century revolution in political economy
transformed the prevailing understanding of and approach to population, labor, and
money. These chapters remind us that the distinct English political economy that
emerged in the 1620s was a direct response to the devastating conditions resulting
from the period’s severe commercial downturn.22 Disturbing levels of unemployment
and poverty threatened to destabilize a society that was already reeling from a precar-
ious polity and the dislocating effects of a rapidly commercializing economy. While the
English Poor Laws were revised to keep the unemployment situation under control,
theorists—including, most famously but hardly exclusively, Gerard Malynes, Edward
Misselden, and Thomas Mun—offered the Crown their counsel on how to deal with
9 Introduction
the crisis. The solution, they argued, was to be found in correcting the various imbal-
ances that were destabilizing the body politic. The key to restoring order and pros-
perity was to ensure that society’s limited wealth was properly distributed through
society so that each segment of the population could reproduce itself and carry out its
prescribed social role.23 For that to happen, the scarcity of money problem that plagued
England had to be resolved. Just as the human body required a healthy circulation of
blood to remain in balance, the body politic depended on a well-ordered monetary
system to nourish its various parts. For the early Stuart political economists, the pri-
mary challenge was therefore to find a way to attract more specie from abroad and thus
replenish England’s money stock.
By midcentury a revolution in political economy ushered in by a group of writers
surrounding the polymathic Samuel Hartlib fundamentally changed the thinking on
how to solve England’s troubles. Inspired by the works of Francis Bacon, the so-called
Hartlib Circle advocated that a systematic pursuit and implementation of new prac-
tical knowledge had the capacity to launch an era of infinite improvement, which
would foster a universal reformation and ultimately create a “paradise on earth.”24 In
trying to activate nature and humanity’s unbounded potential, they focused mainly
on the improvement of mining, agriculture, horticulture, husbandry, and manufac-
turing. In the process, they also developed new conceptions of labor, money, com-
merce, and wealth. Indeed, they viewed natural philosophy and political economy as
inseparable forms of knowledge essential to the improvement process. Considering
how influential the Hartlibians were in terms of the seventeenth-century English
thinking about “unemployment, the role of private initiative and state action in eco-
nomic growth, the relationship of wealth to poverty, the equilibrium of population
and food supply, and the place of science in managing resources,” it is indeed bewil-
dering, as Richard Drayton has noted, that they have “not so far received adequate
historical attention.”25
The Hartlibians discussed in a number of chapters in this book make clear that well
before Smith and the birth of modern “capitalism,” early modern Britons envisioned
inventions, innovations, and productivity improvements in agriculture, manufacturing,
and commerce as essential ingredients in the nation’s economic as well as political,
moral, social, and cultural development.26 The notion that commercial pursuits had
corrosive effects on morality had not disappeared, yet because the commercialization
of the economy sparked widespread employment it was considered by many a necessary
evil and by others an essential component of order and prosperity. Additionally, by
ensuring that the world of goods was steadily expanding, the prospects improved of
funding the ever-more ambitious, but still somewhat inchoate, fiscal-military state
through customs and excise taxes.27 A vigorous and innovative economy thus emerged
as the apparent panacea to England’s troubles.
Across early modern British thinking about the nature of political and economic
power and authority appears a preoccupying concern not simply with the size of the
population but with its management and coordination.28 Work was not only the founda-
tion of national wealth; it was the basis of social stability and morality. In the first chapter
in this book, Ted McCormick identifies three phases in the seventeenth-century thinking
about the concept of population. At first, the focus was on specific groups that were trou-
blesome or of relevance to specific legislative initiatives, not on the population as a whole.
The growing surplus population, consisting primarily of peasants displaced by agricul-
tural modernization and unemployed textile workers and sailors, was of particular in-
terest as they constituted a potential “crop of criminals.” In the second phase, proposals
emphasized the management of population for social reform: that is, the “multiplication
of useful types of people,” through measures such as pro-natal policies and the immigra-
tion of skilled workmen like foreign seamen and weavers. A diligent and expert work-
force would generate material affluence, which in turn would enable further population
growth and, as some writers like William Petty stressed, maintain the proper and dy-
namic ratio between hands and lands. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, a
third phase had developed in which this notion of expanding the number of productive
hands in England was augmented by a quantitative approach to understanding the policy
implications of population, an approach known as political arithmetic.
Picking up where McCormick leaves off, Abigail Swingen explores the implications
of these changing ideas about population on England’s relationship to labor, both free
and unfree, particularly in the Atlantic context. Seventeenth-century thinkers viewed
the problem of surplus population as one that could not adequately be addressed do-
mestically; England simply did not have enough productive land to feed its entire
population. The only hope was to send the poor and unruly across the ocean, where
vast areas of fertile land could provide proper economic and moral nourishment.
However, as the new improvement mentality spread during the second half of the cen-
tury and people were increasingly considered the nation’s most important economic
resource, the focus shifted away from exporting and toward retaining and retraining
the surplus population. Swingen argues that this change in conceptualization of the
domestic population made the idea of peopling the colonies with African slaves all
the more appealing. Thus, it was the shift in populationist ideology that made possible
the massive increase in the slave trade that characterized England’s eighteenth century.
In turn, Swingen shows, slavery needs to be taken seriously as a critical component of
late seventeenth-century thought about population.
Carl Wennerlind’s chapter engages one of the most fraught issues in the debate about
mercantilism: the role of money in society. He argues that Adam Smith did a great
disservice to posterity by offering such a selective reading of seventeenth-century
monetary thought. Not only did he wrongly accuse Malynes, Misselden, and Mun of
11 Introduction
confusing wealth with precious metals, he ignored a whole strand of monetary thinking
introduced by the Hartlib Circle. Wennerlind argues that by midcentury, as part of
their sweeping reform program, the Hartlibians introduced the radically new ideas
that money did not necessarily have to consist of precious metals and that money pos-
sessed the power to ignite economic activity and thus fuel the process of infinite im-
provement. Their proposals for a new, more flexible, generally circulating credit
currency that could be expanded at will would soon revolutionize the seventeenth-
century understanding of the nature and function of money.
The next trio of chapters explore the role of changing forms of knowledge in the pur-
suit of commerce and wealth-formation. Thomas Leng’s chapter explores the effects that
the seventeenth-century epistemological transformations normally associated with the
scientific revolution had on the formation of political economy. Leng argues that thinkers
like Malynes and Misselden initially sought to produce knowledge in the Aristotelian or
scholastic tradition. Later in the century, though, many thinkers were less confident in
their claims to firm, indisputable, and demonstrative truth; political economy, like other
intellectual pursuits, thus came to reflect more localized and tentative sources of knowl-
edge. Especially among the members of the Hartlib Circle, Francis Bacon’s prescription
that the measure of good knowledge was its utility for humanity became as central to
merchants and economic theorists as it was to the practices of knowing long established
among experimentalists, alchemists, apothecaries, and the like.29
The union of natural and economic knowledge was perhaps best exemplified in the
deep connections between political economy and botany, forces that were closely
intertwined both in England and Scotland, as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson observes in
his chapter. If nature was the cornerstone of the formation of wealth, understanding
how it worked became central to the aims of political economy. Advances in botany in
particular had the potential to yield new vendible commodities while also promising
numerous benefits to society, which according to Hartlib included plants that “shall
preserve men not only from sickness, but from death itself.”30 In turn, natural knowl-
edge came to play a critical role in England’s colonial expansion. A thriving English
population and commerce abroad required careful study of climates, florae, and
faunae; likewise, the pursuit of knowledge in the realms of alchemy and chemistry,
animal husbandry, farming, and mining constituted central features of the political
economy of domestic and colonial improvement. This was not just the pattern in Eng-
land, as Lisbet Koerner has shown elsewhere in the case of Carl Linnaeus’s botanical
experiments in Sweden, which echoed the Hartlibian spirit of unending agrarian im-
provements through the pursuit of new knowledge.31
Turning to the Continent, Andre Wakefield’s chapter refracts the ways in which some
of these very same concerns were articulated in the German states, where a distinct
tradition, commonly known as “cameralism” emerged. Science, technology, politics,
and improvement were intertwined in quite different institutional settings than in

England. Yet, the juxtaposition of Wakefield’s exploration of camerialism with the
other chapters in this section reveals that both mercantilism and cameralism, despite
their undeniable differences, responded to commensurable political economic con-
cerns and interests, as well as employed similar strategies and forms of knowledge to
achieve their political and economic aims. As Wakefield writes, “Open a cameralist
text and you will be more likely to find chapters describing lead smelting, gardening,
brewing beer, raising pigs, forestry, and hard-rock mining than, say, general principles
of trade”—a sentiment that helps illuminate, both in comparison and by contrast, sim-
ilar concepts found among Jonsson’s naturalists or Leng’s natural philosophers.
If the chapters in parts 1 and 2 question whether we have been too limited in our
definition of the “economic,” the rest of the book turns to query whether our definition
of mercantilist political economy has been hamstrung by an all too one-dimensional
understanding of early modern “politics.” While still concerned with questions about
the dynamic between theory and praxis, and the ways in which “economic” thought is
embedded and indeed produced by a web of concerns, the chapters here train their
attention on the relationship between the management of commercial activity and
political power. In so doing, they put forth two central propositions: first, that mer-
cantilist projects served to augment the power and wealth of a variety of political com-
munities, not merely the monarchy and the nation-state; and second, that the statist
programs articulated by many early modern writers, so often taken as emblematic of
mercantilism, were deeply circumscribed in practice by the limited ambition, authority,
and power of that state.
The traditional account of mercantilism envisions the relationship between the state
and the merchant as one of protection and dependence; in this sense, merchants used
the government’s domestic political authority to secure patents or charters so that they
could enjoy exclusive rights to trade in certain goods or regions in return for loans,
gifts, and other forms of nonproductive revenue.32 In turn, mercantilism has long been
used as a comprehensive term to encompass the relationship between politics and
commerce that undergirded early modern colonial governance and expansion, partic-
ularly in the form of protectionist policies such as the Navigation Acts.33 Agents of the
English Crown had long tried to regulate and organize commerce in order to make it
compatible with its own interest, in institutions such as the staple, the Statues of Em-
ployment, and the Royal Exchange. Moreover, a number of political economists clearly
had royalist tendencies, or at least positioned themselves that way; Gerard Malynes, for
one, insisted monarchs were “not only Gods Lieutenants upon earth” but perhaps
Gods themselves.34
Yet, such pronouncements were always more claims and aspirations than fully artic-
ulated realities. Throughout the seventeenth century, “absolutism,” so frequently paired
13 Introduction
with “mercantilism,” could never quite achieve its goals, especially in the multiple
monarchy on the British Isles. The state, as Michael Braddick and others have shown,
was not so much made as formed, through a number of coincident fiscal, political,
religious, and cultural processes that were far less directed and far more gradual than
previously imagined by historians.35 Rival concepts of Parliamentary and republican
power, pluralistic notions of the polity, and composite forms of sovereignty posed a
significant challenge to any possibility of a Hobbesian Leviathan. No matter how deter-
mined monarchs and ministers were to overcome these political and ideological obsta-
cles, their states remained far too weak, and ideologies of statecraft too conflicted, to
exercise supreme and complete authority, in particular over English subjects conduct-
ing their affairs overseas.36 Such was the case all over Europe.37 Moreover, the process
of state formation was intimately connected with the construction of empire in the
British Isles and overseas, but both were processes that evolved piecemeal, through
decentralized networks and “webs of empire” constituted by merchants, chaplains,
travelers, companies, and colonists alike, all with varied and sometimes confused rela-
tionships with the “English” (let alone “British”) state.38
With this in mind, part 3 turns to examine a variety of institutions and bodies politic
that operated alongside— and sometimes instead of—the national state in governing
over people, places, and markets in the early modern world. The chapters by Henry
Turner and Philip Stern focus on the ideas and practices of corporations and com-
panies. They offer a place to begin thinking differently about the relationship between
the claims of early modern sovereignty on the one hand and economic organization
and the “market” on the other. Focusing on the works of Sir Thomas Smith and the
colonial promoter and ideologue Richard Hakluyt, Turner stretches both the concep-
tual and chronological possibilities for understanding mercantilism by suggesting that
figures like Hakluyt understood the relationship between politics and the economy
through the figure of the “corporation” as much as the “state.” Turner shows that it was
the idea of a corporate community, of which the state was a subset, that allowed for late
Elizabethan humanist thinkers to reconcile virtue and commerce, alongside and in
some ways in substitution for the city, republic, or colony. The corporation thus was
integral to ordering ideas about economic and political life, and helps us to conceptu-
alize not a new form of state but rather the ways in which all political entities are in
themselves ultimately fictions, albeit fictions with force and purpose.
Stern’s chapter similarly complicates the distinctions between public good and pri-
vate gain, looking to the later part of the seventeenth century and the corporate foun-
dations for British overseas expansion in the form of the joint-stock company. The
incorporated, overseas company blurred the distinction between “state” and “mer-
chant,” both categories ultimately inhering in the same institution. Thus, what looked
to some like a “monopoly” over trade, for example, was taken by corporate leadership
to constitute a jurisdiction and form of political authority; this in turn meant com-
panies, especially those overseas, possessed their own statist political economies,
meant to underscore not just their profit but their power. Put another way, the East
India Company may have had a “mercantilist” ideology, but when and whether it
played the role of the state or the merchant depended a great deal on chronology,
context, and geography.
The next chapter examines another corporate institution also engaged, in different
ways, in shaping the governance of British subjects abroad: the Anglican Church. Brent
Sirota shows how the Anglican episcopacy and ideologues in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries desperately sought to take the “oceanic turn,” understanding the
sea (and the English people on and across it) as a critical aspect of its political and
spiritual authority. Perceiving mariners as particularly vulnerable to both physical and
spiritual hazards, the Church reached out to bring seamen back into the fold
and thereby protect them from such dangers. It also influenced the selection and
supply of chaplains to overseas factories and colonies. In this way, the Church extended
across the seas to buttress its own authority at home and abroad, vis-à-vis its many
competitors. Yet, in pursuing its own interests, Sirota argues, the Church contributed
to and shaped the effort of a variety of corporate and voluntary bodies to “nationalize”
early modern oceanic space; in this way, the institutional needs of the Church, rather
than a coherent plan of state building, contributed to making an empire in which it was
possible to “serve both God and Mammon.”
Turning from those who prayed for and in the empire to those who preyed upon it,
Niklas Frykman fixes his attention on the other end of the political spectrum: the anti-
national maritime space erected by a wider world of pirates and smugglers. By putting
both piracy and smuggling into the same frame of reference, Frykman’s chapter reha-
bilitates what might be understood as an alternative maritime political economy of
those who both thrived upon but resisted this expanding regime of corporate, national,
and state enterprises, one that emphasized “cooperative labor, equal profit-sharing,
democratic decision-making, and, perhaps most importantly, instant enjoyment and
idleness over the accumulation of capital and deferred gratification.” These pirates and
smugglers defied easy categorization. Radically rejecting the structures of the expand-
ing English maritime world, both smugglers and pirates participated in a moral polit-
ical economy, which offered an alternative to the nationally based mercantile system,
not simply rejecting but redefining its core principles: networks of credit, maritime
labor, global commerce in things and people, monetization, capital accumulation, and
the critical values of loyalty, service, oaths, and benevolence.
At the core of this book is the argument that the state faced very real limitations in
achieving the goals traditionally associated with “mercantilist” doctrine. If part 3 en-
gages this problem by exploring the ways in which non-state bodies politic complicate
15 Introduction
such categories in early modern political economy, part 4 turns to examine the weak-
ness of the state itself and the ways in which it consistently failed to regulate and disci-
pline the market and economic behavior. The three chapters here directly query the
relationship between the state’s expansive political aspirations and its quite limited
ability in reality to exercise such power over economy and society. Both Anne Murphy
and Martyn Powell argue that despite its claims and best efforts, the national state was
more often than not unable to control economic life. Murphy’s chapter examines the
extent to which the English government was able to govern the inchoate stock market
in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As she shows, whether it was appro-
priate or necessarily advantageous for the state to regulate the financial market was
itself a matter of debate and controversy. Moreover, Murphy cautions that one should
not confuse the volume of calls for intervention with a volume of action, as officials
consistently failed in their attempts to police this emerging form of economic exchange
and activity. Powell’s chapter similarly engages a problem that has, in a way, been
hiding in plain sight in discussions of mercantilism: that is, consumption. So much
scholarship on mercantilism is concerned with the supply of goods—production and
trade—that it tends to ignore the role demand played in shaping economic thought
and policy. Even if one could argue that the state had power to manipulate production
and trade, it was far less capable of commanding both individual and collective con-
sumer behavior. Focusing on the peculiar but revealing case of Ireland—a place both
kingdom and colony—Powell shows how consumers could undermine the state both
through their purchasing choices as well as more active interventions in the market
such as boycotts and violent protest in reaction to British colonial policy.
Offering stimulating reflections on this rift between the theory and practice of state
power from an Iberian perspective, Regina Grafe’s chapter queries the role of “mercan-
tilist” policy in the colonial world in light of the multidimensional nature of European
politics. Revising our notion of composite or multiple monarchy, instead she introduces
the notion of a “polycentric” Spanish state. As in England, Spain did not lack for theo-
rists calling for a strong relationship between the monarchy and the economy. However,
as Grafe observes, Spain was not a national (let alone absolutist) state but a complex
amalgam of monarchical and imperial realms, a fact that deeply limited its ability to
manipulate the market at the local and regional levels. Mercantilism’s ill-fated history in
Spain, therefore, needs to be recast, less as a failure of an incoherent or inherently flawed
policy than as the result of the fact that the state was itself a composite of so many dif-
ferent interests and constituencies that it has been an historiographical fiction to expect
any coherent “mercantilist” project to have been possible in the first place. As such, this
chapter can be seen as offering an implicit call to arms for historians of Britain as well to
reevaluate their notion of mercantilism, in light of the similarly composite—or perhaps
better yet, polycentric—state that inhabited the early modern “Atlantic Archipelago.”39
The chapters in part 5 look at another issue familiar to scholars of mercantilism: war
and international politics. Expanding upon the work of Istvan Hont, John Shovlin
shows that contrary to the commonplace view that mercantilist states fought wars to
protect trade, early modern political economists actually rarely called for violent state
intervention in the name of commercial expansion.40 This was not, however, because
they necessarily understood commerce as war’s peaceful antithesis. Rather, to many,
trade was itself a form of international competition and conflict that “promoted trade
as a substitute for war” and thus “promised a less bloody world.” In theory, thus, wars
should not have been fought over commerce since commerce itself substituted for war;
however, as Shovlin shows, commerce as warfare overturned traditional diplomatic
systems, focused on dynastic politics. Ironically, then, as the entanglements of mer-
chant corporations, commerce, and competition redefined the dynamics of the geopo-
litical balance of power, commerce led to war, not as its cause but its consequence.
Victor Enthoven turns to a particular set of conflicts, the longue durée of Anglo-
Dutch competition in the Atlantic. Moving away from a literature concerned with
abstract ideological debates over the free and open seas, he traces how the pragmatic
concerns of this rivalry, as articulated in colonial policy, court processes, diplomatic
instruments, and military strategy, defined both Dutch and English approaches to no-
tions of mare clausum and mare liberum. If Shovlin argues that overt hostility was not
necessarily the end of mercantilist commerce, Enthoven suggests the importance of
neutrality as another mercantilist model, one that clearly helped shape early modern
political economy. Rounding out this section, Sophus Reinert argues that rivalry and
competition in early modern political economy must always be read in the context of
actual or imagined inequalities of wealth and power between European nations. In
historicizing the concept of jealousy of trade, Reinert opens up the category of trade to
mean both commerce and finance, as well as industry and technology. He interrogates
Francis Bacon’s insistence, inspired by the works of Giovanni Botero, that the best
strategy to ensure power and independence—the right to give laws—was to “over-
grow” one’s neighbors through success in trade, broadly defined. True liberty or au-
tonomy, Reinert notes, thus “depended on the structures of the world economy as
much as on domestic institutions.”
Finally, Craig Muldrew offers a set of reflections, which bring the volume back to
where it began: Adam Smith. Yet, Muldrew impels us to ask not only how current
scholarship has transformed the notion of mercantilism we have inherited from
Smith. Rather, he suggests, both explicitly and implicitly, that—like the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thinkers many of the preceding chapters have examined—we
are deeply affected by our contemporary world in our own needs and desires to re-
imagine, rethink, and revise mercantilism. The crises of the twentieth century cer-
tainly led scholars—perhaps most famously John Maynard Keynes—back to the very
17 Introduction
same questions critical to those early modern thinkers: the balance between regulation
and free commerce; the role of government in the market; the nature of credit and debt;
the boundaries and confusions among wealth, money, and specie. Muldrew draws our
attention to the twenty-first century, suggestively raising questions about our need to
understand mercantilism in the context of the financial crisis of 2008. Certainly, it
would seem that early modern theorists and statesmen alike dealt in their own ways
with questions about sovereign debt, overextended credit markets, multinational com-
panies that are “too big to fail,” and so on. This serves as a provocation that the contro-
versies of Smith’s “mercantile system” were not a relic of the past, hermetically sealed off
from the modern era by the birth of liberalism and “classical” economics. At the same
time, it serves as a sober reminder that if mercantilism (as this volume argues) was in-
separable from its social, political, intellectual, and cultural contexts, so too are all at-
tempts to rethink, revise, revisit and even reimagine it—in the past, present, and future.
NOTES
1. The irony that mercantilism’s staunchest critic’s definition of the concept has remained the
benchmark for so long has not been lost on previous commentators. See for example
A. W. Coats, “Adam Smith and the Mercantile System,” in On The History of Economic
Thought: British & American Economic Essays (1975; repr., London: Routledge, 1992), 129–
30; Lars Magnusson, “Introduction,” in Magnusson, ed., Mercantilist Economics (Boston:
Kluwer, 1993), 1–2; Steven Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the Brit-
ish Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69, no. 1 (January 2012): 3–4.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3 vols. (Dub-
lin, 1776), 2:489, 3:378. For examples of the canonical view of Adam Smith’s economic
thought, see Eric Roll’s A History of Economic Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1938);
Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954);
and Henry Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1971). The last few decades have witnessed an active reassessment of Smith’s intellectual
contributions. See, for example, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue:
The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Polit-
ical Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Emma
Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Istvan Hont, Jealously of Trade: International
Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2005); Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tony Aspromourgos, The Science of
Wealth: Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2009); and
Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2010).
3. As D. C. Coleman observed, it is deeply ironic that Smith’s work has become standard-
issue for those in support of the limitless expansion of private enterprise, given its great
“hostility to agents of that enterprise”; his attitude toward merchants and tradesmen as
“presumptuous humbugs” was as “unequivocal” as it was “diversely damning.” D. C. Cole-
man, “Adam Smith, Businessmen, and the Mercantile System in England,” History of Euro-
pean Ideas 9, no. 2 (1988): 161.
4. Coleman argues that, “as a label for economic policy, [mercantilism] is not simply mis-
leading but actively confusing, a red-herring of historiography.” “Eli Heckscher and the
Idea of Mercantilism,” in Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen,
1969), 117.
5. The literature on mercantilism is vast and extensive, and it is not our intention to summa-
rize it in its entirety here. For excellent accounts of the historiography of mercantilism, see
Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge,
1994), chap. 2; and Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of
Seventeenth-Century Economic Thought, conclusion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
2000).
6. In a recent examination of the relationship between “the state” and “the economy,” Julian
Hoppit maintains that the English fiscal-military state did indeed come to fruition after the
Glorious Revolution, but cautions us to pay attention to how the architecture of authority
remained fragmented on the local level and to the way political communities and practices
differed substantially among England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Hoppit, “The Nation, the
State, and the First Industrial Revolution,” Journal of British Studies 50, no. 2(2011): 307–31.
Perry Gauci, focusing on different forms of regulation of the British economy, similarly
warns us not to pay too much attention to the Glorious Revolution as a watershed in the
history of the relationship between state and economy. He argues, “the state’s intervention
cannot be represented as the initial sovereignty of ‘mercantilism’ giving way to Smithian
economic liberalism.” Instead of such linearity, Gauci suggests that there were recurrent
cycles of regulatory interventions, accompanied by ideological and theoretical justifica-
tions. Gauci, ed., Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 18.
7. For an overview, see Mark Knights, “Fiscal-Military State,” Oxford Bibliographies Online:
Atlantic History, ed. Trevor Burnard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), http://
w w w.oxfordbibliographies.com/vie w/do c ument/ob o-97 801997 304 1 4/ob o-
9780199730414-0073.xml. See also John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power: War and the English
State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); H. V. Bowen, War and British Society,
1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Braddick, State Forma-
tion in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), esp. part 3; John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth, eds., Rethinking Leviathan: The
Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development
of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967); P. K. O’Brien, “Power with Profit:
The State and the Economy, 1688–1815” (Inaugural Lecture, University of London, 1991);
P. K. O’Brien and Philip A. Hunt, “The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815,” Histor-
ical Research 66 (1993): 129–76; Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain,
the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London: Routledge,
2002); Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the
Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Lawrence Stone, ed.,
An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994).
8. In addition to his many untranslated works in German, see particularly Gustav Schmoller,
The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1897);
Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935); William Cunningham,
19 Introduction
Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, Part 2: The Mercantile System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882); Ronald Findlay, Eli Hecksher, Interna-
tional Trade, and Economic History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
9. Among other works, see Viner’s “Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” World Politics 1, no. 1 (1948); for a recent re-
vival of Viner’s famous formulation on a much broader chronological frame, see Ronald
Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the
Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
10. E. A. J. Johnson, “Unemployment and Consumption: The Mercantilist View,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 46, no. 4 (1932): 698–719; William Grampp, “The Liberal Elements in
English Mercantilism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 66 (1952): 465–501; and T. E. Gregory,
“The Economics of Employment in England, 1660–1713,” Economica 1, no. 1 (1921): 37–51.
For Keynes’s views on mercantilism, see the penultimate chapter of The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).
11. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism; Coleman, “Mercantilism Revisited,” Historical
Journal 23, no. 4 (1980), 773–91.
12. A. V. Judges, “The Idea of a Mercantile State,” in Coleman, ed., Revisions, 35.
13. In historical work, mercantilism tends to serve as a handy (often alliterative) periodiza-
tion for the pre-industrial economy; see among many other examples, Damsård Hansen,
European Economic History: From Mercantilism to Maastricht and Beyond (Copenhagen:
Copenhagen Business School Press, 2001); and Gianni Vaggi, A Concise History of Eco-
nomic Thought: From Mercantilism to Monetarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), as well as in itself as an “age” standing in for the period of early modern expansion
of European maritime empires. See, for example, Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and
Plenty, chaps. 4–5; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism
and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York, 1980, repr.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial
Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Glenn Joseph Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the
French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1996); Jonathan Gil
Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005); Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the
Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Richard Kagen and Philip
Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism,
1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Bruce Masters, The
Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic
Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988). The term as
well has been exported elsewhere: see, for example, Luke Shepherd Roberts, Mercan-
tilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th
Century Tosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). It has also remained par-
ticularly popular among its neoclassical critics. See, for example, the extensive work of
the economists Robert Ekelund and Robert Tollison, particularly Mercantilism as a
Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Station:
Texas A&M, 1981); and Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism
(College Station: Texas A&M, 1997). For a critical examination of their body of work, see
Salim Rashid, “Mercantilism: A Rent-Seeking Society?” in Magnusson, ed., Mercantilist
Economics, 125–42.
14. See Magnusson, Mercantilism, as well as the introduction to his Mercantilist Economics.
15. See Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 251.
16. Steven Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 15. For a critical
engagement with Pincus’s statement, see the rest of the essays, including Pincus’s response,
in Pincus et al., “Forum: Rethinking Mercantlism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.,
69, no. 1 (January 2012): 35–70. See also Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), chap. 12.
17. Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
18. Magnusson, Mercantilism, 11.
19. Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, esp. conclusion.
20. Charles Wilson, “‘Mercantilism’: Some Vicissitudes of an Idea,” Economic History Review
10 (1957): 187.
21. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.
22. R. W. K. Hinton and William Grampp emphasize that the political economic discourse in
the 1620s cannot be disassociated from the prevailing commercial depression and wide-
spread unemployment. Grampp, “Liberal Elements in English Mercantilism,” 465–501;
Hinton, “The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun,” Economic History Review 7
(1955): 277–90.
23. Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance, 89.
24. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform: 1626–1660 (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1975); Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Sam-
uel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Paul Slack, “Material Progress and the Challenge
of Affluence in Seventeenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 62, no. 3 (2009):
576–603.
25. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of
the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 54. If mentioned at all, the Hartlib
Circle is considered important to the history of political economy only insofar as they
informed and inspired William Petty. See, for example, William Letwin, The Origins of
Scientific Economics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); and Terence Hutchison, Before
Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
More recently, a number of scholars have begun to recognize the contributions made to
political economy, broadly defined, by the Hartlib Circle. See, for example, James Jacob,
“The Political Economy of Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Social Research 59
(1992): 505–32, and Steven Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individ-
ualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American
Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 705–36.
26. As Joel Mokyr points out, “Economic change in all periods depends, more than most econ-
omists think, on what people believe, and this was very much true for the economic devel-
opment of the British economy between the Glorious Revolution and the Crystal Palace
exhibition.” Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1. Other scholars, such as E. A. J. Johnson,
Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought (New York: A. Kelley,
[1937] 1965); and Lars Herlitz, “Conceptions of History and Society in Mercantilism,
1650–1730” in Magnusson, Mercantilist Economics, also note how “the belief in the unlim-
ited possibilities of the development of arts” was essential to the seventeenth-century dis-
course, but by not recognizing, as does James Jacob, “The Political Economy in Science,”
21 Introduction
that the Hartlibians ushered in a distinctly new worldview and instead conflating all of
seventeenth-century political economy into one category, important distinctions and par-
ticularities are lost.
27. Patrick O’Brien, “Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and Its European Rivals from Civil
War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo,” in The Political Economy of British Historical
Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and Patrick O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); and William Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Con-
sumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
28. See, for example, Edgar Furniss, The Position of the Labourer in a System of Nationalism: A
Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1920), D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” Eco-
nomic History Review 8 (1956): 280–95; A. W. Coats, “Changing Attitudes to Labour in the
Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 11 (1958):, 35–51; John Hatcher, “Labour,
Leisure and Economic Thought before the Nineteenth Century,” Past and Present 160 (1998):
64–115. For more recent work on this topic, see Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution:
Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009); and Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness Work and Mate-
rial Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
29. Julia Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House:
Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2007);, and Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the
Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
30. Samuel Hartlib quoted by Drayton, Nature’s Government, 10.
31. Lisbet Koerner, Linneaus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 92.
32. The spirit of seeking state protection for their commercial activities was, according to Adam
Smith, one of the main principles of the mercantile system. This practice, Ekelund and Toll-
ison argue, was part of a larger culture of rent-seeking behavior that they believe character-
ized the seventeenth century. Ekelund and Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society.
33. Kenneth Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815,” in Winch and O’Brien,
The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 165–93. See also, among others, John
Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); John McCusker, “British Mercan-
tilist Policies and the American Colonies,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the
United States, vol. 3, ed. Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, chap. 5; Ormrod, The
Rise of Commercial Empires; David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Com-
merce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); P. J.
Thomas, Mercantilism and the East India Trade (London: P. S. King and Son, 1926); Waller-
stein, The Modern World-System II; Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London
and the Atlantic Economy 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
34. Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-merchant (London,
1622), dedication.
35. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); see also Braddick, “State Formation and the Historiog-
raphy of Early Modern England,” History Compass 2 (July 2004): doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.
2004.00074.x.
36. Nuala Zahedieh, “Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in
the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9, 145.
37. As Keith Tribe has argued for the German context, only in the nineteenth century does it
make sense to talk about the “conception that the state is a central and discrete agency,
either intervening, or refraining from such intervention, in autonomous economic ac-
tivity.” Keith Tribe, “Mercantilism and the Economics of State Formation,” in Magnusson,
Mercantilist Economics, 177.
38. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of
Expansion 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
39. J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47,
no. 4 (1975): 605.
40. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
part one
Circulation
1
Population
Modes of Seventeenth-Century
Demographic Thought
Ted McCormick
For generations of scholars, a defining feature of mercantilism has been its perspective
on population.1 Writing before Malthus and without reliable statistics, economic
thinkers saw little but gain—in agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, revenues, and
military manpower—from demographic growth.2 As William Petty put it, “Fewness of
people, is real poverty.”3 This conviction gave rise to proposals for various policies
(fines, tax incentives, social services, immigration) that might promote multiplication.
Modern commentators on mercantilism—regardless of what definition is employed—
insist that “mercantilists saw population as wealth, and advocated state intervention to
increase both.”4 Yet most accounts, concerned with either with the connection between
demography and the growth of the state or with the role of statistics in the emergence
of social science, leave the meaning of “population” unexamined.
This chapter presents an alternative approach to population in early modern English
economic writing by focusing on how different human groups were discussed in social
and economic contexts over time. My approach suggests three phases in the conceptu-
alization of population. In the first, stretching from the early sixteenth through the early
seventeenth century, population as an abstract quantity took a back seat to specific, lo-
calized, and qualitatively defined “multitudes” whose existence was bound up with par-
ticular legislative interventions. The second phase, born of the nexus of Baconian
experimental science and an ideology of “improvement” associated with Samuel Har-
tlib during the mid-seventeenth century Interregnum, saw a decisive turn. Specific mul-
titudes came to be seen as products of regional or national environment or “situation,”
tied to “nature” but subject also to scientific interventions therein—a shift that made
their functional interrelationships and thus the national population legible.5 The third
phase, following the emergence of a Restoration “political arithmetic” with Hartlibian
roots, saw population conceptualized as both an autonomous natural and historical
25
26 Circulation
process of “multiplication” and a quantifiable totality, the foundation of economic and

social analysis.
Although the term appeared in Bacon’s Essays, “population,” in the sense of “the col-
lected inhabitants of a given area,” was little used before the eighteenth century.6 “De-
population,” by contrast, appeared in the mid-fifteenth century and remained a major
concern through the seventeenth. Throughout, it was associated with the progress of
enclosure, the conversion of arable land to pasture, and the displacement of rural pop-
ulations.7 Thomas More established this connection in Utopia, remarking that “Your
sheep . . . that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become
so greedy and fierce that they devour men themselves. They devastate and depopulate
fields, houses and towns.” The root of depopulation was greed:
For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive
wool, there the nobility and the gentry, yes, and even some abbots . . . are not con-
tent with the old rents. . . . Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any
good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land
free for the plough; they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and
abolish towns, keeping only the churches—and those for sheep-barns. And as if
enough of your land were not already wasted on forests and game preserves, these
worthy men turn all human habitations and cultivated fields back to wilderness.8
Tenants, turned off the land, became vagrants; stealing to get by, many ended on the
gallows. This mechanism informed subsequent discussions of depopulation.9 Besides
noting enclosure’s effect on agricultural prices, an anonymous 1552 tract suggested a
threat to security, noting “that shepeherdes be but yll artchers.”10 If later links between
population and national strength echoed Machiavelli, Bodin, and Botero, they also
built on native arguments against enclosure.11
The same author estimated that “there is in England townes and villages to the
nomber of fifty thousand & upward” and guessed that for each, “there is one plowe
decayed sens the first yeare of the raigne of kynge Henry the seventh.”12 Assuming a
loss of fifty thousand “ploughs,” the author stipulated a multiplier of six and calculated
that 300,000 people had been uprooted:
Then is there decayed l. thousande plowes and upwarde. The whiche l. thousande
plowes, euery ploughe were able to mainteine. vi. persons. That is to saye: the man,
the wyfe and fower other in his house lesse and more l. thousande plowes, syx per-
sons to euery plough, draweth to the nomber of thre hundred thousand persons
were wont to haue meate, drynke and rayment, uprysing and downe lyinge, paying
skot and lot to God, & to the kyng. And now they haue nothynge, but goeth about
27 Population
in England from dore to dore, and are theyr almose for Goddes sake. And because
they will not begge, some of them doeth steale, and then they be hanged, and thus
the Realme doeth decay.13
Without an estimate of England’s total population, these numbers were statistically

useless. But their significance in terms of moral economy was striking: each ruined
plow redounded sixfold to the harm of the commonwealth, weakening the body politic
by removing one of its limbs.14
Depopulation was thus conceived in relative and local terms. It did not denote a
decrease in the number of England’s inhabitants, but rather a process by which the
countryside was emptied of a specific group with a specific social role—plowmen or,
metonymically, “plows”—and that group transformed: plowmen into criminals. In
1604, the Lincolnshire clergyman Francis Trigge charged enclosure with “rooting out”
husbandmen, eliminating “a multitude of servants,” “depopulating” or “dispeopling”
towns, and “diminishing the people” of land and church; he referred to the “multitude
of people” in biblical terms as the “honor” of the king and asserted that landlords
beguiled by “improvement” would be cursed with barrenness.15 Tillage supported not
only husbandmen but “a multitude of valiant souldiers” whose loss endangered the
kingdom.16 But the process did not simply destroy husbandmen and soldiers; in addi-
tion, “it makes beggers, and . . . theeves” of them.17 Depopulation, the decay of tillage,
produced overpopulation, a crop of criminals.
Robert Powell’s 1636 Depopulation Arraigned went farther. Powell, a lawyer, stressed
the economic and military costs of enclosure, which, by “translating culture into pas-
ture,” spread idleness, weakened the state—replacing towns of two or three hundred
with handfuls of shepherds—and angered God.18 “Tillage,” by contrast, “is the occasion
of multiplying of people, both for service in the wars, and time of peace”; it promoted
virtue and industry in husbandmen and enabled the nation to “stand upon it selfe.”19
Powell accused “depopulators” of violating nature:
But if, to shut up and close up the wombe of the earth, communis reipublicae matricis
[the common womb of the state] . . . bee a worse sinne than the hiding and hoarding
up of her fruits after it’s birth; then is the one more pernitious and intolerable then
the other. . . . And if the curse be denounced against that, Qui abscondit frumentum
maledicitur in populo, Pro. 11.26. [Prov., 11:26: “He that withholdeth corn, the people
shall curse him”] it must needs fall heavier upon this. Depopulation is praefocatio
matricis, a strangling or choaking of the womb, and causing an utter sterility.20
The depopulator was a “man of bloud,” a “matricide” who “choakes up the earth our
common mother, from yeelding her . . . increase unto her offspring.”21 He “robbes and
28 Circulation
pilles the people of their due meanes and maintenance, and thereby disables them . . .
from performing their service and leige obedience, immediately to their Prince, and
mediately to the Common-weale.”22 This was less a quantitative decline than a qualita-
tive transformation of useful groups into troublesome counter-populations: “it alters
the quality of the people; from good Husbands, it makes them houseless and thrift-
lesse, puts them in a course of idlenesse. . . . So as they become aliens and strangers to
their nationall government, and the kingdome . . . dispeopled and desolated.”23 The
“people” were not a single “population” but a congeries of mutable “multitudes” defined
by their location and function within the commonwealth, and by the qualities of
industry and loyalty or idleness and disaffection they exhibited. “Depopulation” and
“multiplication” described the qualitative demography of these multitudes and their
relative strength—relations essential to social harmony.
Two multitudes loomed especially large: vagrants and seamen. In 1601, Gerard Maly-
nes described how enclosers “augment . . . the number of vagabonds, which through
idlenesse . . . commit robbery and theft, and then are they destroyed by the gallowes.”24
The depopulator “maketh sheepe to become devourers of men, destroying the lustie
husbandmen which are alwaies the best souldiers”; “He is the cause of the dilapidations
of cities and townes, and depopulations of inhabitants, with the decay of their occupa-
tions and handiworke”; he laid the foundations of famine and rebellion.25 The resulting
multiplication of vagrants needed measuring so as to calibrate poor rates to needs of
this new multitude. The 1601 Ease for Overseers of the Poore stressed that
The multitude of the poore must be reduced to number: for in some places they be
very fewe, in many places they swarme, and therefore as no martialist can make
proportionall provision for warre without a iust computation of his souldiers, so
the taxing of money for a stock must be ordered according to the multitude of the
poore.26
The poor must also be classified, idlers distinguished from “impotents” and subcatego-
rized as “Willing” to work, “Wilfull” in their idleness, “Negligent,” or “Fraudulent,” and
disposed of accordingly—given work at home if “tractible,” “constrained to worke, in
the house of correction” if not.27
Foreshadowing later natural-historical efforts—and perhaps drawing on contempo-
rary models of political data-gathering—the author included a preprinted form seeking
both numerical data and causal explanations of the processes they described.28 Early
marriage among the unpropertied was one reason “the world growes so populous and
poore,” since “the poore do most of all multiply children.”29 Yet these children were
“blessings” to the commonwealth; the problem was not the quantity of poor but their
quality. Hence the workhouse was not simply to enforce labor but to break the natural
29 Population
inclination to idleness and instill the habit of industry, regenerating husbandmen and
artificers from vagrants and thieves: “Holde the poore to worke, for most are so by
nature given to ease, that it is as hard to bring their bodies to labour, as the oxe that
hath not beene used to the yoke to drawe.”30 Poor children, at risk of inheriting bad
habits,
are fittest to be bound when they are young, otherwise by reason of their idle and
base educations, they will hardly hold service: but as they have wavering and stray-
ing mindes, so they will have wandering and unstaied bodies, which will sooner be
disposed to vagrancie then activitie, to idlenesse then to worke.31
The apparatus of poor laws, workhouses, and apprenticeships would transform the idle
poor into an industrious multitude. Policy must, “like medicine . . . refresh and not
oppress nature.”32 It should develop useful qualities in wayward multitudes through
institutions that disciplined bodies and molded minds.33
The mariner’s place in writing on trade paralleled the plowman’s in anti-enclosure
literature: a paragon of industry and a bastion of liberty, he was threatened by greed
(the East India Company) and neglect (of the English fishery). Company apologists
like Dudley Digges made a point of denying that the company wasted seamen. Digges
denied any “extraordinary death” among the company’s sailors and touted the com-
pany’s care of its men.34 Though “the hot drinkes” and “infectious women” of the East
made some “the food of that mortalitie,” the company provided “all that the wit of man,
helpt by continuall experience, can invent . . . to keepe them in good health, besides
good Preachers, and the best Commanders.”35 Merchants promoted trade, trade ship-
ping, and shipping seamen; the company thus maintained the multitude of mariners,
who would degenerate if left idle: “living bodies, unemployed, are nothing.”36
Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun agreed. In Mun’s view, unemployed seamen
were not merely idle but treasonous: “Take them from their laudable and accustomed
imployments . . . wee see what desperate courses they doe then attempt, by ioyning,
even with Turkes and Infidels, to rob and spoyle all Christian Nations.”37 The company
reversed this degeneration, creating useful sailors: “thus is the Kingdome purged of
desperate and unruly people, who being kept in awe by the good discipline at Sea, do
often change their former course of life.”38 Misselden extended these arguments to
other companies, seeking to impose order on “Straggling ungoverned trades” to order
and enforce industry among the idle and unruly.39 Dutch usurpation of the East Indies
trade and the herring fishery, a “nursery” that bred “a Multitude of Mariners,” was a
double threat, reducing English seamen while multiplying Dutch.40 Matters of state
and trade were “involved and wrapt up together” by their mutual dependence on mar-
iners.41 Mun’s England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, written in the 1620s, made similar
30 Circulation
points.42 Even Malynes affirmed the role of fishing and long-distance trade in the
maintenance of seamen, trade, and the navy.43
This theme persisted. Lewes Roberts’s 1641 Treasure of Traffike suggested creating a
staple trade to employ ships and mariners as well as poor landsmen, and argued that
“merchant-statesmen” would promote shipping by settling people in port towns.44
Henry Robinson made the multiplication of seamen a criterion for evaluating colonies—
his model was Newfoundland—and called for settling foreign seamen in English ports.45
Restoration writers continued to advocate the development of the fishery, for both
economic and political reasons. Petty’s Political Arithmetick described mariners as
pillars of the commonwealth: “Every Seaman of industry and ingenuity, is not only
a Navigator, but a Merchant, and also a Soldier . . . because he is familiarized with
hardship and hazards, extending to Life and Limbs.”46 The Navigation Laws have been
seen as an exercise in “social engineering” aimed at multiplying mariners.47 Yet the
framework within which economic writers discussed such multitudes had begun to
change.
There were ways of talking about the population of the nation or the world in the
early seventeenth century, as Bodin and Botero demonstrated. Bodin discussed “cen-
suses” (by which he meant “a valuation of every man’s goods”) as a way of discovering
“the number and qualities of the citizens,” and detailed their uses:
The benefits which redounded to the publike by this numbring of the people, were
infinite: for first they knew . . . what numbers they could draw foorth, either to go
to the wars, or to remain at home; either to bee sent abroad in colonies, or to bee
imployed in publike works . . . thereby they shall know what provision of victuals is
necessarie for everie citie, and especially in a time of siege, the which is impossible
to prevent, if they know not the number of the people.48
Further, “the discovery of every man’s estate and faculty, and whereby he gets his
living” would allow the state “to expel all drones out of a commmonweale.”49 Knowl-
edge of the entire population facilitated management of its constituent parts.
Botero too discussed national population in policy terms and outlined natural pro-
cesses and constraints operating on human demography generally.50 He traced differ-
ences between Greek and Roman expansion to attitudes to population: the Greeks saw
“multitudes to breede and bring confusion” and dispatched surplus people to colonies,
while the Romans thought power “consisteth for the most part in the multitude of
people” and “endeavoured all the wayes and meanes they might” to increase it.51
Explaining Roman stagnation, he suggested that populations expanded in proportion
to the generative capacity of their members until reaching a “certaine compleate
number” that exhausted “vertue nutritive” of their territory; they then either ceased to
31 Population
reproduce or moved elsewhere—a process that accounted for human expansion

throughout “the universal theatre of the world.”52
Yet such discussions were rare in early-seventeenth-century English economic
writing.53 We might hear echoes of Bodin or Botero in Digges’s or Mun’s fear of popula-
tion growth without matching industry.54 But authors dwelt on specific multitudes and
on local processes affecting them. These multitudes were defined qualitatively and
evaluated in terms of their distinct contributions to or diminutions of the prosperity
and security of the commonwealth. They might be “reduced to number,” and were
subject to a metaphorical mathematics: husbandmen, artisans, and mariners were to
be “multiplied” through legislation restraining enclosure or favoring naturalization,
vagrants and thieves subtracted through workhouses or transportation to colonies.
Despite this, however, they were important less as fractions of a total population than
as functionally distinct types of people: limbs and organs—or diseases—of the body
politic. The processes that governed them were moral and political. If Bodin and
Botero were occasionally cited, their approaches to population had few English imita-
tors. By the later decades of the century, that would change.
The creation of population as a scientific object is often associated with Graunt’s
work on the London bills of mortality, which applied quantitative data to discussions
of population growth and public health, laying one of the foundations of political ar-
ithmetic. Quantification, however, was only one aspect of a wider shift. The fundamen-
tal development upon which Graunt built was an increasing emphasis on the role of
natural “situation” in shaping population, and vice versa.55 This was most marked in
proposals for “improvement” emerging during the Interregnum from the Hartlib
Circle, with which Henry Robinson, Benjamin Worsley, William Petty, and Graunt
himself were connected.56 Like the idea of “improvement” itself, “situation” featured
prominently in Restoration analyses of Dutch success, linking Petty with the likes of
Josiah Child, Roger Coke and William Temple. Advancing with the new stress on
quantification, situation tied local multitudes both to nature and to each other.
Mun had emphasized “Englands Largeness, Beauty, Fertility, Strength, both by Sea
and Land” and “advantageous situation for Defence and Trade.”57 Yet natural bounty
was a double-edged sword, making the English “not only vicious and excessive, wastful
of the means we have, but also improvident & careless of much other wealth that
shamefully we lose.”58 The fishery, neglected, was a case in point, helping not England
but the Dutch, whom “penury and want” had made “wise and industrious.”59 The key
was to “add Art to Nature, our labour to our natural means.”60 At the Restoration, John
Smith reemphasized that Dutch success flowed from English negligence; “The scitua-
tion of our Country is such, that for the convenience of all kind of Marts the world hath
not the like,” he wrote, “if we are not our own Enemies, and will but be a little indus-
trious.”61 Population was cause and consequence. Industrious multitudes would exploit
32 Circulation
England’s natural advantages, while these same advantages ensured that industry
would multiply useful people.
Beyond multiplication, the distribution of the total population and the effects of
policy upon it were growing concerns. In 1641, Lewes Roberts sought to multiply arti-
sans and fishermen through workhouses, the fishery, and naturalization, while import-
ing raw materials to employ the poor.62 He also sought to repopulate decayed ports by
offering inducements to resettlement, a kind of internal colonization.63 Well-distributed
“work-men, or Arts-masters” would multiply themselves; a regime of raw imports and
finished exports would employ subjects of every class and enrich the nation as a
whole.64 Henry Robinson echoed this: seaports should be populated by naturalizing
foreign seamen and encouraging Englishmen to resettle; foreign weavers should be
brought over to improve English skills; poor laws and taxes should be calibrated to
instill habits of industry in the people at large through commercial employment or
workhouse discipline.65
Geography played a larger role for Robinson. “Sea Towns most commodiously situ-
ated for Fishing, traffike and Navigation” should be encouraged not merely because of
the fishery but also to redistribute England’s urban population, “since London is not
onely populous enough, but likely still to be much more even till its own greatness
prove a burden to it.”
Besides it is no policie for a Prince or Kingdome to have so great a multitude, or

proportion of their wealth and strength in one place . . . because if pestilence come
amongst them they infect one another; if dearth or scarcitie of any thing necessarie,
they are apt to mutinie; if warres they may be besieged . . . and . . . their overballanc-
ing number and riches . . . might be a temptation of ill consequence.66
Vagrants should be transported to colonies and put to work exporting raw materials,
employing their fellows back home. Like naturalization, colonial emigration was a tool
for improving the quality and the quantity of the domestic population:
it were farre better there were power and authority given to take up all beggars
both men and women throughout these Kingdomes and send them for some of the
new Plantations . . . and all such persons in the meane time bee kept in houses for
the same purpose, and forced to worke or starve . . . so should wee not only free
the streetes and countrey of such rascals and vagrant people that swarme up and
downe at present; but prevent many others.67
The growth of London, the importance of industry, and the problem of vagrancy were
old points. In tying them to the exploitation of England’s natural advantages and
33 Population
colonial possessions, however, Robinson also tied them to one another. This set tradi-
tional concerns in a new frame: the distribution of the king’s subjects as a whole.68 The
location of each group affected the quantity and the quality of others, and thus the
health of the entire population. Exploiting situation meant thinking about the totality
of different multitudes in a coordinated way.
Other Hartlibians tied the scientific exploitation of natural resources to the redistri-
bution of laborers, and they dwelt increasingly on the totality of the people. The agri-
cultural reformer Gabriel Plattes favored transporting the poor to colonies in the short
term but wrote that through technological improvements “the Kingdome may main-
taine double the number of people, which it doth now.”69 He located “improvement”
within a providential macro-history linking population growth with periodic transfor-
mations in human engagement with nature:
three severall times the people growing too numerous for their maintenance, God
hath given understanding to men to improve the earth in such a wonderfull man-
ner, that it was able to maintaine double the number . . . for when there were but
few, they were maintained by Fish, Fowle, Venison, and Fruits; freely provided by
Nature: but when they grew too numerous for that food, they found out the Spade
and used industry to augment their food by their indeavours: then they growing
too numerous againe, were compelled to use the plough . . . but when they grew too
numerous for the food gotten that way, they were compelled to find out the fallow-
ing and manuring of Land . . . now the people are growne numerous againe . . . by
the Common course of Husbandry used at this day, the barrennesse doth by little
and little increase, and the fertilitie decrease every yeare more and more, which in
regard that the people doe increase wonderfully, must needs at length produce an
horrible mischiefe.70
This was not a foretaste of Malthus; improvement would save the day. What makes it
interesting is that it situated contemporary challenges within a global history of popu-
lation whose guiding thread was the relationship of people to nature—and that Graunt
and Petty, whose political arithmetic sketched a global demographic history, probably
read it.71
In Restoration projects redistributing particular groups to exploit situation, the total
population played an increasingly explicit role. Petty’s 1662 Treatise of Taxes outlined a
program of social engineering designed to calibrate the size of different multitudes to
the needs of the nation, represented by the total population as calculated by Graunt.
Petty’s ultimate goal, “full peopling,” was measured by the ratio of total hands to lands:
“Fewness of people, is real poverty; and a nation wherein are Eight Millions of people,
are more then twice as rich as the same scope of Land wherein are but Four.”72 As Petty
34 Circulation
put it, “the Ratio formalis of riches” lay “rather in proportion then quantity”: the pro-
portion of hands to lands, and of productive to unproductive people.73 Useful types of
people were now fractions of a population that was itself the ultimate object of knowl-
edge and policy. Demographic ratios supplanted virtuous types. These ratios could be
read from mortality bills and improved by measures directed at the population as such:
practical education, constant labor, toleration and naturalization, regulated mobility
between colony and metropole, and taxes that directed resources to productive sectors
of the economy.74
These emphases mark Restoration economic writing, much of which was taken up
with international comparisons—pressing in the age of the Anglo-Dutch Wars—and
with the management of an expanding empire.75 In 1663, Samuel Fortrey called for
easier immigration and restrictions on finished imports and colonial emigration in
order to maximize employment and build up the “artificial stock” (manufactures) of
the nation, whose greatness depended on being “rich and populous.”76 Revealingly, he
denied that enclosure “depopulated” the kingdom, since the displaced relocated within
it—precisely what “depopulation” had formerly meant.77 A sense of the population as a
measurable quantum, the totality of people within the kingdom, was beginning to dis-
place the local, functionally defined multitudes of earlier writing. This population
appeared increasingly as an undifferentiated component of a national “stock”—to be
maximized and exploited, but made up less of virtuous or vicious multitudes than of
interchangeable people whose characteristics were incidental and impermanent. It was
overall numbers rather than particular qualities that mattered.
This fusion of numbers with policy proposals exploiting situation particularly marks
discussions of the Dutch, feared rivals but admirable improvers.78 Josiah Child’s 1668
Brief Observations lauded Dutch thrift and the policies—education, toleration, and em-
ployment of the poor—that ensured a growing and well-distributed population.79 Wil-
liam Aglionby described how Dutch exploitation of the fishery, commerce, and poor
laws had made a barren land “populous.”80 Roger Coke put population front and center
in comparing England and the Low Countries.81 Asserting that “greater numbers of
people” increase trade, Coke blamed the Navigation Acts, the American plantations,
and the “re-peopling” of Ireland after the rebellion of 1641 for “lesser numbers of people”
in England.82 Resistance to naturalization kept multitudes out while corporations stifled
industry and the numbers of idle increased; the Dutch, by contrast, welcomed “men of
all nations.”83 Immigration increased numbers, numbers meant competition, and com-
petition fed industry, bringing in further numbers.84 Petty disavowed Coke’s pessimism
but agreed that policy should exploit situation by maximizing the ratio of hands to
lands—as Holland, the most “full-peopled” country in Europe, had done.85
William Temple’s 1673 Observations upon the United Provinces summed this view up.
Temple described the characters of different classes of Dutch people, but in relation to
35 Population
national wealth these heterogeneous groups became one population: the source of
industry was a “multitude of people” forced to cohabit and compete for resources in a
“small compass of land.”86 Turning to under-peopled Ireland, Temple repeated that
“The true and natural ground of Trade and Riches, is Number of People, in Proportion
to the compass of Ground they inhabit. This makes all things necessary to life dear, and
that forces men to industry and parsimony.”87 The causes of multiplication were both
natural and political: better climates supported more people, but policies could help or
hinder nature; too fruitful a climate, without political restraints, removed the need to
labor, creating an idle population.88 William Petyt’s 1680 Britannia Languens outlined
a similar mechanism: “multitudes of people” competed for lands, raising rents and
encouraging improvement, as Dutch “riches and populacy” proved.89 With the right
policies, England too “might support almost infinite numbers of people.”90
For Hartlib’s Restoration heirs, government’s task was to channel natural resources
and relationships into a virtuous circle of multiplication, competition, industry, and
wealth, leading to further multiplication. On a policy level this meant some combina-
tion of naturalization, toleration, restrictions on emigration to unprofitable colonies
like New England, and policies supplying the population with ships to man, materials
to work upon, and markets to supply with manufactures.91 On an intellectual level it
shifted discussions of population from a qualitative and particular to a quantitative and
abstract register. Graunt’s quantitative demographic observations played an important
role in this shift, but they built on sturdy Baconian and Hartlibian foundations. The
more that nature—natural situation and human nature—came to the fore, the more
the ratio of labor to land supplanted the virtues or vices of particular groups as the
object of interest; the more the stress fell on multiplying labor in this general sense, the
more sheer numbers displaced all other characteristics of the people they represented.
As Child put it, citing Hobbes, “All men by Nature are alike”; “It is multitudes of People,
and good Laws, such as cause an encrease of People, which principally Enrich any
Country.”92 Given sufficient numbers, the mechanism of competition in conditions of
scarcity would make people—possessed of similar natural capacities and mutually
convertible skills—take care of themselves.
By the mid-1680s, population was regularly discussed in terms of sums, ratios, and
probabilities. These became the objects of scientific knowledge and the goals of political
action. Even familiar groups were analyzed and acted upon in quantitative rather than
qualitative terms. The idle were bad because they were numerous; the disloyal were as
importantly a demographic fraction as a political faction—as the 1676 “Compton Cen-
sus” of religious sects in England, like Petty’s Political Anatomy of Ireland, suggested.93
By 1692, John Arbuthnot spoke not of groups of people with distinct virtues but rather
of the probability with which any quality—economic, political, or biological—might be
assigned to any member of the population at all:
36 Circulation
it is odds, if a Woman is with Child, but it shall be a Boy; and if you would know
the just odds, you must consider the Proportion in the Bills that the Males bear to
the Females: The Yearly Bills of Mortality are observ’d to bear such Proportion to the
live People as 1 to 30, or 26; therefore it is an even Wager, that one out of thirteen,
dyes within a Year. . . . It is but 1 to 18 if you meet a Parson in the Street, that he
proves to be a Non-Juror, because there is but 1 of 26 that are such. It is hardly 1 to
10, that a Woman of Twenty Years old has her Maidenhead, and almost the same
Wager, that a Town-Spark of that Age, has not been clap’d.94
The salient feature of any group was its quantity; political arithmeticians now called for
systematic “accounts” of population growth.95 As individual populations were reduced
to number, population was fleshed out as an autonomous process, part of the nature
that the Hartlib Circle and the Royal Society sought to grasp and to improve.
The mathematical unity and natural autonomy of population mark Nicholas Bar-
bon’s 1685 Apology for the Builder, which placed contemporary debates in a global,
historical nexus between the multiplication of mankind and the development of pro-
ductive arts.96 Dismissing fears of rural depopulation—now blamed on London’s
building craze—Barbon cited “the natural increase of Mankind,” rooted in the divine
injunction to increase and multiply, recorded since biblical times and fostered by good
government.97 New buildings were the local response to this process, housing “the Su-
pernumerary and useless Inhabitants of the country,” giving them “Hives . . . to breed
and swarm in,” and rendering them governable by concentrating them in the capital
under the state’s watchful eye.98 Multiplication was a given; it was up to policymakers
to channel it in England’s favor. Barbon’s 1690 Discourse of Trade generalized this out-
look: just as housing should accommodate natural increase, so trades should be favored
according to the “Number of hands imploy’d.”99 The point was to keep the greatest
number possible employed in England; the expansion of a free, commercial empire
depended on the growth of a free, industrious population.100
The merchant and Irish landowner Francis Brewster’s 1695 Essays of Trade carried
the metonymic displacement of people by numbers farther. Traditional multitudes
entered discussion via the numbers representing them (or numbers they represented).
Brewster worried about the “Numbers [of seamen] lost” in the ongoing war; he re-
gretted the “Numbers of Men . . . gone out of the Kingdom [to New England] for want
of that Liberty [of conscience] they may now injoy”; tracing crime to lack of educa-
tion, he lamented that “Numbers are every Sessions of both Sexes made Victims for
the Sins of the Parish.”101 Numbers were the victims of misconceived policies. Mean-
while, “the Treasure of the Nation” lay “in the Bodies of Men” themselves.102 Arguing
for workhouses, the naturalization of foreign Protestants, and the purchase or com-
pulsion of Native American and African labor, Brewster envisioned English empire as
37 Population
a vast agglomeration of laboring bodies. Whatever his qualities, not a man could be
spared. Even the rebellious Irish could be domesticated through “intermixture” with
the English, their differences dissolved but their bodies and numbers preserved.103
“We do not consider what the loss of a Man is in a Kingdom not half Peopled,” he
wrote. “We want nothing so much as Bodies of Men.”104
The full scope and significance of the shift from local, functional, and qualitative
multitudes to an (inter)national, natural, and numerical conception of population is
clearest in the work of Charles Davenant. The role of demographic numbers domi-
nated the first of his 1698 Discourses on the Publick Revenues, “Of the Use of Political
Arithmetick,” which defined its subject as “the Art of Reasoning by Figures, upon
Things relating to Government” and emphasized that “The Foundation of this Art is to
be laid in some competent Knowledge of the Numbers of the People.”105 The 1699 Essay
upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade bore this
out, examining Gregory King’s demographic estimates before proceeding to England’s
land, product, and revenues.106 Davenant stressed the importance of objective accuracy
and the difficulty of obtaining it. King’s estimate of English population, 5.5 million in
1695, was “no positive assertion” but rather an extrapolation from reasonable assump-
tions laid down “by way of Hypothesis”—here, the historical assumption that England
had begun as a colony of a few hundred between 1500 and 1400 bce, and the scientific
assumption that population proceeded by an “orderly Series of Increase.”107 Such ex-
trapolations were essential: “The Wealth of all Nations, arises from the Labour and
Industry of the People: A right Knowledg therefore of their Numbers, is necessary to
those who will judg of a Countries Power and Strength.”108 A knowledge of numbers
and the natural causes governing their increase was vital, too, in subjecting population
itself to government:
The People being the first Matter of Power and Wealth, by whose Labour and In-
dustry a Nation must be Gainers in the Balance, their Increase or Decrease must be
carefully observ’d by any Government that designs to thrive; that is, their Increase
must be promoted by good Conduct and wholesome Laws, and if they have been
Decreas’d by War, or any other Accident, the Breach is to be made up as soon as
possible, for it is a Maim in the Body Politick affecting all its Parts.109
For Davenant, as for Brewster, “The Bodies of Men are without doubt the most valu-
able Treasure of a Country.”110 The totality of these bodies, which multiplied at predict-
able rates and represented an undifferentiated resource for the state, was the population.
Both the political arithmetician and the statesman were now to approach this popu-
lation from the outside; it was an opaque totality to be known and made useful through
the work of “skilful Computers” like Davenant and governed in accordance with their
38 Circulation
“right Advice” to the state.111 “In all Computations,” Davenant wrote, “the Number of
People is the Ground-work.”112 Only from this total number could one “divide the
People into such proper Classes and Ranks” to “show the Wealth and Substance of the
whole Kingdom”—most importantly, into “the Number of the Solvent, and Insolvent
Persons” (or, in King’s table, those “Increasing” or “Decreasing the Wealth of the Na-
tion”).113 And only then, “The People being thus distributed into their proper Ranks,”
could analysts and statesmen take up specific questions.114 Where early-seventeenth-
century writing merely implied a national population through its handling of concrete,
qualitative groups, such multitudes were now artifacts of political arithmetic. The
“real” object of knowledge and of government was a number.
This was not the end of discussions about the generation or degeneration of specific
multitudes. Indeed, interest in minimizing vagrancy and multiplying seamen grew, as
debates about the East India Company illustrate. Nor, as the storm over the naturaliza-
tion of foreign Protestants shows, were all immigrants equally desirable.115 But such
arguments were properly located within a framework of knowledge of the total popula-
tion and its rate of growth—objects now accorded primacy as products of nature and
human history rather than analysis or short-term policy. Population, by the same
token, was no longer to be explained solely within the confines of economic writing.
Putting historical flesh on the bones of King’s “orderly Series of Increase,” Davenant
signaled one direction explorations of population as a totality would take:
Almost all Countries in the World have been more or less Populous, as Liberty and
Property have been there well or ill secur’d. . . . Nothing therefore can more con-
tribute to the rendring England Populous and Strong, than to have Liberty upon a
right Foot, and our legal Constitution firmly preserv’d. . . . And if the Ambition of
some, and the Mercenary Temperament of others, should bring us at any time to
alter our Constitution, and to give up our ancient Rights, we shall find our numbers
diminish visibly and fast.116
Statistical analyses—the stuff of Halley’s “Life Table”—began to separate out from

writing on economic problems, becoming such stuff as the Philosophical Transactions
and Physico-Theology were made on.117 The history Davenant sketched, meanwhile,
would be taken up and elaborated by the stage-theorists of the Enlightenment. In eco-
nomic discussions, however, “population” was less a snakes’ nest of multitudes than a
simple source of labor.118
While necessarily preliminary, the foregoing examination and periodization of pop-
ulation thought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English economic writing sug-
gests the usefulness of reframing the history of demographic ideas generally, and
rethinking the value of mercantilism as a category of analysis in particular. First, the
39 Population
path to population was a crooked one: originating in what McRae has called the liter-
ature of “agrarian complaint,” a Tudor discourse of depopulation directed against
enclosure and improvement forged much of the conceptual vocabulary for thinking
about the roles, production, and distribution of functionally and morally defined mul-
titudes that would be used by proponents of improvement, many associated with Sam-
uel Hartlib, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.119 Articulated from the
Restoration as part of an empirical approach that turned quantitative data to account
in making the scientific exploitation of nature the purpose of policy, the management
of qualitatively defined subgroups was seen increasingly to derive from a fundamen-
tally quantitative, political-arithmetical knowledge of the population as a whole.
Second, each approach to population implied a distinct construction of its relation to
policy. The particular, qualitative multitudes so central to later-sixteenth and early-
seventeenth-century discussions were tied to particular legal interventions or omis-
sions; the sovereign’s task was to maintain a harmonious balance between essential
multitudes, and prevent the growth of harmful ones, by restraining vicious private
interests. In the wake of Baconian science, and building especially on the Hartlib Cir-
cle’s application of it to social as well as technological improvement in the context of a
Commonwealth, the qualities of multitudes were traced to nature; interest in their re-
lationships heralded a new focus on the total population and its relationship to the
nation’s situation, the major determinant of its potential for improvement and its inter-
national position.120 Policy, in this context, should exploit the environment and human
nature, promoting improvement by putting as many hands as possible on the land and
to sea. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, especially in the political arithmetic
of Petty, King, and Davenant, as the multiplication of mankind became an autonomous
natural and world-historical reality, numbers displaced functional or moral character-
istics as the objects of both knowledge and policy. Sums and ratios became the targets
(or victims) of government.
Third, in none of this did the predominant themes of the historiography of mercan-
tilism play decisive or obvious parts. “Pro-populationism” may be said to have charac-
terized a great deal of the economic writing surveyed, but this neither exhausts the
demographic vision of canonically mercantilist writers nor (as Abigail Swingen points
out in ch. 2) differentiates them as a group from others who shared a similar problem-
atic of population. For similar reasons, it is not necessarily helpful in understanding
the conceptualization of population—as opposed to debates over particular policies—
to divide either writers or eras (pre- and post-1660, for example) into pro- and anti-
populationist camps.121 Nor, for that matter, did “quantification” in itself revolutionize
demographic discussions in economic writing. Political arithmetic’s plausibility and
success rested on a bedrock of Baconian science and a Hartlibian revaluation of
“improvement”—denigrated by early opponents of enclosure as a private vice, but
40 Circulation
championed in Interregnum projects as a public benefit—decades in the making and

innocent, in its early stages, of quantitative demographic analysis.122 If a single turning
point emerges, it is precisely this neo-Baconian revision of the nature and scope of
improvement and the role therein of the kind of empirical “natural history” in which
Graunt and Petty consciously engaged.123 The transformation in demographic thought
that did take place was thus an episode not merely in the history of economic thought,
much less of mercantilism, but in the history of science as well. At its heart was the
construction of population as an abstract totality crucial to national wealth and
strength, a natural resource susceptible to knowledge and manipulation, and the foun-
dation of any imaginable science of policy.
NOTES
1. This chapter was written with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada and a 2010–11 Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library. In re-
vising it, I have benefitted from a 2013 Visiting Fellowship at the Sydney Centre for the
Foundations of Science, University of Sydney, and from conversations with Wilson Jacob
and Gavin Taylor, as well as my fellow contributors.
2. Andrea A. Rusnock, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment,” in The Sci-
ences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 54; John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations,
Mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality (London: Printed by
Thomas Roycroft for James Martyn, James Allestry, and Thomas Dicas, 1662); Charles
E. Strangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic
Theory (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, [1904] 1966),16–17; J. Overbeek, “Mercantilism,
Physiocracy and Population Theory,” South African Journal of Economics 41, no. 2 (1973):
168–74; J. Overbeek, History of Population Theories, (Rotterdam: Rotterdam University
Press, 1974), 2; Jean-Marc Rohrbasser, “William Petty (1623–1687) et le calcul du double-
ment de la population,” Population 54, nos. 4–5 (1999): 698.
3. William Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (London: Printed for N. Brooke
1662), 16.
4. Strangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population, 123–35; Michael S. Teitelbaum, “De-
mographic Change through the Lenses of Science and Politics,” Proceedings of the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society 132, no. 2 (1988): 183–84; Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The
Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 213. See Edgar S. Furniss,
The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the
Later English Mercantilists (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, [1918] 1965), 1–4, 117–97;
James Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young: Lectures Delivered in
the Galtonian Laboratory, University of London, under the Newmarch Foundation, Febru-
ary 11 to March 18, 1929 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1992), especially 94, 108;
E. A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1937), 247–52; more recently, see Charles Wilson, “The Other
Face of Mercantilism,” in D. C. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (London:
Methuen, 1969), 118–39; Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-
Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 129–57; Andrea
41 Population
Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century

English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 123.
5. On legibility, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
6. Oxford English Dictionary, “population, n.1.” See also Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating
People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 39.
7. See Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23–79.
8. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, [1516] 1989), 18–19.
9. [Anonymous]. Certayne Causes Gathered Together, Wherin is Shewed the Decaye of Eng-
land (London: Printed by Heugh Syngelton, 1552), sig. A7r.
10. Anonymous, Certayne Causes, sig. B1v.
11. See McRae, God Speed the Plough, 1996.
12. Anonymous, Certayne Causes, sig. B3r.
13. Anonymous, Certayne Causes, sig. B3r–B3v.
14. On the symbolic significance of the plough, see McRae, God Speed the Plough, 1–2.
15. Francis Trigge, The Humble Petition of Two Sisters; The Chvrch and Common-wealth: For
the Restoring of Their Ancient Commons and Liberties, which Late Inclosure with Depopu-
lation Hath Uncharitably Taken Away (London: Printed by George Bishop, 1604), sig.
A3v–A4r, A5r, A6r, B6v, C4r, E2r. See McRae, God Speed the Plough, 71–72.
16. Trigge, The Humble Petition, sig. B5r.
17. Trigge, The Humble Petition, sig. F7v.
18. Robert Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, Convicted and Condemned, by the Lawes of God
and Man. (London: Printed by R. B, 1636), 31–32, 54–55, 79.
19. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, 35–36.
20. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, 4.
23. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, 6–7.
24. Gerard Malynes, Saint George for England, Allegorically Described (London: Printed by
Richard Field for William Tymme, 1601), 21–22.
25. Malynes, Saint George for England, 40, 44–45.
26. [Anonymous], An Ease for Overseers of the Poore (London: Printed by John Legat, 1601), 17.
27. Anonymous, An Ease for Overseers, 18–19.
28. Anonymous, An Ease for Overseers, 4. On information gathering and management by
early modern states, see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to
Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 116–48; Barbara Shapiro, “Empiricism and Eng-
lish Political Thought, 1550–1720,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 1 (2003): 3–35; Jacob Soll,
The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 13–33.
29. Anonymous, An Ease for Overseers, 26.
33. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. 2nd
ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995) suggests a later point of origin for “discipline” in this sense.
42 Circulation
34. Dudley Digges, The Defence of Trade (London: Printed by William Stansby for John
Barnes, 1615), 11, 23.
35. Digges, The Defence of Trade 37.
36. Digges, The Defence of Trade 6, 32.
37. Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London: Printed
by Nicholas Okes for John Pyper, 1621), 35–36.
38. Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 36–37.
39. Edward Misselden, Free Trade, or the Meanes to Make Trade Flourish (London: Printed by
John Legatt, for Simon Waterson, 1622), 75–76, 78. Compare William Petty’s later injunc-
tion to “Avoyd Stragling plantations”; Petty, The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings
of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne [H.W.E. Petty-Fitzmaurice], 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Constable & Co., 1927), 2:114.
40. Misselden, Free Trade, 35–36, 81, 98–99, 111, 125.
41. Misselden, Free Trade, sig. A3v.
42. Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 22–24, 31, 158.
43. Gerard Malynes, The Maintenance of Free Trade, According to the Three Essentiall Parts of
Traffique (London: Printed by I. L. for William Sheffard, 1622), 29, 42.
44. Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike. Or a Discourse of Forraigne Trade (London:
Printed by E. P. for Nicholas Bourne, 1641), 63, 68.
45. Henry Robinson, Englands Safety, in Trades Encrease (London: Printed by E. P. for
Nicholas Bourne, 1641), 13–15.
46. William Petty, Political Arithmetick (London: Printed for Robert Clavel and Henry Mort-
lock, 1690), 17–18; Tobias Gentleman, The Best Way to Make England the Richest and
Wealthiest Kingdome in Europe (London: [s.n.], 1660); John Smith, The Trade & Fishing of
Great-Britain Displayed (London: Printed by William Godbid, 1661); John Keymor, John
Keymors Observation Made Upon the Dutch Fishing, About the Year 1601 (London: Printed
for Sir Edward Ford, 1664).
47. Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in
Social Engineering (New York: Octagon Books, [1939] 1964).
48. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, trans. Richard Knolles (London: Printed
by Adam Islip, 1606), 637–40.
49. Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, 641.
50. See Romain Descendre, L’État du monde: Giovanni Botero entre raison d’État et Géopoli-
tique (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2009), 164–71.
51. Giovanni Botero, A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of
Cities, trans. Robert Peterson (London: Printed by T. Purfoot for Richard Ockould and
Henry Tomes, 1606), 96, 87–88.
52. Botero, A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of Cities,
89–97.
53. See Gerard Malynes, England’s View, in the Unmasking of Two Paradoxes (London:
Printed by Richard Field, 1603), 28 (citing Bodin), 80.
54. Digges, The Defence of Trade, 32; Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 57.
55. See Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 169–75.
56. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 159–68; Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement:
Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77–101;
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660
(London: Duckworth, 1975).
43 Population
57. Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 176.

59. Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 182–83.
61. Smith, The Trade & Fishing of Great-Britain Displayed, 11–13.
62. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike, 31, 36, 41, 83–84.
63. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike, 68, 77–79. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism:
The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1975).
64. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike, 13–14, 96–97.
65. Robinson, Englands Safety, in Trades Encrease, 8–9, 15, 19, 43, 45.
66. Robinson, Englands Safety, in Trades Encrease, 5.
67. Robinson, Englands Safety, in Trades Encrease, 13.
68. See also Robert Powell, Briefe Considerations, Concerning the Advancement of Trade and
Navigation (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1649), 4.
69. Gabriel Plattes, A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (London: Printed for
Francis Constable, 1641), 5, 11.
70. Gabriel Plattes, A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the Worlds Beginning
(London: Printed by John Legat, 1639), sig. C3r–C3v.
71. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, 63; William Petty, Another Essay in Political
Arithmetick, Concerning the Growth of the City of London (London: Printed by H. H. for
Mark Pardoe, 1683), 18–19. See Rohrbasser, “William Petty (1623–1687) et le calcul du
doublement de la population,” on doubling; and Sabine Reungoat, William Petty: Obser-
vateur des Îles Britanniques. (Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2004) on
Petty’s quantitative demography.
72. Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, 16.
73. Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, 9.
74. William Petty, The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib For The Advancement of some partic-
ular Parts of Learning (London: [s.n.], 1648); Petty, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions,
11–13, 19.
75. Petty, Political Arithmetick, 1690; and William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland,
(London: Printed for D. Brown and W. Rogers, 1691); Steven Pincus credits mid-century
international rivalries with fueling a reconceptualization of national interest in which
population was central, but he does not address how suitable conceptions of population
emerged; see Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making
of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and
Steven Pincus, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of Population and the
Invention of the State,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan
Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272–98.
76. Samuel Fortrey England’s Interest and Improvement Consisting in the Increase of the Store,
and Trade of this Kingdom (Cambridge: Printed by John Field, 1663), 3, 12, 27, 36–37.
77. Fortrey, England’s Interest and Improvement, 17–18.
78. Petty (1690 and 1691); see McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arith-
metic, 169–85.
79. Josiah Child, Sir Josiah Child’s Proposals, for the Relief and Employment of the Poor
(London: [s.n.], 1670?), 4–5.
80. William Aglionby, The Present State of the United Provinces of the Low Countries (London:
Printed for John Starkey, 1669), 1, 365.
44 Circulation
81. Roger Coke, A Treatise Wherein Is Demonstrated, That the Church and State of England,
Are in Equal Danger with the Trade of It (London: Printed by J. C. for Henry Brome and
Roger Horn, 1671); Roger Coke, Reasons of the Increase of the Dutch Trade (London:
Printed by J. C. for Henry Brome and Roger Horn, 1671).
82. Coke, A Treatise, sig. C1v–C2r, 1–8, 16–18.
83. Coke, Reasons of the Increase, 106–7.
84. Coke, Reasons of the Increase, 113–14.
85. Petty, Political Arithmetick. 1690.
86. William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London:
Printed by A. Maxwell for Sa. Gellibrand, 1673), 134–64, 187–88.
87. William Temple, An Essay upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland (Dublin: [s.n.], 1673), 1.
88. Temple, An Essay, 2–5.
89. William Petyt, Britannia Languens, Or a Discourse of Trade (London: Printed for Tho.
Dring and Sam. Crouch, 1680), 4, 13–14.
90. Petyt, Britannia Languens, 45.
91. Besides works already mentioned, see Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London:
Printed by John Everingham, 1693).
92. Child, A New Discourse of Trade, sig. (A6)v, 125.
93. Anne Whiteman, ed., The Compton Census of 1676: A Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland.
94. John Arbuthnot, Of the Laws of Chance (London: Printed by Benj. Motte, 1692), sig. A9v–
A10r.
95. See John Houghton A Proposal for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (London:
[s.n.], 1691); Gregory King, Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the
State and Condition of England, in The Earliest Classics: John Graunt and Gregory King, ed.
Peter Laslett (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1973); Charles Davenant, Discourses on
the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (London: Printed for James Knapton,
1698).
96. Nicholas Barbon, An Apology for the Builder: Or a Discourse Shewing the Cause and Ef-
fects of the Increase of Building (London: Printed for Cave Pullen, 1685).
97. Barbon, An Apology, 3, 6–7, 16.
98. Barbon, An Apology, 16–17, 23–24, 26–27, 32–34.
99. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London: Printed by Tho. Milbourne, 1690),
39–40.
100. Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 57–58.
101. Francis Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation (London: Printed for Tho. Cockerill,
1695), 11, 23, 57.
102. Brewster, Essays on Trade, 11.
103. Brewster, Essays on Trade, 12–14.
104. Brewster, Essays on Trade, 23.
105. Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 2.
106. Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods Of making a People Gainers in the
Balance of Trade (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1699), 15–24. On King’s estimates,
see Laslett, The Earliest Classics.
107. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 24. On Petty, see Davenant, Discourses on
the Publick Revenues, 2–5.
108. Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 17; see also Davenant, An Essay upon the
Probable Methods, 12.
45 Population
109. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 24–25.

110. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 50.
111. Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 7–8, 14, 26.
112. Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 27.
113. Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 16; Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable
Methods12; King’s table appears in ibid. as “Scheme D,” between pages 22 and 23.
114. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 12.
115. On the East India Company, see John Cary, An Essay on the State of England In Relation
to its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes (Bristol: Printed by W. Bonny, 1695), 60; on naturaliza-
tion, see Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and
Population, 1660–1760 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995).
116. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 25–26.
117. Edmund Halley, “An Estimate of the Degrees of Mortality of Mankind, Drawn from Cu-
rious Tables of the Births and Funerals of the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to Ascer-
tain the Price of Annuities upon Lives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 17
(1693): 596–610; William Derham, Physico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being
and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation. 2nd ed. (London: Printed for W. Innys.,
1714), 172–78. See Ted McCormick, “Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population
Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660–1750,” Journal of British Studies (forth-
coming).
118. See Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978).
119. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 25.
120. See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, ch. 5.
121. Compare for example George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System,
1578–1660 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1908] 1959.), 32–77, with Mildred Campbell,
“‘Of People either too Few or too Many’: The Conflict of Opinion on Population and its
Relation to Emigration,” in Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Notes-
tein, ed. William Appleton Aiken and Basil Duke Henning, 169–201 (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1960). See also Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Crom-
wellian Protectorate (London: Frank Cass, 1962). 134, 152; James H. Cassedy, Demography
in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind 1600–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1969), 6n 9; Patricia Coughlan, “Counter-currents in Colonial Dis-
course: The Political Thought of Vincent and Daniel Gookin,” in Political Thought in
Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony, ed. Jane H. Ohlmeyer, 56–82 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
122. See Thomas Leng, ch. 4, and Carl Wennerlind, ch. 3.
123. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, sig. A3v.
2
Labor
Employment, Colonial Servitude,
and Slavery in the
Seventeenth-Century Atlantic
Abigail Swingen
Traditionally, the widespread use and acceptance of slavery in English colonies and the
growth of the English empire have been treated by scholars as contemporaneous but
essentially separate subjects. Historians have rarely considered the connections
between the two when investigating the political, constitutional, military, or even com-
mercial origins of the early modern empire.1 Although economic historians have
explored the contributions slave labor made to colonial production and British over-
seas trade,2 few scholars have investigated how slavery in the colonies contributed to
other, less tangible, perceptions of the empire.3 Historians and sociologists of slavery
who have attempted to answer the question of why it became acceptable for Europeans
to enslave Africans have tended to investigate transformations in European legal codes
and cultural attitudes.4 They conclude that the widespread institution of slavery was
“totally without precedent in the English experience,”5 and that it resulted from an
“unthinking decision”6 on the part of Europeans to enslave Africans. They argue that
the growth of African slavery and the expansion of the slave trade in the early modern
period related almost exclusively to the economic realities of colonial labor demand
and reflected deep-seated cultural prejudices.7
There is no denying this prejudice or how quickly colonial slavery became codified in
racial terms.8 What is less readily acknowledged is the connection between the growth
of unfree labor in the colonies, especially the use of African slaves, and debates over
population, labor, and imperial policy, that took place in England during the early mod-
ern period. Changing perceptions about population at home, outlined by Ted McCor-
mick in chapter 1, related to transformations in unfree labor practices in the colonies.
My chapter explores how colonial unfree labor became a key point of contention in
debates over population and the purposes of empire during the seventeenth century.
46
47 Labor
These discussions illustrate the multiple connections between unfree labor and the de-
velopment of an overseas empire, and demonstrate the complex nature of early modern
thought that has conventionally been labeled “mercantilist” by scholars.9 The problem
with the traditional scholarship on colonial labor is that it has tended to present one
position that was by and large unchanging on issues of labor and population during the
early modern era. This chapter looks at the origins of colonial unfree labor by exploring
the evolution of indentured servitude and convict transportation in England’s transat-
lantic colonies. It then investigates the ways in which contemporaries understood the
importance of overseas colonies in relation to African slavery in the West Indies, and
the role slavery played in England’s imperial trajectory and what contemporaries
thought of this development. Rather than remaining an exclusively colonial phenom-
enon, the interconnected questions of overseas expansion and unfree labor, and the
widespread acceptance of African slavery by the British, were central to contemporary
concerns about domestic labor, population, and economic growth.
Traditionally, the origins of most European colonial endeavors in the early modern
period have been described as mercantilist in nature and design. According to this in-
terpretation, most famously articulated by the historians George Louis Beer and
Charles M. Andrews in the early twentieth century, England’s imperial agenda was
based on a collection of commercial laws that aimed to restrict foreign access to colo-
nial markets and goods. England’s early modern empire was managed by a series of
“regulations whose fundamental aim was to create a self-sufficient commercial empire
of mutually complementary economic parts.”10 This system, of course, came to be
labeled “mercantilism,” and mercantilist policies included the promotion of state-
sponsored monopoly corporations and the Acts of Trade and Navigation. A pervasive,
hegemonic “mercantilist mind” understood such policies governing overseas trade
and colonial settlements as natural defenses against foreign economic and military
competition. Simply put, if England did not seek out colonies and protect its overseas
markets, other European powers would and England would necessarily lose access to
wealth and resources.11
The idea that mercantilist economic ideas lay at the heart of early modern imperial
designs and colonization schemes has generally been accepted by historians of colonial
America12 and has remained the dominant interpretive paradigm among scholars for
more than a century.13 But the overwhelming historiographical acceptance of a static
idea of mercantilism has meant that scholars have often failed to recognize the connec-
tions between the rise of unfree labor in the colonies and significant debates about
population and the purposes of empire that took place throughout the period.
Although many scholars are quick to acknowledge the mutability of “mercantilism” as
a concept, few have explicitly recognized that imperial and commercial policies, and
the ideas and theories used to support them, were in fact highly contested.14 People in
48 Circulation
early modern England and the colonies disagreed over how to manage and regulate the
overseas empire, and whether colonies benefitted the home country in the first place.
One of the major fault lines of the debate was over the issue of labor.
An early justification for colonial expansion and settlement in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries was a prevailing belief that England had a surplus popula-
tion of poor and unemployed people.15 Commentators expressed anxiety about Eng-
land’s ability to provide work, housing, and sustenance for its growing population of idle
beggars and vagabonds. The poor were deemed a dangerous group that threatened
social and economic stability, and it was widely believed that poverty and unemploy-
ment led naturally to criminality.16 The imperial promoters of the Elizabethan period,
such as Richard Hakluyt (the younger) and Gilbert Humphreys, exploited these fears
and presented colonial settlements as a way to ease England’s social and economic bur-
dens. “The frye of the wandering beggars of England,” wrote Hakluyt, “that grow up idly
and hurtful and burdenous to this realm, may there [in New England] be unladen,
[and] better bred up.”17 Pamphlets and sermons promoting the settlement of Virginia
also justified colonial expansion in these terms. “Look seriously into the land,” preached
William Symonds in 1609, “and see whether there be not just cause, if not a necessity to
seek abroad. The people, blessed be God, do swarm the land, as young bees in a hive in
June, insomuch that there is very hardly room for one man to live by another.”18 Another
wrote that England was “abounding with swarms of sole persons, which having no
means of labour to relieve their misery, do likewise swarm in lewd and naughty prac-
tices.”19 England simply did not have enough land or resources to support its growing
population of indigent groups. Colonies were promoted as places where the unem-
ployed and vagrant could be put to work for their own good and the good of the realm.
This narrative, of course, has a long history and is a key component of the traditional
historiographical interpretation of the origins of the English empire, but it is not with-
out its critics.20 In 1960 Mildred Campbell argued that plenty of contemporary thinkers
felt that overpopulation in and of itself was not the problem. The real crisis was the
need for people who could contribute to the commonweal in meaningful ways, which
meant that the primary concern for early modern thinkers was “the proper handling of
labour.”21 In chapter 1 (26–30), Ted McCormick has complicated this further by point-
ing out that it was the depopulation of certain groups or “multitudes” that contempo-
raries feared. Enclosures and other disruptive practices seemed to drain entire regions
of laborers and thus created populations of unemployed and vagrant people. As a
result, some groups needed to be encouraged and certain others discouraged. Total
numbers were not as important as perceptions of various subgroups in this early phase
of theorizing about population.22 The focus on sending vagrants and other problematic
multitudes to the colonies was an outgrowth of this concern, regardless of whether
population was actually increasing.
49 Labor
The idea of shipping poor people to the colonies was not limited to promotional
rhetoric. The Virginia Company officially adopted a policy of sending vagrants to
supply the new colony with labor and thus rid England of undesirables. In 1619 the
company’s governor, Sir Edwin Sandys, embarked on an ambitious program of trans-
porting poor servants to the colony in order to exploit the profitable possibilities of
tobacco.23 According to Sandys, the combination of a seemingly endless labor supply
from England and abundant land in Virginia would result in prosperity for all who
survived.24 Under Sandys’s system, the company contracted with private traders based
in London, Bristol, and eventually Virginia. These merchants took advantage of this
new labor market by delivering shiploads of servants and supplies to North America
and shipping cargoes of tobacco back to England.25 Servants were then bound either to
company lands directly or to planters for a certain number of years in exchange for the
cost of transportation. Sending orphans and the children of convicted felons to the
new colony also became Virginia Company policy as a means of obtaining servants
under this plan.26 As Edmund Morgan has shown, during the 1620s the demand for
agricultural labor to grow tobacco in Virginia reached such heights that Sandys’s pro-
gram transformed into an extremely harsh system of involuntary servitude, in which
men and women bought and sold others, and masters treated servants with a level of
brutality that would not have been tolerated in England at the time. Rather than scram-
bling for land, the shrewdest planters “rushed to stake out claims to men” in a colony
where land was cheap and plentiful, and labor was expensive and scarce.27 In four short
years, Sandys’s program had transported nearly four thousand people, adults and chil-
dren alike, to Virginia.28 Terrifyingly high mortality rates in the colonies contributed to
this insatiable demand for bodies.29
The idea that England had an overabundance of dangerous segments of society also
contributed to the earliest systems of coerced labor in the English Caribbean colonies.30
Efforts to populate these islands with bound labor started almost as soon as the earliest
English settlements were established (St. Christopher in 1624, Barbados in 1627). By
the 1630s, the proprietor of Barbados, James Hay, earl of Carlisle, granted English
planters large tracts of land and actively encouraged them to bring servants to clear the
land and work new tobacco plantations.31 Over the course of the 1630s, merchants who
had established themselves in the indentured servant trade to Virginia moved into the
Barbados market. They sent approximately 836 indentured servants to Barbados
during 1634 alone.32 This system of indentured servitude laid the foundations for the
transatlantic servant trade that lasted with varying degrees of success and intensity for
most of the seventeenth century.
The idea that England was overpopulated with idle and vagrant people, and had
limited resources to support them, worked as a means to justify the earliest colonial
ventures in Virginia and the Caribbean. It also contributed to the creation of harsh
50 Circulation
labor systems in the colonies in which people owned other people’s labor for set pe-
riods of time. Many historians have noted that indentured servitude as it evolved was
fundamentally different from other forms of bound service in England, such as ap-
prenticeship. Service in the colonies tended to be more violent and lasted for longer
periods of time than had been the case in the home country.33 Although labor was not
necessarily cheap on the ground in the colonies, it was widely understood that there
were always more poverty-stricken servants to be had from England, or possibly Scot-
land and Ireland. This was especially true during the earliest decades of colonial expan-
sion, when it seemed that colonial labor demand could be met only through channeling
these undesirable subgroups into indentured service.34 This did not always reflect re-
ality. The historian David Souden has pointed out that the perception that the Ameri-
can colonies were peopled by “rogues, whores, and vagabonds,” especially by the
mid-1600s, is an inaccurate picture.35 The typical indentured servant, usually young
and male, was far less likely to have had a criminal or vagrant background and instead
probably had some experience working as a farm laborer or a craftsman in a provincial
town.36 Such servants also tended to be highly mobile and had probably moved within
England before departing for the colonies.37 But the perception that England had too
many of the wrong sorts of people contributed to the way colonies were promoted and
peopled in the early part of the seventeenth century.38
Where did the idea that England had too many idle and dangerous people come
from? Contemporary observers were likely correct in terms of general perceptions of
population growth. According to historical demographers, England’s population did in
fact increase for most of the sixteenth through the early seventeenth century; E. A.
Wrigley and R. S. Schofield estimate that England’s population increased from roughly
2.8 million in 1541 to about 5.1 million by 1641.39 Cities and towns expanded rapidly
during this period, especially London, which grew from about seventy thousand in
1550 to roughly four hundred thousand in 1650.40 As Keith Wrightson has demon-
strated, overall population growth, shifting domestic migration patterns from rural
settings into urban centers, and changes in agricultural practices combined to raise
food prices significantly and increase poverty rates over the course of the sixteenth and
into the seventeenth century.41 As a result of these transformations, there were more
poor people living in close quarters in cities and towns than ever before, which cer-
tainly alarmed many contemporaries. One pamphlet promoting Virginia focused on
London’s growth, which seemed to make it especially susceptible to the disease of pov-
erty. “Who seeing this City to be mightily increased, and fearing lest the over-flowing
multitude of inhabitants should, like too much blood in the body, infect the whole City
with plague and poverty.” The cure, this pamphlet continued, was “the transporting of
their overflowing multitude into Virginia.”42 As a result, during the first half of the sev-
enteenth century, few if any people seemed concerned about the prospect of sending
51 Labor
large numbers of poor people from England to the colonies. Likewise, few seemed
troubled by the brutal systems of unfree labor that the colonies seemed to require.
The mentality that understood resources as limited and certain segments of the pop-
ulation as expendable directly contributed to creating violent systems of coerced labor
in English colonies. In addition to the widespread establishment of indentured service,
during the first half of the seventeenth century the idea that colonies could be used as
dumping grounds for criminals and political and religious troublemakers also gained
traction. Convict transportation has traditionally been interpreted in terms of changing
ideas of crime and punishment in England. Over the course of the seventeenth cen-
tury, judges became less willing to impose the death penalty for certain offenses and
instead turned with increasing regularity to sentencing convicts to transportation.43
When considered from a colonial perspective, convict transportation is usually pre-
sented as a source of class antagonism in colonial American society, or as an extension
of English law across the Atlantic.44 But transportation can also be understood as a
source of forced colonial labor and therefore intimately connected to indentured ser-
vitude and slavery, and therefore to debates about population and imperial expansion.
In 1611, four years after the initial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia’s governor Thomas
Dale sent a request to Lord Treasurer Salisbury asking for two thousand men. “On
account of the difficulty of procuring men in so short a time,” Dale suggested, “all of-
fenders out the common gaols condemned to die should be sent for three years to the
colony.”45 In 1614, James I granted his Privy Council the power to sentence convicted
felons to transportation to the American colonies “as that in their punishment some of
them may live and yield a profitable service to the Common wealth in parts abroad.”46
The widespread use of prisoner transportation did not take place until the 1650s.47
Often many of the same merchants who had been involved in the servant trade were
also at the forefront of transporting prisoners across the Atlantic. Martin Noell, a well-
established Barbados merchant, was charged with transporting war prisoners from
Ireland and Scotland in 1655.48 Plans to populate the newly conquered island of Jamaica
frequently included proposals for transporting vagabonds and prisoners.49 In 1657,
Noell and his associate Thomas Povey proposed the formation of a joint-stock West
India Company, which would “take aboard such servants, or such as by commissions
given to Justices of the Peace [as] shall be collected of vagabonds, beggars or con-
demned persons, & proceed with them to Jamaica, which is to be a principal rendez-
vous of all the English interests there.”50 Despite the endorsement of powerful
merchants, the Council of State rejected the proposal in 1659. But the idea that pris-
oners could be used as a source of forced colonial labor had taken root. After the Res-
toration there were at least three attempts to pass legislation codifying transportation
to the colonies as punishment for certain offenses.51 In addition, in the aftermath of
political uprisings in London in 1661 and in the north of England in 1663, political
52 Circulation
prisoners were systematically sentenced to transportation to the West Indies.52 Laws

against religious nonconformity, including the Quaker Act of 1662 and the Conventicle
Act of 1664, also subjected violators to labor sentences in the colonies.53 Most famously,
more than eight hundred men captured in the aftermath of Monmouth’s Rebellion in
1685 were sentenced to ten years labor in Barbados and Jamaica at Judge Jeffrey’s
“Bloody Assizes.”54
The increased willingness to use transportation as a form of punishment and as a
source of unfree colonial labor reflected a number of social and cultural transforma-
tions. In the first instance, it represented the intertwining of imperialism and violence,
and the use of the empire as “a tool” of the state.55 In addition, the increased use of con-
vict transportation in the middle of the seventeenth century seems to have coincided
with a drop in the number of indentured servants going to the colonies. A number of
historians have noted that voluntary migration to the English Atlantic colonies peaked
during the 1650s, when approximately seventy thousand people migrated.56 Thereafter,
the numbers of English and other European migrants diminished over time.57 The
direct relationship between this drop-off in voluntary servant migration and the use of
convict labor remains somewhat obscure, however. Richard Sheridan has suggested
that the Civil War slowed voluntary migration and might have contributed to the use of
convict labor in the colonies.58 In his study of coerced labor in Barbados, Hillary Beck-
les argues that the dwindling supply of English servants by the late 1640s not only con-
tributed to the increased use of African slaves but also to the turn toward convict
transportation.59 Russell Menard, on the other hand, has argued that servant migration
did not decline significantly during the 1640s, but that colonial labor demand, at least
in Barbados, simply outpaced supply by the end of the decade. This in turn contributed
to the turn toward convict labor and the rapid increase in slavery.60 There also seems to
have been more convicts available to be sent to the colonies by the mid to late 1600s.
Cynthia Herrup has shown that over the course of the seventeenth century, increasing
numbers of felons received a sentence or pardon of transportation to the colonies rather
than a death sentence for certain noncapital crimes.61
But convict transportation never became a reliable source of coerced labor during
the seventeenth century. It has been estimated that only about forty-five hundred con-
victs were sent to Virginia and the West Indies colonies between 1655 and 1699.62 There
were a number of reasons for this failure. Merchants could choose the prisoners they
thought would yield the highest prices in the colonies, leaving large numbers of “unde-
sirable” convicts in prison. In addition, merchants had to pay exorbitant fees to jail
keepers in order to get the prisoners they desired, and often had to pay a security fee or
bond, which would be forfeited should a prisoner escape and return to England. Mer-
chants were also not paid up front for their services, and they often had to purchase
their own handcuffs and shackles, as well as pay private guards to assist delivering
53 Labor
convicts from jails to the shipyards.63 These costs made the trade in convicts especially
risky. And colonies became less receptive to receiving convicted felons. Virginia and
Maryland passed laws against receiving convicts in 1670 and 1676 respectively.64 Con-
vict transportation did not become systematized and codified until the passage of the
Transportation Act of 1718/19. The act allowed certain offenses to be punishable with
seven years labor in the colonies, and it granted an exclusive contract for transporting
all prisoners to the merchant Jonathan Forward with costs paid directly by the Trea-
sury.65 The vast majority of British convicts sent to the American colonies, nearly fifty
thousand people, came during the eighteenth century in the aftermath of this legisla-
tion.66 But by and large, prisoners sent during the eighteenth century went to the North
American colonies and not to the West Indies, where the use of African slaves had
become widespread.
Significantly, the failure of convict transportation as a source of colonial unfree labor
in the seventeenth century was also most likely related to changes in attitudes about
those various multitudes that seemed to plague English society in the earlier part of the
century. By the mid-1600s, the poor, vagrant, and even criminal populations were not
necessarily considered threatening to society. Instead, these segments of the populace
were increasingly understood to be potential economic opportunities to be exploited
through proper training and management.67 Rather than sending convicts abroad, per-
haps they could be rehabilitated into laborers at home. Instead of shipping out its prob-
lematic multitudes, the English state should instead work to maintain and increase
overall population levels, and focus on how to best employ the population for Eng-
land’s economic “improvement.”68
The general perception that England had an abundant supply of undesirable people
who could provide labor in the colonies was clearly an important component of
viewing the world’s wealth as limited in nature, as the interpretations of Beer, Andrews,
and others have maintained. Usually, this idea has led historians to conclude that com-
mercial policies described by Adam Smith in the 1770s as the “mercantile system” were
natural and necessary in the minds of early modern thinkers, writers, and policy
makers.69 In part this is understandable. From the time of the Commonwealth through
the Restoration era and beyond, the English state seemed to want to control its colonies
and their commerce in an increasingly mercantilist vein.70 The Acts of Trade and Nav-
igation of 1651 and 1660, the Staple Act of 1663, and the Plantation Act of 1673, which
placed customs duties on enumerated goods traded between England’s colonies, were
all aimed at streamlining the collection of colonial profits in the face of foreign compe-
tition.71 Such trading companies as the East India, Royal African, and Hudson’s Bay
Companies held royally granted charters authorizing exclusive trading monopolies.72
As Michael Braddick has cautioned, viewing such laws and corporations “as the cor-
nerstone of an Imperial vision” on the part of the early modern English state that
54 Circulation
lacked any significant enforcement ability is misguided.73 But it is also a mistake to

understand early modern England’s imperial system as uncontested, especially re-
garding the interrelated issues of imperial expansion, commercial regulation, popula-
tion, and labor. Indeed, there were plenty of people, particularly by the second half of
the seventeenth century, who were highly critical of England’s imperial and commer-
cial policies.74 Some even bemoaned the existence of overseas colonies. Many of these
critics were motivated by the idea that population, and therefore labor, needed to be
kept at home, increased, and properly managed for England’s economic benefit. They
saw the colonies as competing with the home country for people. In 1670, the political
writer and economic theorist Roger Coke warned that England’s Atlantic empire was
detrimental to the nation’s prosperity. “Though England be the most excellent and con-
venient place for Trade of all others,” Coke admonished, “yet our practice and ordering
it, is contrary to the nature of it . . . the abundance of our people . . . are diminished in
peopling our Plantations, and in re-peopling Ireland.”75 Colonies, rather than relieving
England of its overabundant multitudes, actually drained England of its most precious
economic resource—its people.
Coke was not alone in his criticism of England’s overseas empire. “You find fault
because some of our people go to Ireland, and the Plantations,” wrote the pharmacist,
economic thinker, and future Royal Society member John Houghton in a fictional di-
alogue in 1677, “and say we want people at home to fill out Cities and Countrie-towns.”76
Samuel Fortrey, a place-seeker from a Dutch merchant family, argued in 1663 that
those colonies that could enable England to substitute goods it had usually imported
from foreign rivals were generally good. But he added the strong caveat that “otherwise
it [colonial expansion] is always carefully to be avoided, especially where the charge is
greater than the profit, for we want not already a countrey sufficient for double our
people, were they rightly employed.”77 “England never was so populous as it might have
been,” the political and economic writer William Petyt lamented in 1680, “and undeni-
ably must now be far less populous than ever, having so lately peopled our vast Ameri-
can Plantations.”78 Instead of focusing on acquiring overseas territory to ship excess
poor and indigent people, these commentators emphasized the value and importance
of keeping a well-managed population at home for England’s economic prosperity.79
Colonies were not integral parts of a larger imperial economic and political system, but
rather competed with England for wealth and other resources.
Many of the same writers were also highly critical of the ways the English govern-
ment attempted to manage the empire and overseas trade. For example, Coke argued
that the Navigation Acts and monopoly trading corporations should be done away
with for England’s economic benefit. “The Law of Navigation,” he admonished,
“excludes much the greater Trading part of the world from Trading with us from
abroad, and our Corporations restrain our Trade to as few at home: so as Trade, which
55 Labor
ever flourishes in multitude and freedom, is by us, by all imaginable ways circum-
scribed, taxed, and reduced to a few.”80 Not only did the Acts of Trade and Navigation
hinder English economic growth, argued William Petyt, but “nor can the like Expe-
dient be found in any Nation on the Earth, who have or aspire to a great Navigation or
Trade.”81 The outspoken republican and merchant Slingsby Bethel advocated “laying all
[trading] Companies open, or at least, by leaving them free, for all to come in to them
that please.”82 According to these critics, by focusing on empire building instead of
properly managing its population, England had lost out on trades it had traditionally
dominated. “After our American Plantations became peopled by us,” complained Coke,
“the Dutch began to partake with us in the Turkey and Muscovy Trades; our Stable at
Antwerp diminished in a very great measure . . . we neglected the Fishing Trade,
whereby . . . the Dutch in a manner became solely in a short time possessed of it.”83
“That people that can get the Trade of the World,” wrote one author in 1686, “may
quickly, without pursuing the toils of the Caesars and the Alexanders, be, (in effect)
Lords of their Neighbours.”84 According to these writers, in order for England to com-
pete successfully with its economic rivals, it needed to focus on the proper manage-
ment of trade, labor, and population, not on territorial acquisition and conquest.
“These Plantations may be Considered as the true Grounds and Causes of all our pre-
sent Mischiefs,” bemoaned Petyt, “for, had our Fishers been put on no other Employ-
ment, had those Millions of People which we have lost or been prevented of by the
Plantations, continued in England, the Government would long since have been under
a necessity of Easing and regulating our Trade.”85 Although some felt that certain col-
onies were worth holding onto, many agreed that new colonial endeavors should be
abandoned. “Most of our Plantations in the West-Indies,” warned Carew Reynell
in 1674, “except Barbados and Jamaica, are but unprofitable.”86 “In this condition I
leave to thee, Reader, to judge,” admonished Coke, “whether it will not be yet much
more pernicious to the Trade of this Nation to endeavour a further discovery of new
Plantations.”87
Considering these opinions provides a fuller appreciation of the complex nature of
early modern thought regarding empire, population, and labor, and what modern
scholars might call political economy.88 Clearly these positions were political; many of
the writers identified here, especially Coke and Bethel, were outspoken critics of the
later Stuarts, their policies, and their political philosophies.89 They also illustrate the
variety of economic opinions that emerged during the second half of the seventeenth
century and indicate some of the multiple ways that contemporaries perceived Eng-
land’s imperial pursuits. Scholars of early modern natural philosophy and scientific
thought have often considered these perspectives as part of a general trend in the liter-
ature of “improvement” that emerged in the mid-1600s.90 Philosophers of the Hartlib
Circle, for example, focused on harnessing nature’s infinite potential for improvement
56 Circulation
by investigating and experimenting with agriculture, husbandry, and industry as ways

to increase natural resources, and therefore national wealth.91 They became interested
in gathering accurate information and organizing numbers and concrete “facts” in
order to better control the natural world. Population was part of this natural world to
be promoted, harnessed, and well managed. As Ted McCormick shows in chapter 1, by
the middle of the seventeenth century economic literature reflected this shift in opin-
ion in terms of the economic potential of well-managed populations. Many writers
and theorists, such as Sir William Petty, who was also skeptical of colonial expansion,
no longer concerned themselves with dangerous multitudes and subgroups but
instead with the economic potential of the population as a whole.92 This desire for
accurate data informed writings on trade and wealth creation, as Thomas Leng shows
in chapter 4, and represented a turn away from viewing the world’s resources in the
realm of human endeavor as naturally limited.93 If properly managed, human labor
could improve natural endowments and therefore create wealth. The state should
therefore do its utmost to promote population growth.94
It is clear that England’s imperial policies and the empire that they regulated did not
emerge uncontested. In addition, these ideas seem to complicate the usual picture of
mercantilist thought regarding population and colonial labor.95 But embracing the infi-
nite possibility of human labor might not have necessarily represented a rejection of a
zero-sum mentality concerning wealth and natural resources. The economic historian
Edgar Furniss, writing in the 1920s, argued that despite the fact that “the sentiment is
reiterated again and again, that the labor of the people is the source of the nation’s
wealth,” contemporaries did not believe that human labor could in fact create wealth.96
A nation with a large laboring population produced more goods to sell abroad, and
thus the laborer brought a portion of the world’s fixed wealth into England’s economy.
In other words, the more people England had working, the more likely they were able
to take wealth away from economic competitors. Therefore, the desire to keep people
at home and profitably employed was another natural outgrowth of the prevailing
“psychology of limited wealth.”97
In his article “Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” D. C.
Coleman suggested in the 1950s that early modern economic thinkers who argued for
the importance of maintaining a large working population did not necessarily do so
out of a sense of early modern “nationalism” and fears of international competition.
Instead it was the relative significance of labor to England’s (and indeed the global)
economy that drove this mentality. In the pre-industrial age, labor was the only part of
the production process over which people had any real control.98 Early modern theo-
rists were concerned with international competition but not because they viewed the
possibility of unlimited economic growth as unattainable.99 Critics of England’s empire
focused on maintaining population at home not simply because of potential colonial
57 Labor
or European competition but because they believed human endeavor could in fact
create wealth. “Trade and populousness of a Nation are the strength of it . . . the more
populous , the more Trade, the more Trade, the more populous, and the more Trade
and populacy, the more Money,” wrote Carew Reynell in 1674.100 This point of view was
not only limited to England’s economic growth. This “dynamic” or “optimistic outlook”
as Richard Wiles has labeled it, recognized the possibility that more than one nation
could prosper at the same time.101 For some thinkers, a well-managed population and
good trade policies could actually create wealth and not merely take it away from other
nations.
It is worth asking some important questions: Why did economic writers concern
themselves with maintaining and increasing population by the second half of the sev-
enteenth century? Were the critics of empire reacting to something, real or perceived,
in terms of English demographic trends? According to Wrigley and Schofield, during
the middle decades of the 1600s England’s population did in fact decline.102 They esti-
mate that from 1656 to 1671, England’s population diminished by approximately four
hundred thousand, down from 5.3 million to 4.9 million.103 This was the result of a
number of factors, including the effects of the Civil War (1642–49), not to mention
recurring outbreaks of plague, most significantly in 1665/66. But it was also related to
migration to the Atlantic colonies. Through an analysis of colonial population esti-
mates, the demographic historian Henry Gemery has projected that about 378,000
people left England, Scotland, and Ireland for the American colonies from 1630 to
1700. The vast majority of migrants were from England. More than half, or about
210,000 people, emigrated during the early part of the period, from 1630 to 1660.104 So
it is plausible that the critics of empire were reacting to a material reality that there
were actually fewer people in England, and it seems equally likely that emigration to
the colonies played an important role in these downward demographic trends.
There were other less tangible factors that contributed to the idea that people, by and
large, were good for a country’s economic well-being. Overall population contraction
by the middle of the seventeenth century was a major factor in a generalized shift in
thinking about the poorest members of English society. In contrast to the earliest
decades of the century, by the mid-1600s the poor were no longer necessarily consid-
ered a threat to social stability but were instead an economic resource to be employed
and better managed.105 Even criminals came to be viewed as a potential economic
resource. Indeed, this idea might have contributed to the failure of convict transporta-
tion as a source of unfree labor in the colonies during the seventeenth century, which,
in turn, informed the idea that maintaining a large domestic working population was
best for England’s economic prosperity.106 But in terms of colonial expansion and pol-
icies, it seems the concerns of these critics of empire were generally ignored. After all,
it was during the second half of the seventeenth century when the pace of England’s
58 Circulation
empire building increased dramatically, as the English established and/or fought to

maintain Jamaica, St. Christopher, Nova Scotia, New York, East and West Jersey, Caro-
lina, Pennsylvania, not to mention important trading outposts in Canada, India, and
West Africa. And the government’s imperial and commercial policies did not change
dramatically. The Acts of Trade and Navigation were regularly renewed and often
strengthened during the last decades of the 1600s.107 What, ultimately, made this pos-
sible? Why was the empire supported and encouraged?
The social, economic, and demographic changes taking place in England, and the
perception that the empire was responsible for some of the negative repercussions of
these changes, coincided with dramatic transformations in the colonies in terms of
unfree labor. It is well known that during the middle decades of the 1600s, Barbados
planters made the transition from using mostly white indentured servants and con-
victs to relying upon the labor of African slaves. Traditionally, this shift has been
explained by the rise of plantation agriculture and the cultivation of tobacco, indigo,
cotton, and eventually sugarcane.108 The successful cultivation of sugarcane necessi-
tated a significant initial investment of capital. The crop required a long time to grow
and harvest (approximately eighteen months from start to finish), and needed to be
cared for intensively by considerable numbers of agricultural laborers. In addition,
large plantations were necessary in order for sugarcane to grow and be successfully
processed. The work was notoriously tedious and difficult, and parts of the process,
such as grinding and boiling the sugarcane, were extremely dangerous. As a result, as
Caribbean planters embraced cultivating sugar, they required constant supplies of both
capital and unfree labor.109
The profits from sugar made by planters and merchants drove an insatiable demand
for labor, especially in Barbados, a demand that English merchants increasingly had
difficulty keeping up with. During the 1640s, in fact, just as Caribbean planters made
the transition to sugar cultivation, colonial merchants were unable to take full advan-
tage of this profitable change as war broke out in Scotland, Ireland, and England.110 At
the same time, fewer English people seemed willing to transport themselves to the
American colonies. As noted earlier, voluntary migration to the English colonies
peaked in the 1650s and declined thereafter. This was the result of a number of factors,
including the war as well as accounts of hard work, disease, and death in the tropics,
which had made it back across the Atlantic and diminished the appeal of such a
voyage.111 In addition, stories of people being kidnapped and sent to a life of drudgery
in the colonies might have contributed to diminishing the numbers of merchants
willing to participate in the trade for fear of being falsely accused, thus limiting the
number of servants going to the colonies.112 The decline was also probably related to
the slight but tangible downturn in population in England during the middle decades
of the 1600s.113 Generally speaking, population decline during the second half of the
59 Labor
seventeenth century resulted in higher wages, especially in rapidly growing urban

areas. Although population decreased overall, urban centers in England continued to
grow significantly.114 With wages rising, people were less likely to be willing to leave the
country.115 These factors all combined to make it increasingly difficult if not impossible
for planters in Barbados to rely entirely on England or even Scotland and Ireland for
servant labor.
Many of the same merchants who had delivered servants to Virginia and the West
Indies also became involved in the slave trade. Men such as Maurice Thomson, William
Pennoyer, and Martin Noell made fortunes first in the servant trade, and then in the
sugar and slave trades. They often reinvested their profits into sugar plantations in St.
Christopher and Barbados during the 1630s and into the 1640s.116 In 1650, there were
approximately 12,800 slaves in Barbados. By 1660, just ten years later, that number had
more than doubled to 27,000.117 Soon the English government wanted to profit directly
from this demand as well as that for slave labor in Spanish American colonies. The
formation of the Royal African Company in 1672 (and earlier companies created in
1660 and 1663) represented the formal incorporation of slavery and the slave trade into
the imperial and commercial designs of the English state. The company held a royally
granted charter and monopoly on all trade to and from the west coast of Africa. It was
closely controlled by its governor, the Duke of York, the future James II, and became
inextricably linked with the politics of the Stuart court.118 The company reaped the
benefits of these connections and exerted a tremendous amount of influence over colo-
nial administration and imperial policies, especially during the 1670s and 1680s.119 Its
monopoly was notoriously hated by colonial planters and independent merchants,
who resented the restrictions it placed on their ability to trade. The creation of the
African Companies indicated the English government’s growing interest in profiting
from unfree labor in the empire.
The story of the transition from servants to slaves in the English West Indies col-
onies, with some variations in chronology, is largely a familiar one. The question in
terms of contemporary debates over empire and labor therefore becomes what place, if
any, did England’s overseas colonies with slaves have in the minds of those economic
thinkers who wrote about empire and the importance of domestic labor? And what
role did the widespread use of unfree labor in the colonies, especially slavery, play in
shaping those perceptions and in influencing discussions of empire, labor, and wealth?
As we have read, there were many outspoken critics of empire by the 1670s and 1680s.
By the end of the seventeenth century, though, a number of writers began to defend the
existence of the empire in creative and inventive ways. Not surprisingly, colonial
planters and merchants took the lead in promoting the idea that colonies were not
detrimental to England’s economic well-being. “The Plantations are not only not per-
nicious,” wrote the absentee Barbados sugar planter Edward Littleton in 1689, “but
60 Circulation
[are] highly beneficial, and of vast advantage to England. We by our Labour, Hazards,
and Industry, have enlarged the English Trade and Empire.”120 Popular opinion “take[s]
for granted that the American Colonies occasion the decay both of the People and
Riches of the Nation,” wrote the colonial merchant and slave trader Sir Dalby Thomas
in 1690. But “upon a thorough examination,” he continued, “nothing can appear more
Erroneous.”121 “The Many and Great Advantages that England Received from the West-
Indies, in Respect of the Revenue, Navigation and Trade, do Abundantly Recommend
their Worth,” another merchant wrote in defense of the colonies in 1695.122
These writers advocated a fundamentally different understanding of the empire, one
that incorporated the colonies fully into the economy, if not the polity, of the home
country. The Bristol merchant and economic writer John Cary maintained in 1695 that
“our Plantations are an Advantage to this Kingdom . . . as they take off our Product and
Manufactures, supply us with Commodities . . . employ our Poor, and encourage our
Navigation; for I take England and all its Plantations to be one great Body.”123 Similarly,
Littleton wrote that “the Sugar we make in the American Plantations (to instance only
in that) is as much a native English Commodity, as if it were made and produced in
England.”124 The pamphlets revealed a vision of empire in which England’s colonies
were seen as integral parts of England itself. This idea of empire was based on a com-
plicated web of economic and political interdependence. Rather than understanding
the colonies as competing with the home country for precious resources, these writers
saw the empire as an integrated whole.
The turn toward embracing overseas colonies, especially the West Indies colonies,
depended upon a complete acceptance of slavery and the slave trade.125 According to
this perspective, one of the primary reasons why colonies were so beneficial to England
was because of the perceived importance of African slavery to colonial production and
the imperial economy. African slaves, Cary maintained, “are the Hands whereby our
Plantations are improved, and ’tis by their Labours such great Quantities of Sugar, To-
bacco, Cotton, Ginger, and Indigo, are raised, which being bulky Commodities imploy
great Numbers of Ships for their transporting hither, and the greater number of Han-
decraft Trades at home, spends more of our Product and Manufactures, and makes
more Saylors, who are maintained by a separate Imploy.”126 Because of slave labor, these
writers maintained, the colonies were profitable in a number of ways. “It cannot be
denied, however some may apprehend,” declared the Anglo-Irish politician and mer-
chant Sir Francis Brewster in 1695, “but the Foreign Plantations add to the Strength and
Treasure of the Nation, even in that of People, which is generally thought our Planta-
tions abroad consume; but if it were considered, That by taking off one useless person
[from England], for such generally go abroad, we add Twenty Blacks in the Labour and
Manufacturies of this Nation, that Mistake would be removed.”127 African slavery
seemed to provide the answer that economic commentators who had been concerned
61 Labor
about the negative repercussions of empire were looking for.128 Carew Reynell hinted
as much in 1674 when he claimed that only Barbados and Jamaica were profitable and
worthwhile colonies.129 In 1680 the Royal African Company published a pamphlet in
defense of its monopoly in these terms. “By the Negro Trade,” it stated, “the Company
yearly at very reasonable Rates, furnish with vast Numbers with Servants, all His Maj-
esties American Plantations,” which “hinders the exhausting this Nation of its natural
born subjects.”130 Simply put, by relying on African slaves, colonies no longer had to
depend upon the home country for a valuable labor supply, or so these writers main-
tained. With slavery, the colonies no longer competed with England for people.
There were clearly self-serving interests to this position. Many advocates of this idea
were colonial planters and merchants involved in the transatlantic slave trade, so it was
of course in their best interest to promote colonial produce and keep the colonies well
supplied with slave labor. But it also reflected a shift in the broader economic literature
concerned with the colonies by the late seventeenth century. Rather than debating the
value of the West Indies colonies, by the 1690s and early 1700s commentators instead
debated how the slave trade to those colonies should be managed and regulated. Slavery
in the colonies became widely accepted, and in turn the perceived economic benefits of
slave labor helped to make the empire acceptable. There was little discussion, however,
about the horrors of the slave trade or the institution of slavery at this early date.
Many of the pamphlets and tracts promoting the importance of slavery to England’s
imperial economy belonged to a significant public debate, which took place in the
wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 over how the slave trade should be man-
aged. After the departure James II, the Royal African Company’s governor and chief
advocate, the company’s charter and monopoly were essentially null and void, and the
slave trade was for all practical purposes open.131 The post-1688 debate fell into two
camps: those in favor of the African Company’s monopoly and those opposed.132 The
language of the debate indicated that by the turn of the eighteenth century it was taken
for granted, at least rhetorically, that the economic health of the colonies and the me-
tropolis were deeply intertwined, and both depended upon slavery. The “Penury or
Plenty” of the American Plantations, wrote one anti-company critic, “lies indispens-
ably upon the Trade of Negro Servants from Africa.”133 “The great and unspeakable
Advantage the West-India Plantations are to England, is so well known,” began one
1698 pro-company broadsheet, “that it needs no demonstration to prove it.”134 “That it
being of so great Importance to this Nation,” maintained another anti-monopolist
tract, “to Encourage and Support the Plantations, it will be of absolute Necessity to
have them plentifully supplied with Negroes, by whose Labour and Strength all the
Commodities of those Countries are Produced is all clear Gains to this Nation, and
better than the Mines of Gold and Silver are to the Spaniard.”135 Always the enemy of
monopolies, Roger Coke also weighed in on the debate. Although England still had to
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redress the loss of its population to the colonies and to Ireland, Coke argued in 1695
that the slave trade should not be managed by a monopoly corporation, as this hin-
dered the ability of domestic manufacturers to sell their goods in Africa.136
As Coke’s pamphlet indicated, concerns about maintaining England’s population had
not disappeared, especially during the Nine Years’ War (1689–97). As Charles Davenant
asserted in 1695, “No Country can be truly accounted great and powerful by the Extent
of its Territory, or Fertility of its Climate, but by the Multitude of its Inhabitants.” “All
Men,” Davenant continued, “who have made any Computations of that kind, seem
convinc’d, England would naturally bear, and nourish, a full third part more of Inhabi-
tants.”137 These sentiments were translated into policy as efforts to send servants to
serve in colonial militias during the war were thwarted for military, economic, and
political reasons.138 In 1696/97 Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a powerful Whig grandee, colo-
nial merchant, and slave trader, attempted to send between five hundred and one thou-
sand men to Jamaica, only to be frustrated by the Admiralty and the Board of Trade
who were wary of the expense and detrimental social effects of such an enterprise.139
There were other obstructions to emigration. In April 1689, Edward Thompson, an MP,
merchant and Whig alderman from the city of York, petitioned the king for a patent on
a national office for registering indentured servants.140 This agency, versions of which
had been established in 1664, 1672, and 1686, ostensibly existed to ensure that each
indentured servant sent to the colonies went legally and not under duress.141 Such reg-
istries often added fees and oaths for merchants, making the trade less profitable and
attractive, especially for those groups who could not swear oaths, such as Quakers.142
Servants’ registries also served as a potential barrier to emigration, as they added an
extra layer of bureaucracy and likely resulted in higher prices. The merchant Dalby
Thomas wrote in 1690 that servants’ registries “Occasions new Offices, new Fees, new
Methods, for sending Servants thither, all which increases their price in the Indies very
considerably, and falls as bad as a Tax on the Industry of the Planter.”143 Although there
is little evidence that Thompson accomplished much with the registry,144 this effort to
regulate the servant trade was a revealing episode in early modern population manage-
ment and might have been an effort to limit emigration out of England.
Edward Thompson’s attempt to revive the servants’ registry and therefore keep closer
tabs on the servant trade was one indication that by the 1690s, the English state was not
interested in sending its own people to the colonies even in times of war when colonies
were vulnerable. Despite colonial fears of slave uprisings and foreign invasions, there
were few concerted efforts on the part of imperial authorities to fill colonial militias or
otherwise promote English emigration to the colonies, especially the West Indies,
during the 1690s and early 1700s. In general, such endeavors were left up to individual
merchants who ultimately had little incentive to provide servants when planters
demanded African slaves. Indeed, after the end of the Nine Years War, when white
63 Labor
servants once again began to trickle into the West Indies colonies, planters ignored
them. “It appears that though servants are imported (as there are many at this time),”
Governor William Beeston of Jamaica reported in early 1698, “the people generally
neglect the buying of them.”145 And chances were the servants arriving in the colonies
by the late 1690s and early 1700s were not English in origin. Instead, servants arriving
in the West Indies and North America by the turn of the eighteenth century tended to
come from places like Germany and Ireland.146 It seemed that by embracing slavery
and failing (or refusing) to promote emigration to the colonies, the English/British
state wanted to keep the English laborer at home. This in significant part reflected the
perceived importance of slavery to England’s imperial economy and the slave trade to
English imperialism.
The transatlantic slave trade had become extremely important to England’s imperial
economy by the late seventeenth century. Raw materials produced by slave labor dom-
inated colonial imports coming into London by the late 1600s. According to Nuala
Zahedieh, in 1686 sugar constituted 87 percent of all imports from the English West
Indies, worth about £586,528.147 In addition, colonial produce played an ever-increasing
role in England’s economy. During the 1660s, colonial products made up approxi-
mately 12 percent of total imports into London; by 1700 the total had increased to 18.5
percent.148 English merchants also exported large numbers of manufactured goods to
the West Indies colonies, which did not produce their own food, clothing, and other
staples. Because of these economic realities, as well as the African Company’s political
isolation in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the company never regained its mo-
nopoly over the slave trade.149 There was broad agreement among planters, merchants,
and the government that the African Company’s monopoly made for bad imperial and
commercial policy. And a more open slave trade translated into more slaves going to
the colonies. From 1676 to 1700, approximately 243,300 Africans were forcibly taken
across the Atlantic in British ships. During the next twenty-five years (1700–1725),
about 380,900 slaves were taken, an increase of one-and-a-half times.150 Promoting the
importance of a large domestic labor force and embracing African slavery for the col-
onies seemed to go hand in hand.
The rise of slavery in English colonies did not result from an “unthinking decision”
on the part of colonial planters and merchants, nor did it emerge from an uncontested
and static “mercantilist” mentality. Early modern debates and discussions over the
merits of England’s transatlantic empire indicate that anxieties about labor and domes-
tic population frequently intersected with concerns over imperial expansion. The
transatlantic colonies were by no means peripheral to the concerns of early modern
English people. These anxieties did not always reflect a rigid zero-sum understanding
of wealth and wealth creation, but demonstrate a broad spectrum of political-economic
possibilities in the early modern era. The widespread perception by the turn of
64 Circulation
the eighteenth century that slavery in the Caribbean colonies benefitted the home
country not only provided an important justification for the existence of the empire
but also illustrates that the widespread use of unfree labor in colonies, especially slav-
ery, did not emerge solely from labor demand. African slavery and the eventual domi-
nation of the transatlantic slave trade by the British were deeply connected to intense
debates over commercial and imperial policies and were thus instrumental for the de-
velopment of early modern English imperialism.151
NOTES
1. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Pol-
ities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1986); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); A. P. Thornton, West-India Policy under the Restora-
tion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors-General:
The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569–1681, pt. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979). Nuala Zahedieh has a small section on the importance of
slave labor to the imperial economy in The Capital and the Colonies: London and the
Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 245–52.
2. See for example P. K. O’Brien and S. L. Engerman, “Exports and the growth of the British
economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens,” in Slavery and the Rise of
the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
177–209; Nuala Zahedieh, “Overseas Expansion and Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” in
Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 398–422.
3. Recent notable exceptions include Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery
and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2007); and Catherine Molineaux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering
Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
4. See, for example, Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,
1550–1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), ch. 2; Betty Wood, The Origins of American
Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 16;
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), ch. 1. For slavery in a broader European context, see David Brion Davis, The
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
5. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,
1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 335.
6. This is the title of ch. 2 of Jordan’s White over Black.
7. These are the essential conclusions of Davis, Jordan, Wood, and Eltis. The question of
which came first, the economic need or the racism, has been the subject of intense debate.
For a strong assertion of the economic argument, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slav-
ery (1944; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 7–20. For a more
“neutral” approach, see Wood, Origins of American Slavery; and Kenneth Morgan, Slav-
ery and Servitude in North America, 1607–1800 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh
Press, 2000), ch. 2.
65 Labor
8. For the racialization of Barbados’s slave codes, see Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and
Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), ch. 4.
9. See Introduction to this volume by Phil Stern and Carl Wennerlind.
10. George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754, pt. 1, The Establishment of the
System, 1660–1688, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1:vii.
11. Andrews wrote that mercantilism “was not a theory but a condition” upon which all
economic assumptions rested. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American His-
tory, vol. 4, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1934–1938), 2–3.
12. See Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Eltis, Rise of African Slavery,
54–55.
13. See, for example, Stanley L. Engerman, “British Imperialism in a Mercantilist Age, 1492–1849:
Conceptual Issues and Empirical Problems,” Revista de História Econômica 15 (1998):
195–234; Nuala Zahedieh, “Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic
Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9
(1999): 143–58; Kenneth Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815,” in
The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and
Patrick K. O’Brien (Oxford: The British Academy, 2002), 165–91; Zahedieh, The Capital
and the Colonies, 35–54. For a recent discussion of the usefulness of mercantilism as an
interpretive method of understanding the early modern British Empire, see Steve Pincus,
“Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69,
no. 1 (January 2012): 3–34.
14. For example, Michael Kammen has written that “mercantilism as a concept was a will-o’-
the wisp. It meant different things at different times and in different places.” Kammen,
Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 4. Even Andrews conceded that “an orthodox mercantilism did not
exist.” Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, 328. See also Edgar Furniss, The
Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the
Later English Mercantilists (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920), 7–8. D. C. Coleman fa-
mously called for doing away with the term “mercantilism” altogether in “Labour in the
English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review, n. s., 8, no. 3
(1956): 295. Richard Wiles has suggested periodizing mercantilist thinkers into early and
“later” to help explicate the complicated variety of opinions that seem to have made up
the mentality. Wiles, “Mercantilism and the Idea of Progress,” Eighteenth-Century Studies
8, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 56–74. Andrea Finkelstein has suggested using the word “mercan-
tile” rather than “mercantilist” for early modern economic thought in England. Finkel-
stein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English
Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 251.
15. Mildred Campbell, “‘Of People either too Few or too Many’: The Conflict of Opinion on
Population and its Relation to Emigration,” in Conflict in Stuart England, ed. William
Appleton Aiken and Basil Duke Henning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 171–201.
16. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), ch.
2; Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 29.
17. Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 120.
66 Circulation
18. William Symonds, Virginia: A Sermon Preached at White-Chapel (London: I. Windet, 1609), 19.
19. Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (London: Samuel
Macham, 1609), D1r.
20. For the traditional view, see, for example, George Louis Beer, Origins of the British Colo-
nial System, 1578–1660 (New York: Macmillan, 1908), ch. 2.
21. Campbell, “‘Of People either too Few or too Many,’” 179.
22. Ted McCormick, ch. 1.
23. On the Virginia Company’s difficulties securing labor before 1619, see Edmund Morgan,
“The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607–18,” American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (June
1971): 595–611.
24. Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Ex-
periment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 94–96. Much of the same promo-
tional literature that presented England as overcrowded and dangerous portrayed
Virginia as a utopia for the laboring poor, even before Sandys’s plans became official
policy. See, for example, R. Rich, The lost Flocke Triumphant (London: Edw. Allde, 1610);
and Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia, and the successe of
the affaires there till the 18 of June, 1614 (London: John Beale, 1615).
25. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 227, 233.
26. Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia,
1618–1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, ed. Howard S. Reinmuth Jr. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1970), 137–51.
27. Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 28, no. 2 (April 1971): 169–98; quote from 183.
28. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 96.
29. Morgan, “First American Boom,” 170–71; David Souden, “‘Rogues, Whores and Vaga-
bonds’? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America, and the Case of Mid-
Seventeenth-Century Bristol,” Social History 3, no. 1 (January 1978): 151.
30. Hilary McD. Beckles, “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth
Century,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas
Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223; Beckles, White Servitude, 36–37.
31. Beckles, White Servitude, 16; Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and
Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2006), 19–23.
32. Beckles, White Servitude, 34–35.
33. Edmund Morgan, “The First American Boom,” 195–98; David Souden, “English Inden-
tured Servants and the Transatlantic Colonial Economy,” in International Labour Migra-
tion: Historical Perspectives, ed. Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (Hounslow, Middlesex:
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984), 23.
34. Souden, “English Indentured Servants,” 29.
35. Souden, “Rogues, Whores,” 166–67. This was an idea popularized by Abbot Emerson
Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947).
36. Souden, “Rogues, Whores,” 160; Souden, “English Indentured Servants,” 23. For more on
“vagrant” as a socioeconomic and legal category and how they fit into larger migration
patterns in England, see Paul Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1664,” in
Migration and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Clark and David Souden
(London: Hutchinson Education, 1987), 49–76.
67 Labor
37. Souden and others have shown how the emigration of indentured servants to the Ameri-
can colonies fit into broader patterns of migration within England. Souden, “Rogues,
Whores,” 151, 156; “English Indentured Servants,” 27–28; Alison Games, “Migration,” in
The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 31–50.
38. Games, “Migration,” 37–38.
39. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1870 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1981), 208–9, table 7.8.
40. Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 51. The growth of London played a central role
in shaping migration patterns within England, Britain, and across the Atlantic. See Games,
“Migration,” 35; John Wareing, “Migration to London and Transatlantic Emigration of
Indentured Servants, 1683–1775,” Journal of Historical Geography 7, no. 4 (1981): 356–78.
41. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 5 and 6.
42. Patrick Copland, Virginia’s God be Thanked, or A Sermon of Thanksgiving for the Happie
successe of the affayres in Virginia this last yeare (London: J. D., 1622), 31.
43. J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986), ch. 9; Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chs. 6 and 9; A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for Amer-
ica: The Transportation of British convicts to the colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987), 3, 19, 44; Joanna Innes, “The Role of Transportation in Seventeenth and
Eighteenth-Century English Penal Practice,” in New Perspectives in Australian History,
ed. Carl Bridge (London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 1990), 1–24; Cynthia
Herrup, “Punishing Pardon: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Penal Transportation,” in
Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English, ed. Simon Devereaux and
Paul Griffiths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121–37.
44. These are the themes of Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New
York: Harper and Row, 1965); and Smith, Colonists in Bondage.
45. Sir Thomas Dale to Lord Treasurer Salisbury, August 17, 1611, Calendar of State Papers
Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739, ed. Karen Ordahl Kuperman,
John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton [CD-ROM] (London: Routledge, 2000), 1:11–12;
Herrup, “Punishing Pardon,” 122.
46. Quoted in Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 93.
47. Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 156; Webb, Governors-General, 73. On the turn to using convict
transportation during the Interregnum, see Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in
an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 185–90.
48. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longmans
and Co., 1882), March 1, 1654/5, 7:62; March 30, 1655, 7:107; March 30, 1655, 7:107–8. For a
contemporary account of war prisoners in the colonies, see England’s Slavery, or Barbados
Merchandize (London, 1659).
49. See, for example, “For the Council of Scotland,”1655, in A Collection of the state papers of
John Thurloe, Esq., 7 vols (London, 1642): 3:497. Instruction nine orders sheriffs in Scot-
land “to take and apprehend by the assistance of the several governors and their forces, all
masterless, idle vagabonds, and robbers, both men and women, within their several
bounds . . . to be transported and carried along into the West Indies.”
50. “A Proposition for the Erecting of a West India Company, and the better securing the
Interests of this Commonwealth in America,” probably 1657, BL Egerton 2395, fols. 87–88.
68 Circulation
51. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 291–92.

52. For the 1661 plot, see A Great Plot Discovered (London: Printed for G. Horton, 1661); for
1663, see Webb, Governors-General, 84–86.
53. Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 175.
54. Peter Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685 (New York: St. Martin’s,
1978).
55. Webb, Governors-General, 85. Webb argues that the transportation of religious and polit-
ical troublemakers to the colonies, theoretically beyond the reach of English law, served
as a metaphor for the growing arbitrary nature of English imperialism.
56. James Horn and Philip D. Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migra-
tions to Early Modern British America,” in Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed.
Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2005), 23. This is an approximate total for all Europeans, but the vast majority would have
come from England during this decade. Russell Menard has estimated that nearly thirty
thousand European migrants, the bulk of whom were English, came to Barbados alone in
the decade around 1650. Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 114–15.
57. Games, “Migration,” 32–33; Souden, “English Indentured Servants,” 22; Menard, Sweet
Negotiations, 44.
58. Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: an Economic History of the British West Indies,
1623–1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 236.
59. Beckles, White Servitude, 46, 49.
60. Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 44–45.
61. Herrup, “Punishing Pardon,” 123, 132–33.
62. Herrup, “Punishing Pardon,” 122.
63. Christopher Jeaffreson to Thomas Hill, March 28, 1685, and April 22, 1685, in A Young
Squire of the Seventeenth Century, ed. John Cordy Jeaffreson (London: Hurst and Black-
ett, 1858), 2:185; 194–201.
64. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 471; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 479.
65. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 429–31. On some of the consequences of the Act, see
Ekirch, Bound for America; and Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century
Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004).
66. Souden, “English Indentured Servants,” 31; Ekirch, Bound for America, 1; Peter Wilson
Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614–1775 (Baltimore: Genealog-
ical Publishing Co., Inc., 1988), ix.
67. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 30–31; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 480.
68. McCormick, ch. 1 (31–35).
69. See Stern and Wennerlind, “Introduction,”.
70. Zahedieh, “Making Mercantilism Work,” 144; Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies, 35–54;
Thornton, West-India Policy, 2; Dunn, “Imperial Pressures on Massachusetts and Jamaica,
1675–1700,” in Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675–1775, ed. Alison Gilbert Olson
and Richard Maxwell Brown (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970),
59–60.
71. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the
Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 173–74; David
S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America, rev. ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 10; Zahedieh, “Overseas Expansion and Trade,” 406; Thornton, West-
India Policy, 164–65.
69 Labor
72. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans Green, 1957); Elizabeth
Mancke, A Company of Businessmen: the Hudson’s Bay Company and Long-Distance
Trade, 1670–1770 (Winnipeg: Rupert’s Land Research Centre, University of Winnipeg,
1988).
73. Braddick, “The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625–1688” in Oxford
History of the British Empire, vol. 1, Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 296. Jack Sosin has argued that there was hardly any logic
at all to Restoration commercial or imperial policies. Sosin, English America and the Res-
toration Monarchy of Charles II: Transatlantic Politics, Commerce, and Kinship (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 49–50.
74. It has long been recognized that colonial groups, especially planters, strongly disliked
many of the English government’s commercial policies. See, for example, Dunn, Sugar
and Slaves; and Christian Koot, “‘A Dangerous Principle’: Free Trade Discourses in Bar-
bados and the English Leeward Islands, 1650–1689,” Early American Studies 5, no. 1
(Spring 2007): 132–63. It has been less readily acknowledged, however, that such criticism
existed in England as well, and that it was as much ideological as it was economic.
75. Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1670), 43.
76. [John Houghton], England’s Great Happiness: Or, a Dialogue between Content and Com-
plaint (London: J. M. for Edward Croft, 1677), 9; Anita McConnell, “Houghton, John
(1645–1705),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13868 (accessed October 14, 2011).
77. Samuel Fortrey, England’s Interest and Improvement, Consisting in the increase of the
store, and trade of this kingdom (Cambridge: John Field, 1663), 39; Perry Gauci, “For-
trey, Samuel (1622–1682?),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004); http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9952 (accessed January
23, 2012).
78. William Petyt, Britannia languens, or a Discourse of Trade (London, 1680), 154 (incorrect
pagination).
79. In order to promote population growth, any of these writers urged the state to ease immi-
gration laws and allow toleration for all Protestants. For example, Carew Reynell in 1674
wrote that England should encourage “Free Naturalization, and some kind of general
Indulgence, the Bug-bear of former Ages,” in order to promote “vastness of Trade, Riches,
and Populousness.” Carew Reynell, The True English Interest (London: Giles Widdowes,
1674), A7r–A7v.
80. Coke, Discourse of Trade, 44.
82. [Slingsby Bethel], The Present Interest of England Stated (London: D. B., 1671), 9.
84. The Character and Qualifications of an Honest and Loyal Merchant (London: Robert Rob-
erts, 1686), 13.
86. Reynell, True English Interest, 88.
88. For a useful working definition of “political economy” in the case of seventeenth-century
England, see Steve Pincus, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of Popula-
tion and the Invention of the State,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restora-
tion, ed. Alan Houston and Steven C. A. Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 272–75.
70 Circulation
89. For example, in the 1680s Coke became a Whig pamphleteer and opponent of James II’s
political and commercial designs. Bethel was eventually considered a serious threat to
the Stuart regime. He was openly critical of many of Charles II’s policies, especially re-
garding religion and trade. He was a known radical Whig who served as a sheriff of the
City of London during the Exclusion Crisis, and was known to be associated with Alger-
non Sidney. For Coke, see John Callow, “Coke, Roger (c.1628–1704x7)”, Oxford Dictio-
nary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/
view/article/5829, accessed October 14, 2011; for Bethel, see Gary S. De Krey, “Bethel,
Slingsby (bap. 1617, d. 1697)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University
Press, 2004); http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2303, accessed October 14, 2011;
Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart Britain (Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 8–9; and Jonathan Scott, Algernon
Sidney and the Restoration crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 63–64.
90. See, for example, Ted McCormick, ch. 1, and Thomas Leng, ch. 4. See also Finkelstein,
Harmony and the Balance; Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology; Richard Dray-
ton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), chs. 2 and 3; Paul Slack, “Material Progress
and the Challenge of Affluence in Seventeenth-Century England,” Economic History
Review 62, no. 3 (2009): 579–80.
91. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 50–54.
92. Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
93. See also Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, part 3.
94. For a political interpretation of this turn away from a zero-sum economic mentality, see
Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commer-
cial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical
Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 705–36.
95. For criticism of the idea of a hegemonic mercantilist perspective in early modern Eng-
land, see Richard C. Wiles, “The Theory of Wages in Later English Mercantilism,” Eco-
nomic History Review, n.s., 21, no. 1 (April 1968): 113–26; Wiles, “Mercantilism and the
Idea of Progress.” John Brewer has also questioned the notion of mercantilism as a mono-
lithic concept. See Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–
1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 167–70; see also Steven C. A.
Pincus, “Whigs, Political Economy and the Revolution of 1688–89,” in “Cultures of Whig-
gism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed.
David Womersley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 62–85. Terence Hutchi-
son has argued that “the degree of ‘mercantilist’ consensus (if that is what it may be
called) which may have prevailed earlier, began to dissolve as the eighteenth century wore
on.” Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 11–12. I argue that this happened well before the turn of
the eighteenth century. Eric Williams argues simply that there was a “complete reversal of
mercantilist thought” on the issue of population. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 15.
96. Furniss, Position of the Laborer, 18.
97. The phrase is Richard Dunn’s, see The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715, 2nd ed. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1979), ch. 3.
98. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy,” 280–82; 292–95.
71 Labor
99. Wiles, “Mercantilism and the Idea of Progress,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 1
(Autumn 1974): 62–66.
101. Wiles, “Mercantilism and the Idea of Progress,” 56–74.
102. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 207–15.
103. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 208–9, table 7.8. The total calcula-
tion is mine taken from this table.
104. Henry Gemery, “Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630–1700: Infer-
ences from Colonial Populations,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 180, 204, 205,
216, table A.6.
105. Slack, Poverty and Policy, 30–31; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, ch. 6; Cole-
man, “Labour in the English Economy,” 293–94.
106. For an interpretation of the perceived benefits of having a working population earning
good wages, see Wiles, “The Theory of Wages.”
107. Thornton, West-India Policy, ch. 1; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution in America; Philip
S. Haffenden, “The Crown and Colonial Charters, 1675–1688: part I,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., 15, no. 3 (July 1958): 297–311.
108. This is the central argument of Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. For similar interpretations, see
Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 229–32; Wood, Origins of American Slavery,
ch. 3. Menard argues, contrary to many colonial narratives that emphasize the role of
Dutch merchants in the transition to sugar and slavery, that English planter and mer-
chant success with tobacco, indigo, and cotton, helped finance a “sugar boom” in Barba-
dos and initiated the adoption of slave labor. Menard, Sweet Negotiations, chs. 1–3.
109. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, ch. 6. Eltis writes “the unpleasant nature of sugar cultivation put
a premium on coercion.” Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 52.
110. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and
London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (London: Verso, 2003), 586.
111. Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 45; Wood, Origins of American Slavery, 55.
112. Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 83. For more on kidnapping servants, see John Wareing,
“‘Violently Taken Away or Cheatingly Duckoyed’: The Illicit Recruitment in London of
Indentured Servants for the American Colonies, 1645–1718,” London Journal 26, no. 2
(2001): 1–22.
113. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 208–9, table 7.8.
114. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 164–66; 235–36.
115. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 46–44.
116. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 162–63; Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery,
231; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 41; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 52, 59.
117. Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 25, table 4; Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 231.
118. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans Green, 1957), 103; John
Callow, The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King (Thrupp,
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000), 251–53.
119. This is a major theme in my forthcoming book, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slav-
ery, and the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
120. Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations: Or, A True Account of their Grievous and
Extreme Sufferings By the Heavy Impositions upon Sugar (London: M. Clark, 1689), 23.
121. Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Collonies
(London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1690), 1.
72 Circulation
122. West-India Merchant, A Brief Account of the Present Declining State of the West-Indies
(London: John Harris, 1695), 3.
123. John Cary, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade (Bristol: W. Bonny,
1695), 66–67.
124. Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 26.
125. Campbell noted a shift in economic literature that came to accept that colonies “were
paying off ” and therefore worthwhile by the late 1600s. But she did not consider the role
slavery might have played in these changing perceptions of colonies. Campbell, “‘Of
People either too Few or too Many,’”197.
126. Cary, Essay on the State of England, 75.
127. Sir Francis Brewster, Essays on Trade and Navigation in Five Parts: The First Part, (Lon-
don: Tho. Cockerill, 1695), 70. For more on Brewster’s views on labor, free and unfree, see
McCormick, ch. 1 (36–38).
128. Eric Williams hints at this conclusion, but does not fully explore its meanings. See
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 16.
130. Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England (1680), 5. For
more on this pamphlet, see Davies, Royal African Company, 107–8; Callow, Making of
King James II, 255.
131. Ann M. Carlos and Jamie Brown Kruse, “The Decline of the Royal African Company:
Fringe Firms and the Role of the Charter,” Economic History Review 49, no. 2 (1996): 311–12.
132. Tim Keirn argues that in this debate “both the proponents and critics of the African
Company monopoly shared in a concept that ultimately wealth could be obtained only at
the expense of other European nations and the African people.” I suggest this was not
exactly the case. See Keirn, “Monopoly, Economic Thought, and the Royal African
Company,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves
(London: Routledge, 1995), 445.
133. William Wilkinson, Systema Africanum: or a Treatise, Discovering the Intrigues and Arbi-
trary Proceedings of the Guiney Company (London, 1690), 7–8.
134. Some Considerations: Humbly Offered to Demonstrate how prejudicial it would be to the
English Plantations . . . that the sole Trade for Negroes should be granted to a Company with
a Joynt-Stock exclusive to all others (London, [1698?]), 1.
135. Considerations Humbly Offered To the Honourable House of Commons, by the Planters, in
relation to the Bill to settle the Trade to Africa (London, [1697?]).
136. Coke, Reflections upon the East-Indy and Royal African Companies (London, 1695), 15, 10–11.
137. [Charles Davenant], An Essay on the Ways and Means of Supplying the War (London,
1695), 145, 146.
138. This was despite repeated pleas from colonial governors. See, for example, James Kendall
(Barbados) to the Lords of Trade, August 22, 1690, The National Archives (TNA): Public
Record Office (PRO) CO 28/1, no. 48; Christopher Codrington (Leeward Islands) to the
Lords of Trade, August 3, 1690, CSPC, 13:303–6.
139. Abigail L. Swingen, “The Politics of Labor and the Origins of the British Empire,
1650–1720” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 301–10.
140. Petition of Edward Thompson to William III, April 1, 1689, TNA: PRO CO 1/67, no. 68I.
141. For a history servants’ registries, see John Wareing, “Preventative and Punitive Regula-
tion in Seventeenth-Century Social Policy: Conflicts of Interest and the Failure to Make
‘stealing and transporting Children, and other Persons,’ a Felony, 1645–73,” Social History
27, no. 3 (October 2002): 288–308; Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 67–69.
73 Labor
142. David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 255, 301–2.
143. Thomas, Historical Account, 41.
144. In November 1691, there was a petition from “divers Merchants, Masters of Ships, Planters,
and others, trading to foreign Plantations,” urging parliament to force Thompson to
establish the office once and for all. “House of Commons Journal Volume 10: November
2, 1691”, Journal of the House of Commons: volume 10: 1688–1693 (1802), 544–45. http://
www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=29135 (accessed January 23, 2012).
145. Proclamation of Beeston and the Council of Jamaica, February 25, 1697/8, TNA: PRO CO
140/6, 78–79.
146. Richard Dunn has estimated that only about twenty-five thousand voluntary indentured
servants left England from 1700 to 1775. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment
and Employment of Labor,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the
Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984), 159–60.
147. Zahedieh, “Overseas Trade,” 410, table 18.7.
148. Zahedieh, “London and the Colonial Consumer in the Late Seventeenth Century.” Eco-
nomic History Review 47, no. 2 (1994): 242, table 2.
149. William A. Pettigrew, “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlan-
tic Slave Trade, 1688–1714,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64, no. 1 (January 2007):
3–38; Davies, Royal African Company, 122–23. An act passed in 1698 required all mer-
chants trading to Africa to pay a fee to the African Company worth 10 percent of their
cargo, but did not reinstate the company’s old monopoly. The act was allowed to expire in
1712. Davies, Royal African Company, 135–39.
150. Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58, no. 1 (January 2001): 43, table 1.
151. On British dominance of the slave trade, see Eltis, “Volume and Structure,” and “The
British Transatlantic Slave Trade before 1714: Annual Estimates of Volume and Direc-
tion,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and
Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 182–205.
3
Money
Hartlibian Political Economy
and the New Culture of Credit
Carl Wennerlind
The concept of money was at the core of the political economic discourse throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Gerard Malynes to Adam Smith. It was
only by the dawn of the nineteenth century that money began to fade into the analyt-
ical background, a trend that John Stuart Mill captured with his famous comment that
there cannot be “a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money.”1
Yet it was concerns about money, or rather the lack thereof, that sparked the formation
of England’s first coherent discourse on political economy.2 Once the scarcity of money
moved from being an inconvenient irritant to the main source of England’s commer-
cial troubles in the early 1620s, a number of people with expertise in different spheres
of the economy—merchants, manufacturers, custom officials, dyers, drapers, and
gentry—were invited by the Privy Council and Parliament to offer their diagnoses and
preferred medicaments for how to restore health to the English body politic.3 Of the
voices heard during these debates, Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas
Mun became most closely associated with the formation of the discourse of political
economy that Adam Smith would later implicate for providing the intellectual founda-
tion for his bugbear, the dreaded “Mercantile System.”4
Adam Smith notoriously accused the early “mercantilists” for confusing wealth with
money and therefore advocating trade surpluses as the only path to national enrich-
ment. He noted sardonically, “A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is
supposed to be a country abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any
country is supposed to be the readiest way to enrich it.”5 Nothing could be further from
the truth, Smith argued. Yet he lamented, “No complaint . . . is more common than that
of a scarcity of money.”6 Subscribing to a version of the specie-flow mechanism, Smith
informed his readers that it is impossible to end up with a situation in which there is
too little money. As long as the state does not meddle with trade flows, the currency, or
74
75 Money
prices, each nation will attract just the right amount of money to circulate its goods. If
for some reason the quantity of money temporarily falls short of its proper level, money
will flow back in, attracted by lower prices. And, conversely, if money piles up in a
country, “no vigilance of government can prevent their exportation.”7 Hence, the in-
ability of the early mercantilists to recognize the true source of wealth had led them to
advocate restrictions on both exports and imports, which interfered with the very
mechanism that otherwise, in Smith’s mind, would have provided the solution to the
problem they sought to address.
Many subsequent commentators on mercantilism, including most prominently Eli
Heckscher and Jacob Viner, continued to adhere to Smith’s unsympathetic reading of
his predecessors.8 In more recent times, however, scholars have challenged the view
that early seventeenth-century thinkers confused specie with wealth and advocated
continuous trade surpluses.9 Both J. D. Gould and Barry Supple, for example, argue
that to properly understand the literature of the 1620s it is necessary to place it in the
context of the decade’s severe commercial downturn, which, according to contempo-
raries, was caused by the devastating shortage of money.10 Whether this shortage had
been caused by the undervaluation of sterling in the international market for bills of
exchange, incorrectly set mint ratios, trade disturbances associated with the Thirty
Years’ War, the failure of the infamous Cockayne experiment, or an excessive con-
sumption of foreign-produced luxuries, in light of its undeniable presence and devas-
tating implications it made sense to advocate for policies that could replenish the
money stock. As R. W. K. Hinton points out, the early mercantilists “did not want more
silver to hoard it but in order to have more money.” Money, for them, he notes, was a
form of spirit or energy, imparting motion to the economy.11
There was a general consensus that every economy required a certain amount of
money in circulation to remain healthy. This did not mean that early mercantilists ad-
vocated an indefinite expansion of money—Spain had already showed the world what
happens when the accumulation of bullion is made an end unto itself. Their aim was
rather to promote policies that might reestablish the appropriate amount of money,
proportional to the nation’s resources and level of economic activity.12 As such, they
shared Adam Smith’s conviction that each nation should always strive to maintain its
optimal stock of money, but they did not agree with Smith that the international mon-
etary mechanism was capable of automatically ensuring the appropriate adjustment.
Indeed, the realities facing England at the start of the seventeenth century made any
such automatic adjustments impossible.13
In addition to situating the ideas of Malynes, Misselden, and Mun in the extraordinary
economic conditions of the 1620s, a few scholars have tried to make sense of their writ-
ings by positioning them within the prevailing neo-Aristotelian worldview. Andrea Fin-
kelstein, for example, argues that early seventeenth-century political economy emerged
76 Circulation
within a long-established cosmology, worldview, and conceptualization of society, all of

which were characterized by a belief in order, hierarchy, and tradition. All things in
heaven and on earth had their proper immovable place, from highest to lowest, within a
closed and finite universe.14 The body politic was similarly conceived as a strictly hierar-
chical entity, in which each unique component played a specific and indispensable part.
In the same way that the head ruled over the physical body, the sovereign was respon-
sible for coordinating the body politic.15 Relations within the social hierarchy were fixed
and so were the moral content of these interactions. While privilege and status increased
toward the top of the social order, power always came with moral obligations and re-
sponsibilities to those below. For everyone to be able to fulfill his intended purpose, it
was essential that society’s wealth was appropriately distributed.16
In the spirit of Galenic medicine, all segments of the body politic had to be in balance
in order for the entire organism to remain healthy, just as the body natural required a
certain balance of the four fluids/humors. Money’s role in the body politic was com-
pared to blood in the human body; its role was to distribute energy and nourishment
to all of society’s various parts.17 And, in as much as Galenic medicine insisted that
there was an optimal quantity of blood uniquely suitable to each physical body, so too
did Malynes, Misselden, and Mun argue that there was an ideal or appropriate amount
of money for each economy.
Balance and harmony could be maintained only if every segment of society properly
carried out its responsibilities. While there was a long history of writings exploring the
roles played by kings, nobility, priests, and peasants, the early seventeenth-century po-
litical economists from Thomas Mun to Lewes Roberts focused instead on the rela-
tively neglected, and sometimes condemned, yet indispensable, contributions made by
merchants. Intended partly as instruction and partly as legitimization, these writers
detailed the skills, knowledge, and unique disposition a successful merchant had to
possess and how these qualities contributed not only to the material enrichment of
society but also to a general improvement in virtue, humanity, and sociability.18
Although the early Stuart thinkers are mostly remembered for their discussions of the
merchant corps, it is essential to recall that they did not neglect the importance of arts
and industry for society to flourish.19 Without artisans, craftsmen, and manufacturers
pursuing their calling with diligence and intelligence, the number of commodities en-
tering circulation would stagnate, choking off mercantile activities and preventing so-
ciety from reaching its full economic potential. A vibrant economy might even succeed
in incrementally expanding society’s material boundaries, yet the potential for eco-
nomic growth was still highly circumscribed by nature’s, society’s, and mankind’s in-
herent limitations, as prescribed by their neo-Aristotelian worldview.
Adam Smith’s characterization—or caricature—of the progenitors of the mercantile
system has now largely been debunked as a result of scholars carefully reassessing the
77 Money
original writings and placing them in their proper material and intellectual contexts.20
Yet there remains one important oversight in this correction of Adam Smith that mod-
ern commentators have only recently begun to rectify.21 While Smith sampled the dis-
course on trade and money from the 1620s, he completely ignored—or was unaware
of—the whole strand of political economic thinking that the Hartlib Circle introduced
during the 1640s and 1650s. Not only did the Baconian-inspired members of the Har-
tlib Circle develop a new worldview of infinite improvement and universal reforma-
tion, they also developed a radically new political economy and reconceived of money
in a manner that would have far-reaching consequences for posterity, even providing
the foundation for much of Smith’s own thinking.22
The Hartlib Circle coalesced around Samuel Hartlib, a Prussian emigrée who ar-
rived in England in 1628. Together with Jan Comenius, John Dury, Gabriel Plattes,
Henry Oldenburg, Benjamin Worsley, Henry Robinson, William Petty, Robert Boyle,
and many others, Hartlib launched a pan-European cooperative project designed to
bring Francis Bacon’s vision of improvement to life. The group was driven by the con-
viction that through the proper use of experimental and empirical methods, sup-
ported by reason and revelation, mankind could re-create the knowledge lost at the
Fall and thus restore his command over nature.23 The key to the Hartlibian program
was cooperation—mankind had to collectively and systematically pursue new knowl-
edge and freely share information about their findings with each other, even across
national and religious boundaries. Only then would mankind be able to initiate a
self-sustaining process of improvement, capable of yielding vast material and economic
benefits, as well as political, social, and spiritual advancement. The Hartlibians firmly
subscribed to the millenarian notion that a paradise on earth was possible, even imma-
nent. All mankind had to do was to find the key to unlock God’s secrets. Their explicit
purpose, Charles Webster points out, was thus to create the “conditions for the imminent
realization of the Kingdom of God, in the form of the earthly paradise, fulfilling the
biblical prophecies of the New Eden and New Jerusalem.”24 Consonant with their pan-
sophic conviction, to study and know nature was to discover and celebrate God’s great-
ness. The search for knowledge was thus simultaneously a spiritual and utilitarian quest.
Hartlib and his collaborators authored, published, and circulated a wide array of
proposals for the advancement of humanity. They offered ideas on how to improve
the development and teaching of new knowledge in numerous fields, including lin-
guistics, practical mathematics, mechanics, manufacturing, physics, anatomy, botany,
horticulture, husbandry, and alchemy.25 For many, alchemy played a particularly
important role, both as a form of knowledge about nature and as a way of framing
mankind’s relationship to nature.26 They believed that all matter was malleable and
that mankind had the capacity to operate on nature. In an account of one of their
many experiments, Hartlib outlined “how all sublunary substances may be changed
78 Circulation
one into any other . . . how Minerals may be turned into vegetables . . . how this Corn
may be turned into Animals . . . how this Animal may be turned into Vegetable again . . .
how this Vegetable may be turned back into Minerals.”27 Knowledge of how to transform
nature could be applied throughout society and, importantly, by anyone interested in
improvement. Indeed, every farmer, artisan, and manufacturer could participate by
experimenting, tinkering, and refining the way they operated on nature. Proper docu-
mentation of experiments was also essential. To that end, William Petty proposed that
people should be instructed in “how to make the most of experiments and to record the
successes of them whatsoever, whether according to hopes or no, all being equally Lu-
ciferous, although not equally Lucriferous.”28
Most of the Hartlibians’ suggestions focused on agriculture, offering ways to improve
the yield on plants, trees, flowers, grass, meadows, forests, and wastelands. Proposals
ranged from the basic science of organic matter to specific instructions on how to brew
the best ale, make wine out of corn, and concoct fertilizer from a mix of cow, sheep,
and pigeon dung.29 The material benefits of a systematic implementation of these plans
promised to be nothing short of remarkable. In summing up his vision for what a
properly managed Baconian project might achieve, Hartlib proclaimed
that our Native Countrey, hath in its bowels an (even almost) infinite, and inex-
haustible treasure; much of which hath long laine hid, and is but new begun to be
discovered. It may seem a large boast or meer Hyperbole to say, we enjoy not, know
not, use not, the one tenth part of that plenty or wealth & happinesse, that our
Earth can, and (Ingenuity and industry well encouraged) will (by Gods blessing)
yield.30
Trees and plants were not the only factors subject to improvement; animals and
human beings were also malleable and perfectable. Improving animal husbandry was
high on their list of priorities, as evidenced by their many publications on how to breed
and care for various beasts, such as the best way to fatten hogs and cure them from
“meazeals,” as well treating horses for small pox.31
The primary way to refine humanity was through education. William Petty, for ex-
ample, advocated that all children, regardless of “poverty and unability of their Par-
ents,” should be given proper physical and intellectual training, because “it hath come
to passe, that many are now holding the Plough, which might have beene made fit to
steere the State.”32 Every child should be taught how to read and write in both English
and foreign languages, as well as perform elementary arithmetic and geometry. Those
who displayed proper talents should also be instructed in music and drawing. And, no
matter how privileged the child’s family, he should be taught some useful trade skills,
from the making of watches and musical instruments to gardening and the refinement
79 Money
of metals. Merit, talent, and education should dictate a person’s place in society, not
their birth or title.
By improving the general population’s access to useful skills, not only would people
be able to contribute to an increasingly complex economy, the process of systematically
engaging both the mind and the body in the pursuit of useful ends would have benefi-
cial effects on people’s manners, character, and morals. Indeed, with the right kind of
education, industry, and religion, it was possible to transmute people, in particular the
poor.33 Petty concluded that the joint improvement of people and nature inevitably
would make the nation both more potent and richer:
For how can it otherwise be when . . . all Beggers seeding upon the Labours of other
men, and even Theeves and Robbers (made for want of better employment) shall be
set on work, barren grounds made fruitfull, wet dry, and dry wet, when even hogs
and more indocile beasts shall be taught to labour, when all vile Materials shall be
turned to Noble uses, when one man or horse shall do as much as three, and every
thing improved to strange Advantages.34
Yet, all of these ambitious projects for the development and application of new
knowledge would come to naught without a proper dissemination of ideas. The Hart-
libians therefore proposed the Office of Address for Communications to organize the
pooling and spreading of information about new scientific breakthroughs throughout
Europe and the Office of Address for Accommodations to disseminate ideas of more
immediate practical and economic utility.35 The prominent merchant and Hartlib
Circle member Henry Robinson was selected to manage this office, which he success-
fully did for a brief period of time at the end of the 1640s. In his writings, Robinson
offered a detailed look at how the Office of Address was designed to fuse the scientific
and commercial features of the Hartlibian improvement program.36
The bulk of Robinson’s writings fell primarily under the rubric of structural eco-
nomic improvements; that is, how to design the economy so that the new culture of
science might yield the greatest possible benefits to as many people as possible.37 “It
hath pleased God, in these later times, to make some men Instruments of very great
discoveries, whereby the state of Man-kind hath already, and may be much more me-
liorated,” as long as, Robinson insisted, the way markets operate can be significantly
improved. In particular, he was concerned with finding ways to enhance the flow of
information so that a more efficient matching of buyers and sellers would become pos-
sible. In exploring the relationship between workers and employers, he noted that
“poore people, and others, spend much time, in running up and down, from one place
to another to seeke employment, and sell their worke.”38 Because of informational gaps
and asymmetries and the resulting high search costs, “the poore mens seeking is rather
80 Circulation
a begging, than a bargaining for employment; which rich men take advantage of, to the
daily more and more undervaluing poore mens paines, and labours.”39 However, such
market failures could easily be rectified. If the people, Robinson noted, who “have oc-
casion or desire to set poor people on work; and poore people that desire continually
to be kept at work; knew where to find one another at all times, they should never be
necessitated to be idle.”40 The poor in particular stood to gain from an improvement in
the way the market mechanism functioned. He projected, “when the rich, as well as the
poore mens occasions, and necessities, are equally knowne to one another, the poor
will be able to treat with more reputation, and get more indifferrent and advantagious
prices, both for their worke-manship and labour.”41
By keeping lists of all people looking for employment and all employers seeking
workers, the Office of Address would rectify the “want of Order” in the markets for all
kinds of labor, from butlers and barbers to professors and chaplains. Other markets
also stood to benefit from a better flow of information. By better matching buyers and
sellers of “any kind of Wares or Merchandize,” financial assets (mortgages, bonds, in-
surances, leases, foreign currencies, credit notes, annuities, options), and real estate,
the Office would generate benefits that “extend as far as humane necessity, which is
little lesse than infinite.”42 Robinson even envisioned that the Office might help make
the marriage market more efficient, by ensuring that anyone who “desire to dispose of
themselves, or friends in Marriage, may here likewise be informed, what encounters
there are to be had, both of Persons and Portions [dowry].”43
Robinson continued to explore the ways whereby economic institutions could be
reengineered to better promote the infinite improvement process in Certain Proposalls
In order to the Peoples Freedome and Accommodation in some Particulars (1652). True
to the Hartlibian spirit of promoting inventions, innovations, and productivity en-
hancements, Robinson advised the state to use its legal and fiscal powers to encourage
every kind of productive pursuit. He suggested that the legal system should be revised
so that “each Improver and Inventor may know what advantage he may expect, and
how it is to be determined and secured unto him, without so much attendance and
charge.”44 Next, he proposed that England should establish a set of free ports in which
all merchants could trade freely without customs and excise taxes, regardless of na-
tional origins. The intent was to expose English merchants and producers to foreign
competition and thus force them to bring their commodities to market at the lowest
possible price. Although this competition might generate some hardship for those who
were unable to meet the challenge, the long-term prospects were undoubtedly favor-
able. Robinson asked:
But if some Forreiners be more nimble, ingenious, and industrious in their ways
of Trading, than generally the Natives of this Land; may it not be consistent with,
81 Money
nay even a speciall demonstration of the Wisdome of our Governours to encourage

such active spirited Forreigners to a cohabitation with us, whom the Fishermen
Manifactors and Artificers of Forreign Nations will certainly accompany . . .? And if
by such course any of the lesse ingenious Natives of this Land happen to be outgone
in their own Trades and Callings, let them apply themselves unto some other which
requires lesse ingenuity and activeness, as they ought to have done at first; and will
not the industry and ingenuity of such Forreigners be a good lesson and example
to us, and contribute much to the inriching and accommodating the whole Nation
in general?45
Competition would force English producers and merchants to apply themselves with
greater alacrity and efficiency in order to survive. And, in the event that they did not
survive, they were replaced by people working harder and smarter: either way, the nation
stood to benefit. Robinson was confident that England would be able to make excellent
use of any art, manufacture, or workmanship imported from abroad, because, in his
mind, no other people possessed the same unique mix of knowledge and diligence as the
English.46 The economic vibrancy envisioned by Robinson would generate a massive
demand for workers, yielding “Imployment to all numbers of People, though they mul-
tiply beyond President or beliefe, provided they have but elbow-roome to dwell by one
another.”47 Commercial prosperity, combined with a few workhouses, public schools for
the poor, and “Physicians and Chyrugions” strategically placed in every county, would
ensure the material, moral, and physical well-being of the entire population.48
The final institutional improvement Robinson deemed necessary for markets to
function optimally was the development of a sound, just, and coherent monetary
mechanism. He offered proposals for how to manage the settlements of bills of
exchange so that the English currency was not undervalued in international exchanges;
to make all bonds, bills, and promissory notes universally assignable; to create a regis-
try that would allow people to use land and estates as securities for personal loans; and
to create a bank that was “capable of multiplying the stock of the Nation, for as much
as concernes trading in Infinitum.”49 While Robinson nicely captured the general mid-
seventeenth-century sentiment among writers favorably disposed toward using banks
and credit money to eliminate the stubborn scarcity of money problem, the most inno-
vative and seminal writings of the Hartlib Circle on this topic belonged to Sir Cheney
Culpeper and William Potter.
Culpeper and Potter pioneered a new way of thinking about the nature of money and
its role in society suitable to the Hartlibian improvement program.50 Although moving
away from the neo-Aristotelian focus on money as a balancing device, the new thinking
still insisted on a certain proportionality between the size of the money stock and the
extent of commercial activity. However, now that the economy would continuously
82 Circulation
expand thanks to the implementation of new scientific knowledge, the money stock
had to be expandable in order to prevent deflation and a deepening of the crisis in li-
quidity. Moreover, and more importantly, money was no longer considered a passive
mediator and balancing device. Instead, Culpeper and Potter insisted that money had
the power to ignite economic activity. Emphasizing this point, Potter began one of his
three surviving pamphlets by declaring: “That according to the revolution of money, or
that which goes for such, such is the revolution of Commodity or Trade is doubtlesse
evident to all men.”51 Culpeper concurred, suggesting that an expansion in the money
stock would “by the revolution thereof quicken Trade in the highest degree. . . . It
would be a means to furnish the people with abundance of stock to employ in the For-
raign Trade, Fishing, Plantations, improving their own Lands, drowned and wasted
grounds, Mines, &c.”52 If people could be furnished with enough money to undertake
the improvement of their trade, there was no end in sight to the progress humanity
would enjoy. “The capacity,” Culpeper concluded optimistically, “of inriching this Na-
tion, is in a sort infinite.”53
The problem with this proposal, of course, was that England operated on a metallic
standard and thus could not expand its money stock at will. For Culpeper, this consti-
tuted a global problem; there just was not enough gold and silver in the world to satisfy
all trading nations’ demand for metallic currency. Even if nations lacking mines, like
England, were able to trade for gold and silver, they would have to give up some of their
best commodities to nations with mines, which in this case was their enemy, Spain.54
Obviously, for England to be able to create a more flexible currency they had to develop
a new form of money, comprised of a material that was not in such limited supply.
Unfortunately, this was of course a conceptual impossibility, at least according to those
who thought in terms of the traditional notion that money has exchange-value only in
so far as it possesses intrinsic value. While it was possible to use copper, leather, or to-
bacco leaves as money, history had showed that gold and silver currencies were far
superior to any other form of commodity money.
For Culpeper and Potter, however, imagining a move away from full-bodied metallic
coin was not that difficult. For them, it was not the materiality of money that was of
greatest importance but rather the fiduciary content—the agreements, promises, obli-
gations, and trust—on which money ultimately relied. In short, all forms of money
were essentially credit. Culpeper, who interchangeably referred to money as a medium
of commerce and a “Universal credit,” observed that “Money it self is nothing else but
a kind of securitie which men receive upon parting with their commodities, as a
ground of hope or assurance that they shall be repayed in some other commoditie.”55
He continued, money “serveth onely to supply the interval of time between the sellihg
[sic.] of one commodity, and the buying of another.”56 By thinking about metallic coin
as ultimately based on credit, Culpeper and Potter could conceive of a situation in
83 Money
which people would be willing to exchange their commodities or labor for money that
represented, but did not embody, value. The major obstacle to the feasibility of such an
artifice was, of course, making people comfortable placing their trust in a sign. Cul-
peper and Potter had both thought carefully about the best institutional design.
Before exploring Culpeper’s and Potter’s proposals for a generally circulating credit
currency, it should be noted that credit as a mediator of commercial exchanges was far
from absent in early modern England. As Craig Muldrew has shown, people paid for
the bulk of their purchases by incurring personal debts, most of which were oral and
informal.57 While the value of commodities was still measured in monetary prices,
“money was not the primary means of exchange.”58 The network of credit satisfied the
needs of the local economy, but because the English legal system was not designed to
accommodate the circulation of personal debt instruments to a third party and beyond,
the network of personal credit agreements did not entirely solve the scarcity of money
problem and was entirely inadequate to support the kind of economic growth envi-
sioned by the Hartlibians. To ameliorate this situation, England could have copied a
number of schemes that had already been successfully implemented on the Continent.
For example, the Italian banks had pioneered a system whereby merchants could pay
by assignation and the Dutch republic had founded a bank that issued paper notes
backed by a 100 percent reserve of coin.
The Hartlibians recognized the virtue of such monetary innovations but ultimately
judged them inadequate to the challenges facing England. They viewed the merchant
banks as too limited in scope in that they only catered to the merchants. The Bank of
Amsterdam fell short on the grounds that it only improved the quality of the currency
and did not address the quantity of money in circulation.59 What England needed was
a “New Medium of Commerce (in place of Gold and Silver)” that
1. Shall be (at least) of as true intrinsick value, as Gold and Silver.

2. May be raised by this Common wealth, within it self, without any parting with
our Staple-Commodities for it, and without supplying the King of Spain, (who
in the judgment of wise men) is likeliest to be our final and greatest enemy.
3. May be extended, to ten times more, than ever this Nation was owner of in
money; to the incredible increase of in-land Commerce, and (consequently) of
exportation and forreign Trade.
4. May be managed, without any least danger, either (of loss) to the Owners, or (of
conquest) to the Commonwealth.
5. May be transmitted, between person and person, and between place and place,
with as much ease and security, as is to be found in forreing Banks.
6. Will leave all the money . . . free for the Peoples use, without burying of it, (as if
the Rulers be just and true) is done in Forreign Banks.60
84 Circulation
Potter proposed a number of different ways to establish such a currency. First, like
many others, he suggested that Parliament had to pass an act removing all difficulties
associated with transferring a bill of credit from one person to another. He argued that
if every person with a debt owed to him had a bill representing this debt, the person
could exchange the bill for a commodity and thus would not have to wait until he was
repaid to reenter the value into circulation. If every person could monetize all their
debts in this manner, it “would tend exceedingly both to the Advancement of Trade,
Imployment of the Poore, and Excrease of Custome and Excise.”61
In a more ambitious proposal, Potter suggested that it would be possible to monetize
not only debts owed but the entire value of people’s estates. That is, it should be possible
to design a system whereby people obtained credit notes representing the full value of
their “Houses, Lands, Ships, Goods, or whatsoever.”62 His plan was designed to func-
tion in the following manner: a number of tradesmen would form a company that
would print a certain number of bills that the members would be able to borrow upon
the security of their assets. Each member would be entitled to borrow as much as he
wanted as long as he presented adequate security. Next, members would enter into a
bond with each other to always accept half bills and half money for their commodities
and to redeem the bills on demand in accordance with the following sequence: mem-
bers would create an office that would issue a bond for payment due in six months
whenever someone presented a bill for redemption. Each member would then be
bound to “make good his proportion of the Bills brought in to the said Office, within
(suppose) four Moneths time, after notice thereof left at this house in writing.”63
Potter maintained that these bills would be at least as good as money, because the
tradesmen would not only accept them in exchange for their commodities, they would
also, after some lead time, redeem them fully with ready money. Since members were
able to borrow bills only on the best security, the solvency of the system was impecca-
ble. There was, of course, always a possibility that a tradesman might lose his security
or that the price of the commodity assigned as security might fall in the interim. To
account for this eventuality, Potter proposed that each loan should be insured by an
independent insurance company.64
Potter envisioned his scheme as the perfect catalyst for infinite growth. There was no
limit to how many people could join the network and there was no end to the eco-
nomic growth it could engender. Even if the scheme were first launched by a small
number of tradesmen, the membership would quickly expand. When other merchants
found out about the benefits of participating in the network of credit money, they too
would soon want to join. Indeed, they would be compelled to join as it would be the
only way to avoid being undersold by the merchants who had access to such cheap
credit.65 Once part of the system, each merchant would be able to finance the expan-
sion of his capital with credit, which in turn would generate a greater security upon
85 Money
which further loans could be taken out. Potter noted, “Their Estates being increased by
such quick Trading, with such doubled stock, they may procure greater Security,
whereby to borrow more Bills to the doubling of such increase, and so ad infinitum.” In
the end, Potter confidently predicted that in forty years people of England would be
worth five hundred thousand times more than they currently were.66
Culpeper’s suggestion was for England to create a series of land banks. He argued
that there was nothing particularly novel about such a plan. It simply required the
combination of two well-established practices: raising credit on the security of land,
and issuing paper notes representing coin lodged in the vault.67 His innovation was
that titles on land would replace coin in the vault as the security backing the credit
notes. He argued that a bank issuing bills to people on the basis of such impeccable
security would constitute the safest possible paper currency as land enjoyed the most
stable value, even more so than silver and gold. Such a land bank would once and for
all solve the scarcity of money problem; it had the capacity to “multiply Money in the
Land to two thirds, three fourths, four fifths, (or (perhaps) more) of the value of the
Lands of the Nation, which can amount to little lesse then a hundred millons Ster-
ling.”68 And, as he noted elsewhere, “The filling of the land with so exceeding great a
quantity of money, would by the revolution thereof quicken Trade in the highest
degree.”69 This would be the best way to “make this Nation abound in Wealth, Trade,
Cities, Shipping, People, and Renown.”70
Credit, for the Hartlib Circle, thus constituted an integral feature of the infinite im-
provement process. Their primary interventions were to conceive of all forms of money
as rooted in credit and of money as possessing the power to ignite economic activity.
This new way of understanding the nature and function of money would come to have
a profound impact on posterity. While the popularity of credit waxed and waned, the
new way of thinking about money endured.71 From the Restoration on, leading up to
the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, there was a vibrant debate over the best
institutional design for a generally circulating credit currency. The major issues de-
bated included what type of assets were best suited to serve as security and what were
the best ways to encourage trust and confidence in the scheme.72
Even though the Hartlib Circle dispersed after the Restoration, their improvement
ideology, including their monetary theory, survived and continued to inform the debate
about England’s economic and financial future. Increasingly, as Steven Pincus and Bruce
Carruthers have respectively pointed out, the deepening of the Whig–Tory divide polit-
icized the debate about credit.73 Two different visions of England’s future went head to
head. The Whigs argued that England would grow rich and powerful on the basis of
labor and manufacturing, whereas the Tories focused on land—soil and territory—as
the source of prosperity. Yet, whether they considered property mobile and infinite or
immobile and finite, both sides broadly agreed on the centrality—although not the
86 Circulation
contours—of improvement, commerce, and credit. The Whigs promoted and defended
the creation of the Bank of England as the foundation for their vision of wealth and
power, while the Tories preferred a national land bank. While the Tories succeeded in
launching such a bank, because of the unfortunate timing, the land bank failed miser-
ably.74 Their continued advocacy for a Tory-alternative to the Whig Bank of England
led them to launch the “new” East India Company in 1698 and the South Sea Company
in 1711.
By the end of the 1710s, the success of the Bank of England and the South Sea Com-
pany in England, combined with the triumphant implementation of their counterparts
in France by John Law, signaled the establishment of a new culture of credit and thus
the victory of the Hartlibian conceptualization of money. This victory, however, was
short-lived. Although Julian Hoppit has shown that the South Sea Bubble had rela-
tively insignificant effects on the real economy, it profoundly changed the discourse
about money and credit for the rest of the eighteenth century.75 While some writers,
like George Berkeley, continued to support the ideas of Potter and Culpeper, and
others, like Isaac Gervaise, advocated the return to a purely metallic currency, most
commentators, including Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, and Adam
Smith, sought to chart out a middle ground. David Hume, in particular, offered one of
the most sophisticated efforts at framing a monetary theory that merged the ideas
about paper and gold, trust and authority, infinite growth and stability.
In his Political Discourses (1752), Hume drew heavily on the version of Hartlibian
political economy that had evolved by the 1690s. For him, the basic insight of political
economy was that commerce, industry, and the arts constituted the key ingredients in
an improvement process that not only generated economic growth but also led to
moral, social, and political refinement.76 Money also played an important role in
Hume’s political economy. Hume shared the basic contours of the Hartlibian ontology
of money: that its essence was trust and confidence, not its materiality. As such, he was
conceptually open to credit money, yet added the caveat that only privately issued
credit notes would work in the long run. This was because the state had revealed itself,
multiple times over, incapable of resisting the temptation of misusing the printing
press—overissuing paper money and government bonds—to fund its military opera-
tions, and in the process disrupting the economy.77 Hume also noted that the capacity
of money to ignite industry and commerce was highly circumscribed; it happened only
during moments of economic acceleration, when money was flowing into the country
as a result of increasing exports or when private credit expanded due to expectations of
future wealth.78 Any attempt to try to re-create this reaction by merely injecting more
money in the economy had no prospect of succeeding. Instead, the quantity of
money—coin and paper—should be left to adjust in accordance to each nation’s cur-
rent and anticipated levels of industry and commerce.
87 Money
In fact, for Hume, the flow of money between countries—the specie-flow mechanism—
served as an important balancing device for the world economy, ensuring that no one
country would be able to absorb all trade. Hume argued that across-the-board price
and wage increases resulting from an inflow of money into a prosperous nation
opened the possibility for poorer, low-wage countries to compete in low-skilled and
less-capital-intense sectors. “The rich country,” he wrote in a letter to James Oswald,
“would acquire and retain all the manufactures, that require great stock and great
skill; but the poor country would gain from it all the simpler and more laborious.”79
This dynamic made it possible for poor nations to benefit from the rich countries’
constant quest to improve commerce, industry, and the arts. Even if convergence were
not in the cards, every country had the opportunity to take some part in the universal
march of progress.80
In closing, while this essay highlights the Hartlib Circle’s innovations to the English
political economic discourse, it is important to note that this thinking was not limited
to England, nor was it universally adopted in England. The Hartlibians corresponded
and interacted actively with scholars, intelligencers, and improvers in the Low Coun-
tries, the Germans states, and Sweden. Although each nation developed their own cul-
ture of improvement, there was substantial overlap among the northern European
nations. While the Hartlib Circle’s program was quickly popularized in England, var-
ious versions of neo-Aristotelian thinking survived. Just like in any other time period,
seventeenth-century political economy was full of bitter disagreements, vibrant
debates, and radical intellectual changes. Different worldviews and visions of the future
were clashing, creating rich and sophisticated debates about the very nature of wealth,
prosperity, order, and stability. Hartlibian political economic thinking evolved over
time and ultimately became part of mainstream Enlightenment political economy. As
such, it is possible to trace a clear lineage between the Hartlib Circle and Hume and
Smith. Arguably, the Hartlib Circle had more in common with the Scottish Enlighten-
ment than they shared with early mercantilists like Malynes, Misselden, and Mun.81
In the process of exploring the emergence of a new way of thinking about money, this
chapter also reflects on the relationship between natural knowledge and political
economy. It suggests that Hartlibian political economy and, more specifically, their
monetary thinking, cannot be understood outside their general worldview—a world-
view that was deeply informed by the period’s new scientific thinking, as well as, im-
portantly, millenarian religiosity. Despite mostly commenting on the flow of ideas from
natural knowledge to political economy, it is not the intention of this chapter to imply
that there was a general scientific determinism or a primacy of scientific thought in the
creation of new epistemic cultures. As recent scholarship has shown, the development
of a new scientific culture in seventeenth-century England—and elsewhere—would
not have occurred in the manner it did had it not been for the historically specific
88 Circulation
contours of the English polity and economy, and the associated ideas and discourses.82
To borrow a concept from Sheila Jasanoff, we might say that the Hartlibian improve-
ment ideology was co-produced, in the sense that natural knowledge, political economy,
and religiosity mutually conditioned, inspired, and influenced each other.83 Although
the notion of co-production does not specify the exact linkages and does not assign
specific weights to different influences, it is a valuable framework that offers ways to
account for complex and overdetermined phenomena and to visualize the cross-fertil-
ization, reciprocity, and symbiosis between intellectual and material forces. The Har-
tlibian experiment illustrates the impossibility of conceptually isolating science from
the social order and vice versa, and shows the inseparability of nature, facts, objectivity,
reason, and policy from culture, values, subjectivity, emotion, and politics.84
NOTES
1. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy. Reprint of the 1871, 7th ed. in vols. 2 and 3
of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1965).
2. There is no doubt that Tudor England actively debated issues pertaining to property, com-
merce, trade, and money, as documented by Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy:
Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994); and David Harris Sachs, “The Greed of Judas: Avarice, Monopoly, and Moral
Economy, ca. 1350–ca. 1600,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), yet
there is a strong case to be made that the political economic discourse of the 1620s exhib-
ited a more discernible sense of methodological and conceptual coherence and focus.
3. For a discussion of the 1620s crisis and the intellectual responses, see Charles Wilson, Eng-
land’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965); and Joyce Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
4. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin
Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 450.
5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 450.
8. Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism, ed. E. F. Söderlund, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1935); and
Jacob Viner, “English Theories of Foreign Trade Before Adam Smith,” Journal of Political
Economy 38 (1930): 404–57.
9. For a longer discussion of how the twentieth-century view about the early mercantilists
evolved, see Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1994), ch. 2.
10. J. D. Gould, “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620s and English Economic Thought,” Journal
of Economic History 15 (1955); and Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England,
1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
11. R. W. K. Hinton, “The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun,” Journal of Eco-
nomic History 7 (1955): 282.
89 Money
12. Hinton, “Mercantile System,” 284. While the bulk of early Stuart political economic writ-
ings were focused on the commercial use of money, as Craig Muldrew points out in the
Afterword (373) the accumulation of precious metals was also important to England in that
it facilitated the conduct of war outside the nation’s borders.
13. B. E. Supple, “Currency and Commerce in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Economic His-
tory Review 10 (1957): 252.
14. Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century
English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 89.
15. See, for example, Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the
World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), ch. 3.
16. Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance, 34.
17. Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance, 36–37. See also Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideol-
ogy, 210–11, and Natasha Glaisyer, “‘A due Circulation in the Veins of the Publick’: Imag-
ining Credit in Late Seventeenth-and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation 46 (2005).
18. See, for example, Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade Or, the Ballance of our
Forraign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure (London [162?] 1664); Lewes Roberts, The march-
ants mappe of commerce, wherein the universall manner and matter of trade is compendi-
ously handled (n.p. 1638); and Benjamin Worsley, The Advocate (London, 1651).
19. E. A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought
(New York: A. Kelley, [1937] 1965), ch. 13; and Lars Herlitz, “Conceptions of History and
Society in Mercantilism, 1650–1730,” in Mercantilist Economics, ed. Lars Magnusson (Bos-
ton: Kluwer, 1993), 92–93.
20. For a synthetic discussion of how various scholars have moved beyond Smith’s character-
ization, see Magnusson’s Mercantilism, especially ch. 2.
21. Steven Pincus made an intervention that set the scholarship on seventeenth-century polit-
ical economy on a new path. He recognized that a new intellectual movement was emerging
around midcentury, centered on the dual notions that commerce promotes the common
good and that commerce is not a zero-sum game. Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment
nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Com-
monwealth,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 708, 721. See also James Jacob’s discus-
sion of how Baconian-inspired writers advocated that a material abundance created by
industry and science had the capacity to benefit the common good and also to reconcile
the long-standing friction between wealth and virtue. “The Political Economy of Science in
Seventeenth-Century England,” Social Research 59 (1992): 505–32.
22. For a discussion of how the Hartlibians employed the term “infinite improvement,” see
Andrea Finkelstein, “Nicholas Barbon and the Quality of Infinity,” History of Political
Economy 32 (2000): 94–100; and Paul Slack, “Material Progress and the Challenge of Afflu-
ence in Seventeenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 62 (2009): 588–89.
23. For a discussion of the gender-inflected discourse of Bacon and his followers, see Carolyn
Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York:
HarperCollins, 1980).
24. Charles Webster, introduction to Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cam-
25. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660 (Bern:
Peter Lang, [1975] 2002); and Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds.,
Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cam-
90 Circulation
26. See, for example, William Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An
American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994); and Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For discussions of the en-
gagement between alchemy and political economy, see Pamela Smith, The Business of Al-
chemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994); Carl Wennerlind, “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the
Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton,
ed. Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
and Walter Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy and the Creation of
New England Culture, 1606–1676 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
27. Samuel Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib His Legacy of Husbandry (London, 1655), 229–31. See also
Hartlib, Cornu Copia: A Miscellanium of Lucriferous and most fructiferous Experiments,
Observations, and Discoveries, immethodically distributed; to be really demonstrated and
communicated in all sincerity (London, 1652).
28. William Petty, The Advice of W.P. to Mr Samuel Hartlib For the Advancement of some par-
ticular Parts of Learning (London, 1648), 20.
29. Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib and His Legacy of Husbandry, 247–50; and Cressy Dymock, A Dis-
covery for New Divisions, or Setting out of Lands, as to the best Forme (London, 1653), 12. See
also Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, ch. 5.
30. Samuel Hartlib, Propositions for Advancement of Husbandry-Learning (London, 1651), 3.
31. Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib and His Legacy of Husbandry, 283–84.
32. Petty, Advice of W.P., 4.
33. Petty, Advice of W.P., 5. For discussions of how the Hartlib Circle, in particular William
Petty and Benjamin Worsley, envisioned the transmutation of people, see Ted McCormick,
William Petty and the Ambition of Political Arithmetic (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010); and Thomas Leng, Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in
Revolutionary England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008).
34. Petty, The Advice of W. P. to Mr Samuel Hartlib, 23.
35. The Office of Address for Communication was likely inspired by the German correspond-
ing group called the Antilia or Plattes’ Macaria, while the Office of Address for Accommo-
dations was based on Théophraste Renaudot’s Parisian Bureau d’adresse. See Charles
Webster’s introduction to Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning.
36. Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning, 46.
37. For an overview of Robinson’s social and economic thought, see W. K. Jordan, Men of Sub-
stance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry
Robinson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). See also Robinson, Englands Safety
in Trades Encrease (London: 1641).
38. Henry Robinson, Th e Office of Adresses and Encounters: Where all people of each Rancke
and Quality may receive direction and advice for the most cheap and speedy way of attaining
whatsoever they can lawfully desire (London, 1650), 4.
39. Robinson, Office of Adresses, 4.
44. Henry Robinson, Certain Proposalls In order to the Peoples Freedome and Accommodation
in some Particulars (London, 1652), 20.
91 Money
45. Robinson, Certain Proposalls, 12.

50. For a longer discussion of Hartlibian monetary thinking, see Wennerlind, Casualties of
Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), ch. 2.
51. William Potter, Humble Proposalls to the Honorable the Councell for Trade: And all Mer-
chants and others who desire to improve their Estates (London, 1651), 5.
52. Cheney Culpeper, A Bank of Lands; or, an Improvement of Lands, never thought of in former
Ages, reprinted in Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib and His Legacy of Husbandry, 298.
53. Culpeper, Bank of Lands, 290.
54. Cheney Culpeper, An Essay upon Master W. Potters Designe: Concerning a Bank of Lands to
be erected throughout this Common-Wealth (London, 1653), 28.
55. Culpeper, A Bank of Lands, 294.
57. Craig Muldrew, “‘Hard Food For Midas’: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern Eng-
land,” Past and Present 170 (2001): 83. See also Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The
Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 1998).
58. Muldrew, “‘Hard Food For Midas,’” 84.
59. Culpeper, An Essay, 30.
61. William Potter, Humble Proposalls, 5.
62. William Potter, The Trades-Man’s Jewel: Or A safe, easie, speedy and effectual Means, for the
incredible advancement of Trade, and Multiplication of Riches (London, 1650), 6. See also
Potter, The Key of Wealth, Or, A New Way for Improving Trade (London, 1650).
63. Potter, Trades-Man’s Jewel, 11.
67. Culpeper, A Bank of Lands, 296 and Culpeper, An Essay, 32.
71. For a discussion of how views on credit evolved, see Julian Hoppit, “Financial Crisis in
Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 39 (1986); and “Attitudes to Credit
in Britain, 1680–1790,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 305–22.
72. R. D. Richards, The Early History of Banking in England (London: Frank Cass and Co.:
1958); Keith Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 1650–1710 (New York: Garland,
1983); and Seiichiro Ito, “The Making of Institutional Credit in England, 1600–1688,” Euro-
pean Journal of the History of Economic Thought 18 (2011): 487–519.
73. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009); and Bruce Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also P. G. M. Dickson,
The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit,
1688–1756 (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Gary De Krey, Fractured Society: The Politics of
London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and
92 Circulation
John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York:
Knopf, 1989).
74. Dennis Rubini, “Politics and the Battle for the Banks, 1688–1697,” English Historical Review
85 (1970): 693–714; Richard Kleer, “‘Fictitious Cash’: English Public Finance and Paper
Money, 1689–97,” in Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Rev-
olution in the British Isles, ed. Charles McGrath and Chris Fauske (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2008); and Steven Pincus and Alice Wolfram, “A Proactive State? The Land
Bank, Investment and Party Politics in the 1690s,” in Regulating the British Economy,
1660–1850, ed. Perry Gauci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
75. Julian Hoppit, “The Myths of the South Sea Bubble,” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 12 (2002); and Ann Carlos and Larry Neal, “The Micro-Foundations of the Early
London Capital Market: Bank of England Shareholders During and After the South Sea
Bubble,” Economic History Review 59 (2006): 498–538.
76. David Hume, “Of Commerce” and “Of the Refinement of the Arts” in Essays Moral, Polit-
ical, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). For further dis-
cussion, see Carl Wennerlind, “The Role of Political Economy in Hume’s Moral Philosophy,”
Hume Studies 37 (2011): 43–64.
77. Based on the state’s mismanagement of credit during the lead-up to the South Sea Bubble
and the alarming rise in its indebtedness during the Seven Years’ War, Hume judged that
the state could not be trusted to behave appropriately. For Hume’s views on how to resolve
this problem, see Istvan Hont, “The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary
State Bankruptcy,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson
and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Ian Simpson
Ross, “The Emergence of David Hume as a Political Economist: A Biographical Sketch,” in
David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas (London:
Routledge, 2008).
78. See, for example, Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country—Poor Country’ Debate in Scottish
Classical Political Economy,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the
Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Istvan Hont, “The Rich Country – Poor Country” Debate Revis-
ited,” in David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2008); and Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, “Hume on Money,
Trade, and the Science of Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25 (2011): 207–16.
79. J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1932), 1:143–44.
80. See Hont, “The ‘Rich Country—Poor Country’ Debate”; and Bruce Elmslie, “The Conver-
gence Debate Between David Hume and Josiah Tucker,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9
(1995) 465–501.
81. Although William Grampp does not distinguish between neo-Aristotelian and Hartlibian
thinkers, by drawing mostly on comments made by the latter he makes a convincing case
for there being a considerable intellectual and analytical continuity between seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century political economy. Grampp, “The Liberal Elements in English
Mercantilism,” Quarterly Journal of Economic 66 (1952): 101–32.
82. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975);
Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the
Relationship between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1983); Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlighten-
ment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Deborah Harkness, The Jewel
93 Money
House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007); and Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in
the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
83. Sheila Jasanoff, State of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order
(London: Routledge, 2004). See also Harold Cook, “Moving About and Finding Things
Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution,” Osiris 27 (2012):
101–32.
84. Jasanoff, States of Knowledge, 3. See also Thomas Leng, ch. 4.
part two
Knowledge
4
Epistemology
Expertise and Knowledge in
the World of Commerce
Thomas Leng
How was knowledge about the world of commerce acquired? Who would be respon-
sible for its generation? And what kind of knowledge was it possible to possess of this
world? Although we may question whether the “conditions of existence of a specific
discursive form, economic discourse” were present in the early modern period,
trade/commerce undoubtedly was a subject of extensive discourse: it existed as a field
of knowledge, as something possible to know about.1 But the production, communi-
cation, and validation of commercial knowledge was fraught by many epistemolog-
ical problems. Early modern commercial discourse might have generated much
knowledge—or at least produced many knowledge claims—but these were frequently
subject to contestation, distrust, and denial. Given the centrality of interpersonal credit
to the early modern economy, distrust among mercantile partners was potentially
destabilizing, but epistemological uncertainty regarding the very nature of commerce
also threatened to undermine the regulatory efforts that contemporaries saw as
necessary to uphold the public good in matters of trade.2
Mercantilism, particularly in its Heckscherian form, has generally been considered
as a doctrine or mind-set obsessed with bringing order to the world of commerce.
Often this has been presented in terms of ordering material resources and private ac-
tions or interests for the advantage of the nation-state, but knowledge, too, is a collec-
tive resource, and one which has been considered as central to the maintenance of any
social order. As the historian of science Steven Shapin describes it: “knowledge is a
collective good.”3 Because “what we know about the world is arrived at, sustained, and
recognized through collective action . . . no single individual can constitute knowledge:
all the individual can do is offer claims, with evidence, arguments, and inducements,
to the community for its assessment.”4 In this respect the world of early modern
commerce—one inhabited above all by merchants—was no different from any other
97
98 Knowledge
social order: shared knowledge of commercial practice was essential to its functioning.
“Since the acts of knowledge-making and knowledge-protecting capture so much of
communal life, communities may be effectively described through their economies of
truth,” and merchants, appropriately enough, depended on a collective truth-economy
as much as any other community.5 However, the distribution of knowledge within
mercantile communities was not straightforward: success in trade might depend on
withholding knowledge from competitors or even partners. More complex still were
the relationships between mercantile networks and the broader communities in which
they were embedded that for international traders could be multiple. Was the knowl-
edge that allowed mercantile activity to take place to be shared with society at large?
And when these societies were confronted with questions regarding the public benefits
or dangers of particular trades, who would be responsible for producing that knowl-
edge necessary to resolve such questions? How could merchants be trusted to speak
truthfully of their own affairs?
Problems of knowledge, then, and particularly problems of trust, were a feature of
early modern commercial discourse. But there is another reason why the epistemolog-
ical basis of this discourse might be worth considering, for the early modern period
has been presented as the location of a revolution in ways of knowing, which laid the
foundations for modernity in another field, that of natural science. The historical coin-
cidence between the so-called scientific revolution and the stirrings of “economic
thought” in the mercantilist era have generally not gone unnoticed by historians of the
latter in their pursuit of the “origins” of the science of economics.6 For William Letwin,
impersonal, objective, and “scientific economics” inherited from the scientific revolu-
tion a method, which essentially combined Cartesian deduction with Baconian induc-
tion, as well as the idea that the natural world was governed by regular and predictable
laws. Once this scientific method was successfully applied to economic analysis, begin-
ning in 1660s England, modern economics was born.7 Here, the scientific revolution
acts as the “unmoved mover” behind the march to modernity, supplying a rational
scientific method to this other discipline.8
But more recently the grand narrative of the scientific revolution itself has been
thrown into doubt by historians of science, who now question whether the period gave
birth to a monolithic “scientific method.”9 The idea of a scientific revolution has been
charged with neglecting significant elements of continuity with the “pre-scientific” era,
implying a single coherent movement, which subsumes many distinct and in some
respects contradictory developments, and most of all, projecting a modern notion of
science onto an era that understood the term very differently. Science (scientia) in this
period meant knowledge, properly founded; knowledge of the causes of natural phe-
nomenon was comprehended under the heading of natural philosophy, which at the
start of the early modern period was given demonstrative certainty through Aristotelian
99 Epistemology
logic. The mathematical sciences were intellectually subordinate to natural philosophy,

and were accorded the status of describing, as opposed to understanding, nature. These
divisions in the realm of natural knowledge were institutionally enshrined, and in many
ways endured throughout the period we know as “the scientific revolution,” fragment-
ing the coherence of that supposed event. And yet, historians remain committed to the
idea that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did indeed see significant changes in
the way the natural world was known and explained, which can be described as genu-
inely revolutionary. This amounted to a rejection of the deductive method of the
ancients, now seen as circular and incapable of creating new knowledge (or discoveries)
about nature, and an overturning of the hierarchy of scholastic divisions of natural
knowledge. For example, natural history assumed a new importance, providing the
foundations for Francis Bacon’s reformed, inductive natural philosophy. Here, the cate-
gory of experience was refashioned from the commonplace observations of scholasti-
cism into the collection of artificially contrived observed instances, or experiments.
Similarly, mathematicians from Galileo on rejected the subservience of their discipline
to natural philosophy by claiming that it could explain as well as describe the world, but
increasingly in mechanistic terms. In many ways these trends overlapped: the experi-
mental method relied on precise measurement, for example, and many of its supporters
strove to explain the world mechanically, while mechanical philosophers developed
their own experimental methodologies. However, the two traditions (the experimental
perhaps best represented by the Royal Society in England, and the mathematical by
continental Cartestianism), could be in tension. Experimentalists tended to adopt a
probabilistic epistemology, according experimentally derived “matters of fact” the status
of moral certainty based on experience, but explanations of the causes of these phe-
nomena only that of a hypotheses. As such, they tended to be suspicious of “logical
methods and demonstrative models for natural science” in the Cartesian vein that
strove to produce knowledge with the same degree of certainty as the scholastics had
done.10 The work of Shapin (and others) focuses on delineating the strategies deployed
by experimental philosophers to gain trust and assent for their knowledge claims, at the
same time avoiding the dogmatic and often uncivil assertions of certainty, which they
saw as having plagued scholasticism.11
Thus the scientific revolution can no longer be seen straightforwardly to have pro-
vided the momentum to push “economics” in the right (scientific) direction: science,
simply understood as knowledge, predated the scientific revolution, and a definition
of science in its modern form lay some way in the future. However, natural and mer-
cantile knowledge often overlapped and can still be productively compared. This is
all the more the case because historians of science have begun to reconsider the ways
in which science and commerce were entwined. For one thing, the new significance
accorded to natural history was in part stimulated by the discoveries of the era’s
100 Knowledge
voyages of exploration, and this created a degree of interdependence between exper-

imental scientists and merchants.12 Moreover, whereas conventional historians of
economic thought sometimes assumed that the scientific method was pioneered in
natural science before being transplanted to economics, the historian of science Har-
old Cook suggested an inverse relationship: the scientific revolution owed some-
thing to the type of knowledge routinely deployed by merchants. Focusing on the
Dutch Republic, a society where science and commerce were particularly close,
Cook argues that the “knowledge economy” of the first age of global commerce sup-
plied a model for natural philosophers seeking to refashion natural knowledge.13 Just
as merchants relied on acquiring detailed and accurate knowledge of objects gained
through physical experience, which could then be measured against other objects,
universalized, and exchanged over large distances, so natural philosophers came to
adopt similar values for their own purposes, in particular “a certain kind of inter-
ested engagement with objective knowledge and an attentive appreciation for collec-
tive generalizations based on exacting information about the objects in with which
they dealt.”14 In a similar vein it has been suggested that the highly commercialized
society of Tudor London provided a fertile habitat in which English science could
flourish.15 One figure who was able to observe that milieu from close quarters was
Francis Bacon; it is possible Bacon even drew from mercantile practice the intellec-
tual strategies that he deployed for his inductive method of discovering nature.16 In
such a manner, mercantile knowledge might provide sustenance for experimental
natural philosophers: as Robert Boyle wrote in defense of using natural information
yielded from a merchant, this might be given credit precisely because it was “not
written by a philosopher, to broach a paradox, or serve an hypothesis, but by a mer-
chant, or factor, for his superiors, to give them an account of a matter of fact.”17
The rest of this chapter focuses on the example of seventeenth-century England to
consider various convergences between ways of knowing commerce and the natural
world, between the information economies that underpinned both trade and natural
philosophy. It considers how mercantile knowledge was created, communicated, vali-
dated, and challenged, and whether these strategies can be related to the new episte-
mologies that were reshaping natural philosophy in the seventeenth century.
That early modern merchants understood international trade to be as much about
the mastery of knowledge as the exchange of goods can be seen from the books of
advice and guidance that were produced for their benefit in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries.18 In the Elizabethan period, these texts were generally intended to
introduce English merchants to the ways and workings of new markets beyond the
traditional cloth trade with northwest Europe, and so were strongly associated with
contemporaneous voyages of exploration and colonization into northeast Europe,
Asia, and the New World.19 Indeed, new trade routes were often described as “new
101 Epistemology
discoveries,” which could be used to justify the granting of monopoly privileges over
them, the equivalent of certain patents that rewarded industrial invention.20
As such, merchants were reliant on knowledge generated by a variety of voyages of
exploration and communicated in various forms, including print, manuscript, and per-
sonal interactions, before being compiled and published by non-merchant “experts”
such as the two Richard Hakluyts, who advised prospective adventurers on how to
gather local knowledge and establish trade routes for England’s best advantage. But as
these routes became regularized in the early seventeenth century, long-distance mer-
chants could claim professional mastery of large territories of knowledge vested in their
trading practices. This comes across clearly in Lewes Roberts’s The Merchants Mappe of
Commerce, where commerce is represented as a world of information to negotiate: geog-
raphy, currency, and exchange rates, commodities, weights and measures, all organized
and made navigable through this vast survey. Furthermore, unlike many earlier authors
who were reliant on secondhand sources of information and too willingly “tooke up
stuffe upon trust,” Roberts presented his information as derived from personal experi-
ence of the marketplace.21 His Mappe is the product of “experience, the true mother of
knowledge,” gathered with “laborious industry, and industrious labour” overseas, thanks
to which “I have at last by due sounding of the Channell, safely sailed over the Ocean
afore-mentioned, and brought my Barke to an Anchor in her desired Harbour; and I
hope so well observed the depths, shoulds, rocks, and sands thereof.”22 Thus Roberts lit-
erally domesticates this knowledge, gathered from across the globe, but organized
according “to the meridian of commerce practised in the famous citie of London.”23
If mercantile knowledge could be acquired only through experience, this informa-
tion was equally comprehended in numerical terms. Practical mathematics was one of
the essential skills for a merchant forced to deal with multiple currencies and weights,
a quality highlighted by Thomas Mun.24 Merchants used numbers not only practically,
but as a way to demonstrate their trustworthiness, above all through the mechanism
of double-entry bookkeeping, as it was codified in published handbooks for mer-
chants. This proclamation of honesty was achieved not only through the public visi-
bility of the ledger book but also its reliance on systematic rule-based practices, which
sorted daily transactions into their purest form of debit and credit, and thus rendered
these numbers apparently transparent and disinterested—a prototype, it has been sug-
gested, of the “modern fact.”25 In a similar vein, many mercantile handbooks advised
readers about appropriate commercial conduct, which involved the prudent taming of
passions and the adopting of a disengaged manner, in order to allow deals to be con-
ducted objectively.26 Thus Lewes Roberts could proclaim that “MERCHANDIZING
(truly considered in it self, and rightly practised) may well be said to be an art or sci-
ence invented by ingenious mankind, for the publike good, commoditie and welfare of
all Commonwealths.”27
102 Knowledge
But of course, Roberts’ Mappe belonged to a particular species of mercantile publica-

tion. This was a specialized handbook for merchants: Roberts advertised its utility to
statesmen and travelers, but essentially the knowledge it contained pertained to the
practice of merchants and would find its application among that group. That this was
seen as necessary suggests that mercantile information, in practice, was vulnerable to
distortion, especially given that commerce was recognized to be the self-interested
pursuit of gain, which could encourage deception and dissimulation.28 With commerce
so dependent on trust between partners, accurate, disinterested public information
could help stabilize merchant relationships, taming some of the risk that interpersonal
relationships invariably entailed, especially when conducted over long distances. This
was particularly the case given that many merchants were reliant for accurate informa-
tion on local market conditions from a junior figure, the apprentice-factor.29 One com-
mercial handbook, The Merchants Avizo, sought to remove almost all personal agency
from this figure by publishing a compendium of ideal letters to be sent to their masters
on all conceivable occasions, which were to be literally copied.30 Similarly one com-
mendatory verse prefacing Roberts’s Mappe suggested that the publication might allow
merchants to now “Discharge their Factors; for thy BOOKE alone / Seemes a sole
FACTOR for our NATION.”31
The existence of advice books such as Roberts’s Mappe indicates not just how central
accurate information was in the practice of merchandise but also its insecurity, ever
liable to be distorted or compromised by self-interested actors. These handbooks were
posited as an impersonal source of secure information to be used in mediating between
vulnerable personal relationships. Fellow merchants were not their only audience,
though, for writers like Roberts had a broader social and political purpose in publi-
cizing the virtue and honesty of their vocation to an often suspicious public, and nego-
tiating between the realms of private and public was a much more fraught task. Much
like double-entry bookkeeping, such public displays of mercantile information sought
to demonstrate that merchants were worthy public servants willing to communicate
their knowledge freely, but at the same time only they possessed the unique skills and
experience necessary to interpret this information for profit. The skilled and knowl-
edgeable merchant was not only a potentially useful member of the commonwealth,
but possessed of a particular analytical power, and as international commerce from the
late sixteenth century on became increasingly recognized as essential to national pros-
perity and security, the means to unlock this powerful knowledge for public benefit
became a matter of debate.
In England, this debate came to the fore in the context of the 1620s commercial de-
pression and the discussions this provoked both in state committees and in print. The
three major figures involved—Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas
Mun—were all merchants who claimed the ability to be able to interpret the depression
103 Epistemology
and suggest appropriate remedies from their expert vantage points. In doing so they
presented another sort of “science” of commerce, not just the interpretation of com-
mercial information in order to make an individual profit but also the ability to repre-
sent and analyze it systematically. Malynes, for example, divided commerce into three
essential parts, commodities, money, and the mechanism of exchange, and his analysis
centered on determining the relations between the three: “And ever as in a Clocke,
where there be many wheeles, the first wheele being stirred, driveth the next, and that
the third, and so foorth, till the last that moveth the instrument that strikes the clocke:
even so is it in the course of Traffique: for since money was invented and became the
first wheele which stirreth the wheele of Commodities, and inforceth the Action.”32 But
for Malynes both these parts were overridden by the third essential part of commerce,
the all-powerful exchange, the final cause or causa causans of commerce.
This preoccupation with causation and with identifying the essential form of com-
merce demarcates Malynes’s analytical style as essentially Aristotelian.33 Thus he did
not need some putative scientific revolution to abstract the world of commerce and
represent it in systematic form as obeying laws inherent to itself: this was science as the
scholastics understood it, qualitative rather than quantitative and claiming to possess
demonstrative certainty. That he desired the sovereign to intervene and fix the exchange
rate according to the intrinsic value of the coinage rather than that set by merchants in
the course of exchange does not invalidate this. Nevertheless, it does reflect that Maly-
nes was writing from the perspective not just of a merchant but also a state-employed
expert on coinage (a commissioner of the mint), who thus claimed specialized exper-
tise, which other merchants did not possess: “Merchants doe not regard, whether the
monyes of a Kingdome are vndervalued in exchange, by the inhauncing of monyes in
forraine parts, whereby our monyes are exported. . . . Merchants doe not know the
weight and finenesse of monyes of each Countrey, and the proportions observed
betweene Gold and Silver, not the difference of severall Standards of coyne.”34 Precisely
because he held this other identity, then, Malynes could afford to denigrate his fellow
merchants: “The opinion and councell in the reformation of abuses of some private
Merchants, is to be held in suspition, and Kings and Princes are to sit at the sterne of
Trade, which caused the wise man to say: Consult not with a Merchant concerning Ex-
changes.”35 Of course Malynes did not expect the sovereign literally to sit at the stern in
person; the position was to be delegated to an appropriately rewarded expert figure,
such as himself. Malynes was far from suggesting a state-controlled “command
economy,” and in fact his proposed regulatory measures were outnumbered by the
“Defective Meanes and Remedies” for restoring prosperity that he identified as having
characterized commercial policy for centuries.36 However, only from the vantage point
of a publicly countenanced expert could the full realm of commerce be surveyed and
understood, but this knowledge still accrued from experience.
104 Knowledge
Writing purely as a merchant, Misselden rejected Malynes’s conclusion that the sov-
ereign could fix the exchange rate and thus override mercantile practice and exper-
tise, but he too adopted an essentially scholastic style of argument (although his
method of presentation owed something to the reformed logic of Petrus Ramus).37
Both authors sought to reform trade by restoring it to its essential form, even though
they differed in their understanding of that form. To that extent, they both envisaged
commerce as static, not because the volume of trade was finite but because it had a
fixed or essential form, which maintained equity and balance in dealings: disorder
was a consequence of this form breaking down, so both authors demanded a literal
reformation of trade.38 Only Mun departed from this scholastic mode by rejecting
Malynes and Misselden’s rhetorical flourishes and writing in a plain style, which
deployed numbers in a similar way to their usage in double-entry bookkeeping in
order to demonstrate the workings of the balance of trade. Nonetheless, he did not
present his numerical examples as having any real equivalence in the commercial
world.39 If all three of these writers claimed to possess mercantile expertise based on
experience, then, it was only Mun who elevated this experience as the sole epistemo-
logical basis for the knowledge he was producing.40 In a sense his ambitions were
more constrained than either Malynes or Misselden; rather than seeking like them to
diagnose the essential, underlying form of commerce, Mun simply described how it
worked in practice. This was clearly tactical: Mun sought to present the facts of com-
merce in as transparent and disinterested a manner as possible. But this information
required the trained eye of the merchant to correctly interpret its meaning, thus
threatening to taint this knowledge with self-interest.
Much of the contemporary discourse of trade that flourished in the decades after the
1620s was centered precisely on the question of how to determine the public interest in
commerce, and how to reconcile this with the privately interested actions of mer-
chants. This also became a debate about how to generate the disinterested knowledge
that could answer these questions: “Epistemological questions about how trade was to
be known about could not be separated from questions of its profitability (personally
or publicly), or from political questions of how trade was to be regulated.”41 Although
merchants possessed the experience necessary to generate knowledge about trade,
therefore, their very interestedness made them unsuitable figures to answer the essen-
tially moral questions that commercial discourse proposed to answer.
It is important to note that this commercial discourse was not in any necessary way
dependent on contemporaneous developments in natural philosophy: there is no evi-
dence that either Malynes, Misselden or Mun were directly inspired to write about
commerce by any methodological advances in the study of nature, or that they saw
their work as part of a shared enterprise of revolutionizing knowledge. Nevertheless,
these two discourses do reveal similarities, particularly on the epistemological level,
105 Epistemology
between the types of knowledge claims that merchant writers and natural philosophers
were making. One key name here, in the English context at least, is Francis Bacon.
Bacon was just the sort of statesman whom merchant authors had in their sights
when they published their self-eulogizing handbooks. Bacon also had numerous con-
tacts among the merchants of London; he spent much of his life in close proximity to
the city, observing its vigorous intellectual life with interest. Given the emphasis that
merchants placed on the exchange of accurate information both in their practice and
their published writings, it is not surprising that Bacon often turned to the world of
commerce to furnish metaphors for the production of knowledge.42 But Bacon’s bor-
rowings from mercantile practice were not simply metaphorical; he also actively
deployed mercantile epistemological strategies for his own reform of natural philos-
ophy. For Bacon true knowledge of nature would come only through direct experience
and acquaintance with things, but this experience was to be subjected to the same sort
of disciplining and prudential restraint, which merchant handbooks recommended to
their readers, in order to erase the presence of the self in the information produced.43
Furthermore, the empirical observations compiled by the natural historian were to be
transmuted into higher axioms through an inductive method, which resembled the
way in which double-entry bookkeeping filtered mercantile transactions through a
series of books into the essential form of the ledger.44 Just as double-entry bookkeeping
reduced the presence of the individual persona by stripping away narrative detail and
leaving bare, “disinterested” numbers, Bacon’s inductive method would produce ax-
ioms, which were not prey to the vicissitudes of individual minds but were reflective of
nature. And of course the knowledge that Bacon hoped to produce would yield
practical, material improvements to human life, just as commerce satisfied people’s
wants and needs. The sort of “fact” that Bacon and his followers hoped to produce—
constructed from direct experience, preceding theory, and ultimately productive—in
many ways echoed the information that merchants produced and relied upon.45
Bacon’s programmatic insistence on the need for self-discipline when compiling em-
pirical evidence reveals the tension inherent in a methodology, which based knowl-
edge on particular, rather than commonplace, experiences and was therefore prone to
the epistemological distortions that Bacon termed the idols. It is revealing that Bacon
labeled those “illusions which seem to arise by agreement and from men’s association
with each other” as the “idols of the marketplace”: here the concern is that commerce
entailed the exchange of words, which “do violence to the understanding,” rather than
things.46 Because they dealt in information as much as commodities, merchants had
ample opportunity to mislead partners and customers for gain: the problem of interest
thus always threatened to taint mercantile knowledge. Such problems were visible in
Bacon’s most extended usage of the mercantile metaphor for the production of knowl-
edge, the so-called merchants of light who appeared in his utopian New Atlantis. These
106 Knowledge
figures were specially appointed to depart from the island of Bensalem every twelve
years on global voyages intended to discover the “sciences, arts, manufactures, and
inventions of all the world.”47 This was Bacon’s most explicit equation of the acquisition
of knowledge with the practice of commerce, and yet these merchants were in most
respects very un-merchant-like in their conduct. As they explained to the incredulous
Europeans, “thus you see we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels; nor for
silks; nor for spices; nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God’s first crea-
ture, which was Light: to have light (I say) of the growth of all parts of the world.” These
were merchants purged of the desire for gain and only then fit to transport this most
valuable commodity home for the benefit of all. But this was to be a particularly
one-sided exchange: the merchants of light acting incognito in order to preserve the
secrecy of their homeland, more like spies than traders. All this was fitting for an island
which had deliberately disengaged from global commerce, and all the corruption that
risked, under the rule of its wisest king, Salamona:
taking into consideration how sufficient and substantive this land was to maintain
itself without any aid at all of the foreigner; being five thousand six hundred miles
in circuit, and of rare fertility of soil in the greatest part thereof; and finding also the
shipping of this country might be plentifully set on work, both by fishing and by
transportations from port to port, and likewise by sailing into some small islands
that are not far from us, and are under the crown and laws of this state; and recalling
into his memory the happy and flourishing estate wherein this land then was, so as it
might be a thousand ways altered to the worse, but scarce any one way to the better;
thought nothing wanted to his noble and heroical intentions, but only . . . to give
perpetuity to that which was in his time so happily established. Therefore amongst
his other fundamental laws of this kingdom, he did ordain the interdicts and pro-
hibitions which we have touching entrance of strangers . . . doubting novelties, and
commixture of manners.48
Secrecy and self-sufficiency were the only ways to preserve purity of knowledge as well
as manners: the idols of the marketplace would not be a problem for the Bensalemites.49
But even within the island, information was not to be freely exchanged among the pop-
ulace, but carefully controlled and regulated by the fellows of Salomon’s House (i.e.,
Solomon’s House)—the intellectual elite who doubled as merchants of light and were
responsible for generating uncorrupted knowledge. Although elsewhere Bacon stressed
that the highest ambition of the natural philosopher was to increase the empire of all
humanity through their investigations, and that knowledge should not therefore be
confined to any nation, his imagining of Salomon’s House reveals a distrust of the free
exchange of information, expressed through the anti-mercantile quality of Bensalem’s
107 Epistemology
society.50 Thus in his reformation of knowledge more generally, the state would play an
instrumental role not only in organizing research but also in making sure that it did not
fall prey to the vicissitudes of personality or private interests. In this light, Bacon’s in-
terest in the intellectual marketplace that he discovered in contemporary London ap-
pears more like an act of covert appropriation in the manner of a “merchant of light”
than the reciprocal engagement of a genuine merchant.51
However much commerce might offer to reformers of natural philosophy like Bacon
an alternative means of acquiring and generating knowledge to scholasticism, this sort
of knowledge could still be tainted by the damaging force of self-interest, something
which for Bacon demanded a state solution. This was an agenda enthusiastically
embraced by some of Bacon’s keenest followers, the circle of Samuel Hartlib, in their
schemes for the reformation of knowledge.52 Hartlib’s central project was the founda-
tion of a state-sponsored “Office of Address,” a sort of clearing house for information,
which (like currency) needed to be kept in circulation in order to be useful:
For therein, as in one Magazin or Market-place, all things Necessary, Profitable,

Rare, and Commendable, which are extant in severall places, and scattered here
and there, are brought together; and exposed to the view of every one that shall
be willing to see them, that according to his reach and capacity they may be made
serviceable unto him, and he thereby in his degree and station more usefull unto
the publike a hundred fold then otherwise he can be without the help of such an
addresse.53
The Office would help to achieve Bacon’s vision of the collective advancement of
knowledge, through maintaining a “Learned Trade with all Men of Abilities within and
without the Kingdome.”54 But it would also supply information on the more mundane
affairs of social and economic life, including coinage, exchange rates, and prices:
a living version of Roberts’s Mappe of Commerce. This would, however, be no “free
market” of information: “In respect of Merchants, the State should haue a care, that the
Office bee not abused to the prejudice of Trade; which possiblely it may bee, if the
Regulating of it in matters of Commerce, bee wholly out of the insight of some that are
faithfull to the State, & vnderstand the Mysteries of Trading.”55
The next generation of English Baconians, the founders of the Royal Society, were if
anything more wary of the self-interested pursuit of commercial riches, however much
they might value mercantile information: the practice of experimental science, com-
bined with piety, would act to discipline the desire for wealth.56 Although the Royal
Society never fulfilled Bacon’s dream of state-organized intellectual endeavor, gentle-
manly conduct replaced state supervision as the guarantor of disinterested proceed-
ings, and this left little room for the suspect presence of the merchant.57 Merchants
108 Knowledge
might supply them with information, but the independently wealthy gentlemen of the
Society would be responsible for validating it as “matter of fact.”
Nonetheless, the Royal Society enthusiastically embraced Bacon’s ambition to pro-
duce useful knowledge, which was increasingly understood in commercial terms, har-
nessing science and technology to enhance the nation’s productive power, as seen in its
interests in the “history of trades” and agricultural improvement.58 Thus when Mun’s
major work was published in the 1660s, it received a warm welcome from several fel-
lows. Toward the end of the century, one fellow, John Houghton, published a journal
blending observations about husbandry, technology, and trade, explicitly linking the
production of knowledge of commerce with the program of the Royal Society (although
some other fellows were unhappy with Houghton’s endorsement of luxury and acquis-
itiveness).59 This was part of a growing interest among natural philosophers in pub-
lishing on commercial themes, which indicates how commerce was becoming
established as an issue of public importance. In the process, custody of commercial
knowledge was becoming distanced from mercantile practice.
In the decades after Mun and Misselden had posited merchants as the key generators
of mercantile knowledge, direct experience and observation of the world of commerce
had become the byword of commercial discourse. A species of publication arose,
which took this to the extreme by essentially listing observations of successful com-
mercial practice, particularly drawn from the Dutch Republic, in order to yield simple
policy recommendations for how to improve English trade on a national basis.60
Although merchants continued to contribute much of this discourse, the growing reli-
ance on observing general commercial conditions rather than particular trading prac-
tices meant that non-merchants could also be involved, while still claiming that their
knowledge was derived from experience (albeit of a less specialized sort).61 Such pub-
lications tended to avoid systematic interpretation in favor of reflecting on numerous
observed instances, imitating in this sense the contemporary Baconian trend in nat-
ural philosophy, but their unsystematic nature could attract criticism. Roger Coke
complained that commercial discourse was plagued by a lack of method: “[B]y not
right understanding the nature of these Principles, and confounding them, all Learning
and Reasoning in these studies is rendered perplexed, difficult, and uncertain, and
without any Order or Method.”62 His own logical method ascended from primary def-
initions to ultimate axioms about trade, which promised to generate knowledge
“descended from eternal causes: begotten by a mind so pure, as partakes not any affec-
tion of any sensual appetite or passion.”
The need to produce certain knowledge in this field reflects the perceived public
importance of commerce and the continued threat of private interest. Commercial
debates on controversial topics such as trading companies, the interest rate, coinage,
and so on were difficult to resolve as rival parties traded their own personal insights
109 Epistemology
and experiences in an inconclusive manner, each claiming to represent the public

good. In this light, experience alone did not seem adequate to create the sort of certain
knowledge on which such questions must be settled, and alternative models of pro-
ducing knowledge were advanced. More famous than Coke’s reformed logic was the
method of another fellow of the Royal Society, William Petty, who sought to enlist
mathematics to the cause of producing certain knowledge of commerce, among other
material factors, in his model of “political arithmetic.” This was explicitly defined
against what Petty saw as the indecisive and ultimately semantic content of contempo-
rary commercial discourse, which rested on the shaky foundations of “mutable Minds,
Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men,” and relied on “comparative and
superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments.”63 Instead, Petty enlisted the apparently
impersonal standards of “Number, Weight, or Measure,” statistics, which would find
their “visible Foundations in Nature,” and conclusions supported by the certain logic of
mathematics. In doing so he departed from the mainstream knowledge-producing ac-
tivities of the Royal Society by combining deductive reasoning with experimental in-
duction to produce knowledge as certain as that aspired to by Descartes. Ultimately
dependent on the statistics accurately reflecting real conditions, Petty proposed to
make the generation of these figures a responsibility of the state, so that “the Observa-
tions or Positions expressed by Number, Weight, and Measure, upon which I bottom
the ensuing Discourses, are either true, or not apparently false, and which if they are
not already true, certain, and evident, yet may be made so by the Sovereign Power.”64
The state might have been slow to take up this role of knowledge-producer, but still
statistical information began to acquire greater authority partly thanks to proponents
like Petty.65
For our purposes, this statistical turn represented a reconfiguring of expertise, which
in many ways denigrated the merchant as producer of commercial knowledge. From
the early seventeenth century at least, commerce was presented as demanding expert
knowledge derived from experience, positing the merchant as possessing exceptional
insight into a practice, which was becoming increasingly important to the state. Early
attempts to analyze this knowledge in a more systematic sense in order to yield prac-
tical policy recommendations for the state were built on this notion of mercantile
expertise, and increasingly the content of this discourse was drawn from direct obser-
vations of commercial practice, rather than theoretical abstractions about its “essence.”
This type of knowledge—experiential, useful, and preceding theory—provided a
potential model for natural philosophers seeking to refashion knowledge of nature
away from a priori scholasticism. And yet, as Bacon’s ambivalent response to com-
merce indicates, the type of knowledge produced by merchants remained suspicious
precisely because these merchants had an interest in its production. Thus personal
experience alone was not sufficient to produce certain knowledge of commerce: a
110 Knowledge
methodology, which could erase such personal opinions, was required. Petty found
this in statistics, supported by the state and interpreted by an expert figure in some
senses reminiscent of Malynes’s authoritative public regulator of the exchange, al-
though like him a relatively autonomous figure representative of the decentralized
nature of the early modern English state. Merchants, by this logic, were held at arms
length from the production of real knowledge about commerce.
While there was no straightforward correlation between advances in science and
“economic thought” in the seventeenth century, the fact that experimental scientists
often subscribed to a model of useful knowledge meant that there were numerous
points of contact between the realms of commercial and natural knowledge.66 In par-
ticular, the intellectual reaction against scholasticism, strongest in natural science,
seems to have allowed a more expansive approach to political economy to develop.
Freed from the preoccupation with restoring commerce to its essential form, as was the
case with Malynes, Misselden, and other “neo-Aristotelians” to use Wennerlind’s
useful terminology in ch. 3 (75), commentators could focus on its quantitative expan-
sion, a trend capitalized upon by numerous contemporary “projectors” who sought to
harness hitherto unrecognized sources of prosperity and productivity. Wennerlind
explains how this shift transformed understandings of the role of money, the supply of
which might now be expanded to support an infinitely expandable commerce: rather
than restore commerce to its pristine, essential state, its very foundations could be
refashioned by human artifice. There are similarities here too with the shift from a
qualitative to a quantitative understanding of population, as described in McCormick,
ch. 1: a quantitative analysis of commerce shifted attention away from restoring the
balance between its constituent parts, as Malynes had demanded, toward increasing
the volume of trade in an absolute sense, allowing something like a concept of eco-
nomic growth to begin to emerge. It is surely no accident, therefore, that these intellec-
tual changes were pioneered by Baconians like the Hartlib Circle, who saw the
advancement of learning as directly improving creating prosperity and driving com-
mercial success. The desire to increase the volume of trade prompted the period’s clear-
est instance of a natural discovery stimulating a rethinking of how commerce
functioned: William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood partly inspired
a new conception of the velocity of the circulation of goods and money, a borrowing
made possible by the fact that commerce continued to be understood in terms of the
“body politic.”67 But if this suggests a tendency to “naturalize” commerce, this was a
nature that might be manipulated according to human design, “squeezed and moulded,”
as Bacon put it, not admired from afar as the idealized scholastic natural philosopher
was wont to do.68
As the stock of experimental scientists as generators of knowledge rose, they increas-
ingly came to adopt the role of expert interpreters of the commercial world. So when
111 Epistemology
in 1695 the Privy Council was looking for advice on questions about the coinage and
the governance of trade, half of the individuals on whom they called were fellows of the
Royal Society, namely Isaac Newton, John Locke, Christopher Wren, and John Wallis
(the others were the merchants Josiah Child and Gilbert Heathcote, the lawyer
Mr. Asgill, and the political economist Charles Davenant).69 When a Board of Trade
was founded in 1696 partly from these deliberations, Locke was a member; in the same
year Newton became Master of the Mint, due in large part to the intellectual authority
he possessed as a mathematician. Things had gone full circle from the start of the cen-
tury: natural philosophers, who once borrowed from merchandise techniques of
knowledge production, were now seen as possessed of the required intellectual skills
necessary to interpret the workings of that world.
The foundation of the 1696 Board of Trade was the culmination of more than seventy
years of efforts to accommodate the governance of commerce within England’s tradi-
tionally land-based polity, efforts that can be traced back to the committees to which
Malynes, Mun, and Misselden were called in the 1620s.70 These bodies represented an
attempt to incorporate mercantile expertise within the state, to generate commercial
knowledge which would be publicly useful. But there remained uncertainty about the
composition and nature of such bodies, reflecting the insecure place of the merchant
within the polity. As a mercantile apologist Lewes Roberts considered that “when a
Countrey is properly seated for trafficke, and the soveraigne willing, by forraigne Com-
merce to inrich his Kingdome, the Merchants advice is questionlesse best able to prop-
agate the same.”71 He therefore recommended the appointment of “a selected number
of able and discreet Merchants,” to be termed “States-merchants, or Merchant States-
men.”72 John Keymer had similarly called for the founding of a “state merchant” under
James I, but not all projected councils would have given merchants such powers.73
Henry Robinson, for example, suggested “a Commission . . . amongst which some un-
derstanding Merchants will be necessarie.”74
In the decades that followed, several councils of trade were founded, containing a
varying proportion of merchants to gentlemen and aristocrats, but none proved long-
lasting, so that one contemporary could complain that “all expired without any consid-
erable advantage.”75 Partly the problem was conflict among merchant members, with
the council founded in 1668 apparently plagued by divisions between East India and
Levant merchants. Perhaps with such contests in mind, Benjamin Worsley, an associate
of the Hartlib Circle and member of this and other councils (although no merchant
himself), complained that the governance of commerce was not “within the Prospect
of the merchant, . . . their Power Care or Consideration; And least of all in their Aime,
when some of them are easily discerned to be expressely contrary to their privatt prof-
itt.” This was because “Commerce As it is an Affayre of state is widely different from the
mercantile part of it,” and therefore Worsley’s ideal council of trade would be staffed
112 Knowledge
largely by gentlemen who were free from “the Intrigues & privat designes of mer-
chants.”76 This formula was increasingly the drift toward the end of the century, as
commercial policy became the responsibility of professional bureaucrats such as
William Blathwayt or self-proclaimed experts like Worsley.
By distinguishing knowledge of the practice of trade from its interpretation, figures
like Worsley denied merchants the specialized insight that earlier figures like Mun had
claimed. There was a direct lineage from Malynes’s surveyor of the exchange to Wors-
ley’s conciliar secretary: from the vantage point of the state, both figures could claim to
possess expertise unpolluted by private interest. Here the state itself was accorded pri-
macy as generator of knowledge of commerce, echoing Izaak Walton’s prefatory verses
attached to Roberts’ Mappe: “If thou would’st be a States-man, and survay / Kingdomes
for information; heres a way.”77 Of course in practice, the state was still reliant on inter-
ested parties to supply much of the information on which the government of trade
relied. Mercantile petitioning and lobbying, for example, thrived as the bureaucracy of
commercial government became regularized: the state tended to see only what was
shown it.78 Nonetheless, this was arguably a much more effective implementation of
Bacon’s vision of the state as knowledge generator than anything achieved by the Royal
Society in the field of natural philosophy, and it is worth noting that Bacon had been
an early advocate of the erection of councils of trade. The convergence between exper-
tise in the interpretation of nature and of commerce by the end of the century was,
therefore, no accident.
This is not to say that every expert in commerce was by then a natural philosopher,
or that merchants were no longer able to muster respect as commentators on their
trade. The genre of mercantile advice books remained popular: merchants were be-
coming more publicly vocal toward the end of the seventeenth century, and some con-
tinued to complain that their voice was too little heeded.79 Neither did the state in
practice come to monopolize the production of commercial knowledge. If anything,
the opposite was the case: by the eighteenth century, political economy was a subject of
public debate to an unparalleled extent, such that political arithmetic, which Petty had
envisaged as an extension of state power, became “a program for reversing the growth
of government and reducing its influence on English social and economic life.”80
Rather, it is to suggest that the “science” of practicing trade was acknowledged to differ
from the “science” of its interpretation, and expertise in the former was not qualifica-
tion enough to speak with authority on the latter. As the merchant John Cary wrote,
“In order to discover whether a Nation gets or loses by its trade, ’tis necessary first to
enquire into the Principles whereupon it is built; for Trade hath its Principles as other
Sciences have, and is as difficult to understand.”81 The impact of this can be seen in the
number of synthetic works of analysis that were produced in the decade in which Cary
wrote, the 1690s, works that were implicitly orientated to the panoptic viewpoint of the
113 Epistemology
state.82 It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the epistemological problems in-
herent in early modern commercial discourse were “solved” in this way by the close of
the century. On the contrary, the 1690s opened an era of ever more politically conten-
tious and methodologically diverse commercial discourse which considered the nature
and limits of state power, as well as the relationship between commerce and the public
good, a truly political economy.83
For Adam Smith, the mercantile system was a product of the blind leading the blind:
“That foreign trade enriched the country, experience demonstrated to the nobles and
country gentlemen as well as to the merchants; but how, or in what manner, none of
them well knew.”84 Of course the mercantile system was Smith’s straw man, and his
quote does little justice to the intellectual energy of commercial discourse in the pre-
ceding era. But it does, perhaps, capture something of the core epistemological prob-
lem of early modern commercial discourse, that of how to generate reliable knowledge
without it being corrupted at its source by the private interests of merchants. This is a
problem faced, we might add, by any society confronted by bodies of knowledge locked
up in the practices of specialized experts with their own vested interests, whose actions
can have such great impact on those around them: this aspect of the “age of mercan-
tilism,” at least, is still with us.
NOTES
1. Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978), 1.
2. See Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations
in Early Modern England. (London: Macmillan, 1998).
3. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century Eng-
land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxv.
4. Shapin, Social History of Truth, 6.
5. Shapin, Social History of Truth.
6. Although this connection is usually stated fairly vaguely, for example by Lars Magnusson:
“the mercantilist ‘revolution’ implied the application of, for want of a better name, a Baco-
nian scientific programme in which logical argumentation should prevail.” Mercantilism:
The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 11. See also Terrence
Hutchinson, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), 6. More common, perhaps, are attempts to trace the internal develop-
ment of scientific methods or standards within the discipline of economics. For example,
Joseph A. Schumpeter’s analysis of the development of economic analysis adopted a loose
definition of science as “any kind of knowledge that has been the object of conscious at-
tempts to improve it” which deploys particular specialized techniques of analysis, and so
he paid little attention to the scientific revolution. Schumpeter, History of Economic
Analysis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 7. One recent account, which posits
strong connections between developments in scientific and economic thought in the sev-
enteenth century, is Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History
114 Knowledge
of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2000). Another route is traced in Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English
Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For
attempts to trace later connections between science and economics, see Margaret Scha-
bas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and
Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Clas-
sical Economists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
7. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1660–1776
(London: Methuen, 1963).
8. Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6, no. 2
(1998): 152.
9. For a recent overview of these issues, see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, “Introduc-
tion: The Age of the New,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science
(Cambridge, 2006), 1–19.
10. Shapin, Social History of Truth, 121.
11. As well as Shapin’s Social History of Truth, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan
and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1985).
12. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and
Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002).
13. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden
Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
14. Cook, Matters of Exchange, 57.
15. Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
16. Julie Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998).
17. Quoted in Shapin, Social History of Truth, 235.
18. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2000), 155–60.
19. Eric H. Ash, “‘A Note and a Caveat for the Merchant’: Mercantile Advisors in Elizabethan
England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 1 (2002): 1–31.
20. Henry Robinson, Englands Safety in Trades Encrease (London, 1641), 6.
21. Lewes Roberts, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (London, 1638), epistle dedicatory
(unpaginated).
22. Roberts, Merchants Mappe.
23. Roberts, Merchants Mappe, title page.
24. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, in Early English Tracts on Commerce,
ed. J. R. McCulloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 122.
25. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 33–65.
26. Solomon, Objectivity in the Making, p. 108.
27. Roberts, Merchants Mappe, 12.
28. Jean-Christophe Agnew. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 80.
29. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93–94.
30. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 59–60.
115 Epistemology

32. Gerard Malynes, The maintenance of free trade according to the three essentiall parts of traf-
fique (London, 1622), 6.
33. Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 26.
34. Malynes, Maintenance of free trade, 4.
35. Quoted in Solomon, Objectivity, 144.
36. Malynes, Maintenance of free trade, 76.
37. Edward Misselden, Free trade: Or, The meanes to make trade florish (London, 1622); Mis-
selden, The circle of commerce: Or The ballance of trade in defence of free trade (London, 1623).
38. Misselden, Free trade, 6; Malynes, Maintenance of free trade, 2.
39. Mun, England’s Treasure. See Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of
the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 134–38.
40. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 79–82.
41. Ogborn, Indian Ink, 151.
42. Solomon, Objectivity, 63–64.
45. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 11.
46. Francis Bacon, The New Organum, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–42.
47. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1626), in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 5, ed. James Sped-
ding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1862), 384.
48. Bacon, New Atlantis, 380–81.
50. Rose-Mary Sargent, “Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 146–71.
51. Harkness, Jewel House, 241–53.
52. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
53. Samuel Hartlib, A further Of the Office of Publick Addresse for Accommodations (London,
1648), 26. For the Hartlib Circle and the office of address, see Charles Webster, The Great
Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975).
54. John Dury, Considerations tending to the Happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation
in Church and State (London, 1647), 46.
55. “Reasons why the State should not suffer the Office of Public Entries or Addresse to bee in
any other hand but such, as it shall appoint to haue it,” HP 63/7/4A.
56. James R. Jacob, “The Political Economy of Science in Seventeenth-Century England,”
Social Research 59, no. 3 (1992): 505–32.
57. Shapin, Social History of Truth, 93–95.
58. Kathleen H. Ochs, “The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early
Episode in Applied Science,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 39, no. 2
(April, 1985): 129–58.
59. Paul Slack, “The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seven-
teenth Century,” English Historical Review 122, no. 497 (2007): 609–31.
60. Robinson, Englands Safety; Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (London, 1641).
61. Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London,
1673).
116 Knowledge
62. Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1670), epistle dedicatory (unpaginated).
63. William Petty, Political arithmetick, or, A discourse concerning the extent and value of lands,
people, buildings (London, 1690), preface (unpaginated).
64. Petty, Political arithmetick.
65. Paul Slack, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and
Present 184 (2004): 33–68.
66. For examples, see “Oeconomies in the Age of Newton,” ed. Margaret Schabas and Neil De
Marchi, special issue, History of Political Economy 35, Annual Supplement, 2003, 1–385.
67. See Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 101–6. Petty (himself a physician) was particu-
larly important in applying this model to the economy. Finkelstein, Harmony and the Bal-
ance, 107–29.
68. Paolo Rossi, “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” in Peltonen, Cambridge Companion to Bacon, 39. See
also Schabas, Natural Origins of Economics.
69. Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade:
1695–1698,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 14, no. 3 (1957): 384.
70. Charles Andrews, “British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Planta-
tions, 1622–1675,” John Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, series
26, nos. 1, 2, 3 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1908), 1–116.
71. Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike, in McCulloch, Early English Tracts, 58.
72. Roberts, Treasure of Traffike, 93–94.
73. [John Keymer] Sir Walter Raleigh’s Observations, Toughing Trade and Commerce with the
Hollanders (London, 1653), 56–57, 62–64.
74. Robinson, Englands Safety, 46.
75. Andrews, “British Committees,” 112.
76. “Some Considerations about the Commission for Trade,” ca. 1668, copy belonging to Lord
Ashley. The National Archives, London, PRO 30/24/49, fol. 87r.
78. Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
79. For example, John Cary, An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to its Trade, its Poor,
and its Taxes (Bristol, 1695), sig. A6r.
80. Peter Buck, “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 73
(1982): 28.
81. Quoted in Magnusson, Mercantilism, 116.
82. “Mercantilist discourse was as much a product of the monarch as it was of the merchant.”
Solomon, Objectivity, 73.
83. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009), 366–99. See also Mark Knights’s discussion of the epistemological problems beset-
ting late Stuart party politics, in Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Brit-
ain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 272–334.
84. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, books4–5, ed. Andrew Skinner (London, 1999), 10.
5
Natural History and Improvement
The Case of Tobacco
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
In 1619 English tobacco became noxious to the government. The Proclamation to

Restrain Tobacco Planting in England and Ireland called English tobacco “crude, poi-
sonous and dangerous for the Bodies and Healths of our Subjects.”1 Only “hotter cli-
mates” like that of Virginia and Bermuda produced a quality crop with the requisite
medicinal virtues. This was at a time when tobacco was celebrated for its power to cure
all manner of ailments, including gout, toothache, and dropsy. The edict also observed
that the cultivation of English tobacco diminished the arable surface available for food
production in the commonwealth and threatened the revenues of the state, since cus-
toms were levied more easily on colonial produce. Finally, English tobacco threatened
the precarious livelihood of the nascent staple economy of Virginia, a settlement that
had more than once in its mere decade of existence faced the possibility of catastrophic
collapse. How could a long-distance trade in tobacco flourish if the plant became a
common garden crop in England? With the 1619 proclamation, the Crown sought to
sanction an ideal climatic division of labor between core and periphery. Medical and
natural expertise underwrote the judgment. The poisonous character of English to-
bacco had been confirmed by “divers persons of skill and experience.” Yet, farmers
continued to grow illicit stands of tobacco in Gloucestershire and other parts of the
kingdom long afterwards. Natural knowledge and political interest were evidently not
so easy to separate.2
The curious story of English tobacco offers a useful departure point to think about
the intertwining of natural knowledge, commerce, and environment in the history of
the British Empire. A sweeping transformation of the natural world accompanied the
boom in the long-distance trades. “The Improuement of the Ground,” Francis Bacon
noted, “is the most Naturall Obtaining of Riches; But it is slow.” Natural history and
agricultural expertise supplied tools to know and master the peculiar characteristics of
local climate, soil, plants, and other natural advantages. The word “improvement” thus
signified both the practical work of transforming the environment and the new forms
117
118 Knowledge
of knowledge needed to organize this labor. The Baconian alchemist and agriculturist
Samuel Hartlib promised “cornu copia” to anyone who adopted his method “of lucrif-
erous and most fructiferous experiments.” Yet on the colonial periphery, such dreams
of abundance gave rise to new systems of exploitation.3
In recent decades, historians of science and the environment have begun to explore
the place of natural knowledge and ecology in overseas expansion. Many of them
employ the concept of “mercantilism” as a framework for their inquiry, despite the
long-standing reservations against the notion among historians of economic ideas.
Perhaps the most explicit linkage of this sort comes in John Gascoigne’s work on Sir
Joseph Banks. In the decades after the American War of Independence, this Lincoln-
shire landowner and president of the Royal Society led an effort to reassert British
imperial power, by diversifying colonial economies with cash crops and aspiring for
imperial self-sufficiency in vital raw materials. According to Gascoigne, this “neo-
mercantilist” strategy rejected Adam Smith’s free trade ideal in favor of a self-conscious
attempt to rejuvenate economic nationalism on scientific grounds. Another important
adaptation of the concept of “mercantilism” in the literature is Joyce Chaplin’s history
of planter culture in the American Lower South during the eighteenth century. Chap-
lin charts different projects of agricultural diversification in colonial South Carolina,
including silk and indigo, to argue the case for a provincial “mercantilism” on the part
of colonial landowners. Such examples could easily be multiplied. Historians of science
no doubt bring a sophisticated understanding of natural knowledge to bear on the
problem of colonial development. Yet they have often shown less patience with the
complexities of economic discourse. This is doubly unfortunate, since the contradic-
tions of political economy and natural history often ran together.4
This chapter provides a more balanced account of the relation between political
economy and natural history. Once we consider “mercantilism” as an orientation
toward a common set of problems rather than a clear and precise doctrine, we are also
in a better position to appreciate the heterogeneity and controversy that marked the
character of early modern natural history and agricultural improvement. The many
polarities of economic thought were matched by similar uncertainities of natural
knowledge. Even basic phenomena of climate and soil confounded early modern ob-
servers, particularly on the peripheries of the nation and empire. How was the fertility
of the soil best preserved? Could some types of land be permanently damaged by de-
manding crops? Was climate a stable physical force or a historical process subject to
human influence? To what extent might ecological exchange and acclimatization
change the geographic distribution of valuable animals and plants? These were not
merely academic controversies but practical problems of pressing importance for
planters and politicians. The natural forces of the colonial environment frequently sub-
verted the best laid plans with hurricanes, floods, erosion, epidemics, and pests. By the
119 Natural History and Improvement
middle of the eighteenth century, Virginia planters complained that tobacco was a
scourge that exhausted soil fertility and forced growers into debt bondage. The ques-
tion of nature thus penetrated to the heart of colonial husbandry and the imperial
order. Indeed, the authority of nature provided competing models of economic
exchange and prosperity. The pioneers of political economy frequently relied on nat-
ural knowledge and scientific metaphors to understand how wealth was produced and
circulated. Yet the multiplicity of environmental processes spurred competing inter-
pretations of the natural order. By the end of the eighteenth century, these tensions
gave rise to two rival ecologies of commerce. In the liberal view, the self-regulating
properties of exchange mirrored deeper harmonies of the vegetable and animal king-
doms. Conversely, free commerce guaranteed the optimal use of nature. Open markets
in grain provided the best incentive for the improvement of the environment, accord-
ing to Adam Smith, ending once and for all the possibility of famine. But for the op-
posing camp, unregulated exchange offered no protection against dearth or depletion.
In this view, the natural order proved not stable and resilient but frequently either too
fragile or destructive for free exchange. This meant that improvers in the service of the
state had to monitor and regulate the use of natural resources for the benefit of the
public.5
The New World furnished a crucible for the fundamental presuppositions of political
economy and natural history. Colonial expansion projected outward the possibility of
inexhaustible abundance. Francis Bacon’s posthumous utopia The New Atlantis from
1627—frequently read and reprinted in the seventeenth century—has often been
understood as a fable about knowledge commanding nature. But it is also a story about
cornucopian riches on the colonial periphery. A secretive circle of natural philoso-
phers governed Bacon’s fictional island state of Bensalem in the South Seas. They built
an empire of “light” by gathering information abroad through acts of espionage and
knowledge transfer. Bacon described this operation as an imitation of divine Creation.
By prolonging human life and reducing bodily suffering, the Fathers of the College of
Six Days Work appeared in fact to have overcome at least some of the effects of the Fall.
Rather than Creation ex nihilo then, this was a project of regeneration. By implication,
Bensalem’s power demanded natural bodies to transform. Since the philosophers
traded in “light” rather than commodities, these raw materials came from within the
“sufficient and substantive” territory of the island with its “rare fertility of soil.” Bacon’s
tableau of Bensalem dwelled lovingly on the spectacle of New World opulence: robes
in dazzling indigo, chariots made of cedar and covered with gold. Such images of Eden
regenerated were staples of the colonial imagination in the early modern era. Richard
Drayton argues that Baconian natural history supplied a flattering justification for the
carnage and rapaciousness of empire. Western experts claimed to possess a transcen-
dent expertise capable of improving conquered lands and harnessing their fertility for
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the benefit of mankind. Colonial subjugation could thus be excused as a form of scien-
tific development.6
In the generation after Bacon’s death, his follower Samuel Hartlib—a German émigré
from the Baltic port of Elbing—transplanted the projects of Bensalem back to England.
As with The New Atlantis, Hartlib’s Cornu copia (1652) presented a lengthy list of pos-
sible inventions and discoveries, imagining new realms of human power. The transfor-
mation of national agriculture was central to this agenda. Hartlib’s colleague Gabriel
Plattes promised to make “this Countrey the Paradise of the World.” The earth held
“infinite and inexhaustible treasure.” Hartlib insisted that he could unlock the greatest
possible fertility in every type of soil, without the use of manure. Old, exhausted soils
would be restored and enriched “to far greater fruitfulnesse than ever they yielded
before, without laying so much as a load of muck thereon, or without any considerable
charge or trouble.” The key act of improvement, apparently, was to sow different kinds
of grasses on barren land to restore its fertility. Hartlib hoped to discover a native Eng-
lish fodder grass that would “transcend glower grasse, Sain Foine, Lucerne, or any
other outlandish grasses whatsoever.” Hartlib fleshed out the details of the argument in
His Legacy of Husbandry, published in several editions from 1651 on. Here, the aim was
to make England rich through ecological exchange and diversification. Hartlib desired
“Ingenious Gentlemen and Merchants, who travel beyond the Sea, to take notice of the
Husbandry of those parts.” He encouraged the collection of valuable plants and seeds
in the new colonies: cedars, cherries, and sarsaparilla from Virginia, cranberries,
squashes, and wild hemp from New England. To skeptics who doubted the wisdom
and feasibility of plant transfers, he recited the long record of transplants to England in
the past. “Cherries, Hops, Liquorice, Potatoes, Apricocks, Peaches . . . Rape-seeds, Col-
liflowers, Great Clover, [and] Canary-seeds.” Without mentioning the 1619 ban, Har-
tlib quietly included tobacco as well. In short, many of the most common and cherished
useful plants in England were introductions from abroad. Doubters deserved only
contempt: “[W]hy might not our fore-fathers upon the same ground, have held their
hands in their pockets, and have said, that Wheat and Barley would not have grown
amongst us?” For Hartlib, plant exchange was part of a greater endeavor of informa-
tion gathering. As early as 1646, Hartlib proposed a real world equivalent of Bensalem’s
empire of “light,” inspired in part by the practical example of Reynaudot’s Bureau
d’adresse in Paris. This state-led “office of address” would collect histories of trade and
other useful secrets from merchants and artisans. The scheme set a precedent for a
series of institutions in the empire, from the Lords of Trade and Plantations and the
Board of Trade to the Royal Society of Arts and the Board of Agriculture.7
Hartlib’s project reminds us that ecological imperialism has a political history. Alfred
Crosby famously described how the unintended consequences of 1492—the spread
of epidemics, feral livestock, and Old World weeds—gave Europeans the upper hand
in the struggle for dominion over the Americas. According to Crosby, the biological
processes that paved the way for empire occurred outside the realm of political agency
or organized knowledge. They were unplanned, spontaneous consequences of the local
interaction between settlers and natives. Yet the Proclamation of 1619 and Hartlib’s
plan of internal diversification suggest that reality, at least in the English empire, was
slightly more complicated than Crosby’s model allows. Indeed, we cannot understand
environmental transformation purely as a biological process, which occurred under
the radar of political authority. Human knowledge and political agency shaped the
process in increasingly ambitious terms. We might in fact re-periodize the dynamics of
the empire in such a way as to illustrate the intensifying interaction of ecology with
politics. From an early stage, there were attempts to coordinate ecological exchange
and direct the flow of useful plants toward particular locations, whether in the colonies
or metropole. By the eighteenth century, this ambition grew into something of an ob-
session for natural historians across Europe. The Enlightenment was not only the age
of liberal political economy but also the heyday of imperial information economies
and acclimatization projects.8
Politics is by definition a struggle of opposing interests. The same holds true of eco-
logical imperialism. Whereas James I sought to secure a cash crop for the new colony
of Virginia, Samuel Hartlib was more interested in diversifying the agriculture of Eng-
land. Over the next century, natural historians, political economists, and politicians
quarreled over the best way to organize the empire by asking if there might be a ratio-
nal means of organizing the commerce of colonies and metropole. Arthur Young’s Po-
litical Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire proposed an axiom of
so-called rational empire in 1772. Young suggested that knowledge of colonial climates
offered the key to the economic value of colonies and thus a strategy of imperial expan-
sion: “To estimate, therefore, the comparative merit of the climate of colonies, it is only
necessary to compare it with that of the mother country. If they are the same, or nearly
the same, the colony is useless; if entirely different, highly valuable.” Barely a decade
later, Young’s correspondent Sir Joseph Banks established an imperial entrepôt for the
exchange of economically useful plants at Kew Gardens. Banks’s goal was to strengthen
the agrarian basis of the British Empire after the loss of the thirteen American colonies.
He found support among leading members of Pitt the Younger’s government such as
Charles Jenkinson and Henry Dundas. Major priorities included the achievement of
imperial autarchy in naval timber stores, the diversification of the Indian economy
with new cash crops, and the establishment of the New South Wales colony. Banks
adopted the taxonomic method of the Swedish natural historian Carolus Linnaeus to
mastermind this global program of top-down ecological exchange.9
Yet Banks’s strategy was not without its share of critics. Even Arthur Young was quite
ambivalent about imperial expansion, perhaps precisely because he had tried to articulate
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an axiom of rational conquest. In a pamphlet written the year after the Political Essays,
Young discussed the charged question of British expansion into the Ohio Valley. He
humored the anxieties of the Board of Customs and the Scottish Lord Justice Clerk
Thomas Miller that emigration to America was deleterious to British society. Young
agreed that there were now “more reason for such apprehensions than before.” It would
be better, he suggested, to give internal colonies priority over external expansion. By
reclaiming the wastelands of Great Britain, large-scale emigration could be thwarted.
Young’s pamphlet included an extended calculation of the long-term profits arising from
establishing a farm in marginal soils. Like Samuel Hartlib, he believed that grass cultiva-
tion could restore fertility to wastelands and exhausted soils. Many of these ideas seem to
have been inspired by Young’s correspondence in the 1760s and 1770s with such Conti-
nental savants of cameralist or physiocratic leanings as John Reinhold Forster, Walter
Harte, Ignatius Massalski, and P. W. Edinger. After the loss of the American colonies,
these hopes of cornucopia at home gained a growing audience in Britain. The develop-
ment of the Scottish herring fisheries and the diversification of the Highland economy
served as a practical locus for anti-imperial sentiments while Young’s journal Annals of
Agriculture provided an official forum to discuss the possibilities of internal improve-
ment. There were even hopes of ameliorating the climate of northern Scotland, making it
more amenable to agriculture and settlement. The movement culminated in the founding
of the Board of Agriculture by the Scottish landowner John Sinclair in 1793 with Arthur
Young as the secretary. The Board became a mouthpiece of the landed interest in defense
of grain autarchy and domestic diversification.10
For Adam Smith, a third path beckoned between the Scylla and Charybdis of Banks’
empire and Sinclair’s autarchy. The defense of free trade in Smith’s The Wealth of Na-
tions (1776) rested on a liberal interpretation of the natural order. Like so many others,
he harbored cornucopian dreams about the New World. The rapid growth of popula-
tion in the British colonies, doubling every twenty-five years, promised to shift the
center of political and economic gravity away from the Old World. Rather impishly,
Smith predicted that the capital of Britain would one day “naturally remove itself ” to
North America. But he recast the dream of New World plenty in distinctly liberal
terms. The differences in climate and soil around the Atlantic world were natural in-
centives for free exchange rather than imperial conquest. For Smith, the rationality of
free trade settled the struggle between climate determinism and internal diversifica-
tion. Under a regime of free trade, the test of profit would determine which option was
more advantageous. Market prices expressed the natural order better than any expert
judgment.11
We can trace the origin of these quarrels over the environment back to the first great
cash crop of the empire. Tobacco proved a precarious foundation for arguments about
environmental difference. The physician-naturalist John Gerard’s vernacular Herball
from 1597 defended the medicinal use of tobacco with an eye to its commercial value
as a cure of many ailments, including the “pain called the migram” and Gerard’s own
“excellent balsame to cure deep wounds and punctures.” Tobacco smoking had been
introduced into the country by sailors a generation earlier and was becoming fashion-
able among patrician consumers. Gerard’s Herball described three kinds of tobacco,
including the Peruvian and Trinidadian varieties (Nicotiana tabacum) as well as the
yellow henbane or “English tobacco” (Nicotiana rustica). Though he favored the former
two as more effective and wholesome, he attributed beneficial medical effects and a
similar “kind of giddiness” to the yellow henbane. He also noted that yellow henbane
prospered “exceedingly, in so much that it cannot be destroyed where it hath once
sowen itself, and is dispersed into the most parts of Englande.” Gerard experimented
with tobacco cultivation himself, perhaps in his own garden in Holborn or possibly in
the garden of the College of Physicians. On medical grounds, he argued that Peruvian
or Trinidadian tobacco grown in England was best suited for English constitutions. He
proposed that such homegrown tobacco could be produced on a large scale. The pref-
erence for imported New World tobacco was nothing but a passing fad among vain
women: “Far fetched and deere bought is best for ladies.”12
Gerard’s argument did little to persuade James I about the benefits of tobacco
smoking. The king’s Counterblast to Tobacco from 1604 denounced the drug as nothing
but the “inconsiderate and childish affectation of Novelty” befitting only “wild, godless
and slavish Indians.” Hence John Rolfe carried out his trials with Nicotiana tabacum in
Jamestown from 1612 without official approval. When the burgeoning Virginia tobacco
lobby won the grudging support of the Crown in the 1619 proclamation, there was still
a note of contempt and caution in the language of the edict. The crop was a “noisome
and running Weede” that threatened to “overspread within this our Kingdom.” The
king’s approval was granted in a deal with the Virginia Company to secure higher cus-
toms revenues on American tobacco. The original charter of the company had given it
seven years of exemption from all custom duties and an exemption in perpetuity from
all import duties above 5 percent. Once Virginia tobacco reached levels equal to the
lucrative import of Spanish tobacco to England, it began to undercut the king’s reve-
nues from the latter source. Fortunately for James, the threat of domestic tobacco cul-
tivation gave him leverage against the Virginia lobby. All the same, the argument of the
act was laid out entirely in negative terms as the choice of a lesser evil. Better to culti-
vate such “Vanities and Superfluities” in the New World where the settlers still strug-
gled to find a profitable use for extensive new lands than in the metropole where
tobacco competed with food production and other essential priorities. In terms of
James’ imperial ambitions, the crop served simply as an emergency solution of a tran-
sitional character. While Virginia and the Summer Isles possessed the “proper and
natural Climates for that plant,” such cultivation was to persist only “until Our said
124 Knowledge
Colonies may grow to yield better and more solide commodities.” Many of the Virginia
Company’s backers agreed. Despite Rolfe’s success, they complained about the quality
of tobacco produced in Virginia and aimed to diversify the economy and ecology of
the colony with other lucrative staples including plans for silkworm production.13
The 1619 Proclamation was met by concerted resistance from English tobacco
farmers. New bans had to be imposed in 1624, 1634, 1652, 1660, and 1663. While the
1619 act spoke of tobacco plantations near the city of London, grown in gardens and
“rich soyled grounds,” the main hub of English tobacco cultivation seems to have cen-
tered on the vicinity of Worcester and Gloucester. Nicotiana tabacum may indeed have
been planted in Gloucestershire as early as 1586. The London merchant John Strafford
tried tobacco on a large scale at his Prescott estate in the region by the second
decade of the seventeenth century. Strafford’s partner Henry Somerscales supplied the
necessary expertise based on his observations in the tobacco fields of the Netherlands.
Strafford spent as much as £1400 on labor in one year and had one hundred acres in
cultivation when the Crown banned the crop. While the ban caused Strafford to take
fright and withdraw from the venture, others persisted. In 1627, local justices were
commissioned to extirpate all English tobacco in the counties of Wiltshire, Worcester,
and Gloucester. Yet clearly, enforcement proved ineffectual. Farmers in Gloucester-
shire resisted the agents of the state “in a riotous & tumultuous way.” Domestic tobacco
was frequently sold in London under the Virginia label. During the Civil War the ban
on tobacco was completely neglected and had to be reissued by the Commonwealth in
1652. A year later, the Virginia lobby submitted a petition to the Council of State, al-
leging that English tobacco was still a serious threat to Virginia production. The state
once again took the side of the lobby, dispatching special commissioners to enforce the
law. In Winchcomb, three hundred armed locals gathered to protect the crop. The ac-
tion was successful in gaining them a short reprieve. Local farmers also submitted pe-
titions to gain lasting exemption from the 1652 act. Crops were also grown elsewhere in
the country; Samuel Hartlib reported of tobacco cultivation near Norwich. Such viola-
tions led to the mobilization of cavalry and militia against the tobacco growers in 1655
and 1658. An armed crowd blocked access to the tobacco fields near Cheltenham as late
as 1658. The struggle continued in the early years of the Restoration. The Crown reis-
sued the ban on domestic tobacco in 1660 and organized customs officers and local
justices of peace to enforce it. If a warning went unheeded after ten days, all crops were
to “be burnt, plucked up, consumed, or utterly destroyed.” When the forty-shilling fine
imposed by the 1660 act was found insufficient, the Crown added a proviso to the
Staple Act of 1663, which repeated the ban and increased the fine to ten pounds per rod
or pole of ground planted. Farmers resisting the agents of the state were to be impris-
oned until they “entred into a Recognizance to His Majestie . . . with two sufficient
Sureties of Ten pounds penaltie not to doe or committ the like offence againe.” Even
then, the political suppression of the crop admitted a practical loophole; the Crown
permitted a limited cultivation of tobacco in botanic gardens. Nicotiana tabacum grew
in the Edinburgh Physick Garden according to James Sutherland’s list from 1683. John
Ray’s Hortus Plantarum of 1686 reported on three varieties of tobacco cultivated in
English gardens.14
The viability of tobacco in the British Isles made it imperative to demote the plant to
the status of a weed. If it could not be prevented from thriving in a northern climate, at
least it could be impugned as matter out of place. From the 1619 act on, the Virginia
lobby and the Crown attacked English tobacco as an unnatural crop. Twice the College
of Physicians certified that domestic tobacco was dangerous to consumers. The acts
against English tobacco echoed this verdict. Robert Read’s pamphlet from 1653 re-
peated the king’s claim that English tobacco should be treated as a weed. Read insisted
that English tobacco flourished spontaneously and was “never planted” yet flourished
“faster than good herbs.” Tobacco in England occupied the “best ground,” used “all the
Dung,” caused “many . . . law suits,” made “Corn . . . grow deare,” and was “a destroyer
of all sorts of graine.” In contrast Virginia tobacco “sustained life upon the Seas” and
was “beneficial to Merchandises and manufacture.” The servant of the merchants of
Bristol and London, Read added simply, “it groweth in its proper place.” A few decades
later, the Tory polemicist Charles Davenant defended the plantation trade in terms of
providential design: “Wisdom is most commonly in the Wrong, when it pretends to
direct Nature. The various products of different soils and countries, is an indication,
that Providence intended they should be helpful to each other.”15
There were few voices of opposition to the weed discourse in print. An anonymous
satirist praised the virtues of Gloucestershire tobacco in the 1655 pamphlet Henry
Hangman’s Honour. Ever since tobacco had been planted in Winchcomb and elsewhere
in Gloucestershire, local men had been profitably employed while the hangman was
out of work:
Sir will ye be pleased to take or taste a pipe of good tobacco? Here’s that which is
good, come, here’s a sort if can recommend unto you, London affords not a better
sort, than I can show you . . .
A generation later, the Duke of Argyll seems to have conducted experiments with to-
bacco cultivation on the sheltered isle of Tiree in the Hebrides. John Spreull mentioned
the trial in order to propose large-scale tobacco cultivation in Scotland in his 1705
pamphlet on the possibility of an Anglo-Scottish Union. But concerted efforts seldom
rose above the local level. The domestic tobacco supporters did not seem to have man-
aged to organize a lobby capable of countering the influence of Chesapeake merchants
and planters.16
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Only in 1776 did British tobacco finally gain a high-profile champion. In a section of
the Wealth of Nations seldom discussed by scholars, Adam Smith observed that “to-
bacco might be cultivated with advantage through the greater part of Europe.” It was
not natural conditions but rather fiscal considerations that had favored colonial pro-
duction. Gathering tobacco duties from the portside customs house was far easier and
cheaper than collecting them from rural hinterlands. Smith stressed that this political
calculation had distorted the market, favoring the Chesapeake and the British Empire
over domestic European suppliers: “The cultivation of tobacco has upon this account
been most absurdly prohibited through the greater part of Europe.” For Smith, then,
the knowledge of climate, soil, and the mobility of species offered a justification for
pure exchange rather than protectionism. Both sides of Smith’s argument were con-
firmed by a little-known turn of events toward the end of the War of American Inde-
pendence. Between 1779 and 1782, Scotland briefly became the locus for domestic
tobacco cultivation when a network of improvers and landowners in the Kelso region
carried out large-scale trials, which took advantage of the severe wartime dislocation
of the Virginia trade. Since the quarrels over English tobacco had occurred long before
the Union of 1707, there was no ban on the books against homegrown Scottish tobacco.
By 1782, the physician Charles Jackson and his allies among local farmers had one
thousand acres under cultivation. Jackson enlisted Gilbert Elliot of Minto to lobby
both Henry Dundas and William Pitt. He even persuaded Adam Smith to analyze the
punitive effects of the custom duties on domestic tobacco in his petition to Pitt. Yet the
Glasgow tobacco merchants and other commercial interests eventually succeeded in
blocking this experiment and outlawing the cultivation of the crop in Scotland.17
While Davenant and Smith wrestled with the slippery authority of climate, material
pressures were conspiring to undermine the economic discourse of improvement.
Environmental and social historians have documented a series of crises of production
across the English Atlantic in the period. The forests of Barbados were largely destroyed
by the 1660s; sugar yields fell by half on the island after the depletion of the high nutri-
ents in the virgin soils. Stede observed in 1689 that “the barrenness of our lands is now
so great that we cannot have a second cutting from our plantings.” Similarly, in Tide-
water Virginia tobacco yields declined over the course of the eighteenth century as old
fields became exhausted. Landowners responded to these problems in a variety of
ways. On Barbados, they increased the input of slave labor, introduced larger herds of
cattle, and pioneered a series of strategies for erosion management. In Virginia, some
planters abandoned the old pattern of tobacco monoculture in favor of diversified
crops, while others sold out and moved to new lands on the frontier.18
Lobbyists turned these ecological crises into political ammunition. Edward Little-
ton’s 1689 pamphlet against the increase of sugar duties included a lengthy passage on
the growing labor costs of plantation agriculture. Littleton placed particular emphasis
on the Sisyphean labor of manuring the fields: “The ramassing the vast quantities of
Dung we must use, the carrying it to the Field, and disposing it there; is a mighty
Labour, which in effect is Charge.” He continued, “An Acre of ground well dress’d, will
take thirty load of Dung; and he that hath two Wind mills, must plant yearly neer a
hundred Acres.” His pamphlet registered a number of innovations aimed at husband-
ing soil fertility: “We carry Mould and Cane-Trash, or anything that is proper, into our
Cattle-Pens, and into our Still-Ponds; to turn all into Dung. We take all ways and means
for the raising of Dung; and we rake and scrape Dung out of every Corner. Some save
the Urine of their People (both Whites and Blacks) to increase and enrich their Dung.”
This kind of improvement required increased inputs of slave labor. Notice Littleton’s
description of efforts to counteract erosion: “We make high and strong Walls . . .
to stop the Mould that washes from our Grounds; which we carry back in Carts or
upon Negroes heads. Our Negroes work at it like Ants or Bees.” Watt’s environmental
history of the West Indies confirms that many of these practices had indeed become
common by the late seventeenth century.19
Environmental crisis fostered changes in plantation agriculture, which then pene-
trated into economic discourse and legislation. Writings on the commerce of empire
included increasingly detailed discussions of the problems of colonial agriculture. John
Oldmixon’s 1708 history of the British colonies paid careful attention to the specific
climate, soil, and produce of each settlement. In the chapter on Barbados, Oldmixon
noted that the productivity of the sugar plantations on the island had fallen dramati-
cally since cultivation began. “In the days when Sugar was first planted in this Island,
one Acre of Canes yielded more than now, for . . . seven Years together, without any
further planting or dunging.” But these virgin soils were now gone. Planters had
“impoverish’d” the land, “pressing it so often with the same Plant, and never letting it
lie still.” He added “They are now forced to dung and plant every Year.” One hundred
acres of Cane “required almost double the Number of Hands they required formerly.”
Elsewhere in the book, Oldmixon described increasing erosion of soil from the hill-
sides of Barbados. In his account of Jamaica, he observed that deforestation appeared
to diminish the level of precipitation.20 George Frere, in his 1768 history criticized the
planters of Barbados for clearing forests, noting that it “hath decreased the quantity of
rain, and hath been thereby detrimental to the planters,” but he allowed that doing so
rendered “the country more healthful.” A law passed on Barbados in 1736 to prevent
the exportation of clay from the island began with the melancholy observation: “it is
but too manifest, that the Soil of this Island is of late Years become greatly impover-
ished, and for the most part worn out.”21
The problem of soil exhaustion also inspired a renewed interest in diversification and
colonial expansion among economic writers. Joshua Gee’s The trade and navigation of
Great-Britain considered from 1729, reprinted many times in the eighteenth century,
128 Knowledge
offers an important example of this trend. Echoing Oldmixon’s critique, Gee wrote of
Barbados: “the island . . . is very much worn out, and does not afford the Quantity of
Sugars as heretofore.” He scolded the Barbados planters for continuing to “live in great
Splendor, and at vast Expence” despite falling yields. But rather than reforming planter
morals and labor practices, Gee’s preference was to establish new sugar plantations in
the virgin soils of South Carolina. Whereas West Indies planters claimed that winter
frosts made cultivation impossible in a northern climate, Gee used the contrary exam-
ples of sugar culture in the Chinese province of Nankin, the Indian region of Lahore,
and on Portuguese Madeira to reject this prejudice. Indeed, he painted Carolina as a
perfect climate for a variety of cash crops: green tea, indigo, cochineal, mulberry trees
for silkworms, hemp, flax, and rice. He was particularly taken with the prospect of
mulberry plantations for silkworms in the Lower South. Here too, his argument focused
on the relative equivalence of climate and latitude between China, Italy, and the Caro-
linas. Another hobbyhorse included the need for imperial autarchy in naval stores. Gee
argued that hemp could be cultivated in South Carolina by convicts and paupers from
the metropole. This would not only enhance military security but also promote
“Charity” and “Humanity.” Gee’s moral ambition was probably inspired to some degree
by his Quaker roots. Though Gee was hardly a patriotic humanitarian only: his busi-
ness interests in the colonies included land speculation, silk, and iron ore.22
A similar mixture of ecological exchange, moral reform, and profit seeking guided
the project of Georgia settlement from the 1730s. The Trustees of Georgia envisioned
the new colony as a moral and natural laboratory for acclimatization of exotic plants
and the rehabilitation of surplus population from the urban metropole. Experts were
mobilized to strengthen the position of the Trustee’s lobby in the House of Commons.
Benjamin Martyn’s promotional work drew on Gee to present a systematic and detailed
account of climate and soil in the colony, insisting on its salubrious habitat and great
fertility. “It is at all Times our Interest to naturalize as much as we can the Products of
other Countries.” In reality, diversification was not necessarily the result of elite initia-
tives. One of the most important crops in the region—African rice (Oryza glaberrima)-
may have arrived from West Africa thanks to slave knowledge and technology rather
than the plans of imperial improvers.23
In the Enlightenment, natural history became a fashionable pursuit among European
patricians. Carolus Linnaeus’s method of sexual classification gave naturalists a pow-
erful means of organizing the flood of new species discovered in the New World. It also
provided a new weapon in the armory of the state. Linnaeus and other leading natural-
ists like Comte de Buffon and Sir Joseph Banks won state patronage to build botanic
gardens, launch bioprospecting expeditions, and transfer valuable plants between con-
tinents and regions. But eighteenth century natural history was never exclusively a mo-
nopoly of the state. Linnaeus was eager to publish his floras and taxonomies for the
benefit of the public.24 In this way, natural history was part of the wider trend in the
period to organize and publish information in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and scien-
tific periodicals. We might say that Bacon’s empire of “light” was now bearing fruit, but
as a popular venture of civil society rather than a cabal of natural philosophers. The
many dictionaries of commerce in the middle of the eighteenth century were filled with
discussions of husbandry and natural history (see Thomas Leng, ch. 4). In Britain,
Adam Anderson, Malachy Postlethwayt, Richard Rolt, Thomas Mortimer, and John
Campbell all included detailed discussions of the agrarian dimension of empire in their
books. A simple word search of the texts by Anderson, Postlethwayt, and Campbell
indicates a rising level of detail on such topics as soil, timber, cattle, grass, manure, and
sheep.25
We should not be surprised then to find that the great critic of “the mercantile
system”—Adam Smith—also devoted significant sections of The Wealth of Nations to
colonial agriculture. Smith’s defense of free trade was in fact inseparable from his
analysis of the optimal conditions of husbandry. Indeed, it is possible to read The
Wealth of Nations as a liberal critique of the phenomenon of soil exhaustion. Free mar-
kets in beef provided the key incentive to effective livestock management, manure pro-
duction, and therefore the improvement of the soil. Crucially, Smith expected this
model of agrarian capitalism to transfer outward to the North American colonies. He
appropriated the critique of colonial husbandry by the Linnaean natural historian Pehr
Kalm. Settlers “scarcely” made “any manure for their corn fields” and “when one piece
of ground” had been “exhausted by continual cropping” they simply moved on to new
land. At the same time, they failed to care for their livestock, which wandered “half-
starved” through the woods. Yet unlike the dirigiste Kalm, Smith was confident that
market exchange rather than expert management held the solution to the problem.
Here he drew an explicit analogy between the state of Scottish and American agricul-
ture. The American livestock was “probably not unlike that stunted breed which was
common all over Scotland thirty or forty years ago, and which is now so much mended
through the greater part of the low country.” Just as the Act of Union had improved the
market for Scottish beef, American commerce would eventually provide incentives for
the introduction of full-scale mixed husbandry. Smith’s liberal critique of soil exhaus-
tion was mirrored across the Atlantic by the agrarian republicanism of great planters
like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The drift toward revolution was marked
in part by a decision of many landowners in Virginia to abandon tobacco monoculture
in favor of wheat and other crops. The exhausted state of the soil seemed an indictment
of the British regime by the natural order itself.26
Bacon’s promise of abundance failed to unite British improvers. Yet the rival ecol-
ogies of commerce shared a common assumption about the prospects of growth.
Bacon, Hartlib, Gee, and Banks all looked to the expanded horizons of conquest and
130 Knowledge
exchange to imagine a new kind of prosperity. Adam Smith’s liberal vision of Atlantic
trade confirmed these cornucopian expectations. Indeed, the hope of indefinite growth
through the mastery of nature continues to undergird all major modern ideologies
down to the present day. But imperial expansion also engendered crises of production
and ecological strain. Soil fertility had to be replenished, whether with growing inputs
of slave labor or the manure produced by the system of mixed husbandry. Exploitation
thus spurred an incipient awareness of environmental limits. No doubt the remedies
for soil exhaustion were often as shortsighted and cruel as the naked plunder that pre-
ceded them. Yet however flawed, these new worries reveal a double movement within
the experience of improvement. The exaggerated hopes of cornucopianism provoked a
new sensibility, which saw in the colonial natural world something to value and pro-
tect. “My vegetable love,” Andrew Marvell wrote, “should grow vaster than empires and
more slow.”27
NOTES
1. James I, A Proclamation to Restrain the Planting of Tobacco in England and Wales [1619].
2. James I, Proclamation to Restrain.
3. Francis Bacon, The essayes or counsels, civill and morall (1625), 207; Samuel Hartlib, Cornu
copia . . . (London, 1652), title page.
4. John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 69–70; Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in
the Lower South, 1730–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 27–28,
38–41, 135, 158–61; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: the Role of the Brit-
ish Royal Botanic Gardens, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 75;
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of
the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 68, 75, 103; Londa Schiebinger,
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2004), 5–8; William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47; Roy Porter, ed., The Cambridge His-
tory of Science: Eighteenth Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 826. Richard Grove uses the term mercantilism as well, though he stresses the phys-
iocratic tendency of natural history, see Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 190. Lisbet Koerner’s research in turn considers cameralist natural
history the “continental sister doctrine of mercantilism.” See Linnaeus: Nature and Nation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3.
5. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the
Natural Historians,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1342–63.
6. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 469–71, 478–79; Drayton, Nature’s Government,
xv.
7. Samuel Hartlib, Cornu copia, 5, 7–8; Hartlib, His Legacy of Husbandry (London, 1655),
69–71; Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western
Europe, 1350–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 311–14; Drayton,

Nature’s Government, 51–52; Charles Webster, Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and
Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of
Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 58 (quoting Plattes); Joan Thirsk, “Agricultural Innovations and their Diffu-
sion,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1640–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 5:547–58; Samuel Hartlib, A Brief Discourse Concerning the Accom-
plishment of our Reformation . . . (London, 1647), 45.
8. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (Cam-
9. Arthur Young, Political Essays concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London,
1772), 8; John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire; Joseph Banks, the British State,
and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 105–6, 118–20, 135–45.
10. Arthur Young, Observations on the Present State of the Waste Lands of Great Britain . . .
(London, 1773), 55; BL 35126, f. 8, 47, 64, 156; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Pas-
sage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf,
1986), ch. 2; Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–
1830 (London: Longman, 1989).
11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed.
R. H Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976),
2:572, 625–27.
12. John Gerard, Herball (London, 1597), 283–89; on identifications, see Katherine T. Kell,
“Folk Names of Tobacco” Journal of American Folklore 79, no. 314 (1966): 591–92; Mary
Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert “The Multinational Commodification of Tobacco
1492–1650: An Iberian Perspective,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia 1550–1624, ed. Peter
Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
13. James I, His Counterblast to Tobacco (London, 1672), 1–2; James I, A Proclamation to
Restrain the Planting of Tobacco in England and Wales; George Louis Beer, The Origins of
the British Colonial System 1578–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1908), 109–13; Karen Ordahl
Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 302–3; Charles
E. Hatch, “Mulberry Trees and Silkworms: Sericulture in Early Virginia,” Virginia Maga-
zine of History and Biography, 65, no. 1 (1957): 3–61. For English silkworms, see Joan Thirsk,
Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 118–30.
14. Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System, 405–8; James I, A proclamation, prohibiting the
planting, setting and sowing of tobacco in England and Ireland, according to an Act of Parlia-
ment herein specified (1660); C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: Eng-
land 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 255; Samuel Hartlib, His
Legacy of Husbandry wherein are bequeathed to the Common-wealth of England, not onely
Braband, and Flanders (London, 1655), 69.
15. Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System, 136, n. 5, 152, n. 3, 403; Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (hereafter DNB), s.v. “John Strafford”; Joan Thirsk, “New Crops and
their Diffusion: Tobacco-Growing in Seventeenth Century England,” in The Rural Economy
of England (London: Continuum, 1993); H. K. Roessingh, “Tobacco Growing in Holland in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Case Study of the Innovative Spirit of Dutch
Peasants,” Acta Historiae Neerlandicae 11 (1978): 14–54; Robert Read, The Complaint of
Many Freeholders [1653]; Compare Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
132 Knowledge
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002) 44; Charles Davenant, An essay
on the East-India-trade. By the author of The essay upon wayes and means, (London, 1696),
34.
16. Anon., Harry Hangman’s Honour . . . (London, 1655), 6–7; John Spreull, An Accompt Cur-
rent Betwixt Scotland and England Ballanced (Edinburgh, 1705), 1–2.
17. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:174; Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland (Chester, 1774), 270;
Spreuell, Accompt, 1–2; NLS MS 11198; T. M Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the To-
bacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1990), ch. 9, passim; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development
of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1986), 157.
18. David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change
since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 219–23, 395–405, Stede quoted
405; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 48–49; John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Envi-
ronmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003), 413, n. 2.
19. Edward Littleton, The groans of the plantations: or A true account of their grievous and
extreme sufferings by the heavy impositions upon sugar, and other . . . (London, 1689), 18.
Compare Anon., A letter to S.C.M. a member of Parliament from an inhabitant of the island
of Barbadoes (London: 1700), 2. Thanks to Abraham Robinson for the latter reference;
Watts, West Indies, 399–405; Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class
in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1972), 82–83, 222–23.
20. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, containing the history of the discovery set-
tlement, progress and present state of all the British colonies, &c.: Volume 2 (London: 1708),
140, 84, 89, 323.
21. Frere, A short history of Barbados, from its first discovery and settlement to the present time
(London, 1768), 114; Barbados, Acts of Assembly, (London, 1732–39), 396.
22. Joshua Gee, The trade and navigation of Great-Britain considered: shewing that the surest
way for a nation to increase in riches, is to prevent the . . . (London, 1729), 45–46, 22–23,
95–96, 58–59; DNB, s.v. “Joshua Gee.”
23. DNB, s.v. “Trustees of Georgia”; Benjamin Martyn, Some account of the designs of the
trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America (London, 1732), 3; Martyn, Reasons
for establishing the colony of Georgia, with regard to the trade of Great Britain, the increase
of our people, and the employment and . . . (London, 1733), 4, 5–11, 17, 37; James Edward
Oglethorpe, A New and accurate account of the provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia:
With many . . . observations on the trade, navigation and plantations of . . . (London, 1733),
55; Martyn, An impartial enquiry into the state and utility of the province of Georgia (Lon-
don, 1741), 14; Richard S. Dunn, “The Trustees of Georgia and the House of Commons,
1732–1752,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11, no. 4 (October 1954): 551–65; Judith
Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Boston, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001).
24. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic
Botany, 1735–1789 (Utrecht, A. Oosthoek’s Uitgeversmaatchaij N.V., 1971); Lisbet Koerner,
Linnaeus; Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from the Old Regime to the
Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and
the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
25. Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1756); Adam Anderson,
An historical and chronological deduction of the origin of commerce, 2 vols. (London, 1764);
Malachy Postlethwayt, The universal dictionary of trade and commerce, 3rd ed., 2 vols.
(London, 1766); Thomas Mortimer, A New and Complete Dictionary of Trade and Com-
merce, 2 vols. (London, 1766–77); John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain, 2 vols. (Lon-
don, 1774); Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth
Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February, 2000): 1–35; Joel Mokyr,
The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2009), 86.
26. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce”; Smith, Wealth of Na-
tions, 1:240–41, 245; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater
Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001 [1985]),
175–82.
27. “To His Coy Mistress,” in Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno
(Penguin, 2005), 51.
6
Cameralism
A German Alternative to Mercantilism
Andre Wakefield
This is a chapter about cameralism in a book about mercantilism, which immediately

raises the question: How are they related? A quick review of the standard reference
literature on the history of economic and political theory suggests that cameralism is a
German variant of mercantilism. “Cameralism—the science of state administration—
developed in a sense as a logical extension of Mercantilism”; “Cameralism is the spe-
cific version of mercantilism, taught and practised in the German principalities
(Kleinstaaten) in the 17th and 18th centuries”; “Cameralists, named after the German
royal treasure chamber, the Kammer, propounded an extreme form of mercantilism.”1
This tradition of interpretation stretches back to the nineteenth century, when histo-
rians of economic theory discovered broad lines of agreement between mercantilism
and cameralism. Scouring the cameralist literature for economic principles, historians
and economists found some of the same things that characterized mercantilist thought.
“According to the doctrines then prevalent,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “whatever tended
to heap up money or bullion in a country added to its wealth. Whatever sent the pre-
cious metals out of a country impoverished it. If a country possessed no gold or silver
mines, the only industry by which it could be enriched was foreign trade, being the
only one which could bring in money. . . . The commerce of the world was looked upon
as a struggle among nations.”2 Later, it seemed logical that the Germans had borrowed
from the English, because it squared with the narrative that located the beginnings of
the Industrial Revolution in England, while discovering relative backwardness farther
east in central and eastern Europe.3
Efforts to reconsider cameralism and its relationship to mercantilism date back more
than one hundred years. In 1909 the University of Chicago sociologist Albion Small
published a massive book, The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity. Small
wanted to make a point about economists and their shortcomings. He argued that
historians of economics, blinded by the anachronistic lens of economic theory, had
persistently misunderstood the historical and institutional context of early modern
134
135 Cameralism
Germany. Cameralists were not economic theorists, he insisted, but practical men ded-
icated to everyday state administration. Small had a good point, because the camera-
lists wrote a lot, and most of what they wrote did not involve what we would call
“economics.” Magdalena Humpert’s bibliography of cameralist literature included
more than fourteen thousand printed sources.4 Not many of those pages (numbering
in the millions) included general admonishments about selling to strangers. Open a
cameralist text and you will be more likely to find chapters describing lead smelting,
gardening, brewing beer, raising pigs, forestry, and hardrock mining than, say, general
principles of trade. These particulars have most often been ignored in accounts of cam-
eralism as a political or economic theory, but they highlight an important fact: cam-
eralism owed much to the development of the Kammer, a specialized collegial body
dedicated to administering the sovereign finances.
Following the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a new “secret sphere” of sovereign gover-
nance, centered around the princely finances, took root in the German lands.5 By the
seventeenth century most German territories, large and small, had developed Kam-
mern to manage the intimate affairs of princes, dukes, kings, and emperors. By the
second half of the seventeenth century, members of the Kammer began to be recog-
nized as a distinct group. People started calling them cameralists. Every cameralist text
looked to the Kammer. All that talk about mines and forests, minerals and manure—
usually ignored or passed over in the secondary literature—represented more than
some technical or scientific curiosity; it was a moral gesture designed to demonstrate
the attributes of the good cameralist. Every responsible fiscal official had to know his
way around a mine or a barley field, because those were the appropriate “ordinary”
sources of revenue for his prince, such as income from the mines. (“Extraordinary”
sources of revenue, such as direct taxation in times of crisis, were seen as illegitimate
and even despotic in many German territories.) Cameralism was thus, from its begin-
nings, structured by unstated assumptions that reflected the material and institutional
realities of fiscal administration in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire.
In the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) the German lands of the Holy Roman
Empire were a mess, devastated and depopulated. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia recog-
nized more than three hundred sovereign territories, ranging widely in size, wealth,
and power. For the next two hundred years the empire served, in the words of Mack
Walker, as an “incubator,” protecting smaller territories against aggressive incursions
from more powerful neighbors.6 The economic and political structure of the empire at
once protected and limited the states within it. Cameralists had to accept these limita-
tions, as the ruler of each territory became a kind of entrepreneur seeking to profit
from the natural and human resources in his territory.
Insofar as cameralists sought to systematize the daily work of fiscal administration,
they faced great obstacles because the logic of every Kammer was distinct, attuned to
136 Knowledge
the local resources of a particular territory or region. The Holy Roman Empire, with its
hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and bishoprics, presented a staggering
diversity of administrative structures, geography, and economic activities. Accord-
ingly, cameralists filled their books with endless detail about everything from pigs and
iron mines to forests and barley fields. This has led authors to suggest that the cameral
sciences were descriptive sciences, models of “practical reasoning,” which avoided the
utopian thinking of nineteenth-century economics.7 It was not always that straightfor-
ward, though. Sometimes, utopian thinking masqueraded as practical, utilitarian
knowledge. Cameralists liked to publish “practical” treatises about how to brew beer or
raise cattle, for example, and they often made it sound easy. But practical success in
agriculture or manufacturing was never easy, which is why failure was the rule when it
came to new state ventures. In this respect, cameralists were utopian pragmatists,
imagining fields full of healthy crops and fat cows, even as the people drank miserable
beer and struggled to feed themselves.
Cameralism became established as an academic science after 1727, when Frederick
William I of Prussia established university chairs in the cameral sciences at his univer-
sities in Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder.8 After this, cameralism increasingly resem-
bled “Hartlibian mercantilism” in its focus on natural philosophy, natural history, and
technology. Moreover, Hartlibian mercantilists and German cameralists certainly
shared the same stated commitment to the improvement of agriculture and manufac-
tures. This general commitment to improvement and utility, very much in the tradition
of Leibnizian schemes from the seventeenth century, might be said—again in very
general terms—to unify the Hartlibians with the cameralists.
But the German and Scandinavian lands would go very much their own direction,
focusing more on the constant, intensive improvement of very limited territorial
domains—what Sophus Reinert has called “Ersatz Imperialism”—than on the restless,
expansionist ambitions of colonial enterprises.9 In addition, German cameralists of the
eighteenth century were not really “Baconians,” inspired by the promise of inductive
sciences; rather, their aspirational “science” looked more like what we would call a pro-
fession. In other words, cameralists endeavored to fashion a fourth higher faculty, which
would take its place alongside law, medicine, and theology. These new professionals
wanted to secure academic posts, and they sought guaranteed positions in state service
for academically trained cameralists.10 If we want to label their typical style of Wissen-
schaft, it was probably Wolffian, at least at the beginning.11 But such a label misses the
point; the real challenge facing academic cameralists involved systematizing and publi-
cizing the “secret sphere” of the Kammer. In so doing, they became propagandists for
the fiscal machinery of the German territories in which they lived and worked.
German cameralists of the mid-eighteenth century, therefore, did indeed share
something essential with the early mercantilists: status anxiety. As Thomas Leng points
137 Cameralism
out in chapter 4, the discourse that emerged in England after the commercial depres-
sion of the 1620s called into question the trustworthiness of merchants. Gerard Maly-
nes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun each struggled to overcome his compromised
position as a merchant in the debates over how “to determine the public interest in
commerce.” Moreover, such questions spilled over into anxiety over reputation. Mun,
for example, argued that merchants deserved more respect. Despite the considerable
skill demanded of every successful merchant—knowledge of foreign languages, arith-
metic, penmanship, navigation, weights and measures, customs and tolls, and foreign
currencies—merchants suffered from disregard and even contempt:
It is true indeed that many Merchants here in England finding less encouragement
given to their profession than in other Countreys and seeing themselves not so well
esteemed as their Noble Vocation requireth, and according to the great consequence
of the same, doe not therefore labour to attain unto the excellence of their profes-
sion, neither is it practiced by the Nobility of this Kingdom as it is in other States
from the Father to the Son throughout their generations, to the great encrease of
their wealth, and maintenance of their names and families: Whereas the memory of
our richest Merchants is suddenly extinguished; the Son being left rich, scorneth the
profession of his Father, conceiving more honor to be a Gentleman (although but in
name) to consume his estate in dark ignorance and excess, than to follow the steps
of his Father as an Industrious Merchant to maintain and advance his Fortunes.12
Like these early mercantilists, German cameralists had problems with reputation.
Wilhelm Freiherr von Schröder, a canonical cameralist writer, wrote some unflattering
things about “Kammeralisten.” They were like wild pigs in a garden, destroying every-
thing in their efforts to fill the prince’s coffers with money. They were also prone to
dangerous fiscal maneuvering and innovation—imposts, sale of offices, monopolies.
These tricks had made cameralists universally “hated” and “suspect.” 13 As late as 1755
Johann von Justi complained about the bad reputation of cameralists, writing that “in
various lands those who now hold the most prominent state offices were once lackeys,
runners, scribes, common hunters, small-time collectors, and the like.” This had led to
disorder and corruption, because so-called practical cameralists lacked “a philosoph-
ical head, the accompanying insight into the whole, and the gift of coherence and good
categories.” “In general,” Justi explained, “those cameralists who have merely been
reared in the affairs of state almost all share the failing that they are too much beholden
to the interest of their lord.”14 Seeking only to please the prince, practical cameralists
neglected the true interests of state and sovereign.
As we have seen, Frederick William I established university chairs in the cameral
sciences almost fifty years before Adam Smith defined the “mercantile system” as a
138 Knowledge
doctrine whose object was “to enrich the country by an advantageous balance of
trade.”15 Academic cameralism, the effort to systematize and institutionalize the educa-
tion of state officials, arose largely out of his frustrations.16 The king made a habit of
screaming obscenities at his officials. He called them “fools, stupid devils, idiots, dogs,
school boys, crooks, thieves, scoundrels, rebels, rascals,” and many other obscene, un-
translatable names.17 Frederick William wanted more obedience, less disputation, and
more economy. He wanted his fiscal officials (Kammerbedienten) to know something
about agriculture and manufacture, mining and forestry, accounting and commerce.
He thought that Prussian officials behaved like “ABC-schoolboys” when confronted
with such subjects, forced to learn their jobs from the very beginning.18 The king
resolved to establish lectures on “Cameralia, Oeconomia and Polizeisachen” at Prussian
universities.19 “To that end,” declared a cabinet order from Berlin, the king had decided
to establish a “special Profession, so that students could acquire a good foundation in
these sciences before they are employed in state service.”20 The first “Professor of Cam-
eralia” would be Simon Peter Gasser, a Prussian War and Domains Councilor. Students
at the University of Halle were encouraged to attend his lectures, and those who
received good recommendations from Gasser could expect special consideration when
the time came to appoint new officials. The authorities in Berlin sketched an outline of
topics for Gasser’s lectures. Frederick William’s “profession” of cameralism would
demand knowledge of Prussia’s productive potential and the complicated landscape of
its rights and privileges. Future cameralists would need to learn about royal domains,
agriculture, grazing, how to draft inventories of fields and animals, brewing, regalian
rights in general, mines and salt works, coins, postal privileges, taxes, forests and fish-
eries, “town and police affairs in general,” the excise, guilds and artisans, factories, “the
brew-nourishment in towns and that its decline mostly has to do with bad hops,” how
to curtail legal processes, and the maintenance of buildings.21
When the chancellor of the University of Halle, Johann Peter von Ludewig, delivered
his inaugural address in honor of the new profession, he spent most of the speech talk-
ing about other things.22 He went on at length about Frederick William’s soldiers, who
were exceptional for their “size, strength, and beauty.” Soldiers in the foremost com-
panies were “three to six inches over six feet.” Their “well-formed bodies” exhibited a
measurable “symmetry of limbs,” and their drills were so polished that they seemed to
be “executed by machines.” These “almost giant-like creatures” had been plucked from
all the regions of Europe. They had excellent weapons, fine uniforms, and regular pay.
They observed the most exact order and discipline. They were the pride of Prussia and
its king.23
The maintenance of some fifty thousand soldiers (big ones) was expensive, and Fred-
erick William had reorganized Prussia’s fiscal administration to provide the money
necessary to support them.24 The creation of the General Directory in 1723, which
139 Cameralism
united the direction of Kammersachen—taxes, domain lands, regalia, etc.—under a

single authority, aimed to avoid the constant battles over jurisdiction that had plagued
the former administrative regime.25 Ludewig saw in these reforms part of a larger plan,
which extended to the state’s farms, manufactories, mines, orphanages, workhouses,
prisons, academies, and universities. These institutions, established and directed by the
state, were the “nurseries” of strong armies and productive populations. Prussia’s in-
habitants would grow the food, manufacture the weapons, store the saltpeter, produce
the clothing, and mine the metals necessary to support a thriving army. Fiscal officials,
in turn, were the directors of this productive machine. They made sure that the people
were industrious and occupied, and that the territory produced as much as possible
and imported as little as possible; they also monitored every taler of income and
expenditure. Such tasks demanded elaborate technologies of oversight and control—
tax registers, excise books, maps, standardized weights and measures, and detailed sta-
tistics about the population and its activities.26 “Good police,” the ideal arrangement of
people and resources, was the purpose of their efforts. “The Prussian style of police”
bragged Ludewig, “has been imitated by many European courts; many princes have
taken it as a model and organized their fiscal councils according to it.”27
The professorial chairs established at Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1727 en-
listed universities in the larger effort to sustain Prussia’s hungry armies. Useful profes-
sors would increase state revenues by systematizing the work of the Kammer. They
would make a science of it. This was the dream behind the cameral sciences, but not
everyone believed in it. Ludewig himself felt the need to address the critics directly.
But what should one say about the general clamor among those who ridicule and
scorn all books on economy (Wirthschafftsbücher) under the pretense: experience
makes a Wirth [manager]? If this opinion stayed in the cow shed or in the barn next
to the flails, then one could regard it with contempt. . . . But the new Professor of
Oeconomy will have to work at steering this misleading doctrine toward truth and
first principles, because the highest directors and members of the fiscal Kollegien
also lapse into the same wrong-headed opinion.28
Many influential officials dismissed the cameral sciences as a waste of time, prefer-
ring instead the traditional mix of legal study and on-the-job training. Cameralist re-
formers, however, argued that the cameral sciences would generate profits for the state,
that one could educate skilled cameralists at universities, and that professors of the
cameral sciences could be useful (nützlich).
After the establishment of the first academic chairs in the cameral sciences, academic
cameralists throughout the Holy Roman Empire sensed an opportunity to establish
themselves. We should not imagine these men as members of a political economic
140 Knowledge
school, like the physiocrats, or as some early modern version of the Chicago School of
Economics. Cameralist reformers had bigger dreams. They imagined their subject not
as a discipline, such as history or mathematics, but as an entirely new academic profes-
sion. Cameralism, in other words, would be modeled on law and medicine. Johann von
Justi, the most prominent of cameralist proselytizers, was very clear about this in his
groundbreaking 1755 cameralist textbook, Staatswirthschaft. He suggested that the
existing professional faculties of theology, law, and medicine be supplemented by a
cameralist faculty.29 The new professors would need to be skilled in areas ranging from
forestry and manufactures to taxes and chemistry. “The professor of chemistry would
be chosen so that he could lecture on assaying and smelting, and not just the prepara-
tion of medicaments . . . the teacher of mechanics would be able to lecture on mining
machinery, and the professor of Naturkunde [natural history] would need adequate
knowledge about the essence of ores and of deposits.” There would be six professors in
all, “to which one might add a teacher of civil and military engineering.” Not only
would this new faculty train skilled future officials, but it would offer “advice for the
many institutions and undertakings of the state, for which one must often turn to for-
eigners at great expense.”30
Justi’s imagined faculty would cultivate what he called “universal cameralists.” The
official who had learned his craft through experience alone “could become a good par-
ticular cameralist in this or that part of statekeeping.” But he would never become a
good universal cameralist. “He will never walk securely because of a lack of unified
principles. He will stagger at every event and grasp at doubtful decisions.” Unable to
see the whole, or the myriad connections between the different parts of that whole, the
particular cameralist would do as much harm as good with his shortsighted improve-
ments. The harmful projects frequently embraced at courts throughout the Empire, for
example, testified to a lack of good universal cameralists. “These projects are so often
absurd, and conflict so obviously with all reasonable police and cameral principles,”
argued Justi, that anyone acquainted with a good system of cameral sciences would
reject them out of hand. Scientific cameralists, those trained at universities according
to a unified and consistent body of principles, would not make such mistakes. “What
could be more indispensable for the state,” concluded Justi, “than accomplished uni-
versal cameralists? The well-being of the state depends very much on that.”31
Justi’s Staatswirthschaft began with an extended manifesto about the epistemological
importance of the cameral sciences. His preface posited a pecking order of knowledge.
“Human knowledge is necessary, or it is only useful, or it is merely amusing and
charming.” Metaphysics, astronomy, literature, and philology counted as merely
charming and amusing, not suited to the proper business of a university. If one mea-
sured the value of a science purely according to its charm or interest, then the “stupid-
est kind of alchemy, chiromancy and other foolish sciences would be on a par with the
141 Cameralism
most useful knowledge.” The useless sciences were selfish, and of little use to anyone
but the scholar himself.32 “The metaphysician, when his imagination has penetrated
into the primordial corpuscles of substance, into the bond between body and soul—
and perhaps even farther—believes that he is engaged in the most splendid science.
And he forgets that these are merely his fairy tales . . . and that the origin of corporeal
things and the essence of creation will always remain hidden from human knowledge.”
Useless subjects like metaphysics were thus the fruit of unhealthy imaginations. Iso-
lated scholars, alone in their studies and divorced from the civil society that sustained
them, created fancy systems of no interest to anyone but themselves. In Justi’s opinion,
much of the philosophical faculty wasted time and money with its “charming and
amusing” sciences. Some, like natural history and chemistry, might be useful, provided
that they were harnessed to the needs of the state.33 While useless professors would
merely increase knowledge, the useful ones would increase the productive forces of
civil society.34 Universities, as “public institutions of the state,” had a duty to encourage
and support such useful sciences; by implication they also had a duty to abandon use-
less sciences.35 Ministers and state officials might regard scholars as “useless people,”
but the blame lay not with the officials but with professors:
Can one blame the sovereign or the highest ministers for promoting those peo-
ple who have the necessary capabilities to conduct the affairs of state, capabilities
which one seeks in vain among the learned? My God! What could a regent or a
prime minister do with the most profound metaphysician, the greatest Meßkün-
stler, the most famous astronomer, or the most thorough archaeologist in the busi-
ness of state?36
Most professors applied themselves to the sciences of least use to the state. The bad
reputation of the university was the fault of its professors. Only radical reform could
restore that reputation.
It has become commonplace to link the development of cameralism to Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz. In this way, it is possible to distinguish the cameral sciences from
mercantilist doctrines according to distinctive discursive traditions: the Germans, it is
supposed, followed the Leibnizian-Wolffian path, whereas the English followed
Hobbes.37 It is important, however, to recognize that many midcentury cameralists
such as Justi were reacting against the traditions represented by Leibniz and Wolff.
Justi made a name for himself in Berlin by attacking the monadology in 1748, and he
did it with intent, hoping to distance himself politically from all things Leibnizian.38
Seven years later he was mounting a full-scale attack on “useless sciences,” with Leib-
nizian metaphysics as the prime target. It may be true, as Mack Walker argued, that
there was something Leibnizian in the effort to find meaning and harmony within the
142 Knowledge
baffling political diversity of the Holy Roman Empire. Cameralism, he argued, “ac-
cepted the existence of all the discrete parts of German civil society, each with a set of
detailed qualities and rules peculiarly its own, and worked from the assumption that if
all of them could be comprehended at once an essential harmony among them would
emerge. That was a metaphysical assumption and even, to begin with, a religious ex-
pression of faith.”39 By midcentury, though, the school of aggressive cameralist reform,
spearheaded by Justi, had consciously distanced itself from the German university and
Leibnizian metaphysics. Cameralist reformers sought not only to train a new genera-
tion of state administrators; they also intended to reform knowledge itself.
Even as he distanced himself from useless professors, Justi had to make the case that
useful science was possible. He thus insisted that the cameral sciences were “actual
sciences” that “can be developed in a proper sequence from general principles.” Merely
“practical cameralists,” those who had acquired their knowledge through experience
alone, would never make great officials. “They will be like the physicians and jurists
who have learned their sciences artisan-like, as a mere rote exercise, and remain pa-
thetic bunglers their entire lives.” These unscientific cameralists might be able to imi-
tate and repeat prior experience, but in Justi’s view they remained profoundly passive
and unproductive, incapable of creating beneficial new measures or institutions.40
As academic cameralists tried to make a case for the importance of this new learned
profession, satirists ridiculed the notion that one could make a science of the Kammer.
“Who learns its first principles? Who teaches them? And how necessary is it to become
a good cameralist? Not any more necessary than it is for learning a trade. One only has
to know the sources from which to draw money; one only has to know a few formulas.”41
This was the cynical view of the cameral sciences, expressed here by the pseudony-
mous author “Maria Machiavel.” For Machiavel and other critics, academic cameralists
were no more than propagandists for the fiscal police state, seeking to “enrich the
Kammer under cover of the general good.”42
Behind the dry recitation of cameralist principles in hundreds of textbooks, then, was
a roiling debate about what it meant to be a cameralist. It was a struggle not so much
over abstract principles of wealth creation as it was over professional identity. When
“aspiring cameralists” flocked to places like Göttingen and Lautern to hear lectures in
the cameral sciences, they were not just studying economic policies and the principles
of good police. They were learning how to behave as members of the Kammer. It was not
enough to know about budgeting and accounting; one had to be fashionable and courtly
as well. The classic markers of scholarly culture—knowledge of Latin, learned disputa-
tion, reference to authoritative sources, reading the textbook from a lectern—were
rejected in favor of more gentlemanly approaches. Justi, when he arrived in Göttingen,
was very specific about this. “I have employed a special teaching style in my courses.” He
would, contrary to common practice, lecture for only thirty minutes. “Then I got down
143 Cameralism
from my lectern and, standing together with my listeners, I spent the rest of the hour in
free and sociable conversation about the lecture material.”43
It would be a mistake, then, to view the cameral sciences as nothing more than a set
of political economic principles. For Justi, as for other cameralist reformers, the new
profession represented a new way of life and a new epistemology. One could not simply
teach students to balance the books and learn about revenue sources; equally impor-
tant was the need to behave like a proper servant of the Kammer. One had to know how
gentlemen acted at court, how to make polite conversation, and how to avoid being a
tedious pedant. Cameralism was thus a perfect fit with the new model universities of
eighteenth-century Germany, notably Halle and Göttingen. Gerlach Adolf von Münch-
hausen, Hanoverian minister and first Curator of the University of Göttingen, sought
from the very beginning to attract young noblemen and wealthy students to his uni-
versity. Like the ideal classroom of Justi’s reveries, Münchhausen’s university aimed to
attract fashionable and wealthy students. Münchhausen focused on building nice
streets, coffee houses, and impressive academic buildings as a way to attract the right
kind of student. He did not want the poor theology students, reclusive Latinate profes-
sors, boozers and carousers, or the general unpleasantness of struggling little univer-
sities in places like Helmstedt, Duisburg, or Greifswald. Like Justi, Münchhausen
dedicated himself to useful knowledge. But for Münchhausen, utility meant the ability
to attract wealthy students to Göttingen from around the Holy Roman Empire and
even from England. For this, one would need famous professors and fashionable
knowledge. From this perspective the cameral sciences, fashionable sciences designed
to appeal to wealthy noblemen, were perfect. Münchhausen brought Justi to Göttingen
in 1755, the same year in which his Staatswirthschaft, the most influential of cameralist
textbooks, appeared in print.44
Cameralism, as imagined by Justi and Münchhausen, was not a stand-alone science
like economics or sociology; it was a system of professional education. During the
latter half of the eighteenth century, reformers worked to create cameralist faculties
throughout the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. In Göttingen Münchhausen worked
for decades to build a system of “auxiliary sciences” that would create the structure
necessary for a cameralist faculty. This involved, most of all, building a system of nat-
ural sciences that could serve to train aspiring cameralists. Münchhausen ran into
trouble with the other higher faculties—notably law and medicine—in his efforts to
harness auxiliary sciences in the service of cameralism. Eventually, though, Münch-
hausen built a system of sciences, ranging from “economic botany” to “technology,”
which served as auxiliary sciences to train future state servants.
Göttingen was not alone. In Lautern, two hundred miles to the southwest, Friedrich
Casimir Medicus founded a free-standing Cameralist Academy (Kameral-Hohe-Schule).
Hoping to avoid the stubborn traditional faculties and their privileges, Medicus decided
144 Knowledge
to sidestep them altogether. By appointing permanent professors to teach subjects like

chemistry, economic botany, technology, and agriculture, Medicus finally realized what
Justi had imagined twenty years earlier in Göttingen. Lautern’s curriculum is worth ex-
amining in some detail, because it represents the fullest concrete expression of camera-
lism as a professional regime of training founded in the natural sciences.
Medicus divided the entire curriculum into three parts: foundational knowledge, the
doctrine of sources (Quellenlehre), and actual state administration. Medicus believed that
the success of the entire system rested on the so-called basic sciences (Grund Wissen-
schaften). These included natural history, pure and applied mathematics, physics, chem-
istry, and mineralogy. It was crucial, he believed, to have one or two professors dedicated
entirely to the natural sciences, because they were the “true foundation upon which all
the knowledge of the future state administrator rests, and without which he will never be
able to make one sure step forward. One must firmly guarantee that no young man who
has failed to study these with zeal is allowed to pass on to the Science of Sources.”45
These so-called source sciences undertook to classify and examine all sources of
wealth within the state. Medicus divided them into agriculture, forestry, mining, and
trade. Although he used a new term here, Medicus was referring to the same group of
descriptive and classificatory subjects that Johann Beckmann had pioneered in Göt-
tingen under the name of Technologie. Medicus warned that the source sciences should
have no more than one teacher, or one risked the fate of the “French economists” (i.e.,
the physiocrats) who had improperly raised one part, that of agriculture, above the
rest. The true Staatswirth, by contrast, preferred no one part to the others, for he had
to direct the whole—mines, manufactures, forests, and farms.46
After thorough study of the natural sciences and the source sciences, candidates could
move to the final stage of training. They were now prepared for initiation into the mys-
teries of state administration proper, which also included three parts: police science,
financial science, and Staatswirthschaft. Police science, Medicus explained, would teach
students how to direct all the different occupations of civic life, using the knowledge
gathered by the source sciences to guide civil society in the best possible way. Financial
science, meanwhile, taught how to collect money from civil society to support the court,
the military, and the government. Financial science, like the science of beekeeping, con-
cerned itself primarily with extraction. It instructed how one should collect revenue
without harming the source of that revenue. Those candidates who survived the entire
course of instruction—foundational sciences, source sciences, police science, financial
science—would be allowed to hear lectures on “true” state administration. This final
course, which drew on all the others, would instruct young cameralists in the art of
governing. Medicus wanted to restrict access to the later courses; he insisted that stu-
dents in Bavaria and the Palatinate should hear the entire course of lectures or they
should hear none at all. Every high-ranking fiscal official would be trained in chemistry,
mineralogy, physics, mathematics, mining, agriculture, forestry, and manufactures.47
145 Cameralism
Not everybody shared Medicus’s enthusiasm for the cameral sciences. By the end of
the eighteenth century, the tide had begun to turn. What seemed exciting and fashion-
able at midcentury now felt a little backward and out of date. The clearest sign of this
shift appeared in debates over naming. By 1784, when Medicus was urging the Cam-
eralist College to change its name, the connection to the Kammer had lost much of its
appeal.
Names are supposed to be meaningless. But experience convinces me of the con-

trary. In Lautern this academy was called “cameralist.” And since one interprets
Kammerale as finance, so one thought that it was designed only to instruct high
fiscal officials, which is an extremely dangerous opinion. The fiscal official and the
state administrator (Staatswirth) are two very different people. The former thinks
only about the increase and maintenance of the princely income, and thus too often
ignores the welfare of the land. The fiscal official must therefore be subject to the
state administrator and must be guided by him. This merely inapt designation of
the academy has generated a completely mistaken impression of it with the public,
which has caused me much trouble. The refutation of it, which has not even suc-
ceeded, has cost me much effort.48
Changing the name would not be enough. By the time of the French Revolution,
cameralists were in full retreat, and the cameral sciences had become an object of rid-
icule. One satire, “Letter from the Cantor in L** to the Author of A** zu ** about the
Study of Economic and Cameral Sciences,” took the form of a letter from a concerned
father to a well-known university professor.49 The father, a choirmaster, had sent his
son Wilhelm to study law at the university. Soon, however, the young man became
enamored of the cameral sciences, and he studied “technology,” a clear reference to
Johann Beckmann and the University of Gottingen. After learning about “technology”
from Wilhelm, the father wondered how it could ever be of use:
You could have studied farming (Oekonomie) at our neighbor Klausmann’s . . . and
why are you troubling yourself over artisans (Handwerker) when you have a higher
calling and could someday be a town clerk? I don’t see how you can call some-
thing a science which consists only of skillful knacks. Science must be capable of
demonstration through the Wolffian method, and demonstration is proof through
indisputable grounds. The shoemaker, for example, doesn’t cut his leather accord-
ing to indisputable and unchangeable grounds, but today this way, and tomorrow
in another way, according to the demands of fashion.50
The choirmaster’s dismay increased as he learned about Wilhelm’s entire cameralist

course of study—botany, popular medicine, commercial science, mining science, forest
146 Knowledge
science, and many other strange new sciences with Greek names— “so that by the end I
was astonished by everything that a young person has to learn these days.”
When Wilhelm completed his studies and returned home, his father sent him to the
old town clerk for an examination. But the old clerk declined to examine Wilhelm,
noting that the young man had clearly applied himself to “galante Studia.” “You are
mistaken sir,” the choirmaster replied, “my son has studied all possible sciences and
speaks more about dung and potatoes than about writing verse.” “Yes yes,” replied the
clerk, “I call everything “galante Studia,” which doesn’t belong ad praxin judicialem.”
Unable to find work, Wilhelm began performing agricultural, botanical, and techno-
logical experiments in the family’s fields, in the garden, and around the house. “The
Ökonom who has learned only through experience,” Wilhelm explained to his father,
“will never make great advances.” Rather, those who had acquired a solid theory of
agriculture, who had studied natural history and the other auxiliary sciences, and who
had gathered knowledge of foreign things would succeed. Wilhelm introduced new
planting methods, purchased a wood-saving stove, suggested stall-feeding for the
cattle, and sought to introduce woad and tobacco to the family’s fields. Unfortunately,
the innovations proved disastrous—the crops died, and the wood-saving stove smoked
out the house.
After these failures, the choirmaster dispatched his young cameralist to a wise old
magistrate, a good friend and relative, to learn about administrative practice. But two
months later the magistrate sent him home again, explaining that Wilhem had little
notion about the theory of jurisprudence and, even worse, found the work too dry and
boring to apply himself to it. “Judicial practice,” explained the old man, “can never be as
easy or amusing as a journal, a poem, or a philosophical-seeming treatment about the
wonder of nature.” His message was clear: Wilhelm had been spoiled by the cameral
sciences. “It is not the first time in the last ten years,” he added, “that young people have
come to me who, despite all talent and industriousness, are of no use in the business of
civic life.” Especially useless were those who had applied themselves to the “so-called
cameral sciences,” a course of study, he explained, which had become fashionable and
increasingly prominent since the end of the Seven Years’ War (aka French and Indian
War, 1756–63). The old judge suggested that the situation at universities was out of con-
trol and that the influence of the cameral sciences was to blame. Students now had to
learn not only speculative philosophy, history, and languages but also “jurisprudence,
pure and applied mathematics, physics, universal natural history, chemistry, mineralogy,
botany, mining science, commercial science, forest science, agriculture, technology,
police science, general and particular politics, statistics, cameral sciences narrowly
understood, and God knows what else.” For Wilhelm, it was too late. When his father
finally sent him to a neighboring estate to become a “practical farmer,” he lasted only
four weeks. “Sir, take back your son!” the estate manager demanded. “He’s ruining my
147 Cameralism
entire estate. He knows everything better . . . though he can’t even work a plow.” In addi-
tion to ruining the crops again, Wilhelm had stabbed two cows to death while experi-
menting with a novel Swiss cure. Finally convinced that his son’s fashionable knowledge
was as useless as all the expensive technological books and models—French plows,
Dutch windmills, and other such things—acquired at the university, the choirmaster had
one last request. “Couldn’t my son, who has heard all the cameralist lecture courses twice
over, and taken careful notes, earn his bread as a private teacher and eventually secure a
professorship at your university? . . . [H]e really does know an amazing amount, just not
exactly what one needs to become a town clerk or an Amtmann [official].”
Contemporaries would have recognized Johann Beckmann and the University of
Göttingen as the intended targets of this satirical critique, but it could have applied to
Medicus and the Lautern system as well. By 1789 cameralism, as an academic subject,
had lost its way. The elaborate system of sciences that had taken shape since 1727 no
longer made sense, and its many claims to usefulness no longer seemed credible. By
1800 cameralism was essentially dead. That is not to say that it was eradicated all at once;
professors wrote books and gave lectures on the Kameralwissenschaften for decades
after that. But the assumptions and structures that had given life to long treatises about
metallurgical chemistry, practical botany, royal lease-holding, mine surveying, and sil-
ver assaying simply faded away. The cameral sciences survived on as vestiges of a bygone
time and culture, until that last professor gave that last lecture—without really knowing
why—on the importance of mineralogical chemistry to the general welfare. Unlike mer-
cantilism, in all its forms and varieties, cameralism lived and died as a learned profes-
sion in the lands of eighteenth-century Germany. The mature cameralist doctrine of the
Lautern academy, with its focus on source sciences (e.g., mining, agriculture, animal
husbandry, and horticulture) bears a striking resemblance to the Hartlibian mercan-
tilism described in other chapters in this volume. We might, therefore, end where we
began, concluding that German cameralism represented a form of Hartlibian mercan-
tilism. But that would be a mistake. Hartlibian mercantilism lacked the academic and
fiscal structures that supported German cameralism. For that reason the two doctrines,
written for different purposes and meant for different audiences, carried different
meanings. We should not let surface similarities blur those essential distinctions.
NOTES
1. Mark Perlman and Charles R. McCann Jr., The Pillars of Economic Understanding: Ideas
and Traditions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 127; Horst Claus Reckten-
wald, “Cameralism,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, ed. John Newell,
Murray Milgate, Peter Newman, and Robert H. I. Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1987),
1:313–14; Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith (Auburn, AL: Ludwig
von Mises Institute, 1995), 492.
148 Knowledge
2. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: Parker and Son, 1852), 1:2–3.
3. This argument takes many forms and persists up to the present. See, for example, Martin
Malia, Russia under Western Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jerry
Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 97–98. For
a fundamental critique about this kind of thinking from the perspective of German history,
see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society
and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
4. Magdalene Humpert, Bibliographie der Kameralwissenschaften (Köln: Schroeder, 1937).
5. Ulrich Heß, Geheimer Rat und Kabinett in den ernestinischen Staaten Thüringens (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1962), 1–161; Hintze, “Hof und Landesverwaltung in der Mark Brandenburg unter
Joachim II,” in Hohenzollern-Jahrbuch 10:138–69; Eduard Rosenthal, “Die Behördenorgan-
isation Kaiser Ferdinands I, das Vorbild der Verwaltungsorganisation in den deutschen
Territorien,” Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 69 (1887): 51–94; Melle Klinkenborg, “Die
kurfürstliche Kammer und die Begründung des Geheimen Rats in Brandenburg,” Histo-
rische Zeitschrift 114 (1915): 437–88; Gerhard Oestreich, “Das persönliche Regiment der
deutschen Fürsten am Beginn der Neuzeit,”in Die Welt als Geschichte I (1935): 218–37.
6. Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648–1871
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 11–33.
7. See, for example, David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of
State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
8. Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750–1840
9. Sophus Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 238–45.
10. Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4–5, 76.
11. Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a towering figure in the German lands of the mid-
eighteenth century. His mathematical method of demonstration in philosophy had great
impact across a range of subjects in the German-speaking world. Despite his influence,
Johann von Justi had rejected Wolffian approaches by the 1750s. (See pp. 12–13.)
12. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade or, The Ballance of our Forraign Trade
is the Rule of our Treasure (London: Thomas Clark, 1664), 9–10.
13. Wilhelm Freiherr von Schröder, Fürstliche Schatz- und Rent-Kammer nebst seinem Tractat
vom Goldmachen wie auch vom Ministrissimo oder Ober-Staats-Bedienten. (Leipzig, 1713),
11–13, 27–30.
14. Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1755), 1:v.
15. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2 vols., 1:429–51. See
Tribe, Governing Economy, 39–44.
16. Acta Borussica: Denkmäler der preußischen Staatsverwaltung im 18. Jahrhundert. (Berlin:
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1892-1936), 4:274–75, 312–13; Erhard Dittrich, Die
deutschen und österreichischen Kameralisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-
schaft, 1974), 81–82.
17. Some of these insults are collected in Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Au-
tocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1958), 57–59; Acta Borussica, 3:453.
18. Simon Peter Gasser, Einleitung zu den Oeconomischen, Politischen und Cameral-Wissenschaften
(Halle: Waysenhaus, 1729); Dittrich, Kameralisten, 81–82.
149 Cameralism
19. See Acta Borussica, 2:216–20; Wilhelm Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universität zu
Halle (Berlin: Dummler, 1894), 1:144; Wilhelm Stieda, Die Nationalökonomie als Univer-
sitätswissenschaft (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906), 17–22. There is a substantial literature on the
meaning and use of these terms. As academic cameralism developed during the eighteenth
century, they were repeatedly defined and redefined. For a good overview of these terms
and their meanings, see Lindenfeld, Practical Imagination, 15–18. Also Hans Maier, Die
ältere Deutsche Staats-und Verwaltungslehre, 2nd. ed. (Munich: Beck, 1980), 116–20, 151–64,
201–7; Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, “Polizei,” Economy and Society 9 (1980): 172–96; and Marc
Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 3, 43–69.
20. Acta Borussica, 2:216.
21. Acta Borussica, 2:218–20.
22. The chairs were formally established in July of 1727. Chancellor Ludewig delivered his ad-
dress in October of that year. Johann Peter von Ludewig, Die, von Sr. Königlichen Majestät,
unserm allergnädigsten Könige, auf dero Universität Halle, am 14 Julii 1727 Neu angerichtete
Profession, in Oeconomie, Policey, und Cammer-Sachen (Halle: Neue Buchhandlung, 1727),
165–66.
23. Ludewig, Neu angerichtete Profession, 33–36.
24. Ludewig estimated the number at around 100,000. The actual figure in 1727 probably fell
somewhere between 38,000 (the size of the army after the peace treaties of 1715 and 1720)
and 70,000 (the size of the army at his death in 1740). See Kurt G. Jeserich, Hans Pohl,
Georg-Cristoph von Unruh, eds., Deutsche Vewaltungsgeschichte, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Deut-
sche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983–88), 1:902–3; Ludewig, Neu angerichtete Profession, 35.
25. See Jeserich et al., Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, 1:899–902; Acta Borussica, 3:659 ff.
26. Ludewig, Neu angerichtete Profession, 57.
27. Ludewig, Profession, 113.
28. Ludewig, Profession, 165–66.
29. Many eighteenth-century cameralists laid out plans for cameral faculties and academies,
especially after 1760, but Justi was an early proponent of institutionalization. Daniel Gott-
fried Schreber’s 1763 outline for a course of study in the economic sciences served as a
model for the first cameral academy, the Kameral-Hohe-Schule in Lautern that opened in
1774. See Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Dis-
course, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 91–118.
30. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:xxxi–xxxiv.
31. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:xxvi–xxix.
32. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:ix–xi.
33. Cf. Henry Lowood, Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlight-
enment (New York: Garland, 1991), 6–7.
34. See Johann von Justi, Policey-Amts Nachrichten, (Göttingen, 1756), 89; Carl Hinrichs, Pre-
ussentum und Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971), 359.
35. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:ix–xi.
36. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:xxii–xxiii.
37. Cf. Perlman and McCann Jr., Pillars of Economic Understanding, 138.
38. See Andre Wakefield, “Police Chemistry,” Science in Context 13 (2000): 231–67.
39. Walker, German Home Towns,145.
40. Justi, Staatswirthschaft, 1:xxvi.
41. [Maria Machiavel], Der volkommene Kameraliste: Entworfen von Maria Machiavel aus der
Italienischen Urschrift des Verfassers ins Teutsche übersetzt von U. (Frankfurt, 1764), 60.
42. Der volkommene Kameraliste, 22.
150 Knowledge
43. Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Abhandlung von den Mitteln die Erkenntniß in den
Oeconomischen und Cameral-Wissenschaften dem gemeinen Wesen recht nützlich zu
machen (Göttingen, 1755).
44. On Göttingen and Münchhausen, see Johann Stephan Pütter, Versuch einer academischen
Gelehrten-Geschichte der Georg-Augustus Universität zu Göttingen, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1765
and 1788); Walter Buff, Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Münchhausen als Gründer der Univer-
sität Göttingen (Göttingen: Kaestner, 1937); and Wakefield, Disordered Police State, 49–80.
45. Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (GLAKarlsruhe), Abt. 205, Nr. 1115, “Plan for Ingolstadt,”
reprinted in Wakefield, Disordered Police State, 148–63.
46. Oskar Poller, Schicksal der Ersten Kaiserslauterer Hochschule und ihrer Studierenden (Lud-
wigshafen: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Pfälzisch-Rheinische Familienkunde, 1979), 52–53; GLA-
Karlsruhe, “Plan for Ingolstadt.”
47. “Plan for Ingolstadt.”
48. “Plan for Ingolstadt.”
49. Anon., “Schreiben des Kantors in L** an den Verfasser A** zu ** über das Studium der
ökonomischen und Cammeralwissenschaften,” Oekonomische Weisheit und Thorheit, Part
I (1789): 1–46.
50. Anon., “Schreiben,” 6–7. Johann Beckmann coined the term “Technologie” and published
the first textbook on the subject, Anleitung zur Technologie, in 1777. The fictitious letter,
addressed as it was to the “author of A** zu **” and concerned with the new science of
“Technologie,” was aimed at Beckmann and the University of Göttingen.
part three
Institutions
7
Corporations
Humanism and Elizabethan
Political Economy
Henry S. Turner
Classically, the notion of mercantilism as an economic policy and practice is insepa-

rable from three ways of characterizing what we think of as the “political” domain in
early modern Europe, which I will define initially as the ideas, institutions, and prac-
tices that concern enduring collective organization on a large scale. First, early modern
ideas about political belonging are marked by the emergence of national concepts and
self-identifications. These national concepts are secured through cultural representa-
tions across many forms and genres; they tend to be strongly marked geographically
and include notions of dynasty, lineage, linguistic heritage, and a shared cultural his-
tory.1 Second, the sixteenth century is often characterized as the moment when a state
concept first emerges as a legally authorized sovereign power or as an administrative
network of offices and authority associated with larger processes of secularization and
modernization.2 More recently, attention has turned to a third political category, which
extends the analysis of political units to an international scale: empire, including com-
posite political entities (states or monarchies) that extend over many different territo-
rial and administrative units.3
Of course, the “mercantilism” of Eli Hecksher or the “mercantile system” of Adam
Smith was not merely, or even primarily, a political theory but rather a theory of polit-
ical economy, a set of ideas and policies for economic regulation undertaken by gov-
ernments to secure treasure and a favorable balance of trade in the context of an
international sphere populated by other nation-states. Historians of economic thought
have tended to regard the debates over the decline of English trade in the 1620s and
1630s among Thomas Mun, Edward Misselden, and Gerald Malynes as the first state-
ments of a modern theory of political economy; in the sixteenth century, the outlines
of a fully elaborated, field-specific, and technical discourse about economic mecha-
nisms are less easy to discern.4 However, if we characterize political economy not as a
set of theories about state-sponsored economic policy or national market mechanisms
153
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but as a bundle of competing ways to think more broadly about the problem of value—
its definition and equivalencies across varying situations—then it becomes possible to
identify the sixteenth century, rather than the seventeenth or eighteenth, as a crucial
moment of transformation in the way that “economic” and “political” ideas came be to
be redefined in relation to one another.5 Approaching the problem in this way also
shows how important humanist ideas were to this process of redefinition, across a wide
variety of discourses and genres of writing, even though scholarship rarely associates
European humanism with the advent of modern political economy. And it suggests,
perhaps most importantly, that our categories for thinking about political power in the
early modern period are often much too narrow.
So how did sixteenth-century writers define their “political” and “economic” prob-
lems, as well as the relationship between them? What traditions of thought did they
draw upon, and to what historical circumstances were they responding when they
turned to these traditions and began to modify them? In what follows, I aim to provide
some answers to these questions by turning to a very old institution that was repur-
posed in the middle of the sixteenth century in order to experiment with new modes
of economic activity and new forms of group association, at different scales: the insti-
tution of the corporation. The Church, universities, guilds, towns, cities, religious con-
fraternities, joint-stock companies: all were corporations, and all enjoyed rights and
freedoms that sometimes exceeded the authority of the state that putatively authorized
them. Because the corporation was (and remains) a legal person, its capacities were
both singular and collective at the same time; similarly, corporations organized collec-
tive rather than individual action, whether this action is understood in political, eco-
nomic, or technological terms. As an entity that was more than the sum of its individual
members, a corporation was one, but it was also many: an artificial person made up of
many natural people. It depended on abstract categories that could extend over many
particulars, and on instruments of representation—vocabularies, modes of documen-
tation, tokens of membership and authority—that could unify its many parts. It
required a broad spectrum of formal techniques in order to gather itself and persist:
rhetorical modes of address, persistent images that could justify action, methods of
description and communication, narrative structures that organized its accounts of
itself.6 My main examples in the brief genealogy of humanism and political economy
that follows come from the writings of the jurist and statesman Sir Thomas Smith
(1513–77) and the geographer and historian Richard Hakluyt the younger (1552–1616).
My goal is to show how important the institution of the corporation was to Elizabe-
thans such as Smith and Hakluyt as they attempted to reconcile several competing
systems of value with one another, as they sought to expand the categories of their
political thought, and as they invented new practical forms with which to intervene in
a pluralist international world of commerce and rule.
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From the very origins of political philosophy, it was impossible to distinguish abso-
lutely between “ethical” and “political” concepts: as every humanist knew, the purpose
of the polis was to foster virtue, which was in turn a defining characteristic of the
citizen as a member of the political community. The place of economic activity in
this ethico-political sphere was clear: Aristotle defined economic activity in ethical
terms—for medieval and early modern thinkers alike, the Nicomachean Ethics was a
long-standing authority on economic and not simply moral problems—and he under-
stood it as part of the household (oikos), through which it became necessary by exten-
sion to the larger political community of virtue. Because the merchant’s activity does
not take virtue as its end, however, he is excluded from the “political” relation properly
speaking: in the Politics, Aristotle states unequivocally that “in the most nobly consti-
tuted state, and the one that possesses men that are absolutely just . . . the citizens must
not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to vir-
tue).”7 Trade concerned with the “good life” is natural, so long as it is not measured in
bodily enjoyments (1.3.19) and so long as it procured “those goods, capable of accumu-
lation, which are necessary for life and useful for the community of the city or house-
hold” (1.3.8). Since necessary goods are by definition limited (1.3.9), the household
form of wealth is “natural” (1.3.17) and could include the exchange of objects when
used for themselves. In contrast, sheer “wealth-getting” is unnatural because unlimited
and pursued “by means of a certain acquired skill or art” (1.3.10); it employs money as
a conventional measure and has as its end wealth, for which there can be no limit
(1.3.13–18). For this reason Aristotle condemns interest and usury in arguments that are
well known to medieval and early modern historians.
Because sixteenth-century humanists took for granted the basic ethical and political
origins of classical discussions of commerce, men who wished to enter into trading
ventures—counselors, statesmen, members of the Privy Council, and other wealthy
members of Elizabethan society—found that some of their most cherished classical
authorities either disdained merchants and money making as a public activity or cir-
cumscribed that activity by linking it to the magnanimity that formed the distinctive
public virtue of the wealthy.8 How did they respond? In the first place, they made great
rhetorical efforts to promote the collective benefits of profit making over narrow in-
dividual interest, and they strongly emphasized the virtuous qualities of the men who
undertook trading ventures. David Harris Sacks has shown how debates over monop-
olies throughout the sixteenth century turned on the distinction between “public
good” and “private gain”;9 the accounts of travel and trade collected by Hakluyt re-
peatedly stress the heroic and even chivalric qualities of the men chosen to lead com-
mercial expeditions.10 Merchants themselves, meanwhile, increasingly sought to
claim the status and political power to which they felt their wealth and bequests
entitled them.11
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Literary works furnish many examples of how humanist and commercial ideas often
sat uneasily with one another at the turn of the seventeenth century. Merchants and
mercantile values form an important topic in the drama of the period, both as figures
of admiration and as objects of satire. Aaron Kitch has recently shown how poets such
as Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe integrated economic metaphors and
themes into their work: to defend, cautiously, merchants and the prudential pursuit of
wealth in the service of the Elizabethan state, and to refashion classical models so that
they might serve an Elizabethan poetic project pulled between a Horatian and a com-
mercial notion of “profit.”12 Shakespeare’s sonnets famous employ economic terms to
refigure traditional sonnet conceits; on a larger scale, his The Merchant of Venice (1596)
vividly demonstrates the conceptual and emotional complexities of juxtaposing an
economy of love and friendship with an economy of coin and credit. By submitting the
qualitas of flesh to the quantitas of measurement, The Merchant of Venice provokes
difficult questions about the laws necessary to regulate relationships among people and
about the values that justify this regulation. For all these reasons, the play is simulta-
neously “economic,” “ethical,” and “political” in its imagination: it invites its audience
to contemplate the impossibility, and yet the necessity, of calculating the relationship
between the one and the many, or between the individual and the collective; to decide
how the “common good” is to be defined, and how the common good of a community
is to be reconciled with the rights and claims of singular members.13 Earlier in the
century, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had posed similar problems, albeit in a different
mode and with very different results; More’s detailed treatment of contemporary eco-
nomic and legal problems, and his striking vision of a political community founded on
common property and the equitable distribution of resources, was often reprinted and
captured the imagination of subsequent generations of writers who sought to under-
stand the nature of the “commonwealth.”
Among the most significant of these writers is the humanist, jurist, and statesman Sir
Thomas Smith, whose work often responds directly to More’s Utopia and who illus-
trates especially clearly how sixteenth-century humanists might accommodate eco-
nomic transactions and the mercantilist logic surrounding them to the ethical and
political categories they had inherited. Educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where
he was named King’s Scholar and University Orator, Smith traveled to Padua to study
civil law before returning to Cambridge to become a leading English authority on
Greek, a Doctor and Regius Professor of Civil Law, and vice-chancellor of the univer-
sity. He was twice elected to Parliament (1547, 1553), made Provost of Eton and Dean of
Carlisle Cathedral, appointed Secretary to Edward VI (1548–49) and later to Elizabeth
I (1572–73), and twice served as Elizabeth’s ambassador to France (1562–66; 1571–72).14
Smith was widely regarded as one of the most learned men of his age, the “flower of the
University of Cambridge” (in the words of his student, the geographer Richard Eden)
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where he lectured in natural philosophy, encouraged the study of practical mathe-

matics, and wrote Latin treatises on the spelling of English and the correct pronuncia-
tion of Greek.15 Smith owned one of the great manor houses of the period, Hill Hall at
Theydon Mount, which he rebuilt several times in the latest Italian architectural styles,
and he accumulated an impressive library of nearly four hundred titles across the fields
of theology, philosophy, civil law, history, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, poetry, drama,
medicine, alchemy, astrology, geography, and mathematics.16
Today Smith is remembered for having written two of the most penetrating analyses
of the Tudor “commonwealth,” A Discourse of this Commonweal of England (ca. 1549,
pub. 1581), often described as an early statement of a modern theory of political
economy, and De Republica Anglorum (1565, pub. 1583), an important contemporary
description of England’s legal and political organization.17 A Discourse advanced so-
phisticated arguments about debasement, price mechanisms, and the internationaliza-
tion of commerce by means of a literary form long-favored by humanist writers: an
imaginary dialogue conducted among a Knight, a Doctor, a Merchant, a Husbandman,
and a Capper, each representing a distinct estate in English life. Smith draws often on
the moral philosophy of Cicero to forge a new understanding of economic and polit-
ical relationships organized around a notion of common profit and private property.18
Whereas Aristotle had subordinated economic questions to ethical ones and accorded
little space to economic ideas or economic practices in political life, Smith views the
two domains as homologous to one another: touching everything and everyone,
economy becomes more than simply a means of achieving political coherence but pro-
vokes a reimagination of the political relation itself as one that is rooted in many small
market transactions and structured around an opposition between domestic and for-
eign trade. In the view of all characters, the concept of profit assumes a moral value
that should extend as widely as possible. In an exchange with the Doctor over enclo-
sures, the Knight poses the problem most sharply as a conflict between “one,” “all” and
“some,” which leads him to the following political arithmetic:
Every man is a member of the Commonweal, and that that is profitable to one may
be profitable to another if he would exercise the same feat. Therefore that that is
profitable to one and so to another may be profitable to all and so to the whole Com-
monweal. As a great mass of treasure consists of many pence and one penny added
to another and so to the third and fourth and so further makes up the great sum
so does each man added to another make up the whole body of a Commonweal.19
But the Doctor counters with another maxim: “[T]hey may not purchase themselves
profit by that that may be hurtful to others” (51). Theft profits the individual person but
is obviously not a benefit to the Commonwealth, he points out (52). Nothing prevents
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“all” from doing what “some” are observed to do; “some” inevitably extends into “all”
without restriction, but this “all” is simply an aggregate of individuals, a plurality that
competes within itself with no regard for genuine political unity. Instead, the Doctor
proposes the “Commonweal” as the larger entity that must be preserved through such
“ordinances” as are “profitable to the most number and do hurt but to the fewest,” “as
that politic Senator Tully says” (116). Like the Knight, in other words, the Doctor
grounds his analysis of the commonwealth in a profit principle—“every man naturally
will follow that wherein he sees profit, and therefore men will the gladder occupy hus-
bandry” (60)—but he tends to favor economic mechanisms, rather than laws, as a
means of reforming the Commonweal. “Some things in a Commonweal must be forced
with pains and some by rewards allured” he concludes, again citing Cicero as his au-
thority (59). His analysis (a model for modern neoliberalism) imagines a political
world in which the individual has no need for intermediate level organizations but
requires only the principle of “free vent and sale” (60).
Smith’s account of English economic life in the Discourse is notable, too, however, for
the way in which it downplays and even views with suspicion the types of incorporated
guilds and companies that in turn provided the structure for local political organiza-
tion in Smith’s period.20 The Doctor of the Discourse openly attributes the decay of
towns in part to the excessive control enjoyed by incorporated guilds, arguing instead
for a patent system modeled on that of Venice, in which individual expertise is pro-
tected rather than corporately organized craft knowledge (124). In fact, the Doctor
inverts the conventional opposition between private and public, contrasting the
common good of the “public weal” to what he describes as the “private liberties and
privileges” (125) enjoyed by the incorporated craft guilds, which stand between the
individual and the community of the realm and inhibit the flourishing of the latter.
There is some historical irony in the fact that Smith would draw directly on corpo-
ratist ideas and legal structures in later life. But the Doctor’s arguments are also typical
of the way sixteenth-century writers sought to fit Greek and Roman concepts of large-
scale political community into long-standing forms of association that had a more
pronounced corporate dimension. Smith’s De Republica Anglorum blends corporatist
and individualistic ideas of community together, distinguishing the unity of the com-
monwealth from more temporary collections of persons in a definition that directly
recalls that of Cicero in his Republic:
[A] society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and
united by common accord and convenauntes among themselves . . . for properly an
host of men is not called a common wealth but abusively, because they are collected
but for a time and for a fact: which done, ech divideth himselfe from others as they
were before.21
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Here Smith remains close to Roman notions of political community as founded on

individual agreements, a proto-theory of social contract. But we soon find him in-
voking corporate images to describe this unity, using populus, for instance, in a corpo-
rate sense (“the people I call that which the word populus doth signifie, the whole body
and the three estates of the common wealth” [16]), and his account of sovereignty in
king and parliament makes elaborate use of corporate images and of the logic of cor-
porate personhood: a principle of unity through representation, repetition, and substi-
tution, the formal abstraction of parts into wholes, and the delegation of voice—the
vocative condition of a collective person that wishes to speak as such.
Smith also draws much more explicitly on the categories of Aristotelian political
philosophy in the De Republica Anglorum than he had in the earlier Discourse, and for
this reason the treatise provides a particularly clear view of how Aristotelian argu-
ments about constitutional forms could be received through corporatist concepts, a
phenomenon that is more widely visible as the sixteenth century draws to a close. The
anonymous 1598 English translation of Louis Le Roy’s French edition of Aristotle’s Pol-
itics, for instance, renders the classical notion of koinonian (today usually translated as
“partnership”) as “fellowship,” “corporation,” and, most commonly, as “company,” all
terms with distinct and long-standing economic as well as social and political mean-
ings.22 In the words of the “Argument or Contents of the First Book of Government”:
Forasmuch therefore as the dutie of him that dealeth with matters of State, is to
treat of ciuill Societie and to seeke out the causes thereof, from Nature, Aristo-
tle purposing to write thereof, sheweth first of all from whence this societie pro-
ceedeth, wherein it consisteth, and to what end it is ordained, beginning at the first
and simplest partes thereof, that is to wit, the companie of man and wife, master
and seruant, father and children: of which companie a household is compacted.
Afterward by increasing many households into a street or hamlet, and many streets
into a Citie, Corporation, or Commonweale: he sheweth he same to haue a naturall
constitution, and to be the most perfect companie, and the end thereof to be of
the best sort, as which comprehendeth all the other endes, and whereunto they be
all referred. Then forasmuch as no companie can maintaine themselves without
goods, he treateth of the manner of getting them, seruing to the maintenance as
well of houshould as of Common-weale, of which manners of getting he setteth
downe diuers sorts both natural and artificiall: among the which he utterly discom-
mendeth interest and vsurie.23
The entire first chapter employs similar phrasing: “euery Citie or Commonweal is a
companie, and euery company is ordained to some good” (1); “Euery companie is
ordained for some good; and euery Common-weale is a companie: therefore euery
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Common-weale is ordained for some good” (1); “A companie, societie, or fellowship, is

a knitting of many persons together in consent, tending to some good” (2); the “City”
or “ciuill societie” is “a multitude of people of vnlike sorts . . . as rich and poore, free and
bond, gentlemen and commoners, learned and vnlearned, handicrafts men and labour-
ers, obeyers and commanders, communicating their Artes, trades, misteries, and exer-
cises one to another in one place, to the end to liue the better and to haue the more
sufficiencie” (2).
In each case, we may assume that, as synonyms or species of “commonwealth,” terms
such as “companie,” “fellowship,” and “corporation” are used generically to describe
any enduring form of association organized for a shared purpose. In a recent and sen-
sitive analysis of these key terms, Phil Withington points out that “company” had per-
haps the broadest set of meanings, ranging from formally incorporated bodies to
loosely organized groups to even more attenuated networks of relationship.24 But the
final sentence in the passage I have just quoted aligns collective political association
closely with economic life, suggesting that, as in Smith’s earlier Discourse, it was diffi-
cult for sixteenth-century writers to make a firm distinction between “political” and
“economic” concepts—a simple point, perhaps, but one that scholarship in the history
of political thought has only recently begun to consider closely. One consequence is
that notions of “political economy” would be much older and more complex in their
determination that we usually acknowledge; at the turn of the seventeenth century, at
least, the phrase “political economy” might suddenly seem less an anachronism than a
tautology.
Equally significant is the term “society,” which Smith and the anonymous translator
of the Politics both understand in two somewhat different senses simultaneously: as a
type of circumscribed political unit that was equivalent to entities like the “company,”
the “fellowship,” or the “corporation,” and as the larger, immanent domain in which
these more restricted entities were located. Societas was a common and long-standing
term to describe groups of persons of all kinds, and especially large-scale groups
organized under law and justice; in the work of Cicero and Augustine, for instance,
societas captured many of the meanings that a term like polis also expressed. In
Roman law, however, the societas could also designate a more restricted group or
partnership formed for commercial purposes, one that was sometimes distinguished
from other corporate associations such as the universitas or the collegium (the latter
often marked by the fact of living and eating together) and in other moments com-
pared to them.25 Smith’s use of “society” and “civil society” throughout De Republica
Anglorum reflects an amalgamated Greek and Roman meaning, since he follows
Aristotle’s derivation of the political community from the family and household but
also uses “society” in the restricted sense of partnership, at several scales.26 The term
“society” thus introduces a flexibility of scale into Smith’s arguments: when he defines
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the “common wealth” as “a society or common doing of a multitude of free men col-
lected together and united by common accord and convenauntes among themselves,”
or when he writes of “societie civill” later in chapter 10, he has effectively appropri-
ated the restricted and more distinctively corporatist notion of “society” that he
found in civil law and used it to describe large-scale political entities. Like the De
Republica Anglorum as a whole, Smith’s concept of “society” combines an individual-
istic Roman meaning with a more strongly corporatist notion of unity, one that is
understood to be ontologically distinct from the sum of its parts. “Society,” then, is
simply another name for the corporate unity that “common wealth” also describes,
and both are always and everywhere “political” because subject to rule, legal admin-
istration, and the determination of justice.
If Smith’s corporate notion of society in the De Republica Anglorum can be traced in
part to his intellectual training as a civil lawyer, it found practical application in two
joint-stock companies that Smith formed in the 1570s, at least one of them ushered
through the process of formal, legal incorporation by Smith himself. The “Society of
the New Art,” as Smith named it, sought to capitalize upon the promises of an alche-
mist named William Medley, who approached Smith in 1571 with the claim that he
could transmute iron into copper. Smith, who had a long-standing interest in alchemy,
astrology, and other practical arts, and had himself conducted chemical experiments
in his home distilleries, enlisted William Cecil (Lord Burghley and Elizabeth’s Secre-
tary of State), the Earl of Leicester, and the colonist and knight-adventurer Sir Hum-
phrey Gilbert in a joint project.27 By December 1572, Cecil having been named Lord
Treasurer and Smith himself having been appointed Secretary of State, Smith soon
obtained a first grant of incorporation for the society, which named him “Governor”
for life. The Society would be “one body politic and corporate forever,” with a common
seal, the power to purchase land, sue and be sued, assemble, keep courts, make rules
for the “good government” of all workmen, and exclusive right to “fine try out alter
change reduce turn and transmute iron ore and every thing that doth or may come or
proceed of iron or iron ore into any kind of copper” (22), as well as to use any necessary
“device or devices whatsoever,” to exchange, sell, and ship their product anywhere “at
their wills and pleasures,” excluding to known enemies.28
The Society of the New Art soon foundered upon Smith’s departure on embassy to
France. But in January 1575, Smith secured a second grant, writing to Cecil (Lord
Burghley) that
yesternight by candlelight I got the patent of the societie signed, and I make all the
haste I can to have it passe the signit, & privie seale, and so to the great seale. Now I
pray yr L. to confer with my L. of Leicester how to procede to the perfit begynnyn-
ing of the work in the maner of a societie. It hath long enough lien in suspennce
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& no profite comm of it but charges & expenses to me & others. And yr LL. lacked
both the profite & honor, which I trust shall rise upon it.29
Smith urged Cecil to appoint one or two men who could keep the Society’s books and
report back to them on its weekly earnings, as well as to imitate other similar societies
in order to draw up
som good statutes & ordres . . . of such as be necessary, & without which a societie
can not well stand. For I am in mynd that in this corporacion & societie, wherein
is so fewe, & they for your ii partes nobler men, & of honor, & for our part, I trust,
men of discrecion, the fewer statutes & well kept, the better.30
The new corporate society would be defined through a minimal statutory structure;
Smith seems to trust entirely in (and hopes to profit from) the moral quality of the
persons who constitute it. But after further investment and more stalling from Medley,
the venture collapsed for good; Smith had lost a considerable amount of money and
died two years later, and Medley soon washed up in debtor’s prison.
In every respect, the venture had been a total failure. But Smith had every reason to
expect success, since the Crown had been pursuing a policy of fostering industrial in-
vention and investment via letters patent since the 1550s, much the way Smith’s own
Doctor Pandotheus had recommended in A Discourse.31 The Society of the Mineral and
Battery Works and the Society of Mines Royal both incorporated only four years before
Smith’s Society for the New Art, and they drew investment from some of the most pow-
erful statesmen of the period: Cecil, the Earl of Leicester, even the queen herself. In fact,
the mining ventures were so exclusive that Smith himself did not participate, a fact that
may have driven him to seek his own incorporated society in 1572. From the point of
view of the Crown, the incorporated societies were important instruments of Royal pre-
rogative, especially where the Crown sought to extend its authority over territories or
substances, like precious metals, where its authority might be subject to question. But by
delegating its power, the Crown had also effectively created subsidiary agencies that
began to enjoy an independent jurisdictional freedom and authority, in principle oper-
ating under Royal permission but in practice conducting activities that the Crown itself
was incapable of pursuing on its own. These ancestors of modern venture capital and
private equity funds were important actors in the formation of a new “political economy”:
all are explicitly named as “bodies politic” as well as “bodies corporate” in their charters,
and as such all operated as small-scale group organizations subject to their own laws,
courts, and a government of their own making: they are specialized zones of jurisdiction
in which technical knowledge or expertise, instruments and substances, persons, and
systems of value were bundled together and translated into an enduring form. Smith’s
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society, after all, is the Society for the New Art, the English and Latin equivalent for the
Greek techne: the Society is “political” because it is technical or technological.
But the Society of the New Art did not exhaust Smith’s involvement with incorpo-
rated ventures. For in 1572 he was also obtaining letters patent granting him and his son
Thomas approximately 360,000 acres in the territory of Ards, a peninsula in northeast
Ulster.32 Surviving documents in Smith’s hand make evident that he was projecting an
entire commonwealth in miniature: the venture was a personal attempt to put into
practice the arguments of A Discourse of this Commonweal and De Republica Anglo-
rum.33 Smith imagined nothing less than a quasi-autonomous polity, composed out of
war and into law, and taking the form of a community organized into parishes with
schools and courts, a central city named Elizabetha, and protected by watchtowers
(and by racial laws that prohibited native Irish from buying land, holding office, or
serving on juries). Smith’s original commission had granted him and Thomas the right
“to execute martial law” and
. . . power to enter the great and little Ardes with an army, and expelling all rebels
and seditious persons, to possess and inhabit the same; to govern the soldiers and
inhabitants; to determine all civil causes except pleas of land, and punish all crimi-
nals except traitors and coiners; and to assemble the inhabitants for defence of the
country.34
As D. B. Quinn first pointed out, the novelty of the Smiths’ project lay in the joint-stock
structure of its financing, which was applied here for the first time to a colonializing
venture; Quinn has also shown how important the example of Roman colonial policy
was to Smith, calling his plans for the Irish venture “the first known academic discus-
sion of colonization by an Englishman for whom the classics provided a living parallel
and inspiration.”35 As an amalgam of classical models, contemporary commonwealth
ideology, martial law, and joint-stock organization, Smith’s venture suggests how
important the “corporation,” the “plantation,” the “company,” and the “colony” (itself a
Roman idea) had become by the 1570s, and how they could be used as extensions of
(and perhaps even as replacements for) older political units such as the “realm,” the res
publica, the civitas or polis, or the “household.”36 Smith’s own project was in fact only
one in a sequence of ventures in the Ulster region organized in a corporate fashion: a
proposal by William Piers and Henry Sidney for an incorporated “body politique” that
would exercise martial law to “plante fowr thousand inhabitants of her naturall subi-
ectes in that Northe cuntrey,” in 1565;37 a proposal for a corporation to colonize Mun-
ster by Sir Warham St. Leger, in 1569;38 a subsequent proposal by Piers to fortify and
colonize Ards in 1578, again through “a company that will beginne this enterprise and
joyne togyther as a bodye pollytyque.”39
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Since the pioneering work of D. B. Quinn and Nicholas Canny, among others, the
Elizabethan colonizing projects in Ireland have been recognized as a training ground
for similar ventures in the New World, although the role played by incorporated soci-
eties and companies, specifically, in a transatlantic system of “political economy” has
only begun to receive close attention.40 This influence is especially evident in the new
joint-stock corporations that emerged in the mid-sixteenth century: we may view the
incorporation charters for the Russia Company (1555), the East India Company (1600),
or the Virginia Company (1609) as proto-constitutions that create autonomous per-
sons in law, with rights that are at once those of a collective and an individual nature,
enjoying their own courts, civil and military authority, organizational hierarchies, reg-
ulations, and trading privileges. As economic instruments, these incorporated ven-
tures differed from the older medieval regulated companies in several important
respects. Under the structure of a regulated company, members traded with their own
capital investment and were obliged to follow the rules of the company, which gener-
ally sought to protect monopolistic privileges; the joint-stock company, in contrast,
“itself traded as a body,” in the words of T. S. Willan, and “was designed, not for laying
down general rules for the conduct of trade by members individually, but for actually
conducting trade on behalf of the company as a whole.”41 As legal persons, trading
ventures had the right to purchase, alienate, and bequeath property, especially over
generations, to bring suits in law and to be sued in turn by other parties. As a conse-
quence, incorporated ventures were more enduring than non-incorporated partner-
ships: they could accumulate capital more effectively and use it more flexibly, and they
offered limited protections for individual members from the debts of the association
when ventures turned bad.42
But the organizational and conceptual problems posed by the international joint-
stock trading corporations should be understood not simply as problems of economic
management but as political problems of the type that were debated in both classical
and humanist writing, including in republican thought: the nature of a community of
equals ruled by all members rather than by a monarch; the prudence, temperance,
fortitude, and justice of the exemplary merchant adventurer and his active pursuit of
wealth on behalf of the common good; the need for specific technologies of represen-
tation and governance to regulate the relationship between the individual member and
the larger group, including laws or rules and tokens of membership (the quantitative
system of the “share” as a mark of belonging); the need to regulate the common good
at the expense of individual action and gain.43
This “political economy” of the incorporated joint-stock companies—a phrase,
again, that we may take in its most literal sense—is especially evident in Richard Hak-
luyt’s massive The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English
Nation (1589; 1598–1600), for which Hakluyt drew extensively on documents furnished
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by the corporations themselves.44 Sebastian Cabot’s 1553 ordinances for the new Russia
Company, for instance, includes provisions that
all wares, and commodities trucked, bought or given to the companie . . . to be

wel ordered, packed, and conserved in one masse entirely, and not to be broken or
altered . . . the whole companie also to have that which by right unto them apper-
taineth, and no embezelment shall be used, but the truth of the whole voyage to bee
opened, to the common wealth and benefite of the whole companie, and mysterie . . .
. . . Item, no particular person, to hinder or prejudicate the common stocke of the
company, in sale or preferment of his own proper wares, and things, and no particu-
lar emergent or purchase to be employed to any serverall profite, until the common
stocke of the companie shall be furnished and no person to hinder the common
benefite in such purchases or contingents, as shal fortune to any one of them, by his
owne proper policie, industrie, or chance . . . but every person to be bounden in such
case, and upon such occasion, by order, and direction, as the generall captaine, and
the Councell shall establish and determine, to whose order and discretion the same
is left: for that of things uncertaine, no certaine rules may or can be given.45
If achieving the proper balance between “private gain” and “common good” was one of
the most important points of debate in sixteenth-century discussions about economic
regulation, as Sacks has argued, then achieving this balance was one of the raisons
d’être of the corporate form, in which the “common stock” and the “mass” provides a
conceptual template for thinking about problems of aggregation, multitude, and other
group or collective formations. The corporation also provided a durable mode of orga-
nization in which the merchant’s “adventure” and “enterprise”—his risk-taking specu-
lation, his investments, his accounting projections, his attempt to capitalize on chance
and on time—intersected with a long tradition of prudential or calculative reasoning
that derived from Aristotle and Cicero and that was fundamental to many areas of
Renaissance political thought. It included problems such as the nature of maintaining
justice in the public community, drawing the distinction between private and common
property, the upholding of contracts and obligations, the calculation of relative value
among heterogeneous objects, and the nature of deliberation and decision-making
when the outcome of action remains unknown—the skill of “seeing into the future”
that Cicero describes as so necessary to the statesmen who would rule other men.46
Hakluyt himself was well informed in the traditions of classical political thought. We
know that he had read Aristotle’s Politics closely, redacting it into a summary or
“Analysis” complete with quaestio-like propositions, counterpositions, and proofs in
September 1583, after two years of lecturing on the Politics to bachelors and masters at
Christ Church in his capacity as Censor of the college.47 Hakluyt presented the “Analysis”
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to Elizabeth herself on October 5, 1584, during a visit to England from Paris, where he
was serving as chaplain to the English ambassador; a second copy of the “Analysis,”
dated 1588 and in Hakluyt’s hand, was probably used as a practical working text for
Hakluyt and the students who attended his lectures on the Politics at Oxford.48 By its
nature, the analysis offers little that is strikingly original in the way of Hakluyt’s own
political philosophy. But it nevertheless provides clear evidence that Hakluyt’s efforts in
publishing, translating, and editing accounts of foreign travel were undertaken with a
detailed knowledge of Aristotelian political categories, including a discussion of mer-
cantile activity that was, at best, rendered in ambiguous terms. It was easy enough, after
all, to present trading ventures as engaged the procurement of commodities that were
necessary to the “common wealth.”49 Certainly Hakluyt’s own prefatory comments in his
printed books and several surviving manuscript “pamphlets” on foreign planting dem-
onstrate that he had a firm grasp of the geopolitical implications of foreign trade, which
he regarded as essential to the economic well-being of the realm and to the military
dominance of England over Spain. The longest and most important of these, the “Dis-
course on Western Planting,” Hakluyt presented to Elizabeth along with his “Analysis”
of the Politics; the treatise, a brief in support of exploratory projects to North America
by Sir Walter Ralegh and Christopher Carleill (Walsingham’s stepson), is a comprehen-
sive blueprint for English plantation efforts in the New World.50 A pamphlet on “the
commodity of the taking of the straight of Magellanus” (ca. 1579–80) even envisions the
possibility of a quasi-independent colony; a separate digest of the same document rec-
ommends the project in Machiavellian-like terms as a way to “so depryve all the inlan-
des of the kingdome of Sp[ain] of vittell that the multitude shalbe redie to starve or
sh[ou]ld fall to rebellion, into the secret and importance whereof fewe man hav entered
into the consideration.”51 The preface to his Divers Voyages (1582), dedicated to Sir Philip
Sidney, compares the English planters to “Bees . . . led out by their Captaines to swarme
abroad” and recommends “deducting” the poor out of the realm, emptying the prisons,
and sending them to the New World; Hakluyt compares the project to the Portuguese
colonies in Brazil, “where they have nine baronies or lordships, and thirty engennies or
suger milles, two or three hundred slaves belonging to eche myll, with a Judge and other
officers, and a Church: so that every mill is as it were a little commonwealth; and that the
country was first planted by such men as for small offences were saved from the rope.”52
Taken as a whole, Hakluyt’s scattered statements suggest that, as for Smith, the “cor-
poration,” along with the “colony,” the “plantation,” and the “company,” had begun to
rival the civitas or polis in his mind and also in those of his contemporaries as an
important unit of political, and not simply economic, organization. The corporation
offered an especially powerful way to fill a perceived gap in political concepts, since it
provided both an abstract legal category and a practical, flexible bureaucratic form
within which to experiment with new models of collective association and mercantile
167 Corporations
exchange. Indeed, we may go somewhat farther and propose that sixteenth-century

writers found the two primary units of classical political philosophy, household and
polis, too narrow to capture the variety and forms of political association in which they
had begun to participate. If Hakluyt shows us how the merchant becomes a distinctive
member of the commonwealth through his prudential intelligence, his fortitude, and
his sense of justice, he also shows us how the merchant fulfills his role as citizen only
in so far as he pushes beyond the limits of the nation-state as it has traditionally been
defined and ventures onto an international or global political horizon. Along with that
of Smith, Hakluyt’s work suggests how important the corporation was to the emer-
gence of a discourse of political economy in the early modern period, especially in the
pluralized domain of legal jurisdictions and rival authorities that was typical of the
international sphere.
As the sixteenth century drew to a close, the global aspect of the corporation as a
fully political entity is most visible in the establishment of the new American colonies,
several of which derived their structure of colonial or “civic” government directly from
the corporate structure that characterized the private companies that founded them.53
On April 10, 1606, James I granted to the Virginia Company and to the Plymouth
Company all commercial rights to land in the New World between 34º and 45º latitude,
while retaining for the Crown the political authority necessary to rule the colonies that
the companies established.54 The Company’s second, formal charter of May 23, 1609
expanded its political powers by naming it “one Body or Commonalty perpetual . . .
[with] perpetual Succession and one common Seal to serve for the said Body or Com-
monalty” (para 3)55 and vesting it with many of the legal rights that had traditionally
defined the nature of sovereignty, among them the rights to
make, ordain, and establish all Manner of Orders, Laws, Directions, Instructions,
Forms and Ceremonies of Government and Magistracy, fit and necessary for and
concerning the Government of the said Colony and Plantation . . . (para. 13)
[to] have full and absolute Power and Authority to correct, punish, pardon,
govern, and rule all such the Subjects of Us, our Heires, and Successors as shall
from Time to Time adventure themselves in any Voyage thither, or that shall at
any Time hereafter, inhabit in the Precincts and Territories of the said Colony as
aforesaid . . . as well in Cases capital and criminal, as civil, both Marine and other . . .
(para. 22)
[with] full Power and Authority, to use and exercise Martial Law in Cases of
Rebellion or Mutiny . . . (para. 23)
The Company’s third charter of March 12, 1611, went even farther in securing its au-
tonomy as a political, and not merely as a commercial, entity, first naming it again as
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“one Body politick, incorporated by the Name of The Treasurer and Company of Ad-
venturers and Planters of the city of London for the first Colony in Virginia” (para 1).
The Charter then declared the need for four annual Assemblies that “shall and may
have full Power and Authority . . . to elect and chuse discreet Persons . . . and to nomi-
nate and appoint such Officers as they shall think fit and requisite, for the Government,
managing, ordering, and dispatching of the Affairs of the said Company” (para 8). Ten
years later, the Company Counsel itself issued “Ordinances for Virginia” (July 24–
August 3, 1621), thereby declaring their intent “to settle such a Form of Government
there, as may be to the greatest Benefit and Comfort of the People” (para. 1) and insti-
tuting two councils, a “Council of State” and a “General Assembly, wherein . . . all Mat-
ters shall be decided, determined, and ordered, by the greater Part of the Voices then
present” (para. 2–4). If we leap forward some one hundred and fifty years, we find in
the “Constitution or Form of Government, Agreed to and Resolved Upon by the Del-
egates and Representatives of the Several Counties and Corporations of Virginia” (June
29, 1776), as the colony is still called, the provision that
. . . the legislative and executive powers of the State should be separate and dis-
tinct from the judiciary; and [so] that the members of the two first may be re-
strained from oppression, by feeling and participating the burdens of the people,
they should, at fixed periods, be reduced to a private station, return into that body
from which they were originally taken, and the vacancies be supplied by frequent,
certain, and regular elections, in which all, or any part of the former members, to
be again eligible, or ineligible, as the laws shall direct. (Section 3 [sic; for Section 5];
my emphasis)
The corporate body has become the body of a people, who declare themselves “by
nature equally free and independent . . . [with] certain inherent rights, of which, when
they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their
posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and
possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” (Section 1). If
this language sounds familiar, it is because we will find it again a week later in the Dec-
laration of Independence of the United States.
Regrettably, I can only gesture toward the ongoing biography of this corporate per-
son, which invites us to reconsider several important concepts in the history of polit-
ical thought and to sketch the contours of a transatlantic early modernity. What
exactly defines the “political” nature of group associations? What resources for its
definition will we find outside of the conventional canon of political thought as a tex-
tual tradition?56 How many scales of “political” entity can we identify, how are they
organized, and how can they be said to “act”? I conclude this chapter by venturing a
169 Corporations
few suggestions for future work, in order to clarify how the corporation might shed
light on the definitions, origins, and scale of political groups.
In the first place, the history of the corporation suggests that we should dislodge the
“State” from the primary place it occupies in historical and political analysis and begin
to redefine it. For the State is only ever one of several jurisdictional entities in a polit-
ical field; more than this, the State is itself a kind of corporate entity, one that lives in
the many persons, instruments, substances, legal formulas, and points of application
for legal power that together constitute it. As such, the “State” does not exist in the way
that we usually imagine it: it exists in the way that certain fictions exist, as David Run-
ciman has provocatively argued; it is a term of convenience to gather together persons,
actions, arguments and substances that do not in fact always sit so easily with one an-
other.57 Eli Hecksher opens his classic study of mercantilism with a similar point.58
What is gained by viewing the State in this way? In the first place, it prevents us from
assigning our explanations of political power to a quasi-Hegelian and subjectified con-
cept rather than to the concrete, and much more contingent, people, buildings, things,
and technologies that in point of fact sustain political communities and that are used
to carry out actions of all kinds in their name, from pen and paper to computers, hand-
cuffs, weaponry, measurements of financial value, and all manner of institutional fur-
niture. In the case of Smith, we see that the participants of an extra-State entity are
themselves at the same time agents of the State and its power: the very same ministers
who make up the “State” in its material substance are now acting, by means of this very
State authority, in an entirely different capacity and in a subsidiary form of association
that is endowed with specific rights, privileges, and powers, many of them “political” in
nature. The same thing routinely happens today. Where, precisely, is the State in these
cases? Like the body of a corporation, the State “itself ” is impossible to grasp or point
toward—one refers only to the body of another, such that the State is everywhere and
nowhere at once. Grasping at thin air, we ignore other forms of collective association
that are equally if not more important, and any meaningful judgments about the
complex causes or consequences that make up a “political” situation remain difficult if
not impossible to make.59
Setting aside the concept of the “State,” in contrast, allows for a more flexible and
more detailed analysis of how political collectivities are formed and ordered and for
more nuanced discussion of the ontology of those essential political substances, force
and value. By “ontology” I mean simply the quality of being—especially institutional-
ized, materialized, concretized, enduring being—that force and systems of value may
assume. From one point of view, forms of association such as the corporation may
seem to resemble little states and to borrow their rights and powers, even as the so-
called State reveals itself to be a species of corporation on a large scale. But from an-
other point of view the corporation reveals to us the pluralistic, fragile, and assembled
170 Institutions
nature of all political entities; the corporation constantly dissolves into its networks
and relays of substances, disperses itself into its collective pronouns, and borrows the
mouths and bodies of its natural representatives, without which its artificial person-
hood would never exist.60
Studying these alternative forms of association as enduring bundles of force and
value, finally, will require a renewed methodology: a fully mediated empiricism in
which concrete singularities are translated into meaningful categories and exemplary
instances by actors themselves and then ordered into their accounts of their own insti-
tutions and practices.61 What we call the “political” can be described as the sum total of
forces that bind or dissociate chains of association and give them enduring form; the
“political” is distinguished by the quanta and the ontological mode of force that is
implied in any act of association and by the systems of value that give those associa-
tions meaning. Hence the phrase “political economy” suggests that systems of value are
as important, if not more so, in the definition of the political than modes of power and
legitimate violence: the “political” is that which negotiates among competing systems
of value. This is my simple definition, one that I believe Sir Thomas Smith and Richard
Hakluyt might have recognized and that remains fundamental to the problem of “rei-
magining mercantilism.”
NOTES
1. See among others Richard Helgerson’s pioneering Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan
Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
2. See, for instance, Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Lon-
don: Verso, 1996); Quentin Skinner, “From the State of Princes to the Person of the State”
in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 2:368–413;
Neal Wood, “Cicero and the Political Thought of the Early English Renaissance,” Modern
Language Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1990): 185–207; and a special section of the Journal of Histor-
ical Sociology 15, no. 1 (2002) on “When and What was the State?” ed. Steve Hindle, 63–113.
3. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France
ca. 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); David Armitage, The Ideolog-
ical Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lauren
Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography
in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andrew
Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation
1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty
and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Cor-
porate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
171 Corporations
4. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–91, with additional bibliogra-
phy. For Smith, the “commercial, or mercantile System” was one of two forms of what he
called “political economy,” and his sarcastic discussion of Thomas Mun allowed him to
clear the way for his new theory of wealth; see Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (1776), in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Cor-
respondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 4:428–29, 431–35.
5. Cf. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, esp. 72–74, 130–31.
6. See my further discussion in Henry S. Turner, “Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego:
The Case of Richard Hakluyt,” differences 20, no. 2–3 (2009): 103–47.
7. Politics 7.8.2, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Transla-
tion, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 2:1986–2129.
8. I am indebted to David Harris Sacks, “The Greed of Judas,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 28, no. 2 (1998): 263–307 and the works cited in the notes below: see also
Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and The English Renaissance (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1965); Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Richard Grassby, The Business Commu-
nity of Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp.
29–52; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Rela-
tions in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of
Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2002); Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, esp. chs. 1, 2, and 3.
9. Sacks, “Greed of Judas”; Sacks, “The Countervailing of Benefits: Monopoly, Liberty, and
Benevolence in Elizabethan England,” in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (London:
Arnold, 1997), 135–55; Sacks, “Private Profit and Public Good: The Problem of the State in
Elizabethan Theory and Practice,” in Law, Literature, and the Settlement of Regimes, ed.
Gordon J. Schochet (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990), 131–42.
10. See Clement Adams’s account of the Russia Company’s 1553 expedition led by Sir Hugh
Willoughby and Richard Chancelor, printed in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Naviga-
tions, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 10 vols. (London: J. M. Dent
and Sons, Ltd., 1927–28), 1:268–93 (hereafter PN), where Willoughby and Chancelor are
described in a combination of chivalric and humanist terms; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and
America, esp. 20–57.
11. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and
London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 29–91.
12. Aaron Kitch, Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (Bur-
lington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), esp. 19–74; see also Valerie Foreman, Tragicomic
Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 1–6, 13–16, 96–97, 114–21, 147–56; Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick
Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
13. Eric Spencer, “Taking Excess, Exceeding Account: Aristotle Meets The Merchant of Venice,”
in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Wood-
bridge (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 143–58; Mark Netzloff, “The Lead Casket: Capital, Mer-
cantilism, and The Merchant of Venice,” in Woodbridge, Money and the Age of Shakespeare,
159–76; Henry S. Turner, “The Problem of the More-Than-One: Friendship, Calculation,
172 Institutions
and Political Association in the Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57, no. 4
(Winter, 2006): 413–42.
14. On Smith, see Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: The
Athlone Press, 1964); and Ian W. Archer’s essay on Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of Na-
tional Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan. 2008), http://
www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/view/article/25906, accessed 29 May 2013
(with convenient further bibliography).
15. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 1–2, citing Eden’s preface to his translation from Spanish of Mar-
tin Cortez, The Art of Navigation (1561).
16. Paul Drury et. al., Hill Hall: A Singular House Devised by a Tudor Intellectual, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Society of Antiquaries, 2009). Smith’s own inventory of his library is printed by John
Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, Kt. D.C.L. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820;
first pub. 1698) as 6 (274–81) and has been partially analyzed by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes
(http://politicworm.com/oxford/oxfords-education/sir-thomas-who/sir-thomas-smiths-
library-list-of-1566).
17. For the publication history of the Discourse, see Dewar, “The Authorship of the ‘Discourse
of the Commonweal’” Economic History Review, n.s. 19, no. 2 (1966): 388–400. Smith wrote
several treatises on economic topics; see Dewar, “The Memorandum ‘For the Under-
standing of the Exchange’: Its Authorship and Dating,” Economic History Review, n.s. 17, no.
3 (1954): 475–87. On Smith’s “political economy” see Neal Wood, “Cicero and the Political
Thought”; Wood, “Foundations of Political Economy: The New Moral Philosophy of Sir
Thomas Smith,” in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Dis-
course, and Disguise, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 1992),
143–72; Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and
Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191–235.
18. Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 287–307 and 355–62, grouping Smith with other “mercan-
tilist” writers of midcentury; see also David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cul-
tural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 1–11, 16–24, 27–36; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 22–25.
19. A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1969), 51.
20. On this aspect of guilds and other corporations, see Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in
European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984), esp. 3–31, 56–58, 66–75, 76–85, 123–28; Phil Withington, The Politics
of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 1–15, 16–48, 51–84; Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The
Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), esp. 139–41 and 149–51.
21. De Republica Anglorum, ed. L. Alston, with a preface by F. W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1906), 20. Smith’s definition is nearly identical to that of Cicero: “a
commonwealth [res publica] is the property of a people [populi]. But a people is not any
collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of
people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partner-
ship for the common good [multitudinis iuris consensus et utilitatis communione sociatus],”
De Re Republica I.25, LCL, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1928); cited by Black, Guilds and Civil Society 54, and Wood, “Cicero,” 191.
22. Aristotles Politiqves, or Discovrses of Government. Translated ovt of Greeke into French . . .
by Loys Le Roy . . . Translated out of French into English (London, 1598).
23. Aristotles Politiqves, Ciiiir.
173 Corporations
24. Withington, Society in Early Modern England, esp. 107, 109, 114–20, 123 (on “company”),
and 134–68 (on “commonwealth”).
25. Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le
Moyen-Age latin (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 64–69 and 70–75; David Runciman, Pluralism and the
Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13–16, 34–37, 48;
F. W. Maitland’s “Introduction” to his translation of Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the
Middle Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, repr. San Rafael, CA: Archivum, 2007), xxii–xxiv ;
Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 20, 37, 78, 84–85, 151–52; Withington, Society in Early Mod-
ern England, 102–33, an excellent recent discussion of the term.
26. The first “societie” of free people in its “least part thereof must be of two,” a “societie of
man, and woman” to which “men are so naturally borne,” as “the prince of all Philoso-
phers” argues. But the “fashion of government” called “Remp.[ublicam] or politeian” (21) is
also a “societie” because it “consisteth onely of freemen” (22); “although of all thinges or
lyuing creatures a man doth shew him selfe most politique,” Smith continues, “yet can he
not well live without the societie and fellowship ciuill” (22). On medieval and early modern
notions of civil society, see Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 32–43, 76–85, 96–109.
27. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 139, 140, 142, 149–55.
28. Cecil T. Carr, ed., Select Charters of Trading Companies A.D. 1530–1707, Selden Society
Publications, vol. 27 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1913; repr. New York: Burt Franklin,
1970), 20–28; Strype, Life, Appendix 7, 282–86, taken from BL Lands. 14/ff. 40–41.
29. BL Harl. 6991 f.112; Smith to Burghley, January 28, 1574/5.
30. BL Harl. 6991 f.112; Smith to Burghley, January 28, 1574/5.
31. William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-
Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2:383–405
(Mines Royal) and 413–29 (Mineral and Battery Works); William Hyde Price, The English
Patents of Monopoly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 49–60; Carr’s “In-
troduction” to Select Charters, esp. lxi and xciii–civ; M. B. Donald, Elizabethan Monopolies:
The History of the Company of Mineral and Battery Works from 1565 to 1604 (Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd, 1961); William Rees, Industry Before the Industrial Revolution, 2 vols.
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1968), 2:367–424; Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and
Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),
19–54; Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolu-
tion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 142–80.
32. D. B. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial
Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89, no. 4 (1945): 543–60 (quote
on 548); Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 156–70; Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of
Ireland: A Pattern Established (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976), 84–88; Hiram
Morgan, “The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–75,” Historical Journal
28, no. 2 (1985): 261–78; a recent booklet by Mark Thompson, “Sir Thomas Smith’s For-
gotten English Colony of the Ards and North Down in 1572,” privately printed by the
Loughries Historical Society (n.p., [2010]), 1–39 (my thanks to Mr. Thompson for sending
me a copy of his booklet); Glimp, Increase and Multiply, 15–16; Withington, Society in Early
Modern England, 202–9; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 35–40.
33. “Offices necessarie in the Colony of the Ards and orders agreed vppon,” December 20, 1573
(Essex Record Office D/DSH/01-7) and “Orders set owt by Sr Thomas Smyth knight . . .,”
December 1, 1573 (ERO D/DSH/01-2).
34. The Irish Fiants of the Tudor Sovereigns (Dublin: Éamonn de Búrca for Edmund Burke
Publisher, 1994), 2:275 (nos. 2149 and 2150).
174 Institutions
35. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings,” 555 and 547; Armitage, Ideolog-
ical Origins, 47–51; see also Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How
Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78, esp. 40–42, 51–52,
54–59, for their account of a staged debate over Livy’s first decade at Hill Hall among Smith,
his son Thomas, Humphrey Gilbert (active in several Irish ventures), and Walter Haddon
(to whom Smith had first announced De Republica Anglorum) in late 1570 or early 1571,
undertaken partly as preparation for the Irish venture.
36. “The Latin word (Colonia) signifies simply a plantation,” Adam Smith would later point
out, calling the Roman colonies “at best but a sort of corporation” (Wealth of Nations 2, ch.
7, 557–58); Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) and the Beginnings,” 547, establishes that
Sir Thomas Smith had this Roman usage directly in mind.
37. See SP 63/9/83 ff. 179–84 (f. 181r), as discussed by Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 70–76.
38. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 79–80.
39. De L’Isle & Dudley Manuscripts, 2:87–91 (quote on 88). On Piers, see Nicholas Canny,
Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85–91.
40. Stern, The Company-State, esp. 83–99; Withington, Society in Early Modern England, esp.
167, 227–31.
41. T. S. Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1956), 19–21; compare Smith, Wealth of Nations 2, book 5, ch. 1.3, 733–34;
William S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 13 vols. (London: Methuen, 1904–52),
4:319, n. 5; 8:206–7; 9:206; John P. Davis, Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Develop-
ment of Great Business Combinations and of Their Relation to the Authority of the State, 2
vols. (New York: Capricorn, 1961; first pub. 1895), 2:153.
42. Scott, Constitution and Finance, 1:1–104, esp. 17–21, 44–45, 59–63; and 2:36–54; Eli F. Heckscher,
Mercantilism, 2 vols., trans. Mendel Shapiro, rev. ed. by E. F. Söderlund (New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1955), 1:326–455, esp. 373–92 and 392–410. Hakluyt, PN, 2:284 and 2:46 at-
tests to the importance of the corporate name in cases of debt.
43. The point is made well by Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; see also Davis, Corpora-
tions, 2:85, 107, 110–11, 156, describing the joint-stock corporations as “institutions of gov-
ernment” and distinguishing them from the older regulated companies on precisely these
grounds.
44. Hakluyt maintained personal relationships with company members and conducted a
minor industry in the publication of books relevant to English overseas commerce; see
Henry S. Turner, “Book, List, Word: Forms of Translation in the Work of Richard Hakluyt,”
in Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Allison Deu-
termann and András Kiséry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 202-236.
45. Hakluyt, PN, 1:237 (my emphasis); see also the captain’s and master’s oaths (1:247).
46. Cicero, De Officiis, LCL, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1956) 1.40.142–43, 2.9.33, 1.4.11. Compare John Dee’s account of King Edgar’s voyage in 973
CE in his General and rare memorial pertayning to the perfect arte of navigation (London,
1577), which Hakluyt excerpts (PN, 1:62, 64–65) and in which Dee retrospectively imagines
the nation as a commercial entity defined by its miraculous profit, using the language of
providence mixed with classical prudence in terms drawn directly from De officiis. On
Ciceronian and mercantilist arguments in Dee’s work, see William Sherman, John Dee: The
Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1995), 131–37, 141–47, 152–62.
47. See Lawrence Ryan, “Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into Aristotle,” Sixteenth Century Journal
12, no. 3 (1981): 73–84 (quote on 74–75); Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:280; Charles Schmitt,
175 Corporations
John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univer-

sity Press, 1983), 57–58, n. 164.
48. Ryan, “Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into Aristotle,” 74, 76, 79.
49. On the importance of the “Analysis” to the political imagination of the Discourse, see
Armitage, Ideologies of Empire, 72–76.
50. The Discourse was composed sometime between July and September 1584 for Walter
Ralegh and Walsingham; a letter from Hakluyt to Walsingham in 1585 reminds him of the
occasion and mentions both the “Discourse” and the “Analysis” (printed in The Original
Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols., ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Hak-
luyt Society 2nd ser. 76–77 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 2:343–44; see The Hakluyt
Handbook, 2 vols., ed. D. B. Quinn, Hakluyt Society 2nd ser., 144 and 145 (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1974), 1:284–87; and Discourse of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison
M. Quinn, Hakluyt Society, extra ser., 45 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), xvi–xvii, xx–xxi.
51. Taylor, Original Writings, 1:139–46 and 163–64 (quote on 143); Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook,
1:272.
52. Hakluyt, Divers Voyages (London, 1582) ¶1r–v.
53. Davis, Corporations, 2:197–98 and 206–8; Withington, Society in Early Modern England,
204–7.
54. See Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter 1606–1609, 2
vols., Hakluyt Society 2nd ser., 136–37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969),
13–23. The company’s formal incorporation appears only as of the second charter (May 23,
1609), but Barbour suggests that the Muscovy Company and East India Company pro-
vided models for the first 1606 charter and (following Quinn) describes the venture as a
“public joint-stock company” (14–15). Barbour calls Hakluyt “the most prominent” (1:15) of
the original four patentees named for the Virginia colony; from 1609 until his death in
1616, Hakluyt owned two shares of £12 10s each in the company, the standard value (Quinn,
Hakluyt Handbook, 1:324). See also Davis, Corporations, 2:160–69.
55. The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, at the Lillian Goldman
Law Library, Yale Law School, Yale University), sourced (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/
avalon/states/va02.htm) from The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters, and
Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the
United States of America, compiled and edited by Francis Newton Thorpe (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), cited by paragraph.
56. See my further comments in Turner, “Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego,” 133–39.
57. David Runciman, “The Concept of the State: The Sovereignty of a Fiction,” in States and
Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Sträth (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), 28–38.
58. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 1:2: “Mercantilism never existed in the sense that Colbert or
Cromwell existed. It is only an instrumental concept which, if aptly chosen, should enable
us to understand a particular historical period more clearly than we otherwise might.”
59. Nearly a century ago, Harold Laski argued a similar point in a lecture that bears rereading
in light of contemporary interest in political theology; see Laski, “The Sovereignty of the
State,” in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press /
London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 1–25; and the essays reprinted in The Foundations
of Sovereignty (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1921); see also Glimp, Increase and
Multiply, esp. xvii–xix.
60. Braddick, State Formation, adopts a networked approach to the problem of the “State” that
significantly advances our understanding of political power; nevertheless, it is worth
176 Institutions
pointing out that if “political power is distinctive in being territorially based, functionally
limited and backed by the threat of legitimate physical force” (9), then all three qualities
were also characteristic of the power wielded by early modern corporations. See also With-
ington, Society in Early Modern England, 134–68 (esp. 155) and 216–27; Stern, Company-
State, esp. 3–15, both arguing a similar point.
61. I borrow from the sociologist of science Bruno Latour; see esp. Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Pandora’s
Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), and Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996). See my further discussion of these problems in Turner,
“Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego” and Turner, “Book, List, Word.”
8
Companies
Monopoly, Sovereignty,
and the East Indies
Philip J. Stern
Joint-stock companies were at the heart of Adam Smith’s understanding of the

“mercantile system”; unsurprisingly, he appeared to have very little use for them.1 They
were inefficient and ripe for mismanagement, “negligence,” and “profusion.” This was
simply, he argued, human nature. Managers of other people’s money—such as direc-
tors of joint-stocks—would never mind a commonly pooled capital with the same
“anxious vigilance” as those in a simple partnership watched their own.2 To succeed in
the market, most joint-stocks needed an artificial advantage: namely, state backing in
the form of monopoly and other prophylaxis against competition. Without this, com-
panies proved time and again ill-equipped to compete with “private” firms in foreign
trade.3 Matters became even worse when those mercantile bodies served as political
institutions, particularly in the colonial context. Inevitably confusing private gain with
public good, such a system was bound to oppress its subjects, the “trading spirit” ren-
dering them “bad sovereigns,” and the “spirit of sovereignty” rendering them “bad
traders.” Here Smith was referring to the recent history of that body he imagined ex-
emplified the pinnacle of mercantilist policy: the English East India Company.4
In many ways, the history of debates over the English East India Company from its
inception in 1600 through to its demise in the mid-nineteenth century was concomi-
tant with the development of British political economy, especially concerning foreign
trade.5 Not only did many of the controversies themselves surround the Company, but
many of the iconic theorists now associated with “mercantilist” thought, from Thomas
Mun and Edward Misselden to Josiah Child and Charles Davenant, were deeply con-
nected to it, not only writing on its behalf but working for, investing in, or even for
some directly administering its affairs. Similarly, for critics, like Gerard Malynes, core
questions of the day—bullionism, balance of trade, monopoly—were as much a ques-
tion about the nature of trade as they were about the proper institutional forms in
177
178 Institutions
which such trade should be organized. In Misselden’s words, “I perceive there’s no

discourse of Free trade will please Malynes, and others of his minde, without a Par of
Exchange, or complaint against Companies.”6
As a chartered joint-stock monopoly, the East India Company has earned a some-
what confusing, Janus-faced historiographical reputation: on the one hand, it is taken
to be the harbinger of “modern” multinational, global corporate capitalism, and on the
other hand, it is imagined as the mercantilist body par excellence.7 The confusion is in
itself instructive. The seventeenth-century Company’s advocates, including those
iconic mercantilists who argued on its behalf, in fact promoted a far more mixed and
nuanced agenda than their historical critics have tended to allow: reconciling the ex-
portation of specie with bullionism; alternatively inviting and resisting Crown inter-
vention in its affairs; offering support for monopolism that was both conditional and at
times extremely limited, while even endorsing free trade, open ports, and free naviga-
tion in other contexts. Meanwhile, the Company’s critics over the century, far from
universally advocating open trade and a labor theory of value, offered a cacophony of
arguments rooted in principles ranging from divine right theory to some of the same
premises offered by Company advocates. Moreover, part of the confusion over how to
understand the Company is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of its very
nature; as Smith himself understood, the joint-stock East India Company was not a
mere commercial operation. It was a form of corporate body politic that in the seven-
teenth century governed over a global network of ships, people, and fortified colonies
in a world of hybrid, multicentered, and competing notions of sovereignty, and which
by the eighteenth century had become itself a territorial empire.8 In this sense, revisit-
ing the debates over and within the Company about the proper organization of trade
can suggest new perspectives on mercantilism, particularly one of its most salient fea-
tures: the relationship between the “state” and the “merchant.”
Reimagining this relationship raises two central propositions about the nature and
structure of mercantilism. First, the alliance of merchants and the state in the early
modern period, often envisioned as a something approaching a mutual conspiracy,
was in fact often an uneasy one: the product of constant negotiation, lobbying, and
even at times outright hostility and suspicion. Seen in this way, mercantilism—both as
a theory of political economy and any policy regime it may have engendered—appears
less a top-down, proactive state-building enterprise than a product of the private and
public pleading, lobbying, treating, and coalition building by companies and their
agents to draw the state into service. There is a certain amount of truth to this ortho-
doxy of a relationship between company and state that ranged between partnership
and parasitism, yet, it is one that sits somewhat uncomfortably with the insight of a
range of new scholarship that has come to understand the early modern state as one
very much in formation, coexisting and sharing power with a range of allies and rivals.9
179 Companies
Indeed, the very body of thought understood as mercantilist writing was quite often
itself a product of that highly politicized environment. English merchants routinely
appealed to the sovereignty of the Crown and its infrastructure—courts, customs offi-
cials, diplomatic corps, naval power, among others—while also attempting with
varying degrees of success to keep the state from interfering too much in its affairs,
especially overseas. Companies and states may have been in alliance with one another,
but that did not mean that their interests, policies, or ideological frames overlapped
neatly and consistently, especially over time. In this sense, statist “mercantilist” policy
was not always the brainchild of the “state” itself but rather must be seen, at least in
part, as a product of political competition among various actors. Merchant commercial
corporations can be seen as akin to municipal corporations, university corporations,
and other forms of locality, which a number of historians have persuasively shown
unwittingly drew in bodies like Crown and Parliament, more conjuring their authority
as a means of dispute resolution rather than reacting to any coherent, centralized top-
down plan of state expansion.10 As Shaafat Ahmed Khan put it, somewhat hyperboli-
cally, almost a century ago, mercantilism “was not, therefore, imposed from above. It
supplied a genuinely felt want, and the government did nothing else but register the
decrees of public opinion.”11
Second, companies, and the East India Company in particular, were by their very
nature also governments, charged with authority over employees to be sure, but in the
overseas context, also over mariners and soldiers, settlers and strangers alike. As such,
they governed over markets outside the bounds of the English realm, generating pol-
icies and procedures over the commercial activity of those under their jurisdiction and
purview. This in turn engendered ideas about the nature of the economy, its proper
organization, and its proper ends that were analogous to but not always consonant
with the “national.” In the case of the Company, the early modern debate over
“monopoly”—again for critics like Smith the sine qua non of the mercantilist system—
was as much a question of political jurisdiction and civil law as it was about basic
commercial interest, or common law rights to trade. If there was something iconically
“mercantilist” about the Company’s position in these debates, it was not always clear
which role it was playing: the merchant or the state.
Through the seventeenth century, the relationship between the East India Company
and the English Crown was certainly close. This was almost inevitable. As an institu-
tion and among various individually powerful members, the Company was a signifi-
cant political force in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.12 Moreover, the
economic ideas generated by the controversies over East India affairs—and companies
in general—were inseparable from the ideological conflicts embedded in late seven-
teenth-century English politics more generally.13 Yet, this was not a relationship born
self-evidently of mutual interest. The Company was vigilant in this regard: gifts and
180 Institutions
gratuities in cash and kind, lobbying, petitions, and vigorous print campaigns secured
its relationship with the state through hard work and strategic deployment of both
political and financial capital.14 Indeed, many of the iconic state “impositions” on the
Company’s affairs can be seen as compromises, in many respects the cost of doing
business. For example, the infamous demands by Charles I in the 1630s for below-cost
pepper from the Company appear on closer inspection to be a mutual settlement, one
the Company’s leadership clearly accepted and may even have invited.15 A century and
some later, the ministry’s demand in 1767 that the Company pay a £400,000 annual
tribute was also a settlement designed by the Company itself to secure the British state’s
acknowledgment of its sovereignty in Bengal.16
More generally, of course, all of the instruments of state power used on the Compa-
ny’s behalf—charters and patents, action by courts, customs, and other agencies against
interlopers and rivals, naval convoys, and so on—were often hard-fought, purchased
with political and actual capital. If perhaps notable in its intensity, this was not at all
uncommon. So much of the regulatory (and at other times deregulatory) impulses
found in early modern Crown policy and parliamentary legislation can be traced to the
lobbying, petitioning, and pamphleteering of interested parties, who in turn were re-
sponsible for working out a wealth of political and economic ideology to stand behind
their arguments. The lines among state and merchant blur quite often enough, as those
various parties also quite often themselves held various forms of local and national
offices, including in Parliament.17
The Company’s relationship with various agents of the English state was thus
constantly fraught with tension, and as much as the Company invited state action on its
behalf, it vigilantly resisted state action in its affairs. Throughout the century, of course, its
relationship with Parliament was ambiguous and precarious, but even the Crown can be
found backing rival companies, coalitions, interlopers, and free traders. Both Charles I
and Oliver Cromwell lent support to William Courteen and his “Association” of East
India merchants; Cromwell suspended the Company’s monopoly altogether from 1654–
57. In the 1690s, when Parliament chartered a “new” East India Company to compete
with and replace the old one, King William III was the largest investor in the new enter-
prise. Moreover, at the height of its close relationship with the Company, the Crown often
failed to respond to its demands support. Both Dutch assaults on the East India Com-
pany at Amboyna in 1623 and Banten in 1682 went largely without the sort of retaliation
one might expect from such a close merchant-state alliance, despite vigorous public rela-
tions campaigns in both instances on the part of the Company and its advocates.18
In the end, the connection between company and state is far better understood as an
awkward alliance rather than a complete subordination. Like all early modern political
coalitions, that relationship was subjected to shifting tensions and constant renegotia-
tion. It was also a relationship based less in mutual benefit than mutual dependence.19
181 Companies
The Company became essential to England not only through the great revenues it pro-
vided through customs but also as an importer of raw materials necessary for native
manufactures (such as silk and indigo), spices, and perhaps most importantly military
supplies. This too was as much an economic reality as it was a product of vigilant argu-
ment and attempts at persuasion. Defending the East India trade in the late seven-
teenth century, Robert Ferguson insisted that without the Company’s saltpeter imports,
“we should be like the Israelites under the Bondage of the Philistines, without means of
defending ourselves.”20 Positioning itself as crucial to the very defense of England was
a strategy with which Company leaders, particularly Josiah Child, had great personal
experience. Child had restored his own political career—endangered by his close ties
to the Admiralty and Navy during the Interregnum—after 1660 largely by supplying
the Navy with timber imported from America and libation from his brewery in South-
wark.21 Similarly, Company advocates insisted not only that its imports were indis-
pensable to a maritime power such as England but also that its very trade and navigation
were critical to the protection of the English constitution itself. Company-trained
seamen and ships, advocates argued, was key to the naval strength of England and thus
one of greatest prophylaxes both against invasion as well as the tyranny and despotism
of land armies.22 The Company continued to maintain against arguments that it
drained specie, and thus wealth, from England, that it had in fact put idle hands to
work, creating jobs both at sea and at home, most notably in silk manufacturing. And
despite criticism that it encouraged a luxury that threatened to make England weak,
the Company became indispensable as a supplier of the nation’s increasing addiction
(in the case of coffee and later tea and to a lesser extent opium, quite literally) to in-
creasingly demanded luxuries, which it repeatedly attempted to redefine, along with
itself, as “useful and necessary.”23 For lack of anything approaching decisive evidence,
the value of the East India trade to England was a matter to be decided by ideology and
policy, which in turn was the product of vigilant political work. Thus, to insist that the
Company served the state was not to maintain that it was at its service. Indeed, the very
same arguments that suggested it required state backing also quite often insisted on the
absolute necessity of its maintaining its independence and freedom from intervention
and interference.
At the heart of this power was incorporation into a body politic, with an exclusive
jurisdiction over its trade, or what critics called its monopoly. To be accused of being a
monopolist was one of the most damning of political insults in seventeenth-century
English political culture. For many, ranging from seventeenth-century parliamentar-
ians to modern critics, monopolies were “Bloodsuckers of the Commonwealth.”24 To
Thomas Hobbes, joint-stock companies were “double monopolies,” as their power mil-
itated toward buying low in one market and selling high in another.25 Yet, even advo-
cates of “monopoly” did not defend it per se and rarely if ever defended it as an absolute
182 Institutions
economic principle. Monopoly was a name one gave to other people. The East India
Company for its part consistently maintained across the century that what it had was
an exclusive privilege: not simply the restriction of a particular trade, with the inten-
tion of engrossing prices or excluding others from its profits, but the responsibility to
tend to the English trade and intercourse with the East Indies. That it was an incorpo-
rated company was critical, since such rights would be meaningless if not maintained
by a singular institution in perpetuity. “How can a Society of Merchants,” Charles Dav-
enant asked at the end of the seventeenth century, “have large Minds, and expatiate
their Thoughts for great and publick Undertakings, whose Constitution is subject to
such frequent Changes, and who every Year run the risk of their capital?”26 Yet, this was
not simply a matter of fiscal but of political confidence. As Davenant continued:
Laws are contriv’d, and Politick Institutions are erected, thro’ an Opinion, that by
Skill at first, and afterwards by a long Series of Wisdom, Governments may be
render’d Immortal. We build strong Houses in Prospect, that at worst, the time of
Death is uncertain, and that Life may be extended to a great length. Large Estates
and Titles are acquir’d with much Labour and Hazard in View, that our Posterity
may continue on the Earth many Ages. But if the Life of Man were as short as that
of some Animals, ’tis a Question (notwithstanding Humane Reason) whither we
should have any more Laws, Politie, Arts, Designs or Contrivance, than Flies or
Summer Insects.
What has been here said, holds generally in all Human Affairs, and by Con-
sequence in our present Argument: So that no society of Trading Men can bring
about any great Thing for the Common Good, who think themselves but in a pre-
carious and momentary Possession of their Rights and Priviledges.27
The defense of exclusive privilege was thus a defense of the company’s very constitu-
tion as a corporate joint-stock body. Privileges required permanence, and permanence
required chartered incorporation. In this sense, incorporation was not a protection by
the state but from it: that is, from any action on its part that would render precarious a
corporation’s particular privileges once granted. A close relationship between com-
pany and state was, as Davenant argued, critical to the establishment of credit and
strength, both at home and abroad, but it was not an inherent or consistent feature of
corporate practice.28 For many seventeenth-century economic writers the basic prin-
ciple of this sort of arrangement was simply put: “Freedom for themselves, restrictions
for others,” including at times the state itself.29
That Davenant compared the incorporated company to an “immortal government”
(among other metaphors) was not incidental. “Monopoly” companies, particularly in
the extra-European world, were ultimately constituted specifically to govern over trade
183 Companies
as well as over people. To their advocates, such a position might have been intended to
restrict particular people, but it was not intended to restrict trade or even, at least in
theories, inflate or engross its prices. Indeed, East India Company advocates argued,
having a single agent in Asia was the only way to keep prices down. It was competition,
according to this argument, that endangered overseas trade, because it diminished bar-
gaining power, both in the form of commercial as well as political concessions. Expe-
rience proved that markets in Asia took advantage of intra-English demand to drive up
cost and play one off against the other politically; this seemed true in the brief period
when Cromwell opened the trade, as well as more constantly, as interlopers rivaled licit
Company trade in places like Surat and Hugli. Moreover, only a single company could
invest in diplomacy, infrastructure (particularly fortifications), and war making, which
was absolutely necessary and would be neglected without government, in an open and
impermanent trade.
While overseas corporations offered the most vibrant examples of ways in which cor-
porations intervened in the economy—and conversely, ways in which the economy was
thought to serve corporations—it was only an extreme articulation of a broader prin-
ciple. The regulation of trade, and governing of the market, was primarily and initially a
matter for local corporate institutions and particularly guilds.30 Corporations of various
sorts underscored the basic nature of social relations in the economy, particularly in the
form of charity. Municipal corporations not only administered poor relief but also
administered charity through other means, such as the extension of credit and the pro-
vision of apprenticeships, which both intervened in the market for those most vulner-
able while reinforcing the corporation as a site of power and identity.31 In a way, the
indentures supervised by Atlantic corporations were themselves a form of credit, lever-
aged against the products of future labor.32 Overseas corporations also took up charities
at home, or at least closer to home. The Company maintained a chapel and almshouse at
Poplar for invalided soldiers and sailors, and consistently fielded petitions for relief from
relatives of servants abroad. The Levant Company and the Ironmongers’ Company
administered charities for, among other things, the relief of British captives in Barbary.33
In this context, the question of “monopoly” was hardly a clear-cut economic issue.
From its very origins, the Company argued that distance and danger required them to
have both a perpetual existence and an exclusive privilege, “the trade of the Indies, being
so far remote from here.”34 Charles Molloy argued in 1677 that exclusive companies were
only good for trade “where the Places may bear it”: the East Indies, Ottoman Empire,
and elsewhere were necessarily organized into companies, but “the Canaries, France, or
any of those Places on this side of the Line . . . will not bear it, but the same would be
better distributed, either into the Trade of voluntary Associations, or single Traders:
others perhaps would result into Monopolies, if incorporated; however the Standard
rule is, to know whether the Trade of the Place will bear a Campany [sic], or not.”35
184 Institutions
Following Molloy’s line of argumentation, not all “monopolies” were created equal.
Indeed, almost everyone seemed agreed that monopolies were illegal or at least unfair;
it was just that while all monopolies may have been exclusive, not all exclusive privi-
leges were monopolies. An exclusive company in a place that “will not bear it” will turn
into a monopoly, which engrosses and manipulates prices; it was quite another story,
Josiah Child argued, when trading with people “with which his Majesty hath no Alli-
ance, nor can have any by reason of their distance, or Barbarity, or non-Communica-
tion with the Princes of Christendom.” In such a case, especially when there is “a
necessity of Maintaining Forces and Forts (such as East-India and Guinea) Companies
of Merchants are absolutely necessary.”36 Thus, joint-stock was critical in some places
but even potentially dangerous in others. Davenant argued similarly, though was per-
haps less convinced that the West Africa trade met the threshold and standard. Admit-
ting that the joint-stock was hardly without flaw, he suggested nonetheless that in such
a case, smart policy was to go with what has worked: “The well-governing of a People
is what has most employ’d the Thoughts of Men, and yet no Politick Institution was
ever perfect: Upon which Score the wisest Rulers have always desir’d to tread in the Old
Path, to follow ancient Customs, and to observe those Methods in their Proceedings,
which have been approv’d of by longest Experience.” Joint-stock companies may be
“defective in many Parts,” but they were less so than other possible schemes of govern-
ing trade, particularly regulated companies—especially because of their ability to
maintain treaties of alliance and fortifications.37 “Nothing but a Joint-Stock,” he argued
about the East India Company specifically, “could produce such a Joint-Force, as might
be able to preserve the Traffick safe, against Pirates or Foreign Enemies, in so long a
voyage.”38 The model, again, was the Dutch, whose “Success has chiefly proceeded from
the Validity of their Settlement.”39
Exclusive rights to trade in Asia were a form thus not just of economic right but of a
responsibility of government, and in a sense sovereignty and political power. This was
in fact the converse of Hugo Grotius’s complaint about the Portuguese in Mare Li-
berum. In that case, Iberian exclusive sovereignty in Asia, he argued, led to the en-
grossing of Indian commodities; drawing an analogy to monopolies that drove up the
price of grain, he argued that this was both illegal and unnatural:
That very thing therefore which in a commonwealth, to wit, in a less assembly of

men, is judged and esteemed grievous and dangerous, is it tolerable in that great
society of mankind that the Spanish people should make a monopoly of the whole
world? . . . Let the Portugals therefore exclaim as much and as long as they list, “Ye
take away our gain!.” The Hollanders will answer, “Nay, we are careful of our own.
Are you angry at this, that we take part with the winds and sea? But who hath prom-
ised those gains shall remain yours? It is well with you wherewith we are contented”40
185 Companies
Grotius thus suggested (on behalf of the Dutch East India Company) that Iberian
claims to sovereignty were bad politics and bad political economy; free access to Asian
ports among European states was both just policy and sound economics. Yet, famously,
it was not long before the Dutch themselves “forgot” their Grotius and began to follow
the very same approach, enforcing through violence or diplomacy exclusive access to
various ports in Asia.41 It was then the English East India Company’s turn to complain.
At the beginning of the century, they even used Grotius against himself, employing a
translation of the anonymously published Mare Liberum (by Richard Hakluyt, prob-
ably at the Company’s behest) to argue against growing Dutch claims to exclusive
rights in southeast Asia; these arguments were most fervently directed at the Dutch
delegates at the Anglo-Dutch Conferences of 1613, among whose number, ironically,
was none other than Hugo Grotius.42
If the international debate over sovereignty in Asia was to some extent a debate over
monopolism, in turn the debate over monopoly in England mirrored that jurisdic-
tional controversy in the law of nations. The Company and interlopers sparred not
only over common-law precedents dating to Magna Carta but also over questions ger-
mane to the civil law and the evolving arguments in the law of nations, most particu-
larly the extent to which a body like the Company had to use and improve its vast
hemispheric jurisdiction in order to make a valid claim to ownership of it.43 The Com-
pany’s rivals’ arguments often mimicked the early seventeenth-century opponents, like
Grotius, to Portuguese claims by virtue of papal donation. Especially as debates over its
rights reached a climax in the 1680s and 1690s, Company opponents insisted that such
a jurisdiction was illegal because it was first and foremost impractical: the Company
neither did nor could maintain a trade to the entirety of the East Indies. After all, inter-
lopers argued, the Company had “half the known world in their Charter, and that’s too
much for any Company,”44 the very same position taken by the English against the
VOC in the 1613 London conference.45 This was an opinion not only taken up by inter-
lopers but by other corporations, both would-be replacements for the East India Com-
pany as well as rivals like the Levant Company, which though once closely allied with
the East India Company had now come to see it and its trade in Persian silk as a direct
infringement on Levant Company rights in the Ottoman Empire. Its pamphleteers
argued that the Company’s chartered authority was incommensurate with the size of
its stock and the extent of its trade.46 This was in one sense a common-law argument
about the freedom of trade and the rights of subjects as well as a practical one about
revenues lost both to traders and to the Crown customs.47 Yet, it also served to continue
to cast the English monopoly debate in the light of the law of nations and the nature of
imperial jurisdiction abroad. What the Levant Company argued for the East India
Company’s jurisdiction at its extremes, interlopers (two groups not mutually exclusive)
argued it for the East Indies as a whole. Here again the charter became much like the
186 Institutions
papal bull, a connection Roger Coke made explicit: “Their Patent . . . I say is more, if
you compute the Coast on both sides of the Red Sea, and the Gulph of Persia, than half
the circumference of the Globe of the Earth. . . . However Oliver would, in his Zeal,
have the Pope to be Anti-Christ in exalting himself above God, and in disposing the
Kingdoms upon Earth, wherein the Pope and he were Simeon and Levy; but herein the
Pope and he differed: The Pope would have all his own Tribe to Partake of his Blessings;
whereas Oliver, by this Patent, excluded all the rest of the English Nation in this Trade.”48
While jurisdictional squabbles may have provided the immediate context for the
Levant Company’s assault, its content extended to fundamental issues about the con-
stitution and organization of the overseas corporation itself. The Levant Company was
perhaps the most prominent of the English “regulated” companies, guild-like syndi-
cates consisting only of those directly involved in the trade. This structure provided for
a commonly policed monopoly and a set of pooled resources and authority for the
appointment of consuls and ambassadors. The English factories in Turkey, as a result,
were more “communities” of proprietors’ factors, organized together for mutual ben-
efit and security, than a single station both created and administered from the top
down.49 The relatively parvenu joint-stock, on the other hand, was a radical departure
from this model. As one contemporary noted, “the society of the Company trading to
the East Indies differ from others, both as in reference to the persons . . . as also for that
their Adventurers run all into many stocks, and is governed and carried all jointly
upon benefit, and loss.”50 In a single corporate body with a centrally directed trade,
finance of the trade and the prosecution of that trade were deliberately distinct. Stock,
not trading profits, provided the basic capital. Stockholders, who did not actually pros-
ecute the trade themselves, made the ultimate decisions.
Both joint-stock corporations and regulated companies were monopolies, and in this
sense, ostensibly shared some common ideological ground. However, the controversy
over the two forms was perhaps even more lively than the debate between monopolism
and free trade, though neither absolute “monopolism” nor absolute “free trade” were
ever really themselves mainstream ideological options.51 Much of the argument for
opening the East India trade, at least, amounted to demands that access to its privileges
be widened, or the constitutional structure of those privileges transformed in some
way. Yet, there was a trenchant debate over the very propriety of the joint-stock form
of capital organization. To many advocates of regulated companies joint-stock was an
appalling form of government, anathema to the guild model upon which the regulated
trade was founded. In a more traditional guild model, only qualified, authorized, and
often previously apprenticed traders could be allowed into any particular trade; such a
model transferred to the regulated company, which was essentially a guild of indi-
vidual traders and small partnerships. Conversely, it was capital, not expertise, that
earned one membership and even leadership of a joint-stock corporation; “freedom” of
187 Companies
the corporation and thus access to its privileges, responsibilities, and sworn obligations
of membership were available to anyone with the money available to invest (provided
someone was selling stock, or the capital stock was itself opened to new investment).
To its critics, the problem here was obvious: the East India Company was a trading
body not necessarily or primarily constituted by traders. Joint-stock trades could be—
and were often—administered by people who had little or no practical experience in
the particular they governed. Yet, the argument went further. The artificial corporate
person was a body politic, but it was one, some argued, without a soul and thus without
a conscience. Practically, this argument was meant to cast doubt on the Company’s
trustworthiness and reliability in contracting debts, perhaps to scare off future inves-
tors. Here was the crux of the controversy over the corporation’s perpetual life: Was it
immortal because it was a bloodsucking vampire, or a transcendent government? This
etherealness was characterized in distinctly corporeal metaphors. Apostrophizing the
East India Company, a lawyer for one interloper proclaimed that “Dealing with you is
a kind of dealing with Spirits, an Invisible Body subsisting only in intelligentia legis.”52
Again, there was a practical point to be made here: if one went looking for the “Com-
pany,” where would one actually find it? Certainly, it was far more of a legal abstraction
than an individual trader, a partnership, or even a coalition of partnerships. But, taken
to a deeper level, this accusation of soullessness was itself an indictment not only of the
Company’s creditworthiness but of its credibility as a political body. After all, if a body
politic were to have integrity and permanence, it needed not just an institutional
structure—the body—but also the politic, or, as Nathaniel Johnston had argued more
generally, that “Forma Informans, that divine particular auræ . . . the forming Soul, the
Portion of Divine Spirit and Ubiqitary power that presides and governs all”—that is,
sovereignty.53
There was embedded in the critique of monopoly a deeply held suspicion of the
joint-stock company itself, one that struck not just at the core of the Company’s eco-
nomic activity but its very nature as a corporate and political body. To the Company, a
joint-stock was probably more profitable, to be sure, but it was also “more national,”
since investors and governors did not have to be qualified merchants, as in the Levant
trade.54 Moreover, regulated and open trades were dangerous because they encouraged
irresponsible government. This was a principle upon which all sides could seem to
agree: commerce, especially overseas commerce, required some form of governance to
be safe and profitable. As Edward Misselden insisted in his essay on Free Trade, “Those
that Trade without Order and Government, are like unto men, that make Holes in the
bottome of that Ship.”55
“Philopatris,” who was likely Josiah Child, argued in 1681 that merchants “while they
are in the busie and eager prosecution of their particular Trades,” can never determine
what is best for the “profit or power of a Kingdom.” With their attention focused on the
188 Institutions
particular they would easily fail to see the general. This is why we have governments—
a principle he derived from authorities as wide as Cicero, Bodin, Oliver St. John, and
“manifold Experience.”56 A few years earlier, another Company advocate made the very
same point, “according to the Proverb, That which is every mans business, will be no
mans business; when there is none by particular obligation of place, duty, and interest,
engaged to mind the general security and priviledg of the English-Trade, but every one
minds only his own private concern, the National Honour and Interest will decline.”57
Or, as Child summarized it almost a decade later, in an anonymous pamphlet “abstract-
ing” Philopatris’s arguments, only a “mixt Assembly of Noblemen, Gentle-men and
Merchants are the best Constitution for the making Rules, Orders and By-Laws, for the
carrying on any Trade for the publick utility of the Kingdom.”58 Presumably, the same
was the case for the “wise council” that governed a joint-stock corporation as well. As
Charles Davenant noted, “Men in their Private Capacities may be allow’d to prefer their
single Profit, but should consult only the General Good in Publick Councils.”59 Citing
Child, Davenant posed an obvious question: Why, he asked, did the Dutch seem to
possess commercial advantage over England? Possessing no natural advantage or (to
his mind) advantage in character or cunning, the answer, he argued, was that they had
integrated the “concerns of commerce” as a “matter of state,” involving merchants in
governance and appealing not only to political theory but, in Child’s words, “the Prac-
tical Experience of Trade, by whom Laws and Orders are contriv’d.”60
Good counsel enabled a body politic as geographically dispersed as the Company to
act like a Leviathan, that is, with the prevention of anarchy as its fundamental guiding
aim. This served not just the trade but also the security and material and moral
well-being of the English in Asia. Company policy erected as its ideological corner-
stone the notion that it provided good governance, over the Eurasian trade as well as
over the commerce and free trade of those in its settlements at places like Madras,
Bombay, and Calcutta. Whether it achieved its aims is infinitely debatable (and was
infinitely debated). The Company argued, in the line of a long intellectual tradition,
that it possessed its jurisdiction because it improved it, not just commercially but dip-
lomatically, militarily, religiously, and politically as well.61 In return, it had taken on a
responsibility to govern that it could no more abandon than the king could forsake his
rule over his own subjects. This would later give way to arguments for the Company’s
own perpetual existence, in the sense that to abandon its agreements and government
in Asia would amount to breaking treaties and threatening the lives and souls of its
subjects. The point was patently not that monopoly was an unmitigated good or a uni-
versal principle of sound political economy. Rather, it was that both joint-stock and
chartered exclusive companies were inseparable and crucial in the absence rather than
the dominance of the state. As a later interlocutor in the Africa debate noted, regulated
companies “may doubtless be practiced with Success in Places where trading Cities
189 Companies
and Towns are built; where Factories can without Difficulty be established; where Pro-
tection is to be found for the Government of Commerce; and . . . where the Laws of
Nations operate, are in Force, and bind all Parties to an exact Observance of them”—
places like Russia, Hamburg, and the Ottoman Empire. However, the more centralized
and rigorous form of government that came with joint-stock was crucial among the
“Negroe-Princes and Chiefs” of Africa.62
Moreover, as a form of colonial government, the Company’s leadership, particularly
during the late seventeenth-century tenure of Josiah Child, exhibited a far different
attitude toward monopoly within intra-Asian trade than the position it had staked out
regarding the English trade to the East Indies. As the Dutch had before them com-
plained about the Portuguese, English Company officials constantly carped, in both
Europe and Asia, about Dutch “monopolizing” of the pepper trade, and spoke menac-
ingly of their pretensions to universal empire.63 Moreover, though the English Com-
pany insisted that their exclusive privilege allowed it to determine which English
subjects could be in the East Indies at any given time, especially after the 1660s, once
there, those travelers and traders were to have a free and unrestricted trade within Asia
itself—as long as they ultimately submitted to the rules and regulations of Company
governance. Company leaders in London supported, in a conditional sense, the exclu-
sive farming of custom and other duties yet continually admonished their subordi-
nates in India for allowing “the monopolizeing of Provisions for the private advantage
of particular men.”64 Indeed, at its city-colonies of Bombay, Madras, and later Calcutta,
the Company through the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century
sought to create free ports with as little encumbrance to trade as possible, in order to
encourage immigration and settlement from regional merchants, artisans, and sol-
diers. Trade at Bombay was to flow “as free there as water does run in the Rivers.”65
The central point, upon which many sides in these controversy seemed to agree, was
that early modern people and trade needed to be governed; what was up for debate was
where royal government would suffice to such a purpose, and where other forms of
governance, like companies, would be necessary. Underneath this was a sense that the
national state was similar in kind to the variety of other forms of corporations, from
municipalities to commercial companies, that governed over people in the early mod-
ern English world. Companies were not monarchies, as Misselden pointed out in his
bombastic opening to The Circle of Commerce: “[I]t is the complaint not of a common
man, but of a Common-wealth; not of a Companie of men, but of a Kingdom.”66 Yet,
that one was theoretically beholden more to the monarchy than to any particular other
corporate body did not mean that company and state were categorically unique. As
Misselden continued, defending against charges that his arguments in favor of the
Merchant Adventurers should be discounted because he was invested in the company:
“It is true, I am a brother, though unworthy of that worthie Society: and so I am of other
190 Institutions
Companies also: and so also am I am member, though one of the least, of the great
Common-wealth of this Kingdom, wherein I have learnt to preferre, that publique, to
all these particular obligations.”67
This was essentially one crux at least of the so-called mercantilist debate over monopoly:
Were all corporate bodies, including the state, of a kind, or could one distinguish between
the Crown and other forms of what Hobbes called “lesser commonwealths”? John Locke,
for example, was explicit. Only civil society was instituted solely for civil ends. Locke
clearly imagined civil society to be a “peculiar” form of society; the suggestion that an-
other society might also be instituted for broader ends, that is, any “benefits which Polit-
ical Government can yield” (such as, in this case, the salvation of souls) would be
tantamount, he objected, to saying there was no distinction between “Church and State;
A Commonwealth and an Army; or between a Family and the East-India Company; all
which have hitherto been though distinct sorts of Societies, instituted for different Ends.”
For Locke, it was the function, not the form, that distinguished one body politic from
another: “one of the Ends of the Family must be to Preach the Gospel, and Administer the
Sacraments; and one business of an Army to teach Languages, and propagate Religion.”68
By the eighteenth century, the state’s relationship with its corporations was changing.
Parliamentary regulation came to characterize relationships with overseas corpora-
tions, from the Royal African to the Newfoundland Companies. Charters were recalled,
proprietors brought into line, corporations regulated (especially following the South
Sea Bubble), and even the East India Company, in the aftermath of the internecine
conflict between the two East India Companies in the 1690s, was now under closer and
increasingly greater parliamentary scrutiny. Clergy, Francis Atterbury complained in
1700, without the right to assemble and appeal to Parliament for redress of grievances,
were “in a worse condition than the Pettiest Company or Corporation in the King-
dom.”69 Bodies like the Board of Trade also signaled this greater involvement and reg-
ulation of imperial venture by the national state, and as such the viability of monopolies,
such as the Royal African Company, were increasingly tenuous.70 The move from a
sense of trades governed by corporate councils to either councils of state or, by the time
of Smith and beyond, the natural laws of the marketplace would seem to be the ana-
logue to the transition from early modern forms of community regulation to forms of
economic activity, which have accompanied the internalized self-discipline character-
istic of modern political and economic regimes. Commercial corporations, in this
sense, would seem to be a critical step between household and informal community
regulation, on the one hand, and the “highly abstract and bureaucratized” forms of
economic regulation embodied in the community of the nation-state on the other.71
The union of modern capitalism and the modern state has done a great deal to per-
suade us of the unity of modern sovereignty, while blinding us to the ways in which
corporations serve not as persons but as societies and self-governing bodies politic, with
191 Companies
great power, rights, and (ideally) responsibilities intertwined with but potentially inde-
pendent of the national state. Accepting a simple binary between ruler and ruled—
between state and society — has in turn anachronistically established a far-too-simplistic
vision of the political dimensions of mercantilism, particularly when coupled with the
observation that it was companies and corporations, not states, that did much of the
business of early modern empire. In a sense, Smith was right that political economy tends
to emphasize the enrichment of both the “individual” and the “state,” and early modern
political economy—that is, mercantilism—often stressed the importance of government
in regulating and intervening in the “market,” in providing for the welfare of subjects and
in creating the conditions for population, strength, and power via commercial exchange.
This realization can move us from a vision of corporations as malfunctioning “publick
institutions and publick works”72 to one in which corporate bodies constituted political
communities, engaged in the governance of people and markets, and approached eco-
nomic life according to certain patterns, but with great variation within those patterns.
Against a backdrop of variety of corporate, associational, and communal understandings
of politics and economy, such a proposition, at the very least, raises the serious question
as to who constituted the “state” or the “merchant” in the first place.
NOTES
1. While one can see the critique of companies, and monopoly specifically, in the first edition
of 1776, Smith added his explicit arguments about companies, both joint-stock and regu-
lated, in volume 3 of the 1784 edition. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1784), 3:107ff; Adam Smith, Additions and Corrections to
the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations ([London?], [1784]), 47ff. See Sankar Muthu, “Adam Smith’s Critique of
International Trading Companies: Theorizing ‘Globalization’ in the Age of Enlightenment,”
Political Theory 36, no. 2 (2008): 185–212; Andreas Ortmann, “The Nature and Causes of
Corporate Negligence, Sham Lectures, and Ecclesiastical Indolence: Adam Smith on Joint-
Stock Companies, Teachers, and Preachers,” History of Political Economy 31, no. 2 (1999):
297–315; Gary Anderson and Robert Tollison, “Adam Smith’s Analysis of Joint-Stock Com-
panies,” Journal of Political Economy 90, no. 6 (1982): 1237–56, for an alternative reading.
2. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 3:124.
3. Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2010), 265.
4. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:118; 3:249.
5. See, for example, William Barber, British Economic Thought and India: A Study in the His-
tory of Development Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
6. Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce, Or The Balance of Trade in Defence of Free
Trade: Opposed to Malynes Little Fish and His Great Whale, and Poized Against them in the
Scale (London, 1623), 63.
7. For one of the most fully articulated versions of this notion of the Company as a product
of “mercantilism,” see Robert Ekelund and Robert Tollison, particularly Mercantilism as a
192 Institutions
Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Station: Texas

A&M Press, 1981); Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism (College
Station: Texas A&M Press, 1997); P. J. Thomas, Mercantilism and the East India Trade: An
Early Phase of the Protection v. Free Trade Controversy (London: P. S. King and Son, 1926);
Douglas Irwin, “Mercantilism as Strategic Trade Policy: The Anglo-Dutch Rivalry for the
East India Trade,” Journal of Political Economy 99, no. 6 (1991): 1296–314. On the Company
as a forerunner of the “modern multinational,” see among others, Nick Robins, The Corpo-
ration that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multina-
tional (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006); Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “Giants of an
Earlier Capitalism: The Chartered Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History
Review 62 (1988): 398–419; Carlos and Nicholas, “Theory and History: Seventeenth-
Century Joint-Stock Chartered Trading Companies,” Journal of Economic History 56
(1996): 916–24; K. N. Chaudhuri, “The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th
Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational Organization,” in Companies and Trade, ed. Leon-
ard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1981).
8. I explore this understanding of the East India Company much more fully in Philip J. Stern,
The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British
Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9. See, for example, Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.
1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign
State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and
Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994).
10. Braddick, State Formation; Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics
in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11. S. A. Khan, The East India Trade in the XVIIth Century, In its Political and Economic Aspects
(London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 143.
12. Lucy Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1952); Arnold A. Sherman, “Pressure from Leadenhall: The East India Company
Lobby, 1660–1678,” Business History Review 50 (1976): 329–55; Margaret Bauer Havlik,
“Power and Politics in the East India Company 1681–1709” (PhD diss., University of Akron,
1998); James Bohun, “Protecting Prerogative: William III and the East India Trade Debate,
1689–1698,” Past Imperfect 2 (1993): 63–86; Henry Horwitz, “The East India Trade, the Pol-
iticians, and the Constitution: 1689–1702,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 1–18; Robert
Walcott, “The East India Interest in the General Election of 1700–01,” English Historical
Review 71 (1956): 223–39; Stern, Company-State, ch. 7.
13. See Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2011); Perry Gauci, “Introduction,” in Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 7.
14. On print, see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East
India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. ch. 4.
15. William Foster, “Charles I and the East India Company,” English Historical Review 19, 75
(1904): 456.
16. H. V. Bowen, “A Question of Sovereignty? The Bengal Land Revenue Issue, 1765–67,” Jour-
nal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 16 (January 1988): 156–71.
17. See Gauci, Regulating the British Economy, esp. 25–40 (Pettigrew); 63–81 (Knights); 107–22
(Gauci); Tim Keirn, “Monopoly, Economic Thought, and the Royal African Company,” in
193 Companies
Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995), 427–66.
18. Among others, see Anthony Milton, “Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, The East India
Company and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” in Politics of the Public Sphere
in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2008); Stern, Company-State, 71.
19. Bruce Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
20. [Robert Ferguson], The East-India-Trade A Most Profitable Trade (London, 1677), 9.
21. Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-
Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 131;
William Letwin, Sir Josiah Child, Merchant Economist (Boston: Kress Library of Business
and Economics, 1959), 12–13.
22. William Barber, British Economic Thought and India 1600–1858: A Study in the History of
Development Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 33; Philopatris, A Treatise
Wherein is Demonstrated That the East-India Trade is the Most National of Foreign Trades
(London, 1681), 28.
23. Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 32.
24. Quoted in David Harris Sacks, “The Countervailing of Benefits: Monopoly, Liberty and
Benevolence in Elizabethan England,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 275. For a modern critic, see Ekelund and
Tollison, Politicized Economies.
25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 160–61.
26. Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, And on the Trade of England. Which
more immediately Treat of the Foreign Traffick of this Kingdom. (London, 1698), 2:421.
27. Davenant, Discourses, 2:422–23.
28. Davenant, Discourses, 2:424.
29. Jacob Viner, “Theories of Foreign Trade Before Adam Smith (Concluded),” Journal of Po-
litical Economy 38, no. 4 (1930): 405.
30. Thomas Nachbar, “Monopoly, Mercantilism, and the Politics of Regulation,” Virginia Law
Review 91, no. 6 (2005): 1320.
31. Phil Withington, “Citizens, Community, and Political Culture in Restoration England,” in
Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard
and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
32. Hilary McD. Beckles, “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth
Century,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas
Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 224.
33. Alfred Cecil Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge, 1964), 203.
34. Quoted by Cecil T. Carr, ed., Select Charters of Trading Companies, A.D. 1530–1707 (Lon-
don: B. Quaritch for the Selden Society, 1913), xvii. See, also, An Answer to Two Letters,
Concerning the East-India Company (London, 1676); [Ferguson], The East-India-Trade A
Most Profitable Trade, 15–18.
35. Charles Molloy, De jure maritime et navali, or, A treatise of affaires maritime and of com-
merce in three books (London, 1677), 434.
36. Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade Wherein is Recommended several weighty Points
relating to Companies of Merchants, The Act of Navigation, Naturalization of Strangers, and
our Woollen Manufactures, The Ballance of Trade, and the Nature of Plantations, and their
194 Institutions
Consequences in relation to the Kingdom are seriously discussed, And Some Proposals for
erecting a Court of Merchants for determining Controversies, relating to maritime Affairs,
and for a Law of Transferance of Bills of Debts, are humbly Offered. (London, 1694), 103, 105.
37. Davenant, Discourses, 2:399, 401.
40. Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, or A Disputation Concerning the Right which the Hollanders
Ought to Have to the Indian Merchandise for Trading, ed. David Armitage, trans. Richard
Hakluyt (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2004), 56.
41. Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Pre-Modern Commerce and Society in Southern Asia: An Inaugu-
ral Lecture delivered at the University of Malaya on December 21, 1971 (Kuala Lumpur:
University of Malaya, 1972), 9.
42. C. H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies
(16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 58–59; Alexandrowicz,
“Grotius and India,” The Indian Year Book of International Affairs 3 (1954); Grotius, The Free
Sea, xxii.
43. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order
from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 90, 104–8, 174–75.
44. Argument as characterized by Philopatris, Treatise, 15.
45. W.S.M. Knight, “Grotius in England: His Opposition There to the Principles of the Mare
Liberum,” Transactions of the Grotius Society 5 (1919), 29.
46. The Allegations of the Turky Company and Others Against the East-India-Company, Relating
to the Management of that Trade (London, 1681), 5.
47. Barber, British Economic Thought and India, 39–40.
48. Roger Coke, Reflections upon the East-Indy and Royal African Companies (London, 1695),
6–7.
49. Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1998), 14.
50. Molloy, De Jure Maritimo et Navali, 431–32.
51. Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 62, 65.
52. The Argument of a Learned Counsel Upon An Action of the Case Brought by the East-India-
Company, Against Mr. Thomas Sands, an Interloper (London, 1696), 32–34; Barber, British
Economic Thought and India, 31, n. 8; T.B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials
and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest
Period to the Year 1783 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1816), 10: 431.
53. Nathaniel Johnston, The Excellency of Monarchical Government, Especially of the English
Monarchy; wherein is largely treated of the several Benefits of Kingly Government, and the
Inconvenience of Commonwealths. Also of the Several Badges of Sovereignty in General, and
particularly according to the Constutions of our Laws. Likewise of The Duty of Subjects, and
the Mischiefs of Faction, Sedition and Rebellion. In all which The Principles and Practices of
our late Commonwealths Men are Considered. (London: Printed by T. B. for Robert Clavel,
1686), 5.
54. Ferguson, The East-India-Trade A Most Profitable Trade, 25.
55. Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 66.
56. Philopatris, Treatise, 1–2.
57. Ferguson, The East-India-Trade A Most Profitable Trade, 15.
58. Josiah Child, A Discourse Concerning Trade And in Particular of the East Indies (London,
1689), 1.
195 Companies
59. Charles Davenant, An Essay on the East-India-Trade, By the Author of the Essay on Ways
and Means (London, 1698), 9.
60. Charles Davenant, Discourses, 2:174.
61. See Stern, Company-State, ch. 2.
62. Mr. O’Connor, Considerations on the Trade to Africa, Together with A Proposal for Securing
the Benefits thereof to this Nation (London, 1749), 33.
63. See, for example, “An Insinuation made by John Brabourn Comondore,” January 30,
1694/5, IOR E/3/50 f. 318.
64. London to Madras, September 11, 1689, IOR E/3/92 f. 34.
65. Cited by Stern, Company-State, 85.
66. Misselden, Circle of Commerce, 2.
67. Misselden, Circle of Commerce, 65.
68. John Locke, A Second Letter Concerning Toleration ([London, 1690), 51
69. Francis Atterbury, The Rights, Powers, and Priviledges of an English Convocation, Stated and
Vindicated in Answer to a Late Book of D. Wake’s, entitled The Authority of Christian Princes
Over their Ecclesiastical Synods asserted, &c., and to several other pieces (London, 1700),
103.
70. Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David
Armitage and Michael Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 190–91.
71. Craig Muldrew, “From a ‘Light Cloak’ to an ‘Iron Age’: Historical Changes in the Relation
between Community and Individual,” in Shepard and Withington, Communities, quote on
171.
72. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 3:91.
9
The Church
Anglicanism and the
Nationalization of Maritime Space
Brent S. Sirota
Among the alterations to the Book of Common Prayer revised in 1661 and appended to
the Act of Uniformity the following year was a new chapter titled, “Forms of Prayer to
be used at Sea.” The chapter provided devotions for tempests and naval battles, mirac-
ulous deliverances and the burial of the seafaring dead. Among them was the humble
orison for English seamen that would come to be known as the naval prayer, “Preserve
us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy, that we may be a
safeguard unto our most gracious sovereign lord King Charles and his kingdoms, and
a security for such as pass on the sea upon their lawful occasions; that the inhabitants
of our island may in peace and quietness serve thee our God.” The forms of prayer, it
has been suggested, comprised an Anglican response to the Supply of Prayer for the
Ships of this Kingdom issued by the Long Parliament in 1645 as a supplement to the
Puritan Directory of Public Worship.1 Moreover, the prayers in some small measure
revived the martyred archbishop William Laud’s dream of an imperial Church of Eng-
land, forfeited along with his life in the political and religious crisis of the English civil
wars.2 Most importantly, the additional prayers signaled a new cognizance on the part
of the both Church and state that English national life now comprehended both land
and sea, and that the subjects of the reestablished confessional state might require the
consolations of its public worship far beyond the traditional demarcations of parish,
diocese, and kingdom. English Christianity was beginning to participate in the general
“oceanic turn” that at its most elemental level comprised what might still be considered
“the age of mercantilism” in early modern Europe.3
The question is whether the concept of mercantilism as traditionally formulated is
adequate to accommodate the plurality of domestic actors and institutions undergoing
this oceanic turn in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England (and Britain). After
all, mercantilism is conventionally applied only to the maritime reorientation of the
196
197 The Church
territorial state and its sanctioned commercial and military enterprises.4 Mercantilism
is generally understood as “the politicization of oceanic space,” the endeavor to inscribe
an unbounded maritime sphere of trade, transport, migration, and defense within the
rubric of territorial sovereignty.5 Limited exclusively to the posture of coercive and
commercial entities—Jacob Viner’s famous seekers after “power or plenty”—such con-
ceptions tend to treat this maritime reorientation of national life as a fundamentally
secular development, articulated exclusively in the radically immanent discourses of
political economy and reason of state.6 Moreover, such conceptions tend to shunt other
contemporaneous and plainly affiliated modes of engagement abroad, such as Chris-
tianization efforts, reformation of manners, and philanthropic activity, into the iso-
lated historiographies of church, Christian missions, or early humanitarianism.
Protestantism and prosperity were by no means irreconcilable in the minds of early
modern Britons; it is not clear why they have become so in the minds of historians.
The religious outreach to English seafaring and transmarine peoples in the later sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries permits a productive reconsideration of mercan-
tilism as the nationalization of oceanic space. Such an expansive definition has the
advantage of creating an analytic framework through which may be considered the
broader public engagement with the maritime world in this period. Moreover, it (quite
usefully, I hope) begs the question of what comprised the notoriously unstable cate-
gories of nation and national identity throughout this period; specifically, which ele-
ments of national life, which institutions, laws, communities, and mores were deemed
fit for application abroad. Such a definition will hopefully underscore the myopia of
invoking mercantilism solely to describe commercial and political investment in, say,
the East or West Indies, while excluding contemporaneous missionary or philan-
thropic engagement. The notion of mercantilism might better serve to comprehend the
broader national conversation in which the relative merits of divergent forms of en-
gagement abroad were articulated and assessed.7
England in this period was engaged in what Carl Schmitt once deemed an “elemental
metamorphosis” of its national life, which “turned her collective existence seawards
and centered it on the sea element.”8 England would, as John Dryden wrote, “by line
upon the ocean go, / Whose paths shall be familiar as the land.”9 The various institu-
tions of public life in England struggled to take cognizance of the ocean, what Antonis
Balasopoulos describes as “a geopolitically vital yet obstinately unassimilable piece of
the world picture,” no less inimical to claims of sovereignty and police actions than to
Christian soteriology and the blandishments of moral reform.10 Indeed, the maritime
orientation of English society bred something of a moral antinomy at the heart of Eng-
lish (and later, British) national identity. The ascendancy of trade and navigation in
English public life oriented the nation, in some sense, beyond itself—in Dryden’s
terms, toward paths of the ocean that as yet remained unfamiliar. National prosperity
198 Institutions
and security were entrusted to seafaring and transmarine peoples, denizens of oceanic
space and the far-flung network of factories and territories bound by it, who were
widely perceived as peripheral, if not wholly alien, to national life. Even as English
identity was increasingly predicated on this maritime orientation, it remained haunted
by the social and political liminality of the sea.
Religious outreach to the maritime sector in the later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries constituted a movement to overcome the moral hazard of the ocean, to
inscribe the sea and seafaring peoples within the Protestant, moral order that was in-
creasingly becoming constitutive of English national identity in this period.11 Far from
catalyzing what Eli Heckscher deemed the wholesale secularization and “amoraliza-
tion” of public life, the mercantilist orientation toward the sea seems to have engen-
dered a fresh campaign of Christianization, and indeed, confessionalization of the
maritime world.12 The network of largely Anglican religious and charitable associa-
tions engaged in Christianization efforts throughout the maritime empire sought to
redress the bounded insularity of English spiritual and moral authority, and accommo-
date the new spaces of national life: the hospitals and ports, ships-of-the-line and East
Indiamen, continental factories, new world plantations, and trading posts throughout
Asia and Africa. For such activists, the nationalization of oceanic space could proceed
only by way of its moralization—a moralization rendered acute by the tendency of
economic accumulation to eclipse other more spiritually enriching forms of engage-
ment abroad. For them, the affinity of Protestantism and commerce was an aspiration
rather than a structural feature of eighteenth-century English expansion. The empire
might be rendered “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” only through the ac-
commodation of an insular, national Protestantism to a sprawling blue-water empire
that had long proved an unreliable bearer of confessional identity.13
Ironically, this English moral and religious engagement abroad, rather than facilitating
nationalization of ocean and empire under the rubric of an insular, metropolitan Protes-
tantism, tended to broaden and diffuse the “sympathetic imagination” of Englishmen.14
The sense of moral obligation expanded with the widening sweep and growing diversity
of overseas English commercial and geopolitical interests.15 The narrow confessional as-
pirations of what some historians label “imperial Anglicanism” gave way first to a broader
Protestant solidarity, and then the generalized benevolence that came to characterize the
eighteenth century.16 The nationalist objectives of metropolitan religious writers, mis-
sionaries, and activists readily opened up onto a more capacious humanitarianism. The
eighteenth-century “age of benevolence,” it might be said, originated in the attempt to
render the insular notions of English national identity somewhat more seaworthy.
“Seamen,” as Nicholas Rodger begins his monumental history of the eighteenth-
century British navy, “have always dwelt on the fringes of settled society.”17 In early
modern England, they were set apart by their peculiar apparel and the salty cant and
199 The Church
impenetrable pidgins with which they communicated, their very bodies often marked
by weather, ink, and disfigurement.18 Seamen, reasoned the East India trader and po-
litical economist Josiah Child, “are inhabitants of the universe,” unbound by traditional
ties of allegiance, kinship, and confession.19 “Their lives,” another writer put it, “are
amphibious. They are born on the land, and do service on the water, yet have they
common justice on neither.”20 The English devotional writer John Flavel deemed sailors
“a third sort of persons, to be numbered neither with the living nor the dead, their lives
being continually in suspense before them.”21 In spite of the perennial reaffirmations of
their indispensability to English security and prosperity, seamen seemed to occupy an
alien social order, perhaps even an alien biological order.
Perhaps most troubling to the public at large, seamen were often considered veri-
table excommunicates, if not downright atheists, living in perpetual deprivation of
the sacraments and holy writ of the Christian religion. As Protestantism loomed ever
larger in the constitution of English national identity in the later seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, the perception of widespread irreligion amid the mari-
time sector grew more publicly discomforting. Seafaring and transmarine people
seemed to inhabit a morally and ecclesiologically liminal space beyond the ken of
traditional sources of pastoral oversight, discipline, and charitable relief. Of course,
the sea had traditionally been allotted its own unique spiritual comforts.22 The pre-
cariousness and privations of a life at sea were believed compensated by the vital and
unmediated experience of divine Providence that commerce and navigation neces-
sarily entailed.23 “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters,” ran the popular 107th Psalm, “These see the works of the Lord, and his won-
ders in the deep” (KJV).24 The factory chaplain Basil Kennett reminded his audience
of merchants at the port of Leghorn, “the sea, or the great waters, are an especial field
or subject of the power and providence of God.”25 And yet, there was a growing sense
in early modern English society that the sea had lost its traditional reputation as a
nursery of devotion. “That receipt is surely exolete,” the London clergyman Deul
Pead lamented before a congregation in Virginia, “qui nescit orare, discat navigare”—
he who does not know how to pray, let him learn to sail.26 The New England preacher
and Puritan luminary Cotton Mather could not overlook this bitter irony of impiety
among the seaborne, that those whose lives and livelihoods were most dependent
upon Providence seemed least mindful of its author.27 An early eighteenth-century
hymn by the London independent Isaac Watts traced this theme, “How is thy glo-
rious power ador’d / Amidst these watery nations, Lord! / Yet the bold men that trace
the seas / Bold men, refuse their Maker’s praise.”28 The sea, far from serving as a spe-
cial theater of divine Providence, was acquiring a reputation as a moral hazard, a
zone of irreligion and immorality as indifferent to the communion of churches as it
was to the sovereignty of states.
200 Institutions
Paradoxically, seamen were located on the moral and religious periphery of civil so-
ciety, while rhetorically occupying the very heart of national life. They were, William
Talbot, bishop of Oxford, told the House of Lords in 1704, “the living bulwarks of this
kingdom.”29 Though socially and culturally marginal to public life, the seafaring classes
acquired a growing prominence in English national identity in a period characterized
by rapid commercial and imperial expansion, and persistent hostilities with Bourbon
France.30 “’Tis to you (I may venture to say it),” the Church of Ireland clergyman John
Finglas told the sailors of Trinity House, Deptford, “in a great measure that we owe our
being a people.”31 Seamen, averred Cotton Mather in 1700, “are under God the very
defense of our nation.”32 George Stanhope similarly credited seamen with the mainte-
nance of English security and prosperity:
If trade flourish, and wealth increase, it is because your industry and courage trans-
plant the product of distant countries hither. . . . If this island enjoy the benefits of
its happy situation, it is because that sea, which God hath made our rampart and
entrenchment, hath been stoutly defended by our navies. Without these the nation
must be so far from rich and prosperous, that it could not so much as be safe.33
The imperatives of national mobilization during the protracted, global wars against
France ensuing in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688–89 thus engendered a
growing concern for the spiritual and physical welfare for the seafaring classes. The
dean of Worcester George Hickes deemed such concern highly becoming of “the
public wisdom of a Christian nation.” Hickes judged it “much for the honor of Christi-
anity, and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom upon the seas, if any way, could be
found out for the better instruction of common seamen in the rudiments of religion,
and for reforming, or restraining their open profaneness.”34
Sustained outreach to seamen figured fairly prominently in the platform of national
reformation embodied in the so-called moral revolution of the reign of William and
Mary.35 William III mentioned seamen conspicuously in his frequently reissued procla-
mations for the reformation of manners, inculcating “religion and virtue” among “all
officers, private soldiers, mariners and others who are employed in our service by sea
and land,” and demanding a strict policing of vice among the ranks.36 The London cler-
gyman William Bisset quipped that should any reformation take root among the
seamen, “I shall be apt to conclude the world’s near an end.”37 In 1700, the East India
Company chaplain and devotional writer Josiah Woodward penned a brief tract for the
consolation of English captives abroad. It was advertised as just one of a growing
number of “little useful books, proper to be had and read by all mariners and sea-faring
people.”38 At the same time, the Warwickshire clergyman Thomas Bray, before embark-
ing for Maryland as commissary for the bishop of London, envisioned a network of
201 The Church
lending libraries established “in each of the seaports” as bases for missions to the mari-
time sector and to discourage naval chaplains and missionaries from frequenting “cof-
feehouses and maybe less sober places” that lent seaside life its dingy allure. Bray actively
promoted such foundations at the maritime centers of Gravesend, Deal, and Plymouth
along his journey to the new world.39
Queen Mary, whose outsized Anglican piety inspired much of the moral and reli-
gious activism of the era, had a particular concern for the welfare of seamen. The “last
great project her thoughts were working on” before her death in 1694, was “a noble and
royal provision for disabled seamen . . . as to put them in a probable way of ending their
days in the fear of God.”40 That year, William and Mary founded the Royal Hospital for
Seamen at Greenwich on the premise “that the trade, navigation and naval strength of
this our realm of England (whereupon the safety and flourishing state thereof doth so
much depend) should by all proper means be promoted and advanced.”41 Greenwich
Hospital embodied the mixture of political economic objectives and conspicuous
Anglican benevolence that had come to characterize the reign of William and Mary.42
The virtuoso John Evelyn, one of the commissioners for the building of the hospital,
articulated his vision of the institution, which would not only house “the sick, wounded,
aged & otherwise disabled” but also “a seminary of a thousand boys or more instructed
to supply the navigation from time to time with able seamen in all capabilities,” mod-
eled on the mathematical school at Christ’s Hospital in London. The school would, of
course, require the ministrations of “some grave and diligent catechist,” not only to
cultivate a sense of religion among the students but also “to fix in them a detestation of
that common vice of cursing and swearing, so universal among seamen.”43 Soon after
the founding of Greenwich Hospital, the care of the souls lodged therein was com-
mitted to a London clergyman named Philip Stubbs, who was fast acquiring a reputa-
tion as an apostle to the maritime sector in England. He was formerly the rector of the
dockyard village of Woolwich and the author of a work of devotional writings for mar-
iners titled The Religious Seaman. His popular sermon “God’s Dominion over the Seas”
delivered aboard the flagship HMS Royal Sovereign in 1701 reached five editions in as
many years.44 Funding for the hospital was cobbled together from a variety of sources
reflective of the age: royal grant, charitable contributions, a lottery plan called “The
Charitable Adventure,” fines levied on smugglers, the forfeited estates of Jacobites, and
even a portion of the effects of the executed pirate William Kidd.45
Perhaps most remarkable was the way in which this concern for the moral lives of
seamen and overseas peoples rapidly expanded beyond the ken of the British state.
Never merely confined to the corridors of Whitehall or Lambeth Palace, this moral and
religious engagement with the maritime world soon became a prominent feature of the
post-Revolutionary public sphere, occupying the intersection of public discourses con-
cerning political economy, empire, and reformation of manners.46 Thus, in 1697, when
202 Institutions
Thomas Bray failed to divert some portion of the public funds for Greenwich Hospital
toward “the propagation of true religion in our foreign plantations,” he could envision
the work being carried on by a “voluntary society” established “to propagate Christian
knowledge as well at home as abroad.”47 In March 1699, Bray, along with four laymen,
founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) at the London resi-
dence of the Irish lawyer John Hooke. Though operating without any official sanction
from the English government, the SPCK adopted the entirety of the English commer-
cial and territorial empire as its field of mission. At its very first meeting, the Society
requested that Bray present his “scheme for promoting religion in the plantations.”
What he formally delivered two months later was a hodgepodge of charitable projects:
parochial libraries for American cures; “charitable plantations, stocked with some
Negroes,” to make the colonial Church self-sustainable; a program for the reduction of
Quakers, “who are so numerous in those parts”; and finally, charity schools for the
education of native youths, “in order to convert the Indian nations.”48 As a result of its
expansive outlook, the SPCK quickly attracted the attention of the numerous disparate
religious activists concerned for the spiritual welfare of seafaring and transmarine peo-
ples.49 Josiah Woodward began attending meetings of the organization in June 1699. In
October of the following year, Woodward pleaded that some notice be given to “Eng-
lish captives in the island of Ceylon.”50 Fifty copies of Woodward’s Letter of Advice and
Comfort to the English Captives Who Suffer in Slavery in Foreign Parts were dispatched
at the Society’s expense. In February 1701, the Society agreed that were a number of
Woodward tracts, “dispersed amongst the seamen, it would much conduce towards the
Christian instruction and reformation.”51 Woodward would serve as the Society’s liai-
son to the East India Company, procuring Anglican chaplains for the company’s Asian
factories, “till it please God to enable them to send missionaries of their own.”52 In
December 1700, the SPCK named the naval chaplain Patrick Gordon, author of the
popular geography textbook Geography anatomiz’d, “correspondent for the Navy.”
Gordon immediately submitted his “Proposals for Christian Instruction of Seamen” to
the consideration of the Society.53 By early 1702 George Stanhope, vicar of the dockside
parish of St. Nicholas, Deptford, and author of The Sea-Man’s Obligations to Gratitude
and a Good Life, had also become a corresponding member of the Society.54 By 1703 the
Greenwich Hospital chaplain Philip Stubbs had also joined. He would be among the
most reliable attendees of weekly Society meetings throughout the next fifteen years. In
early 1709, Stubbs donated to the Society for distribution among the Fleet copies of his
work, The Sea-Assize: Or, Sea faring Persons to be judged according to their Works, a
funeral sermon for Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, the Lord High
Admiral of Great Britain.55
By 1701 the SPCK had made extensive contacts among the naval chaplaincy. The
“correspondent for the Navy” Patrick Gordon wrote the SPCK from Deal in April 1701
203 The Church
to request eight thousand copies of Josiah Woodward’s tract A kind caution to pro-
phane swearers “to be distributed through the whole Fleet,” and to lodge similar devo-
tional and monitory works among the merchants at Gravesend. Aboard the Salisbury,
Gordon proposed a “little gift of tobacco” be distributed to sailors along with the So-
ciety literature, and accordingly requested that the Society send a “considerable quan-
tity of coarse tobacco to be disposed of by each chaplain.” He also proposed a method
for lending English Bibles throughout the Fleet.56 Thomas Thewell, chaplain to the
Barfleur, a ninety-gun ship of the line in the Channel fleet commanded by Sir Cloud-
esley Shovell, accepted a correspondence with the Society in April 1701. He com-
plained to the secretary of the SPCK John Chamberlayne, “That the service of God is
wholly laid aside in some ships, by the contrivance of the seamen,” and reported being
interrupted midsermon by a captain weary of his preaching. He recommended that
the Society lobby to have the power of choosing chaplains stripped from the ships’
captains, and that the bishop of London be empowered to appoint a chaplain-general
to supervise public worship throughout the navy.57 The Admiralty obliged by empow-
ering the clergyman William Hodges, who had already made something of a name for
himself as a tireless advocate for the reform of abuses in the payment of seaman’s
wages, “to inspect and oversee the lives and behaviors of the rest of the chaplains of
the ships.” Hodges began somewhat pretentiously to style himself “Chaplain General
to the Fleet,” although no such title was granted in his initial commission. In August
1701, the Society initiated correspondence with Hodges aboard the Triumph at
St. Helens on the Isle of Wight, who pledged the distribution of Society literature
throughout Sir George Rooke’s Channel fleet.58
Under the auspices of the SPCK, Josiah Woodward produced in 1701 a pamphlet ti-
tled The Seaman’s Monitor: or, advice to sea-faring men, one of the most enduring mon-
uments of the “oceanic turn” of English Christianity at the dawn of the eighteenth
century. “As the good success of our sea affairs is one of the principle concerns of this
our island,” Woodward wrote, “so nothing will, I conceive, more directly tend there-
unto, than the good behavior of our seamen.” The seafaring classes, he proclaimed,
“are, under God, the chief strength and defense of our nation, and the means of its
wealth and commerce.” Moreover, these men were the nation’s emissaries to the known
world and therefore responsible for its credit and reputation in partibus infidelibus,
before “papists, Turks, and infidels of all sorts.” Woodward grieved that the lives and
conversation of most seafaring men, “their unchristian behavior,” rendered them unfit
representatives of the English nation and its holy religion abroad. Their ships traversed
the whole world bereft of sacrament, public worship, and the reading of Scripture. “For
what a horrible and afflicting thought is it,” Woodward wrote, “that sometimes a hun-
dred Christians shall be together in a ship many whole months, and never worship
God together all that time!” Woodward advised the seamen “to keep up serious and
204 Institutions
fervent devotion in your whole voyage”; to observe the Sabbath, as circumstances

allow; to abstain from cursing, gaming, and drunkenness; and to deal justly with all
foreigners. “And when you come to any port,” he directed, blurring English Christian-
ity and imperial legality, “let nothing induce you to defraud the government of its just
customs.” He advised seamen as a method of devotion to mark down “God’s extraordi-
nary providences upon the seas” in a public register or journal as an aid to pious reflec-
tion. Though fairly conventional in its religious and moral outlook, The Seaman’s
Monitor was remarkable for its extraordinarily expansive nationalism. The maritime
orientation of English national identity could no longer permit seamen to be relegated
to the moral periphery of English public life. “The English nation is supposed to excel
all other in the strength and glory of her naval power. It would be the greatest pity in
the world, yea, the saddest neglect, should English seamen . . . be found wanting in the
principles and practices of religion and virtue.” Failure to integrate English seamen
into the broader moral and religious community stood as a rebuke to the moral and
Protestant pretensions of English nationalism.59
The Seaman’s Monitor was perhaps the outstanding example of what was rapidly be-
coming a distinct subgenre of English religious writing in the early eighteenth century:
devotional literature for mariners. The vast store of nautical imagery in the Bible, the
immediacy of providence in seafaring, and the physical precariousness of life at sea all
readily lent themselves to an emergent style of maritime piety. Works such as Cotton
Mather’s The Religious Mariner (1700) and The Sailours Companion and Counsellour
(1709); Christopher Bassnett’s The Seaman’s Character and Calling Consider’d (1712);
John Flavel’s Navigation Spiritualiz’d: Or, A New Compass for Seamen (originally pub-
lished as A New Compass for Seamen in 1664, as republished in 1698 and again 1708);
and James Janeway’s popular Restoration-era compilation, A Token for Mariners (1698)
diligently cataloged what Mather called “the vices of the sea,” and laid out a compelling
program for the Christianization of English seafaring.60 The preface to the 1703 edition
of Theophilus Dorrington’s popular multivolume work, Family devotions for Sunday
evenings, recommended its consolations “to masters of vessels; who have their com-
pany under them as their family,” though all the while at sea, “detained from the public
worship, and those ordinances which are his appointed means of grace and salvation.”61
Christopher Bassnett similarly analogized the crew to a “sea-family,” reasoning that, “If
a man should have a church in his house at land, he should much more have one in it
at sea.”62 The common worship of God fulfilled the barest requirements of human so-
ciability. “For such a society to live without any social acknowledgment of a God,”
Cotton Mather wrote of the crews of English vessels, “would be a practical atheism.”63
Such writers resorted to the naturalistic language of family and society in order to
invest maritime social relations—in actuality, often reaffirmed merely through the
wage and the lash—with the organicism of the parish and community. “What a happy,
205 The Church
what a lovely thing were it,” opined Mather, “if our vessels might be like little floating
churches, for the devotions therein performed?”64 James Janeway imagined “sea-
prayers and sea-praises” resounding from the quarterdecks: “this is the sound of trum-
pets you should carry to sea with you, outward bound, and homeward bound.”65 In
maintaining the worship of God aboard ship, English seamen might retain some ves-
tige of English sociability at sea and perhaps their identification with the broader
national community.
Such devotional works were common instruments of moral and religious outreach to
English seamen throughout the eighteenth century. In New England, Cotton Mather
was committed to “lodging books, which may be instruments of piety, in all vessels of
any burden, that may sail out of these colonies.”66 The SPCK periodically ordered
packets of devotional literature distributed to English seamen the world over. One such
packet was dispatched in summer 1713 to the soldiers and sailors of “Her Majesty’s gar-
rison at Port Mahon” on the newly captured island of Minorca in the western Mediter-
ranean.67 The next year, the SPCK shipped devotional works to the chaplains at Fort
St. George in Madras, India, “to be distributed among sailors or soldiers as you shall
see occasion.”68 Another such packet was dispatched in June 1717 to the West Indies.69
In March 1722, the secretary of the SPCK Henry Newman dispatched a catalog of So-
ciety literature to one Captain Sharrow for his perusal, “by which you will find the
books are chiefly adapted to the use of the common sailors, etc. under your care”70 In
summer 1723, George I reissued William III’s proclamation for reformation of manners
in the Fleet and appended it to the new impression of The Seaman’s Monitor he ordered
to be printed. The SPCK oversaw the distribution of some ten thousand copies through-
out the ranks of the service.71 Significantly, this latest edition of The Seaman’s Monitor
contained a new chapter, exposing “the detestable wickedness of piracy which it is
wished could be also put into the hands of every sailor in the merchant service.”72 The
SPCK aided the government crackdown on piracy by recommending that their clerical
members in port towns “take such occasions as they shall think proper to expose this
detestable practice in the public discourses.” That devotional works and agencies were
readily enlisted in the enforcement of imperial commercial restrictions underscores
something of the collaborative dimensions of the project of nationalizing oceanic
space. Woodward’s Monitor periodically resurfaced as a prop of English maritime na-
tionalism; it was republished in 1767 and then again during both the War of American
Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars.73
The English missionary impulse in this period was generally mediated by the pri-
mary imperative to promote and maintain English Christianity among natural-born
subjects at sea and abroad. In 1701, the imperial component of SPCK programming
was entrusted to a chartered corporation solely devoted to ecclesiastical expansion in
the Americas, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).
206 Institutions
The SPCK being no more than a voluntary association, it was thought necessary to
establish a more permanent entity to oversee the Christianization of the English com-
mercial empire, “to make the management legal and safe,” as Gilbert Burnet noted.74
Significantly, William III’s charter to the new corporation did not mention the non-
Christian inhabitants of the English empire; its intended design was to rectify the
plight of overseas Christians stationed in “plantations, colonies and factories [that] are
wholly destitute and unprovided of a maintenance for ministers and the public wor-
ship of God.”75 The objective of the new corporation followed naturally from the out-
reach to the maritime sector that had preoccupied its elder sibling society, the SPCK.
Membership in the two organizations significantly overlapped, and the SPG counted
many of the leading maritime activists, such as Thomas Bray, Philip Stubbs, George
Stanhope and Josiah Woodward, among its ranks.
The English seafaring and colonial populations were routinely deplored as unfit in-
struments of the propagation of the Gospel abroad. “The most glorious improvement
of navigation,” preached George Stanhope in 1699, “would be to spread Christianity
wider, and enlighten the still dark corners of the earth with saving knowledge.”76 And
yet, the men engaged in trade and navigation were often considered bereft of any mo-
rality or religion that might distinguish them from the heathens among whom they
traded and settled. “Are they not generally the loosest sort of Christians,” asked Chris-
topher Bassnett, “that go into foreign parts, and converse with the enemies of our reli-
gion?”77 Josiah Woodward lamented, “Though these men were born in Christian land,
they were strangers to the principles and power of the Christian religion.”78 The English
would have no success in converting the non-Christians of Asia and America, preached
William Stanley, dean of St. Asaph in 1706, as long as they failed “even to keep our own
people in their own religion.”79 Stanley bid his auditors reflect upon those “many thou-
sands” whose physical removal from their native country has been transmuted into
spiritual exile from their mother Church, “baptized as well as we, and made members
of Christ’s Body the Church; who yet through the want of ministers and churches are
rendered almost as rude and ignorant as to religion, as the very heathens themselves.”80
The English would never succeed in, as George Stanhope recommended, “converting
our traffic and navigation into means of establishing the Christian faith,” so long as the
maritime and mercantile world remained external to the moral and religious commu-
nity of the nation.81
These considerations circumscribed, and perhaps retarded, the English missionary
impulse throughout the eighteenth century. English evangelism in this period pro-
ceeded under the sign of English maritime nationalism. “Our designs upon aliens and
infidels” preached the bishop of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet in 1704, “must begin in the
instructing and reforming our own people.”82 The SPG thus sponsored a ministry in the
American plantations designed, as Charles Trimnell, bishop of Norwich, suggested,
207 The Church
“rather for the taking care of the religion of our own people; than for the conversion of
the Indians.”83 Richard Willis, dean of Lincoln, insisted that the work of the Society was
“a charity to the souls of men, to the souls of a great many of our own people in those
countries, who by this may be reformed.”84 The phrase, “our own people,” which
recurred repeatedly throughout the sermons and literature of the SPG, signals the
sense of moral propriety that informed its objectives. These activists were, in the final
analysis, nationalists, invested in maintaining both a sense community and commu-
nion among the denizens of the broader English commercial empire over and above
the earthly political economic relations that knit colony and factory to metropole. The
maritime and mercantile sectors abroad could not be allowed to inhabit what seemed
to be an alternative dispensation, where English Christianity, particularly that of the
established Church, had little or no purchase. The global commerce and navigation by
which English national interests were secured could not be permitted to outstrip the
reach of English Christianity. This constituted something of a crisis in the ideology of
English imperialism described by the immensely influential late seventeenth-century
colonial clergyman Morgan Godwyn as “trade preferred before religion.”85 As one early
eighteenth-century devotional writer informed the seamen in his audience, “You must
not suffer business to jostle out religion.”86
These maritime activists were operating in the very interstices of English national
identity, doggedly attempting to maintain a genuinely Protestant component to the
English commercial empire. “And might not something considerable towards it be
done,” wondered John Hough, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, in 1705, “if factors and
agents were ordered to join the care of religion with that of trade?”87 Members of the
Anglican societies tirelessly advocated the establishment of Protestant chaplaincies in
all the military and mercantile outposts of the English commercial empire. During the
reign of Queen Anne, members of the SPCK and SPG adopted the project of establish-
ing an Anglican church at Rotterdam as their own, promising “the first public national
Church out of her Majesty’s royal dominions.”88 The advocates of the Rotterdam church
touted “the benefit which their posterity, strangers and seafaring men may find in the
public enjoyment of their religion in a foreign country in communion with their native
Church.” Moreover, they envisioned the Rotterdam church as something of sanctuary
for English merchants and mariners abroad, “providing for the poor and shipwrecked
seamen, to clothe and assist them to their native country, to their great comfort and
our country’s advantage.”89 The Rotterdam church’s first pastor, William Thorold, was
naturally chosen a corresponding member of the SPCK in 1701.90 Members of the
Anglican Societies similarly supported the far more perilous endeavor to establish an
Anglican chapel at the English factory at the bustling port of Leghorn on the Ligurian
Sea in Tuscany between 1705 and 1707, which succeeded in the face of bitter opposition
from the Inquisition and the courts at Florence and Rome.91 In July 1705, a London
208 Institutions
merchant named Brown attended a meeting of the SPG “in the name of himself and
diverse other merchants, traders to Newfoundland,” to request that two Anglican min-
isters be dispatched to that outpost as quickly as possible. The Society responded by
dispatching Jacob Rice to minister to the English fishing communities in that terri-
tory.92 The SPG sent prayer books, Bibles, and Anglican devotional literature to the
East India Company outpost of St. Helena in the south Atlantic.93 In 1710, the SPCK
initiated a long relationship with the East India Company itself, procuring and sup-
porting the clergy required by the company charter of 1698, which stipulated a minis-
ter in every garrison and factory, and a chaplain on every ship carrying two tons or
more.94 The SPCK also promoted the construction of chapels and charity schools on
the Balearic island of Minorca in the western Mediterranean, ceded to the British
Crown in the Treaty of Utrecht.95 Like the outreach to mariners, these efforts at Chris-
tianizing the global English commercial empire were part of a broader project of na-
tionalizing oceanic space. In the fledgling Protestant chapel at Leghorn, the harried
chaplain Basil Kennett bid his expatriate flock rejoice “that the God of their fathers has
blessed them with his ordinances in a strange land.”96
The reconceptualization of mercantilism in terms of the nationalization of oceanic
space has the advantage of significantly broadening the field of institutional participa-
tion under consideration. It permits one to conceive of the network of churches,
agencies, and activists operating amid the institutional pillars of early modern British
political economy—state, company, factory, and fleet—as collaborators in a broader
project of realizing national forms, interests, identities, and values within marine and
transmarine spaces external to the traditional, insular demarcations of national life.
The largely Anglican clergy, writers, and activists considered in this chapter were not,
it must be stressed, emissaries of an alternative imperialism. Despite their ostenta-
tiously confessional ideals, these figures did not seek to displace the commercial and
geopolitical logic of English expansion in a fit of imperial reenchantment. On the con-
trary, the religious writers and activists of the era seemed to have internalized the basic
nostrums of English political economy current throughout the broader society. Their
projects, sermons, and devotional writings endlessly reaffirm the overwhelming public
interest in promoting trade and navigation; the indispensability of seamen for the
maintenance of both power and plenty; and the belief that commercial wealth consti-
tuted the sinews of national security. Their anxiety over the presumed secularity,
indeed, profanity, of English expansion appeared as a concern for the incomplete
translation of national life overseas: the fraying of the Protestant moral order at the
shores of the British Isles. The moral hazard of the ocean threatened to dissociate the
confessional and commercial elements of English national identity.
Problematically, however, the Church of England did not actually possess anything
resembling sole custody of the confessional component of English national identity
209 The Church
either at home or abroad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.97 Overseas set-
tlement throughout the seventeenth century had been overwhelmingly led by various
dissidents from the national Church. And the religious diversity of the colonies had
only been exacerbated by the conquest and incorporation of foreign territories from
Dutch, Spanish, and French imperial rivals, as well as by the continuing influx of im-
migrants from across Europe. In the metropole, the Church of England was effectively
demoted by the Toleration Act of 1689 from the national church to the merely estab-
lished one. The Union with Scotland in 1707 further provincialized the Church of Eng-
land, rendering it but one of two ecclesiastical establishments in Great Britain. Within
two years, the Kirk of Scotland possessed an incorporated missionary society in the
Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, which harbored its own designs
on British North America.98 By the 1730s, as Kathleen Wilson has shown, it was pos-
sible to espouse a highly moralized imperialism of virtue, which had precious little to
do with strictly confessional identity.99 David Armitage deemed the mid-eighteenth-
century patriotic imperialism of the deist Viscount Bolingbroke “Protestant enough”
on account of its vituperative anti-Catholicism—a remarkably low bar indeed.100 As
the content of British national and imperial identity evolved in the eighteenth century,
moral engagement abroad required a decidedly less overtly confessional agenda.101
If, as Eli Heckscher avers, “the humanitarian outlook was entirely alien” to mercan-
tilism, it is perhaps because social and moral engagement proceeded explicitly under
the rubric of national interest.102 Yet, oriented outward by overseas trade and naviga-
tion, the framework of national interest proved surprisingly hospitable to an increas-
ingly expansive, indeed, global sense of British benevolence in the eighteenth century.
The ambit of British moral concern, the “sympathetic imagination” of Britons, began to
accommodate not merely mariners and merchants but also soldiers, children, immi-
grants, Protestant refugees, African slaves, indeed, any vulnerable population whose
well-being might plausibly be reckoned among the reasons of state—or whose suf-
fering might constitute a rebuke to the moral pretensions of British identity.103 This
remarkable moral capaciousness, though perhaps insufficiently disengaged from the
interests of the nation to qualify as humanitarianism, nevertheless lent the eighteenth
century its celebrated character as an “age of benevolence.”
Scriptural prohibitions notwithstanding, the British commercial empire of the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries managed, after its own way, to serve both God
and Mammon. It does not seem wise to confine discussions of mercantilism to the
worship of the latter, as if advocates of moral and religious engagement abroad were
singing from an entirely different hymnal. On the contrary, the campaigns of religious
activists make sense only within a nation undergoing a profound reorientation of its
public life toward overseas trade and settlement. An intercontinental network of
writers, activists, and voluntary associations, possessed of an expansive and dynamic
210 Institutions
sense of moral obligation, anxiously monitored the spiritual impact of British engage-
ment abroad. One must not, however, assume that the simultaneous worship of God
and Mammon occurred without practical and ideological contradictions; that the con-
fessional and commercial elements of British national and imperial identity co-existed
harmoniously. An empire at once Protestant, maritime, and commercial was always, if
not quite a contradiction in terms, at least a work in progress.
NOTES
1. “Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea,” The Book of Common Prayer (London, 1662); “The Six
Hundred Alterations made in the Book of Common Prayer by Convocation, and adopted
by Parliament,” in Documents relating to the Settlement of the Church of England by the Act
of Uniformity of 1662 (London, 1862), 456–58; on the genesis of the “Forms of Prayer to be
used at Sea,” see J. H. Blunt, ed., The Annotated Book of Common Prayer (New York:
E. P. Dutton and Co., 1884), 650–51, n. 1; A Supply of Prayer for the Ships of this Kingdom
that want Ministers to Pray with Them (London, 1645).
2. A. L. Cross, The Anglican Episcopate and American Colonies (New York: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1902), 9–21; and see Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus anglicus, or, The history of the
life and death of the Most Reverend and renowned prelate William, by divine providence
Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668), 231–33, 275–76.
3. On the “oceanic turn,” see Ulrich Kinzel, “Orientation as a Paradigm of Maritime Moder-
nity,” in Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and
Culture, ed. Berhard Klein (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 28–48; Christopher
L. Connery, “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt and the
Shaping of Global Myth Elements,” boundary 2, no. 28 (Summer 2001): 173–201.
4. Elizabeth Macke, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David
Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 175–95;
but on the hybridity of these entities, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate
Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
5. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Histor-
ical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe
and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 101–32; Elizabeth
Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space” Geographical
Review 89 (April 1999): 225–36; David Armitage, “The Elephant and the Whale: Empires
of Land and Sea,” Journal for Maritime Research 9, no. 1 (2007): 23–36; Ken Macmillan,
Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire,
1576–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and for classic studies, see
Thomas Weymiss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea, An Historical Account of the Claims
of England to the Dominion of the British Seas (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1911); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europeaum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006), 172–84.
6. Jacob Viner, “Power versus Plenty as Objectives in Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” in Revisions in Mercantilism, ed. D. C. Coleman (London:
Methuen and Co., 1969), 61–91; Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political
Economy, the British Empire and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
211 The Church
Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69, 1 (January 2012): 3–34; a fine recent
discussion of the framework of “immanence” in economic discourse may be found in
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 176–85; see also
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2006), 26–47.
7. For a stark dichotomy between confessional and political economic assessments of na-
tional interest, see Steve Pincus, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of
Population and the Invention of the State,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the
Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 272–98.
8. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, trans. Simona Dranghici (Washington, DC: Plutarch Press,
1997), 28; Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: the Irruption of Time into Play, trans. Simona
Draghici (Corvallis, OR: Plutarch Press, 2006), 54–56; and see Jonathan Scott, When the
Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011)
9. John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (London, 1667), 41.
10. Antonis Balasopoulos, “‘Suffer a Sea Change’ Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and
the Politics of Utopia” Cultural Critique 63 (Spring 2006): 122–56; Philip E. Steinberg,
The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
68–109.
11. There has been a vigorous debate on the contribution of Protestantism and Anglicanism
in the creation of British nationalism; see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation
1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 11–54 passim; J. C. D. Clark,
“Protestantism, Nationalism and National Identity, 1660–1832,” Historical Journal 43
(March 2000): 249–76; a useful intervention in this debate may be found in Jeremy Black,
“Confessional State or Elect Nation? Religion and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Eng-
land,” in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850, ed. Tony
Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53–74.
12. Eli F. Heckscher, “Mercantilism,” in D. C. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (Lon-
don: Methuen and Co, 1969), 31–33; and Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. M. Shapiro, 2
vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 2:285–307. The case for a morally consci-
entious mercantilism “not discreditable to the age” is most forcefully made by Charles
Wilson, “The Other Face of Mercantilism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
5th ser., 9 (1959): 81–101; see also Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London
Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989),
11–43; James Stephen Taylor, Jonas Hanway: Founder of the Marine Society: Charity and
Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Scolar, 1985)
13. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 188; and see also Kathleen Wilson, “‘Empire of Virtue’: The Im-
perial Project and Hanoverian Culture, ca. 1720–1785,” in An Imperial State at War: Brit-
ain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1993), 128–64; Wilson, The
Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. On imperial Anglicanism, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North
America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 107–35; J. C. D. Clark, The Language
of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 141–217; B. S. Schlenther, “Reli-
gious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2,
212 Institutions
The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 128–50;
James B. Bell, The Imperial Origins of the King’s Church in America, 1607–1783 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire c.
1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41–117.
15. See Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,”
American Historical Review 90 (April 1985): 339–61; and “Capitalism and the Origins of
the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 547–66.
The phrase “sympathetic imagination” is that of Maurice Parmlee, “The Rise of Modern
Humanitarianism,” American Journal of Sociology 21 (November 1915): 345–59; Thomas
W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural His-
tory, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176–204; Lynn Hunt,
Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 35–69.
16. Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic
World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); on the “age of benevo-
lence,” see David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1964), 11–88; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French,
and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 131–46; Michael
Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 49–56; on the importance of philanthropy to British national identity in
the eighteenth century, see Colley, Britons, 85–98.
17. N. A. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1986), 15.
18. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and
the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987); Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London:
J. M. Dent and Son, 1970); Christopher Lloyd, The British Seamen, 1200–1860: A Social
Survey (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1968); Charles A Le Guin, “Sea Life in
Seventeenth-Century England” American Neptune 27 (1967): 111–34.
19. Josiah Child, A Treatise wherein is demonstrated, I. That the East-India trade is the most
national of foreign trades, &c. (London, 1681), 26.
20. “The case of the poor sailors of the English navy; kept out of their pay upon pretense of
Q’s and R’s” (N.D.), 1; Francis Brokesby, Of Education, with respect to Grammar Schools,
and the Universities (London, 1701), 48–49.
21. John Flavel, Navigation Spiritualiz’d: Or, A New Compass for Seamen, 4th ed. (London,
1698), sig A3r; he was referring to a well-known anecdote of the Scythian philosopher
Anacharsis, who, when asked whether the living or dead possessed greater numbers,
wondered in which category to place seamen.
22. Sarah Parsons, “The ‘Wonders in the Deep’ and the ‘Mighty Tempest of the Sea’: Nature,
Providence, and English Seafarers’ Piety, c. 1580–1640,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches in
the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge, UK: Ecclesiastical
History Society, 2010), 194–204.
23. John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 22–43; Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The
Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 19–32; Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea,
164–69; Le Guin, “Sea Life in Seventeenth-Century England,” 128
24. Psalm 107:23–24 (KJV).
213 The Church
25. Basil Kennett, “Sermon 13,” Sermons preached on several occasions, to a society of British
merchants, in foreign parts (London, 1715), 296.
26. Deul Pead, “A Sermon Preached at James City in Virginia the 23rd of April 1686 Before
the Loyal Citizens Born in and about London and Inhabiting in Virginia,” ed. Richard
Beale Davis, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., v. 17, no. 3 (July 1960): 383; George
Stanhope, The Sea-Man’s Obligations to Gratitude and a Good Life (London, 1699), 23;
John Flavel, The Whole Works of the Revered Mr. John Flavel, 8 vols. (Paisley, 1770),
7:396–97; and see the Tory satirist Ned Ward’s acerbic depiction of the drunken and irre-
ligious naval chaplain, who “envies not at home the country vicar, with his tithe-pigs and
plumb-puddings, since here he can whore with security, and get drunk like a gentleman,
without scandal.” Edward Ward, The Wooden World Dissected, A New Edition (London,
1745), 30–33.
27. Cotton Mather, The Religious Mariner (Boston, 1700), 5–6.
28. Isaac Watts, “Hymn LXX: God’s Dominion over the Sea, Ps. cvii.23, &c.” The Psalms and
Hymns of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D. (London, 1806), 362; Christopher Bassnett, The Sea-
man’s Character and Calling Consider’d and Improv’d in a Sermon Begun to a Ship’s-
Company Upon Thursday, December the 13th (London, 1712), 40.
29. William Talbot, A sermon preach’d before the Lords spiritual and temporal (London,
1704), 22.
30. Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Formation of the Mecantilist State and the Economic Growth of
the United Kingdom, 1453–1815” WIDER Research Paper No. 2006/75 (2006); Linebaugh
and Rediker have attempted to assess this period in terms of competing forms of “hydrar-
chy,” that is, “the organization of the maritime state from above and the self-organization
of sailors from below.” Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:
Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2000), 144.
31. John Finglas, A Sermon Preached at Deptford before the brethren of Trinity-house of
Deptford-Strond on Trinity Monday (London, 1695), 33.
32. Mather, Religious Mariner, 9.
33. George Stanhope, The Sea-Man’s Obligations to Gratitude and a Good Life (London,
1699), 18.
34. George Hickes, “Sermon 17,” in A Collection of Sermons Formerly Preach’d by the Reverend
Dr. George Hickes, 2 vols. (London, 1715), 2:372.
35. For the broader ideology of national reformation during the reign of William and Mary,
see G. V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1912); Dudley Bahlmann,
The Moral Revolution of 1688. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957); A. G. Craig,
“The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715” (PhD diss., University of
Edinburgh, 1980); John Spurr, “The Church, the Societies and the Moral Revolution of
1688,” in The Church of England c. 1689–c. 1833, ed. J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127–42; Eamon Duffy, “The Long Refor-
mation: Catholicism, Protestantism, and the multitude,” in England’s Long Reformation
1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: UCL Press, 1998), 33–70; Craig Rose, “Provi-
dence, Protestant Union, and Godly Reformation in the 1690s,” Royal Historical Society
Transactions, 6th ser. 3 (1993): 151–69; Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolu-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
36. By the King, a proclamation for preventing and punishing immorality and prophaneness
(London, 1697).
214 Institutions
37. William Bisset, Plain English. A sermon preach’d at St. Mary-le-Bow, 5th ed. (London,
1704), 52.
38. Josiah Woodward, A Letter of Advice and Comfort to the English Captives Who Suffer in
Slavery in Foreign Parts (London: William Hawes, 1700); on Woodward, see Joseph Fos-
ter, ed. Alumni Oxienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 4 vols. (Oxford: Parker
and Co, 1892), 4:1677.
39. Sion College Library Bray MSS Box 1: “A Memorial Representing the Rise Progress and
Issue of Dr. Bray’s Missionary Undertaking”; and see William D. Houlette, “Parish Li-
braries and the Work of the Reverend Thomas Bray” Library Quarterly 4 (October 1934):
588–609.
40. [Abel Boyer] The History of King William the Third, 3 vols. (London, 1702), 2:404.
41. “Copy of King William’s Commission,” in John Cooke, An Historical Account of the Royal
Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (London, 1789), 13.
42. This mode of philanthropy might be considered an example of what James Stephen Tay-
lor refers to as “Christian mercantilism”; see James Stephen Taylor, “Philanthropy and
Empire: Jonas Hanway and the Infant Poor of London” Eighteenth-Century Studies 12
(Spring 1979): 285–305.
43. British Library Add. MS 78299 f. 97: John Evelyn to Mr. Travers, Wootton, December 29,
1695.
44. Canon Scott Robertson, Archdeacon Philip Stubbs (1665–1735) (London: Mitchell and
Hughes, 1889); Philip Stubs [Stubbs], The Religious Seaman, Fitted with Proper Devotions
on all Occasions (London, 1696); Philip Stubs [Stubbs], God’s Dominion over the Seas, and
the Seaman’s Duty Consider’d (London, 1701); in 1703, Stubbs’s sermon was printed in a
French translation “in order to be distributed amongst French seamen who are prisoners
here”; Edmund McClure, ed. A Chapter in Church History, being the Minutes of the Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge for the years 1698–1704 (London, 1888) 236, 244 (here-
after Minutes of the SPCK).
45. Cooke, Historical Account of the Royal Hospital, 43–55.
46. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas
Burger (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1989), 14–26, 57–67; on the career of the concept in
early modern British history, see Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public
Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (April 2006): 270–92; and
Brian Cowan, “Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from
the Post-Namierite to the Post-Habermasian,” Parliamentary History 28 (February 2009):
166–78; although for a somewhat myopic dissent, see J. A. Downie, “How Useful to Eigh-
teenth-Century English Studies Is the Paradigm of the ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere?’” Liter-
ature Compass 1 (2003): 1–19; and on the prevalence of political economic discourse in the
post-Revolutionary public sphere, see Steve Pincus, “The State and Civil Society in Early
Modern England: Capitalism, Causation and Habermas’ Bourgeois Public Sphere,” in The
Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2007), 213–31.
47. Sion College Library Bray MSS Box 1: “A Memorial Representing the Rise Progress and
Issue of Dr. Bray’s Missionry Undertaking with other Incidents.”
48. McClure, Minutes of the SPCK, 18.
49. A second letter from a member of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge
([London, 1705]), 2.
50. McClure, Minutes of the SPCK, 26, 88.
51. McClure, Minutes of the SPCK, 112–13.
215 The Church
52. S.P.C.K.: Early Eighteenth Century Archives (London: World Microfilms Publications Ltd.,
1977), Part C: Letters & Memorials, Henry Newman Letterbooks, 1:31–32: Newman to
Rev. Dr. Woodward at Maidstone in Kent, December 6, 1711.
53. McClure, Minutes of the SPCK, 98, 100.
54. See the partial membership list at British Library Harleian MS 7190 f. 8, dated March 7,
1701/2.
55. Cambridge University Library SPCK Abstract Letter Book 1708–1709 §1547. Philip Stubbs
at Sion College. January 27, 1708/9; Philip Stubbs, The Sea-Assize; Or, Sea faring Persons to
be judged according to their Works (London, 1708).
56. Cambridge University Library SPCK MS D2/2 280. Mr. Patrick Gordon from Deal to
Secretary’s Asst. [Humphrey Wanely] April 10, 1701.
57. Cambridge University Library SPCK MS D2/2 271. Mr. Thomas Thewell from Gravesend
to Mr. Chamberlayne, April 4, 1701; SPCK MS D2/2 291. Thomas Shewell from the Fleet,
on board the Barfleur at Spithead to Chamberlayne, April 28, 1701.
58. A copy of the appointment may be found in Stubbs, God’s Dominion over the Seas, 32–33;
and see Cambridge University Library SPCK MS D2/2 396. Mr. Wm. Hodges, Chaplain-
General to the Fleet, from on board the Triumph at St. Hellens, to the Sec’t, August 16,
1701; William Hodges, An humble representation of the seamens misery in the loss and
abuse of them in their payment (London, 1694); William Hodges, Great Britain’s groans, or,
An account of the oppression, ruin, and destruction of the loyal seamen of England, in the
fatal loss of their pay, health and lives, and dreadful ruin of their families (London, 1695);
William Hodges, Humble proposals for the relief, encouragement, security, and happiness of
the loyal, courageous seamen of England (London, 1695); on Hodges and the literature of
advocacy on behalf of English sailors, see L. F. Church, Oglethorpe: A Study of Philan-
thropy in England and Georgia (London: Epworth Press, 1932), 25–31.
59. Josiah Woodward, The Seaman’s Monitor (London: Joseph Downing, 1705), preface, 1–2,
16, 23, 26, 30–31, 34, 35–37, 40, 44, 57–60.
60. Cotton Mather, The Sailours Companion and Counsellour (Boston, 1709), 37.
61. Theophilus Dorrington, Family devotions for Sunday evenings: in four volumes, 3rd ed.
(London, 1703), 1:preface.
62. Christoper Bassnett, The Seaman’s Character and Calling Consider’d and Improv’d in a
Sermon Begun to a Ship’s-Company Upon Thursday, December the 13th (London, 1712), 11.
63. Mather, Sailours Companion and Counsellour, iii.
64. Mather, Religious Mariner, 25.
65. James Janeway, A token for mariners, containing many famous and wonderful instances of
God’s providence in sea dangers and deliverances (London, 1708), 121–22.
66. Quoted in Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth (Pasadena,
CA: William Carey Library, 1986), 13.
67. S.P.C.K.: Early Eighteenth Century Archives, Part A: Minutes & Reports Reel No. 2:
Minutes, 1712–1715, Vol. 6: June 4, 1713 §5.
68. Henry Newman Letterbooks Vol. 5 f. 1: Newman to Mr. Jennings at Ft. St. George, January
4, 1714/15.
69. S.P.C.K.: Early Eighteenth Century Archives, Part A: Minutes & Reports Reel No. 2:
Minutes 1717–19, Vol. 8: June 13, 1717.
70. Henry Newman Letterbooks Vol. 12 f. 3: Newman to Capt. Sharrow, March 5, 1721/2.
71. The details of this project may be found in the Henry Newman Letterbooks Vol. 13 ff. 7–8,
“Copy of the Letter Sent along with the Seaman’s Monitor, May 31, 1723”; f. 8: Henry New-
man to Josiah Burkett, Esq. Secretary to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, June
216 Institutions
1, 1723; f. 28: Henry Newman to Sir Jacob Ackworth, Commissioner of the Navy in Col-
chester, July 18, 1723; f. 38: Newman to Ackworth, August 12, 1723; Bodleian Library Raw-
linson D MS 839 f. 23: Newman to [J. Downing], September 15, 1725 tallied the total
number of copies at 10,694.
72. Bodleian Rawlinson D MS 839 f. 96–97: “A Rough draft of a Letter to the Members in Sea
Ports upon Piracy, Read September 10, 1723.”
73. Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 101.
74. Gilbert Burnet, Of the propagation of the gospel in foreign parts. A sermon preach’d at St.
Mary-le-Bow, February 18, 1703/4 before the society incorporated for that purpose (London,
1704), 23.
75. William the Third, by the grace of God . . . Whereas we are credibly informed, That in many
of Our Plantations, Colonies and Factories beyond the Sea (June 13, 1701) (London, 1701);
and see Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Over-
seas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 17–18; Tra-
vis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15–39.
76. George Stanhope, The Sea-Man’s Obligations to Gratitude and a Good Life (London,
1699), 22.
77. Bassnett, Seaman’s Character and Calling, 18.
78. Woodward, Seaman’s Monitor, preface.
79. William Stanley, A Sermon preach’d before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts, at the parish church of St. Mary le Bow, February 20th, 1707/8 (London,
1708), 12–13.
80. Stanley, Sermon preach’d, 4–5.
81. George Stanhope, The early Conversion of Islanders a wise Expedient for propagating
Christianity. A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts. At their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish-Church of St. Mary-le-
Bow; on Friday the 19th of February 1713–14 (London, J. Downing, 1714), 12–13; and see
White Kennett, The Lets and Impediments in Planting and Propagating the Gospel of
Christ. A Sermon preach’d before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts at the Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church at St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the
15th of February 1711/12 (London, 1712), 27–28.
82. Burnet, Of the propagation of the gospel in foreign parts, 20; emphasis mine.
83. Charles Trimnell, A sermon preach’d before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts at the parish-church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday the 17th of February,
1709/10 (London, 1710), 17; emphasis mine.
84. Richard Willis, A sermon preach’d before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts, at their first yearly meeting on Friday February the 20th 1701/2 at St. Mary-
le-Bow (London, 1702) 18; emphasis mine
85. Morgan Godwyn, Trade preferred before religion, and Christ made to give place to
Mammon (London, 1685); on Godwyn’s influence in the early eighteenth century, see
Brent S. Sirota, “The Christian Monitors: Church, State and the Voluntary Sector in Brit-
ain, 1690–1720” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 386–93; and see John M. Fout,
“The Explosive Cleric: Morgan Godwyn, Slavery, and Colonial Elites in Virginia and Bar-
bados 1665–1685 (master’s thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005), 1–19, for a
useful overview of the historiography concerning Godwyn.
86. Bassnett, Seaman’s Character and Calling, 20.
87. John Hough, Of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1717), 21.
217 The Church
88. British Library Add MS 61300 f. 56: Trustees of the English Church at Rotterdam to the
duke of Marlborough, February 6, 1703/4; and see C. F. Secretan, Memoirs of the Life and
Times of the Pious Robert Nelson (London: John Murray, 1860), 68.
89. British Library Add MS 61300 f. 66: Memorandum on Rotterdam Church, N.D.
90. Cambridge University Library SPCK MS D2/2 §334.
91. On the Leghorn chaplaincy affair, see Sirota, “Christian Monitors,” 415–29.
92. Lambeth Palace Library SPG Minutes I July 23, 1705 f. 62; Ruth M. Christensen, “The
Establishment of SPG Missions in Newfoundland, 1703–83,” Historical Magazine of the
Protestant Episcopal Church 20 (June 1951): 207–29.
93. Lambeth Palace Library SPG Papers Vol. I f. 100: Minutes May 21, 1706.
94. British Library Lansdowne MS 1032 f. 173; Henry Newman Letterbooks Vol. 2 ff. 31–32:
Henry Newman to Josiah Woodward at Maidstone in Kent, December 6, 1711.
95. Henry Newman Letterbooks Vol. 12 ff. 26–28: Henry Newman to John Robinson, bishop
of London, June 23, 1722.
96. Basil Kennett, Sermons preached on several occasions, to a society of British merchants, in
foreign parts (London, 1715), 2.
97. Pestana, Protestant Empire, 66–127; Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial
Empire,” 128–50; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of
Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–53.
98. Frederick V. Mills, “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in
British North America, 1730–1775,” Church History 63, no. 1 (March 1994): 15–30.
99. Wilson, “‘Empire of Virtue,’” 128–64.
100. Armitage, Ideological Origins, 185–86.
101. P. J. Marshall, “Who Cared about the Thirteen Colonies? Some Evidence from Philan-
thropy,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27 (May 1999): 53–67.
102. Eli F. Heckscher, “Mercantilism,” 32; Michel Foucault offers a similar critique of the limits
of population management in mercantilism, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory and
Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 68–71, 101–4, 337–38.
103. P. J. Marshall, “The Moral Swing to the East: British Humanitarianism, India and the
West Indies,” in East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Sir Cyril Philips, ed.
K. Ballhatchet and J. Harrison (Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, 1986), 69–95; and see
Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
10
Pirates and Smugglers
Political Economy in the Red Atlantic
Niklas Frykman
In the decades following the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain’s thinly stretched imperial
commodity circuits twice came under serious and sustained attack from below, once
by thousands of plunder-hungry pirates out in the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean,
the other time by highly organized, militant smuggling gangs at the very heart of the
empire. Though engaged in economically distinct activities, both pirates and smug-
glers posed a similar threat to the integrity of what John Brewer famously called Brit-
ain’s “fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century.”1 Over the preceding half-century,
the country had invested substantial resources in building and consolidating its over-
seas empire, chiefly by expanding its possessions in the New World slave plantation
zone, creating an imperial administrative structure, which regulated the flow of com-
modities between colonies and metropole, and by vastly growing the size of its naval
force to protect the shipping lanes in between. In order to service the rapidly expand-
ing national debt in peacetime, and thus maintain the trust of major lenders for future
conflicts, the state relied increasingly on excise revenues; that is, on taxing the steadily
growing flow of commodities throughout the imperial economy.2 Pirates disrupted
that flow entirely, and smugglers, equally pernicious, instead steered it around the
excise man. Both struck at the root of the British Empire: its tax base.
Pirates and smugglers have rarely been studied together, and their separate histori-
ographies have fallen quite rigidly into one of two camps, one emphasizing their eco-
nomic activities and the other their countersystemic social organization.3 Economic
historians of metropolitan smuggling have focused their attention first on document-
ing the extraordinary scale of the illicit trade and, second, on analyzing the role played
by that trade in integrating the home and world markets, thus driving forward the so-
called early modern consumer revolution.4 Social historians, for their part, have
instead emphasized smuggling as a form of social crime, a backward-looking assertion
of customary rights in the face of the rapidly expanding statute book of the early eigh-
teenth century.5 The historiography of Atlantic piracy is similarly bifurcated, with
218
219 Pirates and Smugglers
some historians focusing on pirates as social rebels in armed opposition against mer-
cantile capitalists, while others portray them as nothing more than common criminals
whose greed and violence confirm the popularly held notion that what distinguishes
piracy from imperialism is primarily the scale of operation.6
There are good reasons for rethinking these dichotomies and for pulling early eigh-
teenth-century Caribbean pirates and English southcoast smugglers into the same
conceptual framework. Both groups unapologetically, and sometimes violently,
accessed the growing wealth pulsating through the globalizing world economy and
then used it to finance the development of strikingly similar microsocieties marked by
cooperative labor, equal profit sharing, democratic decision making, and, perhaps
most importantly, instant enjoyment and idleness over the accumulation of capital and
deferred gratification. As such, both Atlantic piracy and English southcoast smuggling
represented an alternative, though ultimately parasitic, form of trade-driven develop-
ment, which neither reaffirmed the pre-capitalist social relations of rural England nor
looked forward to those of the maturing class societies of the rapidly modernizing
Atlantic world. This countersystemic threat, more than just the narrowly economic
challenge, in the end brought down the full force of Britain’s punitive state machinery
on the pirate republic of the Caribbean and the smuggling communities of the Weald.
Within a few short years of the end of the War for Spanish Succession (1701–14), sev-
eral thousand pirates “declared War against all the World,” established a secure,
self-governing base in the Bahama Islands, and from there launched a furious, all-out
attack against a central section of the commodity circuits of the world economy.7 Un-
like their freebooting forebears of the seventeenth century, the pirates of the golden age
had no national loyalties, no lasting alliances, cared nothing for royal commissions,
and plundered whomever they came across. And they came across thousands of ves-
sels. Bartholomew Robert’s crew alone, admittedly an unusually industrious lot, cap-
tured close to four hundred ships in less than three years, many of them slavers along
the West African coast.8 Other pirate ships focused their assaults on the Caribbean,
quickly darting in and out between its many small islands to ravage some of the most
densely trafficked and strategically important shipping lanes in the world. Captain
“Black” Sam Bellamy and his crew took dozens of ships in the course of a few months
cruising in the West Indies, and then made their greatest capture in early 1717 when
they chased down the Whydah Gally, a large slave ship just embarked on the final leg of
its triangular voyage and therefore heavily laden with treasure. Bellamy and his crew
judged the loot sufficient to retire on.9 Other pirate ships chose to make the North
American seaboard their primary hunting grounds. One of Bellamy’s former com-
rades-in-arms, the infamous Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, pillaged shipping along the
Carolina coasts and in 1718 even laid a brief blockade on Charleston, plundering several
vessels trying to enter its harbor before once again disappearing north along the coast.10
220 Institutions
Large-scale seaborne piracy was not a new phenomenon in the early eighteenth-
century Caribbean, or indeed in world history. Wherever maritime trade has achieved
a certain level of density, seaborne marauders have come sailing over the horizon to
prey on it. Thus it was not long after the conquistadores’ locustlike sweep across the
Antilles and into silver mining areas of Central and South America in the early six-
teenth century that pillage of Spanish treasure emerged as an important mode of Euro-
pean surplus extraction in the New World. In the middle of the seventeenth century,
this international plunder economy reached its violent crescendo when Dutch, French,
and English empire-builders aggressively pushed into the Caribbean and there began
to claim possession of formally Spanish-owned islands. But their considerable, short-
term ability to project violence overseas was rarely matched by sufficiently developed
state-bureaucratic structures to ensure orderly colonial governance, enforce metropol-
itan law, regulate commerce, or protect their newly acquired territories from recon-
quest or internal unrest (see Stern, ch. 8, and Grafe, ch. 11). In the islands of the Greater
Antilles, in particular, chaos and violence reigned for several decades.
Much of the disorder originated with groups that operated beyond the control of any
of the imperial powers. The most fearsome among them were the famous buccaneers
of Jamaica and Tortuga, a wild hodgepodge of indentured servants, landless com-
moners, native survivors of genocide, runaway slaves, deserted sailors and soldiers,
gentleman adventurers, and hardened veterans from the European religious wars. Be-
ginning in the 1650s, hundreds of these men regularly came together in self-governing
armies, set sail for the Spanish Main, and there tore through treasure-laden cities,
towns, and villages by the dozen. Some of Spain’s most valuable overseas settlements
were raided not once or twice, but three, four, even five times.11 These repeated attacks
on the Spanish American mainland brought enormous amounts of wealth into circu-
lation. At a time when the value of Jamaica’s combined annual sugar exports barely
reached £10,000, the 1668 raid against Portobello alone netted £75,000 worth of plun-
der, much of it spent during epic orgies of disaccumulation on Port Royal’s raucous
waterfront.12
Once known as the wickedest city in the west, the buccaneers came here with the
single aim of blowing their loot and celebrating their violent, profitable life on the im-
perial margins. Alexander Exquemelin, who sailed with the buccaneers in the late
1660s, recalled one freebooter who was known to “buy, in like occasions, a whole pipe
of wine, and placing it in the street, would force everyone that passed by to drink with
him, threatening also to pistol them.” It was not uncommon for men to spend up to
3,000 pieces of eight in a single night, “giving themselves to all Manner of Debauchery,
with Strumpets, and Wine.” One man paid a woman 500 pieces of eight—the equiva-
lent value of five slaves—merely to see her naked.13 “It was,” in the words of Richard
Dunn, “a swinging place.”14
It was also place where staggering profits could be realized. Merchants and their
planter allies quickly learned to benefit from the localized hyperinflation that raged
after each successful raid on the Spanish. By supplying the campaign-weary bucca-
neers with everything their hearts desired, they accumulated vast amounts of capital
on the waterfront, which then they invested in fertile land, slaves, and sugar works in
the backcountry. Partially obscured by the spectacle of Port Royal, the Jamaican plan-
tation economy fed off its wealth and grew, rapidly replacing the rough egalitarianism
that had marked the island in the 1650s and 1660s with the violently racialized hierar-
chies of a slave society. And as sugar production mushroomed into the island’s eco-
nomic mainstay—by the end of the 1680s, its output began to approach Barbadian
levels—the rowdy presence of the buccaneers and their anarchic forms of primitive
accumulation emerged as fundamentally incompatible with a fully developed, self-
reproducing plantation regime.15 Their constant raids on the Spanish, and the latter’s
tit-for-tat retaliation attacks, kept freight rates for the island’s sugar at prohibitive
heights, disrupted the steady supply of slaves, food stuffs, and other essential items,
and overall tarnished Jamaica’s image as a place open for business. Even worse, as long
as slaves and servants could run away into the welcoming arms of the buccaneers, and
when artisans, clerks, overseers, and other auxiliary workers could put down their
tools and pick up bottles of rum and cutlasses instead, it was difficult to maintain the
murderous plantation regime required for competitive sugar production on the world
market.16
Most buccaneers tended to prefer sailing out of their own country’s colonial ports,
but their single-minded pursuit of plunder allowed for a certain flexibility on that
point. As long as there were rival colonies willing to accept their business, they hap-
pily exploited the free spaces that opened up between or on the margins of imper-
fectly integrated empires by constantly shifting their bases of operation in response
to repressive measures in particular ports or colonies. But when fi nally the tensions
of hegemonic transition that had been building for half a century exploded into the
general conflagration of the Nine Years’ War in the early 1690s, quickly followed by
the even wider War of Spanish Succession, those spaces were abruptly closed down
by the unprecedented militarization of the Caribbean. At first, the belligerents en-
thusiastically handed out privateering commissions to the buccaneers, but when
plunder-hungry freebooters turned pirate and ignored the 1697 peace treaty, both
France and England for the first time took simultaneous steps to suppress them.17
Most importantly, they very firmly closed their ports, and even though a number of
peripheral harbors such as St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands, New Provi-
dence in the Bahamas, and eventually New York discreetly continued to welcome
ships of dubious legality, the buccaneers no longer had anything like the great free
ports of the past to support them with necessary supplies in exchange for plunder.18
222 Institutions
When hostilities reopened in 1701, France once again sought to enlist buccaneers as
licensed privateersmen, and many thousands appear to have availed themselves of
that offer.19 The majority of English buccaneers joined the Royal Navy, an organiza-
tion that expanded at an explosive rate during the wars and therefore happily
embarked every skilled seafarer available, no matter what trades they may have fol-
lowed before.20
Britain did exceptionally well out of the war. With the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Spain’s
American hegemony was broken, French imperial ambitions were checked, and Brit-
ain’s own Atlantic empire was much the stronger for it: its forces now controlled
Gibraltar and Minorca at the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean, Acadia near the
mouth of the St. Lawrence, half of St. Kitts in the Caribbean, and, most deliciously of
all, Spain had been forced to cede the Asiento, the monopoly right to sell slaves to all
of Spanish America. But imperial glory won by state-funded sea power was not cheap.
Britain’s public debt had risen from nearly nothing to more than £36 million in the
course of the wars, and if the government wished to maintain the trust of its major
creditors for future conflicts, it had better start meeting its obligations, including to
the shareholders of the newly established South Sea Company who had been encour-
aged to trade in their government bonds in return for the profits expected to flow
from the company’s monopoly trade with Spanish America.21 In order for the govern-
ment to continue reducing the unprecedented burden of its national debt, commerce,
and in particular its transoceanic branches needed to readjust quickly to peacetime
conditions, swell and speed up the amount of taxable capital in circulation, provide
the state and its subsidiary entities with income, and thus make the empire finally pay
for itself.
Britain’s major mercantile interests—the ship-owners and builders, victuallers, mer-
chant houses, manufacturers, planters, private investors, insurers, bankers, and more—
were eager to finally reap the peace dividend and once again send commodities pulsating
through the triangular Atlantic system. The spectacle of up to seventy-five thousand
demobilized naval war workers suddenly flooding the civilian maritime labor market
can only have boosted their enthusiasm. Unemployment took the Atlantic waterfront
into an iron grip, and wages and conditions in the few berths that were available spi-
raled to their lowest sustainable level. The situation became so bad that even the hugely
unpopular navy, which usually was forced to resort to impressment to fill its lower
decks, was overrun by volunteers. “I have not known a Man of War commission’d for
several Years past,” one contemporary remarked, “but three times her Complement of
Men have offer’d themselves in 24 Hours; the Merchants take their Advantage of this,
lessen their Wages, and those few [seamen] who are in Business are poorly paid, and but
poorly fed; such Usage breeds Discontents amongst them, and makes them eager for
any Change.”22
The change that came was independent, unlicensed commerce-raiding, or in other

words, piracy. At first, the pirates consisted of only a small number of British privateering
crews that went rogue, threw out their royal commissions to plunder a Spanish salvage
operation off Florida’s Atlantic coast, and instead started attacking anything that floated
into their sights.23 By routinely extending a welcome to disgruntled seamen on board the
ships they captured, the pirate community rapidly grew into the hundreds, then into the
thousands, continuously dividing and subdividing their crews, until finally around four
thousand men on fifty self-governed ships sailed under the black flag.24 They terrorized
Caribbean, North Atlantic, and West African shipping for nearly a decade.
Unlike the seventeenth-century buccaneers, whose flexible exploitation of market
imbalances within and between Europe’s unevenly developed New World empires
overall probably had a positive impact on the growth and integration of the Atlantic
system—not least by forcing a redistribution of American wealth from Spain to the
emergent northern European powers—many golden-age pirates celebrated the wan-
ton, willful destruction of anything and all that did not satisfy an immediate need, such
as food and drink, naval stores, war material, or the gaudy clothing they loved so much.
But not all pirates were opposed to mutually beneficial commerce, and some actually
managed to do rather well for themselves by trading booty with open-minded mer-
chants in third- and fourth-tier port cities in the Bahamian archipelago and up the
North American seaboard. The infamous Blackbeard, for instance, whose carefully
cultivated image as a death-defying sociopath concealed a man of great commercial
cunning, did profitable business selling plunder to North Carolina’s Governor Eden,
who in turn convinced his friend and neighbor Tobias Knight, the colony’s chief justice
and customs collector, to look the other way.25
The scale of this trade between pirates and peripheral merchants was probably fairly
modest, but it certainly did contribute to the continued redistribution of scarce re-
sources—including specie, slaves, and other commodities—to the colonial periph-
eries. Imperial authorities in London, however, were hard-pressed to see the benefit of
this redistribution when those resources were plundered from British ships to begin
with. Nor were they especially pleased when those goods originated on French, Dutch,
or Spanish ships instead, since the erstwhile Atlantic plunder economy by now was
transformed into one in which accumulative violence no longer took place in the
sphere of commodity circulation but only at the point of production; in particular,
through the super-exploitation of African slaves in the plantation zone and the waged
employment of workers in Europe’s slowly emerging manufacturing centers. “To a
trading Nation,” the trial verdict against members of Bartholomew Roberts’s crew ac-
cordingly argued, “nothing can be so destructive as Pyracy, or call for more exemplary
Punishment; . . . it cuts off the Returns of Industry, and those plentiful Importations
which alone can make an Island flourishing.”26
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It is hard to measure the pirates’ direct economic impact with any degree of preci-
sion, but it is indicative that English shipping as a whole recorded zero growth between
1715 and 1728, a time one would have expected substantial expansion after the initial
readjustment period to peacetime conditions had passed.27 Moreover, the West Indian
trades in particular stagnated for most of the 1720s, and slavers along the African coast
seemed to have suffered especially hard. A London newspaper reported in April 1720
that piracy had already cost the British slave trade £204,000 in damages, a significant
sum when considering that a single slaving voyage required an average outlay of only
£3,000.28 The successful suppression of Atlantic piracy in the mid-1720s, in turn, coin-
cided with a 25 percent rise in the total number of slaves carried across the Atlantic.29
Once it recovered from the initial shock at seeing a fleet of common, unruly seamen
dispute its control over the Atlantic’s fragile shipping lanes, Britain’s Royal Navy
worked with surprising speed and efficiency, and within a few short years large-scale
piracy was eradicated from the Atlantic world. In the first instance, the offer of a royal
pardon (and the guarantee that those who accepted would be allowed to keep all their
ill-gotten gains) slashed the number of active pirates, some of whom even accepted the
invitation to help hunt down their former comrades. Second, British authorities tar-
geted the pirates’ safe spaces by shutting down the central base at New Providence in
the Bahama Islands and by legally harassing all those who were suspected of trading in
pirate booty in the lesser ports. Finally, and most dramatically, the navy physically
confronted the remaining, now isolated pirates, capturing and killing them by the
dozen. Altogether, documentation survives of 418 executions between 1716 and 1726,
but the actual number was probably between one-third and one-half higher, not count-
ing those who died in battle, in prison, or by suicide. As a symbol of Britain’s reestab-
lished authority, executed pirates were left to rot in chains at harbor entrances around
the Atlantic.30
Having finally pacified both its overseas territories and the shipping lanes linking
them to the metropole, it was with some consternation that Britain’s imperial ruling
class shortly afterwards learned that yet again a whole region, and this time right on
London’s doorsteps, had drifted nearly out of its control. And once again, the problem
was caused by armed gangs of commoners challenging the government’s control over
the commodity circuits of the imperial economy. In 1745, a House of Commons com-
mittee charged with inquiring “into the Causes of the most Infamous Practice of
Smuggling” was astonished to learn that nationwide an estimated twenty thousand
men made their living by sending vast quantities of untaxed goods in and out of the
country, among them many of the key commodities of the imperial economy, in-
cluding tobacco, textiles, alcohol, and tea.31 This trade was carried on openly, and on a
massive scale. “There are notorious Gangs on the Sea-Coasts,” a London court room
was told shortly afterwards, “that publickly ride armed and disciplined in Troops, and
that set the Officers of the Revenue at Defiance . . . without any Fear of Terror from the
Justice of the Nation.”32 In the rural southeast, where tea smuggling had grown into the
second most important sector of the local economy after agriculture, the situation was
especially severe.33 In the small village of Hawkhurst in Kent, less than a day’s ride from
the center of London, five hundred smugglers were able to assemble in less than an
hour, armed to the teeth and ready to fight against customs men, the militia, riding
officers, or anyone else threatening their livelihood.34
Although they spread their operations all across the southeastern counties, the area
with by far the highest concentration of smugglers was the Weald, a relatively wild and
forested upland region approximately halfway between London and the Channel coast.
Once home to a flourishing and internationally successful gunfounding industry, by
the early eighteenth century deindustrialization and underdevelopment had reduced
the Weald’s role in the regional economy to that of reproducing casual labor, which
nearby downland farmers could draw on as and when needed.35 These farmers had, for
several generations already, been busy with restructuring their enterprises, enclosing
what few commons there were, driving free- and copyholders off the land, and devel-
oping large, capital-intensive estates that specialized in non-labor-intensive corn-
sheep husbandry instead. Large numbers of small farmers and laborers were deprived
of their living.36 Many of them saw no alternative but to move east, to the open parishes
of the Weald where it was still possible to scrape together a bearable living from the
unenclosed commons.
From the perspective of the large downland farmers, having an area with increasingly
overpopulated open parishes close by should have resulted in an ideal labor market. On
the one hand, the increasing pressure on the Wealden commons should have forced
people to seek seasonal employment, and their growing numbers ought to have
depressed wages. On the other hand, the enclosures in their own parishes and the con-
tinued existence of common land outside of them would have freed the farmers from
maintaining their workforce when not employed. In reality, however, the trade-off for
releasing their seasonal labor into reproductive independence was the breeding of a
population, right on their doorsteps, that was fiercely jealous of its self-sufficiency.
When continuing in-migration resulted in population pressure, which threatened the
fragile socioecological balance of the Wealden commons, its inhabitants—much like
those unemployed seamen who had turned pirate two decades before—refused to com-
pete for paid work at ever lower wages and instead sought a new way of maintaining
their traditional independence.37 The phenomenally profitable smuggling trade between
Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and England turned out to be that way.
At the peak of their activities in the early 1740s, English smuggling gangs were re-
sponsible for the illegal import of somewhere between 3 and 3.5 million pounds of tea
annually, at an approximate combined wholesale price of £800,000. This was almost
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three times as much as was imported by the East India Company (EIC), the sole legal
trader in tea.38 To carry on a trade of this magnitude took more than moonlit nights,
deserted beaches, boats with muffled oars, and all those other well-known elements of
traditional smuggling lore. On the contrary, tea smuggling was carried on as a major
business venture. Gang members had to raise large amounts of capital and secure
credit, find vessels and seamen, cross the Channel or the North Sea to pick up the
cargo, hire additional workers to assist in the landing, sometimes as many as two hun-
dred, find dozens of horses for transport, and then organize the storage, distribution,
and sale of many thousand pounds of tea and gin to consumers all across the rural
south and even into the London suburbs.39 They had to look after security as well,
physically confronting the coast guard, riding officers, and the militia if these should
be so foolish as to show up in the middle of a landing. Usually, of course, they stood
little chance against the armed and very determined might of the smugglers. “[O]ften
times these are attack’ed in the night with such numbers,” Daniel Defoe reported of the
riding officers he met during his tour through the southeastern counties, “that they
dare not resist, or if they do, they are wounded and beaten, and sometimes kill’d; and
at other times are oblig’d, as it were, to stand still, and see the whole carry’d off before
their faces, not daring to meddle.”40
The conditions of business were rather more peaceful on the continental side, where
English smugglers were treated with the respect and consideration due to important
customers.41 Beginning in the later 1710s, East India companies had sprung up in more
than half a dozen ports from Gothenburg in western Sweden to Bordeaux in southern
France, all of them sending ships to China with the primary purpose of purchasing tea
ultimately destined for the English black market. In many cases, these trading com-
panies were set up or principally financed by London merchants who, tired of being
excluded from the state-enforced monopoly on trade with the Far East, took their cap-
ital across to the Continent and from there sent out a fleet of ships that was larger in
both number and carrying capacity than those that sailed under the flag of the EIC.42
Once back in Europe, the tea was sold in perfectly legal transactions to English
smugglers who benefited from the fact that goods destined for re-export were always
taxed only very lightly. And in England, of course, the smugglers evaded customs and
excise duties altogether, making their product far cheaper than the EIC’s. Tax evasion,
however, was not the only means by which smugglers gained a competitive edge on
their legal counterparts. They also had a far more efficient and cost-effective distribution
network. Legal tea could enter the country only through the port of London, where the
EIC sold it in large volumes to wholesalers, who in turn sold it in smaller volumes to
distributors, who in turn sold it to shopkeepers, who in turn sold it to the end con-
sumer. Naturally, the price of tea increased with each transaction, pushing it some-
times well beyond the means of common householders. The smugglers, by contrast,
eliminated most intermediate steps, kept the price low, and sold their tea to both shop-
keepers and end consumers in quantities small enough so that they could easily afford
it. Unsurprisingly, the domestic legal market for tea contracted by some 50 percent in
the early 1740s, and by 1745 more than 3 million pounds of unsold legal tea had accu-
mulated in the EIC’s London warehouses.43
The British government found this invasion of the supposedly protected home mar-
ket for tea very troublesome. Since the Chinese had firm control of both production
and the wholesale market at Canton, there was no chance of lowering costs through
changes in the productive process, as there was in the Atlantic trades.44 The only way
therefore to profit from the booming tea trade was to control the distribution in the
home market, but as long as tea remained heavily taxed, the EIC could not even dream
of beginning to compete with the smugglers. But lowering duties to make their tea
price competitive was no solution either, for the survival and expansion of the imperial
state depended on the reliable collection of steadily increasing taxes in the first place.
By the early 1740s, Britain’s national debt had grown to reach the £50 million mark,
and renewed international warfare ensured that it continued to rise at an accelerated
pace until it temporarily leveled out at £76 million by the time hostilities ceased in
1748.45 But this in itself was not a problem, for the Hanoverian state had so far suc-
ceeded in expanding revenues at a sufficiently high rate to maintain the trust of large
capital holders. This they did by reconfiguring its tax regime to take full advantage of
the increasingly commercialized economy through shifting the principal tax burden
from the wealth and income of the propertied classes to the movement of commod-
ities. Accordingly, between 1690 and 1735 the proportion of tax revenues derived from
the wealth and income of the propertied classes fell by well over half, while the propor-
tion derived from excise and customs rose to make up the difference. But in the late
1730s that development was suddenly reversed. Excise and especially customs revenues
dropped significantly, and the government once again was forced to lean more heavily
on the wealthier classes in society.46 How much of this contraction in customs and
excise revenues was due to smuggling alone is difficult to say, though considering the
enormous scale on which it was carried on, it probably made a noticeable difference. If
contemporary estimates were correct, smugglers annually sent around £800,000
worth of specie out of the country and failed to pay customs and excise duties on more
than 3 million pounds of tea every year. For a chronically indebted state, these were far
from negligible sums.
In its fight against smuggling, the government launched a three-pronged attack, mir-
roring, in some ways, the tactics employed in the successful war on Atlantic piracy two
decades before. First, it robbed the smugglers of their customers by cutting the excise
duty on tea by 75 percent in 1745, releasing onto the market a flood of 3 million pounds
of now suddenly cheap tea from the EIC’s London warehouses.47 Second, it shredded
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the solidarity between smugglers and the local population by offering £500 to in-
formers who helped get a smuggler convicted and executed.48 Third, it militarized the
rural south, sending in the army to assist the militia, customs men, and riding officers
in their struggle against the smugglers.49 Things turned nasty. As soldiers piled into the
villages of Sussex and Kent, smugglers turned on informers and collaborators, threat-
ening violence and beating to death at least one government witness and one customs
officer. It now being harder to move goods across the region, they extended their crim-
inal repertoire to include highway robbery, housebreaking, and even piracy in the
Channel, successfully boarding and robbing several vessels. To dampen the zeal of the
customs service, smugglers now regularly and openly assaulted officers and robbed
them.50
But it was all to no avail. In the contest of violence with the state, the smugglers stood
as little chance as the pirates had done before them. In 1749 the conflict ended with
three mass executions. On January 19, Benjamin Tapner, John Cobby, John Hammond,
William Carter, Richard Mills, Senior, and his son, Richard Mills, Junior, were hanged
together after the special assizes at Chichester. William Jackson, who had been sen-
tenced to death along with the others, cheated the hangman by being “so struck with
horror, at being measured for his irons, that he soon expired.”51 Tapner, in chains, was
left to rot on Rook’s Hill after the execution; Cobby and Hammond, also in chains,
were returned to their old stomping ground, the beach at Selsey Isle, where they had
often landed goods; and Carter’s decomposing corpse greeted travelers who passed by
Rake on the busy road between Portsmouth and London.52 Two months later, the next
mass execution took place at East Grinstead. This time Jockey Brown, Laurence Kemp,
Thomas Kemp, Robert Fuller, John Mills, and Henry Sheerman were hanged. Four
months later, following the Lewes Assizes, another mass killing was arranged: Richard
Double, John Geering, William Trover, Edmund Richards, George Chapman, and
Thomas Holman were all hanged by the neck until dead.53 With that, smuggling disap-
peared from the rural south, at least for the time being.
By the mid-eighteenth century, it had become a common literary trope to assimilate
the world of high politics with that of crime. Henry Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild—
ostensibly about the infamous thief-taker general of Great Britain and Ireland, but re-
ally about Prime Minister Robert Walpole and his sordid circle—was built entirely
around it, as was John Gay’s wildly popular and occasionally censored play The Beggar’s
Opera and its pirate-themed sequel Polly.54 The trope appears as well in Charles John-
son’s 1725 General History of the Pirates when “Black” Sam Bellamy explains to the
captain of a captured merchantman the difference between himself and the imperial
ruling class: “They vilify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only this Difference, they
rob the Poor under Cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the Rich under the Protec-
tion of our own Courage.”55 In the later 1740s, the anonymous author of A Free Apology
on Behalf of the Smugglers similarly argued, in defense of a number of smugglers

charged with killing an informer, that it really was “very hard that one should be more
vilify’d, more cry’d out upon, for a single Act of Cruelty on one Man, than another that
shall act it on Millions.”56
It is not difficult to understand where this reversal—this charge of ruling class crim-
inality—came from, for the governments of the first half of the eighteenth century
were among the most openly corrupt in British history. Members of the ruling junta
awarded themselves, their relatives, and their allies sinecures of enormous value. One
could, for instance, earn thousands of pounds a year in such taxing positions as Master
of the King’s Tennis Courts or Taster of the King’s Wine in Dublin.57 High-ranking of-
ficials reserved dozens of these positions for themselves, feeding, year after year, at the
trough that was His Majesty’s Treasury. They funneled enormously valuable govern-
ment contracts to build up, maintain, and victual the fleet to their friends in the ship-
building, manufacturing, and food-processing industries, and these in turn threw a
protective shield over mercantile capitalists and their far-flung interests across the
globe. They repeatedly raided the Sinking Fund, they gambled with the national debt,
they created a highly lucrative but dangerously artificial stock-market boom that ended
with a resounding crash in 1720, sending thousands of small-time investors into bank-
ruptcy. No matter: they dispatched tax collectors across the country to raise new funds
for the Whitehall feeding frenzy. To safeguard the redistributive orgy from even the
most feeble democratic oversight, Parliament passed the 1717 Septennial Act, thereby
more than doubling the time between general elections from three to seven years.58
E.P. Thompson memorably characterized the whole affair as having “the sick quality of
a banana republic.”59
Through the operation of the excise, it was primarily the middling sorts—
shopkeepers, craftsmen, freeholders, and the like—whose participation in the so-
called consumer revolution directly funded the government’s redistributive project.
Commodities deemed to be necessities of the poor were exempt from taxation.60 But
this did not mean that the poor escaped lightly. The taxes they were eligible for rose
faster than their wages, and more importantly, those wages increasingly became their
sole source of income as common rights and customary privileges were abolished in
step with the accelerating enclosure movement.61 Between 1600 and 1760, 28 percent of
England’s landmass was turned into private property (bringing the enclosed total to 75
percent), and at the same time Parliament vastly increased the number of capital stat-
utes, the majority of them designed to protect the newly created private property in
land from the customary appropriations of commoners.62 Hunting and fishing became
poaching if the forest or fishpond was enclosed, and the sentence was death; collecting
firewood, berries, herbs, wild flowers, or reeds in an enclosed meadow was trespass
and theft, as was now the age-old custom of gleaning a field after the harvest. These too
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could lead to a sentence of death at the hanging tree. Many of the non-waged forms of
reproduction by which the poor had traditionally maintained themselves were thus
suddenly outlawed, which in effect criminalized an entire class of people who were
unable and often unwilling to make a living by any other means. Heaved onto the
streets as vagrants, streaming into the bulging slums of the cities, or continuing onward
to the overseas colonies as indentured servants, convicts, soldiers, and sailors, these
were the masterless men and women that so terrified early modern elites. Some of
them eventually ended up as Caribbean pirates; others joined smuggling gangs in
Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent on England’s Channel coast.
Neither group appears to have encountered much difficulty attracting new recruits
from this swelling pool of the dispossessed. As a member of a pirate crew, a poor sailor
or runaway servant exchanged his miserly wages for the same share of the voyage’s
profits as all of his shipmates, save for the captain and quartermaster (two shares); the
master, boatswain, and gunner (one and a half shares); and the remaining officers (one
and a quarter shares).63 “In an honest Service,” as the pirate captain Bartholomew Rob-
erts proudly proclaimed, “there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in
this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not bal-
lance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a
sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my Motto.”64
Had most of them not been quite so enamored with merrymaking, pirates who kept at
it for a year or two could grow fairly prosperous, as indeed a few did. Edward Teach,
better known as Blackbeard, was laundering his very substantial treasure by getting it
certified as legal salvage around the time he was captured and killed.65 A few others,
less well known, probably were successful in returning to land with a nest egg illicitly
accumulated at sea, though their very success makes them hard to trace in the histor-
ical record.66
Many inhabitants of the rural south likewise profited from involvement with the
smuggling gangs. Core members, who were drawn from a broad cross section of the
rural population, though most heavily from the lower end of the socioeconomic spec-
trum, were able to make a substantial profit from the trade, enough for William Gray
to build a house worth between £1,200 and £1,500 in his home village of Hawkhurst,
while his comrade Trip built one for about £700.67 The temporary workers hired by the
gangs to assist in major landings also did very well. According to one contemporary
estimate, the wages smugglers’ paid for a night’s work added up to half a guinea, plus a
dollop of tea (approximately 13 pounds, worth at least 24 or 25 shillings, depending on
the quality), plus all expenses for food and drink paid. In total, this came to about £1
14s.68 To put this in context, Joseph Massie’s proto-census estimated that an average
laborer in rural England in 1759 had an annual income of £16.69 In other words, a la-
borer employed by the smugglers would have exceeded his average annual income
after only ten nights of working landing goods and carrying them inland to hide. It is
small wonder that southern farmers were heard muttering about labor shortages
caused by the smugglers’ utterly uncompetitive wage rates.70
Considering that these penny-pinching farmers were the only major source of alter-
native employment in the region, it appears that these phenomenally high wages did
not reflect the relative availability of labor power. A correspondent for the Gentleman’s
Magazine certainly maintained, and that with some annoyance, that the wages the
smugglers paid their workers “bore no proportion to the price of common labour,” that
most fundamental measure of capitalist economics.71 This must have been particularly
irritating since elite opinion—long preoccupied with reforming and making produc-
tive England’s large surplus population (see chs. 1 and 2)—was finally turning against
the violent bullying of the disposable poor and instead focused its attention on the
Sisyphean task of imposing wage discipline and corralling underemployed labor into
productive, profitable activities.72 Smuggling gangs in the rural south, and pirates out
in the far reaches of the Atlantic, interfered with these schemes on a large scale.
Instead of using the destruction of the commons and the increasing monetization of
the imperial economy to drive down “the price of common labour” to ever lower levels,
and thus extract at low cost an ever larger amount of work from the newly wage depen-
dent, both groups used their violent, illicit access to the capital circuits of the world
economy to drastically lower the amount of effort it took to sustain a comfortable life.
Thomas Puryour, an unemployed ex-servant and member of the Hawkhurst smug-
gling gang, spent his days rambling across the beautiful Weald, rolled around the hay
with a young woman from a neighboring parish, and only every now and then disap-
peared for a night’s work landing goods and taking potshots at customs officers.73 Eco-
nomic historians have sometimes followed Adam Smith in viewing smugglers
primarily as a kind of militant vanguard of laissez-faire capitalism, but Puryour’s de-
cidedly nonaccumulative, leisurely life complicates such an interpretation.74 Similar
arguments have been applied to the pirates of the golden age—most forcefully by Peter
Leeson in his recent book The Invisible Hook—but these too have difficulty explaining
the sheer laziness with which most crews approached their work.75 In stark contrast to
the merchant trades, where crew numbers were always kept at the absolute minimum
in order to keep wage expenditures low and profits high, pirates excessively overcrewed
their ships so as to reduce each man’s share in the twenty-four-hour cycle of necessary
shipboard labor to a mere nuisance. And in between voyages, most of them enjoyed
long periods of heavy drinking, carousing, singing, dancing, and much other disaccu-
mulating merrymaking ashore.76
It was more than just the promise of such “Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease” that
steadily swelled the ranks of pirates and smugglers. Both groups also established and
contractually regulated an attractive, empowering political order, which emphasized
232 Institutions
mutual solidarity, shared decision making, and democratically accountable leadership.

Pirate crews, in particular, were political microsocieties of some complexity. On Bar-
tholomew Roberts’s ship, articles one and two of the crew’s bare-bones constitution
fixed the principle of one man, one vote in every decision large and small, and further
regulated the fair and equitable division of provisions and loot; articles three to six set
down a few basic rules of behavior, such as prohibiting gambling on board or requiring
every man to keep his personal weapon clean and ready at all times; articles seven to
nine determined the procedures that would be followed in case of conflict amongst the
crew; article ten set down the exact division of spoils; and article eleven guaranteed
that the ship’s musicians would have the Sabbath, but only the Sabbath, off. In case of
any misunderstanding as to the meaning of these articles, an ad hoc jury made up of
common crewmembers was to be called and invested with the authority of interpreting
their intention.77 Some crews added generous workers’ comp provisions to their arti-
cles, a practice that went back to the buccaneers of the mid-seventeenth century, where,
for example, a man was compensated for the loss of his right arm with 600 pieces of
eight, for the left leg with 400 pieces of eight, for the loss of an eye with 100 pieces of
eight, and so forth.78
There is only limited evidence as to the ways in which smuggling gangs regulated
their internal affairs, but it all points into a direction reminiscent of the egalitarian
manner in which the buccaneers and later pirates organized theirs. Like these, the
smugglers appear to have been a contractually minded lot, consecrating mutual sup-
port and solidarity by signing their names to an agreement, “by way of bond.”79 Smug-
glers took their “solemn Oaths and Engagements” very seriously, and they went to
great lengths in order to punish those who broke them.80 The seriousness of this collec-
tive ethos also found expression in their habit of calling general councils in order to
come to decisions, and they did so even in emergency situations when they formed
“councils of war” instead.81 From time to time, there is mention of certain men as gang
leaders, but it is possible that this was simply a projection on the authorities’ part, for
there is also testimony that, among the smugglers, “no-body took the lead one more
than the other.”82
The survival of these countercultural, egalitarian microsocieties of course hinged on
their ability to extract sufficient resources from the imperial economy, and for that they
depended on amiable relations with partners who bridged the gap between the world
of legal trade and their own more opaque underground economies. Pirates could not
always acquire all the goods they desired or required through outright theft, and some-
times found themselves in possession of commodities for which they had little use, so
they traded surplus booty for gold and supplies with open-minded merchants on the
imperial periphery. Smugglers, likewise, first acquired tea in open and legal transac-
tions across the Channel, and then converted it back into capital by trading it for
money with customers throughout the rural south. All available evidence suggests,
however, that neither of these groups—not their trading partners, not their hundreds
of small-time customers—were much troubled by questions of legality, and mostly
viewed smugglers and pirates as purveyors of cheap and desirable commodities and
who were formally no different than legal, state-sanctioned merchants. Nor did most
people view them as morally reprehensible. Given the government’s bullishly corrupt
behavior, its self-interested use of state power to redistribute societal wealth on an
unprecedented scale, many commoners throughout rural England and the western
colonies dealt quite happily with pirate crews and local smuggling gangs, for these men
at least often had roots in the communities with whom they traded. It was no coinci-
dence that the bulk of the government’s successful efforts in suppressing both piracy
and smuggling therefore aimed at decomposing the bonds of solidarity that tied gang
members to the communities from whence they came, and on which they continued
to depend until the very end.
Before 1745, convicted smugglers could expect to be transported to the West Indies
for seven years, a fate so common in these communities that one gang even called
themselves the Hastings Transports.83 No doubt, during their stint abroad, which often
turned out to be considerably shorter than seven years, transported smugglers heard
many tales of the floating pirate republics that were destroyed only a decade or two
before.84 Nevertheless, there is no evidence of personal continuities or a direct transfer-
ral of experience between Caribbean pirate crews and Sussex smugglers. On the face of
it, they remain unrelated phenomena.85
And yet, the striking parallels in the way in which they latched on to the commodity
circuits of the world economy, diverted substantial profits, and then used these to
finance alternative and similar systems of social relations, which quite decidedly ran
counter to the general thrust of that world economy, appears to be more than merely
coincidental. Indeed, considering what kinds of people turned to such villainy, the
sociogeographic gulf separating the Caribbean from the Sussex Weald suddenly
shrinks. In both cases, these were men who were drawn from a class of expropriated
commoners and casualized laborers created during the feverishly brutal process of
primitive accumulation that socially devastated Europe, parts of Africa, and the New
World in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. As Marx noted, this was
a process containing two moments, encompassing the accumulation of capital and of
labor, which became available for setting this capital in motion, once its basis for inde-
pendent subsistence had been withdrawn.86 But this was not an even development. As
common land was privatized and redistributed on an enormous scale, a class of dispos-
able people was created, lacking legal access to land and, as yet, opportunity for contin-
uous employment. The vast majority of indentured servants, soldiers, and sailors who
went overseas came from this class, as did the migratory workers within Britain who
234 Institutions
either made their way to London or to regions with open, unenclosed parishes such as
the Weald.
By then violently latching on to one of the most important, dynamic, and profitable
elements of eighteenth-century economic development—the formation of a unified
home market integrated into the world economy—and thereby subverting its class-
determined hierarchy of profit distribution, these dispossessed men-turned-pirates-
and-smugglers were able to escape the miseries of unemployment and wage-dependency
at precisely the moment their betters sought to generalize these conditions. The speed
with which the British imperial state managed to crush these challenges should not be
taken as an indication of their weakness but of the seriousness of the threat. When
pirates and smugglers got together in gangs, wrote egalitarian microconstitutions,
armed themselves, and then attacked one of the most important projects of the eigh-
teenth-century British state—the protection of the enormous profits from overseas
trade—at stake were not simply lost ships and untaxed tea but the fundamental ques-
tion of how and by whom societal wealth was to be produced, distributed, and enjoyed.
Wage labor, immiseration, and capitalist class society was one option; pirate republi-
canism, zero work, and moral economies another.
NOTES
1. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), passim.
2. Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic His-
tory Review, new series (hereafter n.s.), 41, no. 1 (1988): 9.
3. For examples of the small number of works that fold piracy and smuggling into the same
framework, see Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Wim Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in
the Americas, 1600–1800,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellec-
tual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 141–80; for an explicit argument for keeping the phe-
nomena apart, see Alan L. Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 19–44.
4. G. D. Ramsay, “The Smuggler’s Trade: A Neglected Aspect of English Commercial Devel-
opment,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5, no. 2 (1952): 131–57; W. A. Cole,
“Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling,” Economic History Review, n.s., 10, no. 3 (1958):
395–410; Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, “Smuggling and the British Tea Trade
before 1784,” American Historical Review 74, no. 1 (1968): 44–73; Hoh-Cheung Mui and
Lorna H. Mui, “‘Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling’ Reconsidered,” Economic His-
tory Review, n.s., 28, no. 1 (1975): 28–43; W. A. Cole, “Rejoinder: The Arithmetic of Eigh-
teenth-Century Smuggling,” Economic History Review, n.s., 28, no. 1 (1975): 44–49.
5. Cal Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-
Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1975), 119–66; J. G. Rule, “Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and
Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Southern History 1 (1979): 135–53. For social crime more gener-
ally, see “Conference Report,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 25 (1972):
5–21; John Lea, “Social Crime Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 3, no. 3 (1999): 307–25.
6. For an overview of both perspectives, see C. R. Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader
(New York: New York University Press, 2001); for radical interpretations, see Christopher
Hill, “Radical Pirates,” in Collected Essays, vol. 3, People and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century
England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate
Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes. 2nd rev. ed. (Brooklyn: Autonome-
dia, 2003); Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Bos-
ton: Beacon, 2004); Rüdiger Haude, “Frei-Beuter: Character und Herkunft piratischer
Demokratie im frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56, nos 7–8
(2008): 593–616; Gabriel Kuhn, Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy
(Oakland, CA: PM, 2010). For interpretations of pirates as criminals, see David Cordingly,
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Ran-
dom House, 2006); Arne Bialuschewski, “Pirates, Markets and Imperial Authority: Eco-
nomic Aspects of Maritime Depredations in the Atlantic World, 1716–1726,” Global Crime
9, nos. 1–2 (2008): 52–65; for a highly original if not deeply researched twist on this inter-
pretation, see Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
7. Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1999), 319.
8. Defoe, General History, 5.
9. Defoe, General History, 585–92.
11. C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (Hamden, CT: Archon,
1966), 267–68.
12. Nuala Zahedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica,
1655–89,” Economic History Review, n.s., 39, no. 2 (1986): 216.
13. Alexander O. Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America: Or, A True Account of the Most Remark-
able Assaults Committed of Late Years Upon the Coasts of the West Indies, By the Bucaniers
of Jamaica and Tortuga, Both English and French (London, 1684), 1:106–7.
14. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,
1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 177.
15. Zahedieh, “Early English Jamaica,” 208.
16. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of
the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 160–61.
17. Haring, Buccaneers, 271–72; James Burney, History of the Buccaneers in America (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 375–76.
18. Haring, Buccaneers, 236; Burney, History, 377; Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War
against Pirates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 37.
19. J. S. Bromley, “The French Privateering War, 1702–1713,” in Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760
(London: Hambledon, 1987), 213–42.
20. England/Britain increased the number of its line of battle ships from 83 to 119 between 1690
and 1715, and its cruisers from 26 to 63. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A
Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: Norton, 2004), 608.
21. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), 30; Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Rev-
olution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 6.
236 Institutions

23. Arne Bialuschewski, “Between Newfoundland and the Malacca Strait: A Survey of the
Golden Age of Piracy, 1695–1725,” Mariner’s Mirror 90, no. 2 (2004): 173–75.
24. Rediker, Villains, 80.
25. Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Carib-
bean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (New York: Houghton Mifflin Har-
court, 2007), 279.
26. Quoted in Defoe, General History, 264.
27. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (London: Macmillan and Co., 1962), 31–32; Rediker, Villains, 34–35.
28. Bialuschewski, “Pirates, Markets and Imperial Authority,” 62–63.
29. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/esti-
mates.faces?yearFrom=1700&yearTo=1750, accessed December 9, 2010.
30. Rediker, Villains, 163.
31. Stephen Theodore Janssen, Smuggling laid open in all its Extensive and Destructive Branches;
with Proposals for the Effectual Remedy of that Practice, etc (1763), 21.
32. The trial of Thomas Puryour (t17470909-36), in Old Bailey Proceedings Online (hereafter
OBP, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/, accessed February 19, 2009.
33. John Lowerson, A Short History of Sussex (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 130.
34. Janssen, Smuggling, 21, 24.
35. Howard C. Tomlinson, “Wealden Gunfounding: An Analysis of its Demise in the Eigh-
teenth Century,” Economic History Review, n.s., 29, no. 3 (1976): 387; Brian Short, “The
De-industrialization Process: A Case Study of the Weald, 1600–1850,” in Regions and
Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, ed. Pat Hudson (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 169; Brian Short, “The Evolution of Contrasting
Communities within Rural England,” in The English Rural Community, ed. Brian Short
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34.
36. Peter Brandon and Brian Short, The South East from AD 1000 (Harlow: Longman, 1990),
227; Brian Short, “The South-East: Kent, Surrey, and Sussex,” in The Agrarian History of
England and Wales, vol. 5.1, 1640–1750: Regional Farming Systems, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 293, 311.
37. Wage-dependency was generally considered as being synonymous with an undignified
state of wretched poverty in early modern England. See Christopher Hill, “Pottage for
Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage-Labour,” in Change and Continuity in Seven-
teenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 219–38.
38. Unfortunately, there are not reliable numbers for the southeast alone. H. S. Kent, War and
Trade in the Northern Seas: Anglo-Scandinavian Economic Relations in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 116; for a somewhat testy debate
over the estimated volume of the smuggling trade, see W. A. Cole, “Trends in Eighteenth-
Century Smuggling,” Economic History Review, n.s., 10, no. 3 (1958): 395–410; Hoh-Cheung
Mui and Lorna H. Mui, “Smuggling and the British Tea Trade before 1784,” American His-
torical Review 74, no. 1 (1968): 44–73; Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, “‘Trends in
Eighteenth-Century Smuggling’ Reconsidered,” Economic History Review, n.s., 28, no. 1
(1975): 28–43; W. A. Cole, “Rejoinder: The Arithmetic of Eighteenth-Century Smuggling,”
Economic History Review, n.s., 28, no. 1 (1975): 44–49.
39. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 126–27.
40. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Dent, 1962),
123.
41. Gavin Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1814,”
Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 38.
42. Kent, War and Trade, 112–15; E. H. Pritchard, “The Struggle for Control of the China Trade
during the Eighteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 3, no. 3 (1934): 280–95.
43. Mui and Mui, “‘Trends,’” 38.
44. Jordan Goodman, “EXCITANTIA, Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs,” in
Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1995), 130–31.
45. Brewer, Sinews, 30.
46. O’Brien, “British Taxation,” 9.
47. Mui and Mui, “Trends,” 29, 38.
48. Between October 20 and December 9, 1747, no less than £3,500 was paid for information
that led to the arrest and execution of Richard Ashcraft, John Cook, Thomas Fuller, Wil-
liam Rowland, Samuel Chapman, Francis Andrews, and Robert Scott. West Sussex Records
Office, Chichester, Goodwood Ms 154, 155.
49. Paul Muskett, “Military Operations against Smuggling in Kent and Sussex, 1698–1750,”
Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 52, no. 210 (1974): 89–110.
50. East Sussex Records Office, Lewes, Say Ms 3870, February 8, 1747; Gentleman’s Magazine 18
(September 1748): 407; GM 17 (October 1747): 496; GM 15 (March 1745): 163; Winslow,
“Sussex Smugglers,” 144; William Durant Cooper, “Smuggling in Sussex,” Sussex Archeo-
logical Collections 10 (1858): 69–94.
51. The Ordinary of Newgate, “Benjamin Tapner, John Cobby, John Hammond, Richard Mills,
Richard Mills the Younger, William Carter, William Jackson: Revengeful Smugglers, who were
executed for a diabolical murder, 18th of January, 1749,” in The Complete Newgate Calendar,
http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/completenewgate.htm accessed July 25, 2004.
52. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 66.
53. Albery, “Sussex Smugglers,” 561.
54. Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Gay, Dra-
matic Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
55. Defoe, General History, 587; Bellamy’s alleged speech echoes that of the nameless pirate
confronting Alexander the Great in St. Augustine’s City of God: “The King asked the fellow,
What is your idea, in infesting the sea? And the pirate answered with uninhibited inso-
lence. ‘The same as yours, in infesting the world! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I am
called a pirate; because you have a mighty navy, you are called an emperor.’” Augustine, The
City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 139.
56. Anon., A Free Apology on Behalf of the Smugglers, So far as their Case affects the Constitu-
tion, by an Enemy to all Oppression, whether by Tyranny or Law (1749), 11.
57. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 47.
58. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991), 107–16.
59. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977), 197.
60. O’Brien, “British Taxation,” 12–13, 17.
61. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 155.
62. J. R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review,
n.s., 36, no. 4 (1983): 494–95; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England,
1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 23–24. For the flood tide of new capital statutes, see
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cam-
238 Institutions

65. Woodard, Republic of Pirates, 279.
66. Mark Hanna’s book The Pirates’ Nests: Piracy and the Formalization of the First British
Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming) promises to shed
some much-needed light on this question.
67. West Sussex Records Office, Chichester, Goodwood Ms 154, n.d. (ca. November 1748); East
Sussex Records Office, Lewes, Say Ms 3870, November 27, 1747.
68. Anon., The Trials of the Smugglers, and the other Prisoners, at the Assizes held at East-
Grinsted, for the County of Sussex (1749), 19.]
69. Hay and Rogers, English Society, 20.
70. Albery, “Sussex Smugglers and Smuggling,” 451.
71. Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (March 1749): 138.
72. See also A. W. Coats, “Economic Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century,”
Economic History Review 13, no. 1 (1960).
73. The trial of Thomas Puryour (t17470909-36), in OBP, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
accessed February 19, 2009.
74. Adam Smith, An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976), 429; Mui and Mui, “Smuggling,” 44–73.
75. Leeson, Invisible Hook.
76. Rediker, Villains, 58–59.
78. Rediker, Villains, 73; Exquemelin, Boucaniers, 1:87.
79. The Ordinary of Newgate, “Thomas Kingsmill, William Fairall and Richard Perin: Three of
the thirty Smugglers who broke open the Custom-House at Poole, and were executed at
Tyburn, 26th of April, 1749,” in The Complete Newgate Calendar.
80. Anon., Trials of the Smugglers, 19; The Ordinary of Newgate, “John Mills: His Father and
Brother were hanged, and he suffered a similar Fate on Slendon Common, Sussex, 12th of
August, 1749,” in The Complete Newgate Calendar.
81. The Ordinary of Newgate, “Thomas Kingsmill, William Fairall and Richard Perin: Three
of the thirty Smugglers who broke open the Custom-House at Poole, and were executed
at Tyburn, 26th of April, 1749,” in The Complete Newgate Calendar; The trial of Edmund
Henley (t-17470225-19) and the trial of Benjamin Tapner, John Cobby, John Hammond,
Richard Mills the Elder, Richard Mills the Younger, William Jackson, and William
Carter (t17480116-1), in OBP, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/, accessed February 19,
2009.
82. The trial of Thomas Kingsmill, William Fairall, Richard Perin, Thomas Lillewhite, and
Richard Glover (t17490405-36), in OBP, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/, accessed Febru-
ary 19, 2009.
83. East Sussex Records Office, Lewes, Sayer Ms 3870, May 3, 1744.
84. Since convicts were not imprisoned once transported, it was fairly easy to catch a ship back
to England if one was willing to remain an outlaw threatened by the gallows thereafter. See
OBP, January 16, 1741, the trial of John Catt (t17410116-11) and June 7, 1753, the trial of Peter
Ticknor (t17530607-34).
85. One cannot, however, help but be intrigued by the fact that the Hastings Transports tried
their hand at piracy in the Channel. East Sussex Records Office, Lewes, Sayer Ms 3870, May
3, 1744.
86. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin, 1990), 1:871–904.
part four
Regulation
11
Polycentric States
The Spanish Reigns and the “Failures”
of Mercantilism
Regina Grafe
Spain’s history and historiography in what has come to be called the “Age of Mercan-
tilism” has been peculiarly contradictory. Thinkers of the mercantilist age viewed Spain
as particularly unsuccessful at any of the policies regarding trade, taxes, population, or
strategic industries they advocated. Contemporary foreign pamphleteers and domestic
arbitristas (projectors) agreed that there was hardly a place in Europe that had failed so
conspicuously at implementing policies “to the advantage of the common wealth”
(maybe the weakest working definition of mercantilism one could think of). As Eli
Heckscher pointed out in his classic treatment of mercantilism, the likes of Thomas
Mun thought of Spain as a deterrent, not an example to follow.1
From the mid-eighteenth century on, however, commentators on political economy
identified Spain closely with everything that now seemed wrong with mercantilism.
Spanish enlightened writers, such as Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes and Gaspar
Melchor de Jovellanos, berated national guild structures and monopolies, trade regu-
lations of all kinds, and most of all the tasa, the price ceiling for bread. They preceded
or echoed Adam Smith’s indictments of the “absurd policy” of restrictions against the
export of bullion, which only contributed to “discourage both agriculture and manu-
factures.”2 Smith summed up this view when he stated that “industry is there [in Spain]
neither free nor secure; and the civil and ecclesiastical governments of both Spain and
Portugal are such as would alone be sufficient to perpetuate their present state of pov-
erty, even though their regulations of commerce were as wise as the greatest part of
them are absurd and foolish.”3
The historiography in Spain and elsewhere has approached mercantilism through
three quite distinct lenses: as part of a history of thought about state and economy; as
the actual history of political economy in a narrower sense; and as part of the sociocul-
tural and political transformation of European society in what we tend to label as Euro-
pean state-building. In the Spanish case, most attention has been paid to the intellectual
241
242 Regulation
history of mercantilism.4 The history of political economy has by contrast said relatively
little about mercantilism, beyond the statement that it either failed in Spain or that
Spain was never more than pseudo-mercantilist.5 Finally, the sociocultural historical
context of the era of mercantilism has received scant mention to this date. One purpose
of this chapter is to suggest a rebalancing of these perspectives. It will offer only a few
very general comments on the better-known intellectual history of Spanish mercan-
tilism. Instead, the major focus is given to developing a sociopolitical framework for
understanding the political economy of the mercantilist period in Spain. It is arguably
in this particular framework that the most interesting comparative aspects emerge in
relation to developments in the Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
The argument developed in this paper is as follows: The supposed failure of mercan-
tilism in Spain was not rooted in a failure to develop or assimilate a coherent set of ideas
about the state and the economy, which could be labeled “mercantilist.” Spanish com-
mentators on political economy were probably ahead of their times by European com-
parison in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and well in touch with debates
elsewhere in the eighteenth century. Nor were Spain’s economic woes mostly the result
of a problem of implementation of good ideas, “a wealth of analysis [of economic and
political problems] and poverty of execution” as Stein and Stein have claimed.6 Instead,
the problem of applying new mercantilist policies was rooted in mercantilism’s role in
state formation, that is, in the sociopolitical framework that shaped, enabled, or
obstructed the political economy of Spain.
The set of policy priorities that emanated from the economic ideology that we
broadly define as “mercantilist” in this volume could not be turned into mercantilist
practices because it collided with Spanish notions of political representation and par-
ticipation. Mercantilist policies were perceived as a disenfranchisement and were
resisted for sociopolitical reasons because they interfered with where sovereignty and
power were located, how they there legitimized, and the way in which they were
practiced. This view reflects recent research into the intellectual history of Spanish
economic thought, but it offers a fairly radical revision of the history of political
economy and the relationship between state-building and political economy south of
the Pyrenees. Even more important, the characterization of mercantilism’s inbuilt
incoherencies in Spain opens up room for debate about mercantilism elsewhere in
Europe.
In the 1970s, Spanish historians of economic thought began to analyze the rich body
of literature on economic affairs produced in the mercantilist era in Spain, and in 1978
Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson provided the first modern overview.7 The outcome of this
literature is often a quite conservative intellectual history. Nevertheless it forms a thor-
ough body of research on the writings of the most influential writers, which suffices to
locate the Spanish case in a comparative European context.
243 Polycentric States
The central debate in this literature has evolved around the question of how to de-
limit the mercantilist era in Spain. Thus, the boundaries between the late scholastics of
the Salamanca School and early mercantilists are as controversial as those between the
late mercantilists and the early Spanish physiocrats and liberals.8 Beyond those labels,
however, we can now trace the development of the economic side of mercantilists’
thought at least in relation to commerce and money. Much less is known about their
thinking with regard to topics, which were central elsewhere, such as population, in-
cluding labor and migration. The famous attempts by Pablo de Olavide to attract
skilled immigrants to Andalusia have received some attention as have some of the
early attempts to change commercial policy during the Spanish War of Succession in
Catalonia (1701–14).9 Yet there is for instance no study of how Spanish political
economy thought about the demographic catastrophe in the Americas of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century or of the rapid population growth in the same regions
in the eighteenth century.
It has become clear, however, that for most of the period under consideration, com-
mentators on economic affairs were evidently in communication with developments
elsewhere in Europe in both their choice of themes and in their thinking. The tradi-
tional narrative of Spain stuck in scholastic traditions, and left behind from the major
intellectual development in Europe as early as the seventeenth century, has clearly been
debunked.10 This is most obvious in one of the core areas of mercantilist theorizing: the
question of the role of silver and gold in the economy. Although Spanish thinkers were
regularly accused of a belief in crude bullionism, this was rejected in Spain earlier than
elsewhere in Europe.11 Martin de Azpilcueta formulated a simplified version of the
quantity theory of money twenty years before the publication of Jean Bodin’s famous
commentary on the same phenomenon.12 By the late sixteenth century, Spanish arbi-
tristas as well as moral philosophers commenting on the state of the polity understood
perfectly well the impact on prices of the inflow of American silver into the Spanish
economy, and later that of the expansion of copper coinage.13
The common depiction of Spain as isolated from the intellectual advances in the rest
of Europe was thus plain wrong for the sixteenth century. But is was also vastly exag-
gerated for the eighteenth century. The “spirit of ambitious emulation” that was raging
across eighteenth-century Europe was certainly visible in Spain even before the En-
lightenment had taken roots.14 Gerónimo de Uztáriz (1670–1732), the internationally
best known, though not most brilliant Spanish mercantilist, used his Theory and Prac-
tice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs as an explicit tract of comparison with French,
Dutch, and English policies. The book first circulated in Spain in 1724 and, after 1742,
went through various posthumous editions, becoming popular in England and France
as well.15 Indeed, it was part of this process of comparative inquiry that in Spain as in
France and elsewhere, the Balance of Trade doctrine survived the mercantilist age in
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disguise and remained still very much en vogue among such early thinkers of the lib-
eral age as Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes.16
This revisionist assessment in the history of economic thought, which places Spain
more neatly in the European context, has not been matched by the historiography of the
political economy or the sociocultural context of mercantilism in Spain. The North
American historiography of the mid-twentieth century and its political embeddedness is
partly to blame for this. Armed with an ideologically powerful set of normative economic
concepts, three US American economic historians, Julius Klein, Earl Hamilton, and Rob-
ert Sidney Smith, published between the 1920s and the 1950s a series of monographs to
show how mercantilist government regulation of wool production (the famous Mesta),
colonial silver trade and currency manipulations, and guild-organized merchant activity
respectively had doomed Spain’s economic prospects in the early modern period.17
That their endeavors should coincide with the rise of neo-corporatism—and espe-
cially fascism—in Spain was hardly happenstance; they echoed the frustration of many
U.S. observers at the rise of government intervention in European economies. Still, this
early twentieth-century interpretation of Spain as the country that exhibited the “vices
of incoherence and excess [of mercantilism] most conspicuously” outlived even the
painfully long-lasting Spanish dictatorship of the twentieth century.18 The only study of
mercantilism proper by a Spanish author, José Larraz López’s small volume from the
1960s simply repeated what now had miraculously become received wisdom: Spain’s
political economy had remained encumbered by mercantilist thought long after other
nations had understood their errors, and it had thus contributed to Spain’s economic
decline.19
A recent comprehensive attempt to integrate a discussion of the political economy
and contemporary intellectual developments in Spain still struggles with these contra-
dictions. Stanley and Barbara Stein’s Silver, Trade and War returns to a description of
Spanish mercantilism as the worst of all possible worlds. Even as the principal trade
networks that articulated Spanish long-distance commerce expanded enormously over
the sixteenth century, trade regulation was neither unified nor rationalized. There was
little effort to overcome the “micro-regional, even narrowly urban . . . outlook and
mentality.”20 The principle argument is that the Spanish state lacked a developmentalist
orientation while it persisted in imposing more and more regulatory mechanisms,
which served only one purpose: the creation of rents for Spanish intermediaries in the
Indies trade at Seville and for corrupt bureaucrats. Reform attempts undertaken by the
new Bourbon monarchy after the War of Succession failed to break the influence of the
powerful Seville merchants who had bribed the bureaucracy and the Crown in equal
measures.21
Spanish society, according to Stein and Stein, walked knowingly and willingly into
disaster. The analyses of Spain’s decadencia offered by arbitristas starting in the late
sixteenth century were largely perceptive and suggested the sort of remedies that con-
temporary mercantilism demanded: less complex tax schedules, improved internal
communications, an abolition of internal tariffs and tolls, import restrictions and
export subsidies, and the fostering of agriculture and industry. Uztáriz for instance
argued that Colbert’s success in France had proven that decline could be reversed, if
only French mercantilist policies were adapted to Spanish circumstances, and his com-
ments were widely read in the early eighteenth century.22 Stein and Stein thus confirm
the view of an intellectual history of Spanish political economists who were read up on
what happened elsewhere in Europe and in addition developed quite a few ideas of
their own. The issue was implementation.
Stein and Stein explain the large gulf between contemporary intellectual debates and
practical political economy with both political structures and sociocultural context.
They track the persistence of urban and regional interests over national ones back to
Habsburg dynastic politics, which “failed to distinguish between the parts of the patri-
monial empire.”23 The threat to “national” policies came, on the one hand, from foreign
merchant interests attracted by the rich American trades, which acted as “multinational
conglomerates.” On the other, Spain’s economic policy was hopelessly out of step with
robustly mercantilist strategies pursued by England, the Netherlands, and France, which
succeeded in imposing highly prejudicial commercial conditions on Spain at Westpha-
lia. Spanish society colluded with these foreign interests because it was supported by
silver extraction from the colonies, which removed the pressure for structural reform.
Institutional involution was as much a consequence of political shortsightedness and a
“pseudo-absolutism” as of this “deformed or pseudo-mercantilism” that came into exis-
tence thanks to the “agency of a dependent pseudo-bourgeoisie.”24 In Spain appearances
were deceptive.
This assessment is convoluted but not entirely nonsensical. It simply reflects what
happens when historians attempt to press Spanish political economy into a set of the-
oretical concepts and heuristic devices that are, in this case, ill-suited. Once we disas-
semble these concepts into their various parts, it is not so difficult to see where the
paradox arises. The fundamental piece missing in this traditional narrative is an un-
derstanding of the structure of governance in early modern Spain. In this it ignores Eli
Heckscher’s important comment that mercantilism was “primarily an agent of unifica-
tion.”25 In other words, Heckscher’s notion of mercantilism was that of a set of ideas
and practices, which were not principally directed at international competition but
inwardly at state formation and the creation of an integrated domestic market.
We should, then, read mercantilism as an attempt to transform the constitution of
society, in the German sense of Verfasstheit not Verfassung, (i.e., the way in which so-
ciety is constituted rather than the Anglophone written or unwritten constitution). In
the Spanish context, however, historians of political economy have concentrated almost
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exclusively on outward oriented mercantilist trade policies. The strong historiographical

tradition that identified the regulation of the American trades and their role in interna-
tional competition and in securing metropolitan rents with monopoly and mercantilism
has crowded out everything else.26 Curiously little has been said about mercantilism in
Spain in relation to the unification of the sources of political power and administrative
structures. Was Spanish mercantilism a program toward unification or a by-product of
unification or neither of the two? And how was it embedded in political structures and
social habitus?
The perceived paradoxes of the political economy of the mercantilist age in Spain
become clearer when we locate them in the structure of governance. Governance itself,
of course, is complex, involving not just political structures but also what has been
called the “philosophical matrix” underlying the contemporary understanding of rule
and monarchy—and the social structures that underpinned the inclusion and exclusion
of ordinary Spaniards in political process—or to use a slightly anachronistic term,
their representation.27 Thus, the problem was not one of implementation. Instead three
reasons accounted for the poor fit between Spanish governance and mercantilist
thought and practice. First, and most obviously, Spain was not unified politically, so-
cially, or culturally in the mercantilist period. Unification was a political and economic
priority of monarchy, councils, and validos (court favorites, effectively first ministers)
for most of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but reforms in this direction
failed almost entirely. Second, the way in which power and rule were conceptualized
and legitimized in Spanish political and philosophical writing circumscribed attempts
at increasing unification. The intellectual foundations of governance in Spain were in
conflict with unifying tendencies. Third, this intellectual incompatibility was especially
in Castile enshrined in long traditions of political representation through strong mu-
nicipal authority, which central “government” never overcame. Each of these issues can
be illustrated in the following through the fiscal system and its development between
the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries. It is here that one can begin to
understand the sociopolitical context into which mercantilist ideas entered.
That Spain was at its origins a “composite state” is well known.28 It emerged as out of
the dynastic conglomerate of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, adding Portugal, the Neth-
erlands, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Milan and the largest pre-eighteenth-century
empire in the Americas and the Philippines. In turn, neither Castile nor Aragon was
unified: they comprised historic territories that maintained their own political repre-
sentations. In the old kingdom of Aragon, the Crown had to negotiate with separate
Corts in Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon, plus Mallorca; in Castile, the three Basque
provinces were largely independent and equally protected by their historic freedoms,
the fueros, as was Navarre. To a lesser extent, exceptions applied to the former king-
doms of Granada and Murcia.
The legacy of this process of dynastic unification without political or territorial inte-
gration was nowhere more obvious than in the fiscal system. The distinct rules of bar-
gaining in each of the constituent territories survived the dynastic union and created a
degree of complexity that set the Hispanic monarchy apart from its European neigh-
bors. James Tracy has recently shown how different constitutional structures in Naples,
the Low Countries, and Castile produced vastly different outcomes in their fiscal nego-
tiations with Charles V.29 In each territory some form of representative assembly
existed, but their role and interests were strikingly different. In the Netherlands, the
large towns and the provinces were both invested with authority to negotiate with the
monarchy (or its representative in Brussels), making it virtually impossible to extract
revenue beyond those used within the territory. In Naples, the nobility was far more
powerful and could be co-opted by the monarchy against towns and territories. This
ultimately meant that Naples, like Castile, fiscally subsidized the monarchy’s policy
outside its confines.30
There were several well-known attempts to achieve a more uniform tax burden
between the various territories. The first systematic attempt was undertaken by the
valido of Philipp IV, the Conde Duque de Olivares.31 Under the increasing financial
pressure of the Thirty Years Wars (1618–48), Olivares tried to raise the fiscal contribu-
tion of the non-Castilian territories, which was either nonexistent or minor.32 The
Catalan and Portuguese representations in particular, however, refused to vote any
additional taxes. Olivares’s final plan, the Union of Arms, thus proceeded to allocate
the costs of raising troops directly to the historic territories, in an attempt to circum-
vent the thorny issue of raising taxes.
The outcome of Olivares’s policy is well known: both Portugal and Catalonia rose in
revolt in the 1640s, Palermo and Naples in 1647. Portugal was eventually lost entirely at
the end of a long and costly struggle. The Masaniello Revolt in Naples was “suppressed”
only after it had run its course. Catalonia seceded for a time and became controlled by
France but returned to Spain in 1652 after a less-than-pleasant experience with domes-
tic strife and French indirect rule, which turned out to be considerably more meddle-
some and serious than Spanish notionally direct rule. The Habsburg monarchy’s
reaction to the Catalonian experiment in secession was surprisingly mild and mir-
rored that in Naples. A few leaders were punished severely, but for the second half of
the seventeenth century the Habsburgs largely left Catalonia to its own devices in what
has been described the neo-foral period, in which the regions traditional freedoms, the
fueros, were reinforced. As John Elliott argued, paraphrasing González de Cellorigo,
“such strength as it [the Spanish Monarchy] possessed derived from its weakness.”33
Yet the problem had not been solved, of course. On the contrary, mercantilist thinkers
continuously urged Spanish monarchs and councils into increasing fiscal integration
among the historic territories at least. In the late 1680s under the direction of the
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Conde de Oropesa, valido of Carlos II, a new attempt was made to remedy the situa-
tion. But the emphasis had changed substantially, revealing the tensions between mer-
cantilist fiscal ideas and Spanish constitutional reality. The plans Olivares offered in the
1640s for tax unification had followed mercantilist logic in that they assumed that uni-
fying the tax schedule would increase the total tax take and thus strengthen the royal
treasury. Oropesa’s thoughts implied the opposite:
It seems to me against reason, Christianity, convenience, and politics that the poor
Castilians are not free [from over taxation] just as the Aragonese, Catalans, Valen-
cians, Navarrese, and Biscayans, no matter how obedient they are, how miserable
and most rigorously [fiscally] oppressed, given that they preserved these kingdoms
in far away places fighting with their blood and contributing with their properties.34
De facto Oropesa had accepted the impossibility of increasing non-Castilian taxation

and concluded that the only way to achieve a degree of fiscal equality was to decrease
Castilian taxation. Rarely had the contradiction between mercantilist strategy and
Spanish political economy been formulated more clearly. Mercantilists everywhere
favored political and fiscal unification as a means of increasing the fiscal revenues of
the monarch by wrestling away taxes from towns, historic territories, and other corpo-
rate bodies. The strong political rights of the historic territories in Spain, however,
made it impossible to unify and increase taxation. A degree of unification could be
achieved only at the expense of lower overall taxation, that is, unification at the lowest
common denominator. Paradoxically, mercantilist policies threatened to make the
state fiscally weaker rather than stronger in Spain, and they thus were a practical im-
possibility in a time of extreme fiscal distress—and that meant in Spain at least for the
entire seventeenth century.
The political changes of the early eighteenth century in Spain did little to alter the
balance of power. The fact that the Aragonese territories supported the losing Austrian
side in the War of Spanish Succession gave the new Bourbon monarchy the opportu-
nity to finally restrict the power of at least some of the historic territories. The famous
Nueva Planta laws of 1707–14 ended Catalonia’s, Aragon’s and Valencia’s status as inde-
pendent reinos, and customs between Aragon and Castile were abolished.35 Spanish
historiography often interprets these events as a decisive move toward absolutist and
centralist rule.36 Fiscally, though, the reform was an almost complete failure. The intro-
duction of a tax meant to be equivalent to that of Castile in these territories, the aptly
named equivalente, resulted in anything but an approximation of Valencian, Ara-
gonese, Catalan, and Castilian tax incidence.37 At first the tax revenue rose substan-
tially, but it was swiftly eroded by inflation and population growth. Reform remained
nominal rather than substantive. In addition, the Basque provinces and Navarre, both
of which had supported the winning French side in the war, got guarantees that their
entirely autonomous fiscal system was not to be touched at all.38
The non-Castilian territories thus sheltered behind historic rights in order to actively
scupper any tendency toward integration, in some cases even after those had been of-
ficially abolished. However, in the heartland of the Spanish possessions, León and Old
and New Castile, the mercantilist drive for fiscal reform ran into equally insurmount-
able problems. Earlier than elsewhere in Europe, power was territorially defined rather
than through personal vassalage in the Crown of Castile, likely as a consequence of the
reconquista and demographic conditions in much of the Duero valley.39 Feudal struc-
tures were weak, and political power was located to an unusual degree in the towns
that held strong rights over their hinterlands. In Castile, towns controlled the rural
areas, no matter if those towns in turn were part of the realengo, the royal lands, or if
they belonged to ecclesiastical institutions or noble houses or were free. Towns also
controlled the fiscal apparatus. As a consequence revenue collection relied throughout
the early modern period almost exclusively on typically urban indirect taxation,—
taxes levied on consumption and trade, such as customs, excises, and sales taxes.40
Mercantilist observers were cognizant of the link between indirect taxation and the
fact that power was located in the historic territories and urban governments. The
general sales tax, the famous alcabala, was a common object of criticism. Accused of
being the ruin of agriculture, domestic trade, and manufacture, its effect was aggra-
vated by additional taxes such as the sisas, cientos, and millones falling on the very same
transactions. Sancho de Moncada, for example, presented in 1619 a project to abolish
all sales taxes in favor of a single tax on bread and food grains.41 He reasoned that this
“matters so that trade can go freely, and all make use of their wealth on occasions,
without fear of alcabalas and pains, so that all would engage in trade.”42
The problem was that all of these sales taxes were collected at the town level, and
more often than not it was also the towns that decided how they were raised, what
products were burdened, and at what rate. Although alcabalas and cientos were
supposed to be levied at a fixed ad valorem rate, the local administration meant that
the effective rate could in fact differ dramatically. As a consequence an arroba of
wine paid 12 maravedís in taxes in Málaga, 25 in Cuenca, 51 in Ávila, and 152 in Jaén.
Similar differences existed for other staple foodstuffs.43 Unification of these rules
remained a distant dream of Spanish mercantilists and with it any attempts to foster
commerce.
The tension between attempts at unification, what we commonly refer to as the early
phases of the creation of the nation-state and local, regional, and corporate resistance
against this tendency, was a general European feature of the mercantilist period, no
matter if we believe that mercantilist thought was instrumental in this process or was an
outcome of it. Heckscher saw mercantilism largely as struggling against the remnants of
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medieval particularism and Weberian patrimonialism, although this latter point was
more implicit than explicit. The real question is why unification was encumbered so
severely in Spain compared to Europe’s most unified state, England, or even to less cen-
tralist France. Why did a mercantilist bureaucrat like Oropesa come to the conclusion
that unification could be “bought” only at the expense of a fiscal weakening of the cen-
tral treasury, which made it practically impossible time and again? A satisfactory answer
to these questions can hardly be achieved here, but a few elements toward explanation
are given.
The most important element is the survival of strong contractual elements in Span-
ish understanding of the way rule and governance were legitimized. The recent histo-
riography has begun to explain much better the relationship between rulers and
ruled in both theory and practice. Spanish political philosophy never gave up the idea
that monarchy had contractual foundations.44 There were several reasons for this.
Spanish kings never attained the degree of divine legitimization commonly ascribed
to English or French monarchs.45 Neither Castile nor Aragon and much less the
Basque provinces or Navarre developed a coronation ceremony. Indeed, in Castile
the last leftovers of such a ritual, which was almost certainly of Moorish origin, were
abandoned in the fifteenth century. The Monarch was the defender of the faith but
not an impersonation of the divine. Spanish Jesuits were adamant that “no king is
absolute or independent or proprietary, but is a lieutenant and minister of God.”46
While Spanish kings engaged in public acts of devotion, such as the foot-washing of
paupers, demonstrating that they were subject to a higher law, they were never
thought of as having healing powers or other sacred attributes.47 Thus, they could fail
and if they did, tyrannicide was permissible. Just as Jean Bodin legitimated the abso-
lute power of French kings, Juan de Mariana argued that if hope were gone and reli-
gion in danger, only a fool would argue that it was not just and according to law to kill
the tyrant.48 As Henry Kamen pointed out, Mariana’s De rege et regis institutione
(1598) was publicly burned in London and Paris but raised little opposition in Madrid
or Barcelona.49
Catalonia in the late sixteenth century saw the dissemination of the legendary myth
of Sobrabe, a mountain region located in today’s province of Huesca, said to be the
origin of the establishment of a Christian polity, which would be the nucleus for the
kingdom of Aragon. Linked to this mythical origin of Aragon, the so-called Oath of
the Aragonese appeared in four independent publications in Italy, France, and Spain
between 1565 and 1593, but it was also mentioned by Jean Bodin and others.50 All al-
leged that since earliest times the kings of Aragon had had to swear the oath before
their subjects would swear them allegiance. Although important variations existed in
the wording, the best-known version became the one reported by Antonio Pérez, the
fugitive secretary of Philipp II of 1593:51
Nos, que valemos tanto como vos

Os hazemos nuestro Rey y Señor
Con tal que nos guardeys nuestros fueros, y libertades
Y syno, No52
[We, who are worth as much as you
Make you our King and Lord
So that you guard our ancient freedoms and liberties
And if not, Not.]
This was mythmaking in practice. The story of Sobrabe was fused with the fueros (tra-
ditional liberties) of Navarre, and the actual tradition of an oath being taken first by the
heir to the throne and then by the king himself at accession. Yet, the very fact is that the
myth was propagated in defense of Aragonese rights vis-à-vis the Monarch. An Italian
diplomat remarked on it in reports to the Doge explaining how difficult it was for the
Crown to influence affairs in Catalonia. He reflected the view of uninterested contem-
poraries that Aragon enjoyed an unusual degree of independence by contemporary
standards.53
In Catalonia and Valencia the notion of a contractual monarchy was thus deeply
embedded in the political culture, and arguably the abolition of the territorial institu-
tions simply served to reinforce the view that the king had overstepped his rights, thus
legitimizing resistance at all levels.54 This has long been recognized by historians but is
usually contrasted with an allegedly far more absolutist Castile.55 But there is historio-
graphical myopia in this view, which zooms in on diversity within the peninsula and
thus loses sight of the larger comparison. The Catalan nobility and bourgeois elites
might have felt that Castile was indeed absolutist. Yet by European standards and in the
absence of divine providence, the Spanish Crown depended on a large degree of ap-
proval by their subjects in practically all of its territories. As Monod observed, it is
unlikely that Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna (1619), one of the most important plays of
the Spanish Golden Age, could have taken place in France or England: As the villagers
of Fuenteovejuna shout “Long live the king,” they kill their abusive landlord and antic-
ipate that the just kings will pardon them for taking justice into their own hands against
the abuse of power they suffered. And pardoned they were.56
The best-known expression of the limitations to any form of central authority, be it
that of the Crown or its councils, was the famous phrase “la ley se obedece pero no se
cumple” (the law will be obeyed but not executed).57 What it meant can be illustrated
with a small incident that occurred when the Crown tried to introduce an unpopular
new trade registration in Bilbao in 1628 in an attempt to use a uniform customs and
registration policy in its international competition, especially with the Dutch and Eng-
lish. The representative of Bizkaia argued that
252 Regulation
In . . . the said fuero . . . it is said that any royal decree, which would be directly or
indirectly against the fuero of Vizcaya, should be obeyed but not complied with
(sea obedecida y no cumplida). I, in the name of the said señorio [Vizcaya], with
due respect obey the said decree as our King and natural sovereign has sent. But
inasmuch as this is in any way against our fueros . . . I submit humbly before his
royal person . . . and I refuse to execute and comply with the said royal decree in
everything prejudicial.58
The pase foral, the special privilege contained in the fueros, amounted to a real veto. But
the assumption that this veto-right applied only in Vizcaya or the Basque Country is
mistaken. The pase foral was simply the institutionalized expression of a constitutional
tradition in the Hispanic monarchy, which defined the relation between monarchy and
territories, towns, and corporate bodies more generally. The constitutional concept un-
derpinning the role of the monarchy in the Spanish composite kingdom meant that
every official, corporation, or individual could invoke the famous phrase. It was born
out of what Colin MacLachlan calls a “philosophical matrix,” which argued that the
king could not will anything that would prejudice his subjects.59 Therefore, any royal
decree perceived locally as prejudicial could be resisted perfectly legally under the con-
stitutional pretext that the king would not have issued it had he had full information
about its consequences. Especially in the Anglophone historiography on colonial Latin
America, the phrase is often erroneously seen as a sign of a lax attitude to legal compli-
ance. Yet, as Alejandro Cañeque has pointed out, the veto-right was the law.60
The possibility of a veto gave unparalleled powers not only to the political elites in the
historic territories but also to town oligarchies, who could use it against any policy that
would restrict their regional decision-making powers. This tradition was so powerful
that it survived well into the eighteenth century and functioned even after the king had
effectively been removed with the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. When the Juntas Gene-
rales de Sevilla that governed “free” Spain ordered Cuba to close its port to foreigners, the
Cuban authorities obeyed and thus accepted the Juntas’ legitimacy, but they “suspended
the compliance with the decision” since the local situation did not allow its application.61
In addition, this practical right to resistance was applied across the board. Ruth
MacKay has shown how Castilian towns, but also humble individuals, refused and
renegotiated the terms of being called into the army in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century. What puzzled her was that the most humble and miserable subject of Philip
IV (1621–65) “wrote to the king as if they expected to be listened to, and their confi-
dence was often rewarded.”62 Spaniards were equally notorious for their habit of litiga-
tion. While this might have been the result of the poor enforcement of contracts and/
or the level of social conflict, it also reveals very clearly that Spaniards of all walks of
life felt entitled to be heard before the law. Indeed, higher appellate courts in Spain
were surprisingly willing to defend villages against the aristocracy or poor peasants
against urban oligarchs.63
Corruption and favoritism was obviously endemic. Yet the existence of such institu-
tions as the defensores de pobres (ex officio lawyers for those too poor to pay a lawyer)
illustrates a legal notion of equal access to the law though not equality before the law.
Equally, the remarkable number of cases brought against the Crown as a seigniorial
lord bears witness to the fact that the Crown in most of its activities was not perceived
as standing above the law. Richard Kagan wrote that the high level of litigation was a
sign of an increasingly absolutist Habsburg monarchy, which was eager to exercise the
role of rey justiciero. This seems somehow problematic in the face of recent research
that has revisited the understanding of absolutism.64 More convincing is Helen Nader’s
interpretation that “the Castilian’s famed litigiousness might be seen as a sign of their
confidence in their capacity for self-administration and their essential faith that the
monarch or lord was not their enemy.”65 The king was more an “ultimate arbiter” of
interests in the peninsula and the “stakeholder empire” he ruled in the Americas than
anything approaching the classical definition of an absolutist ruler.66
The conflict over unification of rule was not particular to Spain. But the relatively
weak seignorial rights of the Castilian aristocracy meant that it took a particular shape.
If we accept the basic notion that mercantilism was the political economy side of a
struggle to overcome the multiple allegiances of early modern subjects to their sei-
gneur, their monarch, the Church, their religious fraternity, their guild, and their town,
we should also embrace the idea that it fostered the drive toward an emergent “state”
represented by a much more powerful impersonal ruler, be it a monarch or a parlia-
ment. The literature about the role of the ruler in unifying what would become Euro-
pean nation-states concentrates on the conflict between Crown and aristocracy or
gentry and the multiple allegiances of subjects to king and seigneur that had to be
overcome. In Spain, however, the contest was largely between monarch and territorial
units rather than about personal bonds between monarch, aristocracy, and vassals.
Marxist historians of the 1970s concluded that the Castilian Crown’s winning of the
upper hand over the aristocracy was a sign for an early shift toward absolute rule.67
What they failed to notice was that the strength of the fueros of the historic territories
and the central position of urban corporations in the sociopolitical makeup of the
Hispanic realms circumscribed royal prerogative more effectively than the aristocracy
could have. Their representatives, namely the assemblies of the territories or the town
oligarchies represented in the councils, were much more heterogeneous than the aris-
tocracy or even the noble estate as a whole, and therefore much harder to co-opt.68 The
limitations imposed on the Crown and councils as an expression of a central govern-
ment were not primarily incompetence or even corruption, but were structural and
deeply ingrained in the Verfasstheit of Hispanic societies.
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The heterogeneity of the opposition toward unification was but one problem for
Spanish mercantilist reformers. The idea of a contractual relationship between Crown
and subjects remained strong. In the non-Castilian territories, traditional rights were
jealously guarded vis-à-vis Madrid even after the abolition of the Aragonese institu-
tions. In Castile, the towns played a special role. Since towns controlled most of the
taxes, the Crown began in the sixteenth century to raise its debts via the towns. This
was an obvious step because creditors asked for specific taxes to be earmarked for re-
payment, something only towns could do efficiently. By the late seventeenth century,
much of the Castilian “public” debt was in fact hidden in urban treasuries. One means
to raise money to withstand the military pressure of increasing European competition
was the sale of town charters practiced by the Spanish Crown from the sixteenth
through the eighteenth centuries.
Towns, large, small, and tiny, were the legal, social, administrative, and cultural back-
bone of Castilian society; the proliferation of new towns, established out of villages or
new settlements, was equivalent to a substantial devolution of power because it created
an ever-increasing number of self-administering towns. Nader raised a fundamental
issue when she pointed out that most male adults in Spain, outside the very large cities,
would at some point have held some kind of public office simply because most towns
were so small but they still required a substantial number of officeholders: mayor,
council-members, treasurer, and the like. Hence they would have been part of a tradi-
tion of political organization at the lowest level that was fundamental for their under-
standing of their role in society and the constitutional nature of rule.69
The overwhelming majority of Castilians felt “represented,” a somewhat anachro-
nistic term used here in the absence of a better alternative, through their participa-
tion in urban cultural, social, economic, and political life. The point is not that there
was anything particularly urban in the sociological sense about Castilian life. In the
sixteenth century 60 percent of the population lived in places of more than one thou-
sand inhabitants, the majority of which might sociologically, culturally, and econom-
ically at most qualify for the label “village.” Politically, though, they were towns. They
might have a noble or ecclesiastical seigneur with rights to payments or who con-
trolled part of the taxes due. They would negotiate and/or litigate with or against the
seigneur or the regional representative of the Crown, the Corregidor. But beyond
that, there was little intermediate authority between the estimated fifteen thousand
municipalities and the Crown.70 In the meantime, they would have decisive influence
on how taxes were raised, how land was used, if commons were sold to finance taxa-
tion that had been apportioned as an encabezamiento (effectively a lump sum) on the
entire town. Small wonder the representative of the most humble little place felt enti-
tled to raise its concerns with the king or sue the neighboring town in the Chancille-
ria’s appellate court.
Attempts to reform and unify the tax system not surprisingly stumbled time and
again over these municipal forms of representation. Mercantilists abhorred the indi-
rect consumption and sales taxes that dominated the treasury revenue, but they were
nonetheless deeply embedded in the constitutional structure. It is true that the great
majority of Spanish towns were so indebted in the seventeenth century that their de
facto choices were at best between raising the wine tax and raising the fish tax.71 Yet,
their town privileges did indeed entitle town councils to those basic decisions and they
could never be overruled. When the Conde Duque de Olivares contemplated unifying
the tax system, abolishing the odious alcabalas and sisas, and replacing them with a
direct tax levied on each town and village in Castile, he quickly retreated after having
estimated that royal officials would have had to negotiate the exact amount and terms
with each and every one of those fifteen thousand municipalities.72 Even in the mid-
eighteenth century, reforms aimed at simplifying and unifying the Castilian tax system
collapsed in the face of concerted resistance from town oligarchies.73
The Castilian experience thus fits well with Heckscher’s classic treatment of mercan-
tilism as an era in economic policy, which pointed out that the most formidable obstacle
toward unification were neither the estates nor the remnants of medieval universalism
represented by the Church, but the towns themselves.74 The relative strength of towns
shaped the penetration of mercantilist thought into political reality, or the absence
thereof, decisively. There were those polities like England, where towns mattered least
according to Heckscher, and where unification could proceed—not unopposed but
ultimately successfully.75 But elsewhere the strongly urban character of governance
in polities like Spain stood against the tide, a fact that has only recently become fully
appreciated.
Seen from the bottom up rather than the top down, it is evident that fiscal regulation
of any kind in Spain, or indeed in its constituent parts—Castile, the Crown of Aragon,
Navarre, the Basque territories, and the American territories—was rarely unified, let
alone “national” in any way. The admittedly anecdotal evidence on the fiscal constitu-
tion of the Hispanic monarchy illustrates that. Most European territorial states were
from their inception composite states. But some, notably Spain and the Netherlands,
remained what I have elsewhere called “polycentric” states.76 In Spain, nothing approach-
ing a “national” policy could have been adopted in fiscal matters or in the regulation
and fostering of certain industries considered crucial by mercantilists.
Stein and Stein are absolutely right that the Spanish Habsburgs failed to distinguish
between the various historic territories, and that the interests of Castilian wool pro-
ducers were not given preference over Flemish cloth makers or American suppliers of
dyestuffs.77 They could also have cited another even more striking example, that of
shipbuilding. This was a central concern of mercantilist strategy in a polity, which was
kept together through maritime trade across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and
256 Regulation
thus the lack of Spanish “national” policy has always puzzled historians.78 The problem
was not a consequence of patrimonial empire but rather a deep seated understanding
of the contractual nature of governance, which was protected from royal encroach-
ment through an effective right to a veto over any initiative emanating from the king’s
councils in Madrid. Although mercantilist thinkers and modern historians regularly
compare the Spanish political economy to that of France, Spain was really facing prob-
lems that were more similar to those that afflicted the Dutch Republic. The latter found
it equally hard to pursue any mercantilist strategy against the objections of its powerful
towns once the external threat of war with Spain was removed.
The lack of implementation of mercantilist “national” projects in the Hispanic reigns
was not an outcome of a lack of administrative capability. Instead, it refl ected a funda-
mental tension between the sociopolitical realities in the Iberian Peninsula and a shift
in political economic thought. At the same time, both the fiscal history of Spain and
the short example of shipbuilding also show that the Crown could use the constitu-
tional structure quite effectively as long as it did not try to impose mercantilist consid-
erations. This explains why Spain managed its public finances so successfully when
compared to, say, France in the eighteenth century.79 It is also the reason why Spain
effectively maintained maritime communications by pragmatically purchasing and
producing shipping resources in public-private partnership in whatever territory of-
fered the best cost/benefit ratio.80 That made for poor industrial policy in the mercan-
tilist sense, but it respected the Spanish sociopolitical reality and created even a limited
amount of competition between regions.
Yet, Spain’s fiscal policies as well as its “industrial” policies, such as shipbuilding,
came at a cost that contemporaries could hardly have conceptualized. Letting locals
run the tax system and take care of the debt in return while simply purchasing ships for
the navy wherever the best offer could be had, was an inexpensive way of running a
state and a navy. But the push for “national” taxation, regulations, and industries in
England or France created clusters of knowledge and agglomeration economies, which
began to feed a virtuous cycle of industrial development. Spanish commentators
noticed this toward the mid- and later eighteenth century, but like their English and
French colleagues they found it hard to understand its functioning. A basic theory of
the economics of agglomeration would first be formulated by Alfred Marshall in his
famous Principles of Economics more than a hundred years later.81
In Spain, political and economic thinking that aimed at fostering a “national” economy
threatened the traditional channels of representation within the Spanish monarchy that
were strongly based on regional and urban structures. Therefore, powerful regional
elites found themselves in a difficult situation. To use Hirschman’s classic terminology:
in ancien régime Spain’s decentralized, negotiation-based decision-making process,
voice was exercised through the implicit veto that regional groups derived from the
survival of traditional political freedoms.82 The monarchy and its councils had to nego-
tiate with their subjects because the traditional regions could legally resist the imple-
mentation of policies under that famous phrase that a law they objected to was going to
be “obeyed but not complied with.” This form of exercising voice channeled political
representation through regionally organized institutions rather than national ones and
often transgressed social stratification, adding to the weakness of centralizing attempts.
Conflict continued to take to a large extent an interregional shape. The very real threat
of territorial dismemberment, that is, the exit strategy in Hirschman’s terms, presented
the Crown with an almost insurmountable opportunity cost of implementation of
reforms, fiscal or otherwise, that were aimed at unification.83
This structure tended to empower commercially successful elites, especially in the
coastal regions, which could rely on broad support in their region against the center. At
the same time it converted the attempt to implement any “national” economic regula-
tion into an attack on political and cultural representation, generally fiercely—and suc-
cessfully resisted by the regions. Commercial elites, in principle the prime potential
beneficiaries of many mercantilist policies, found themselves lobbying against these
policies, in order to maintain their regional representation and power base. In the
Spanish context, the notions of economic nation-building and social, cultural, and po-
litical representation and participation became incompatible.
Spanish thinkers participated actively in the development of what could be called a
mercantilist body of theory; they probably even originated quite a lot of it. But this
intellectual mercantilism stood no chance in Spain of becoming a real life economic
and political mercantilism. The constitution (Verfasstheit) of Spain was entirely incom-
patible with economic and political mercantilism. In a polycentric polity characterized
by political participation through municipal, local, or regional institutions, mercan-
tilist economic measures implied a disenfranchisement of important political groups.
In England, the lines between corporate groups and the state were blurred for much of
the era of mercantilism. Yet their outlook was nevertheless essentially “national” or
“imperial” rather than local or regional. Territorially, unification had progressed much
farther long before the era of mercantilism. In France, the opposition to unification
was primarily a conflict between Crown and aristocracy, thus strategies of co-optation,
enlargement of the nobility, and a little power play were likely to render a reasonable
result: the elite could be cajoled into becoming a part of that new more unified state
and its mercantilist policies; after all there was no “exit option” for the aristocracy.
Where the monarchy had to face territorial representation with a strong intellectual
and cultural backing, as in Spain, unification was impossible. Mercantilist ideas could
take root, but mercantilist practices were repulsed. When we place the intellectual his-
tory of mercantilism into the sociopolitical and cultural context of Spain’s conflict-
ridden state and nation-building process in the sixteenth to eighteenth century, it
258 Regulation
becomes apparent that the notion of mercantilism as the Urform of economic nation-
alism simply reveals that Spanish governance in the early modern period was a poor
basis for either political or economic nation-state building. Spain was not supposed to
be mercantilist.
NOTES
1. Eli F. Heckscher and Mendel Shapiro, Mercantilism (London: G. Allen and Unwin ltd.,
1935), 1:344; Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, Or, the Ballance of Our
Forraign Trade Is the Rule of Our Treasure (London: Printed by J. Flesher for R. Horne,
1669), ch. 6.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, repr. 1979), Book IV, Chapter 5, 541.
3. Smith, Wealth of Nations.
4. Andres V Castillo, Spanish Mercantilism: Geronimo de Uztariz, Economist (New York:
1930); Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought in Spain 1177–1740 (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1978); Earl J. Hamilton, “Spanish Mercantilism before 1700,” in
Facts and Factors in Economic History. Articles by Former Students of Edwin Francis Gay
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); José Larraz López, La Época Del Mer-
cantilismo En Castilla (1500–1700), (Madrid: 1963, repr. Asociación Española de Historia
Moderna, 2000); Ernest Lluch, El Pensament Econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840): Els Orí-
gens Ideológics del Proteccionisme i la Presa de Conscíencia de la Burgesia catalana, vol. 22
(Barcelona: Ediciones 62, 1973); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and
War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000); José Luis Sureda Carrión, La Hacienda Castellana Y Los Economis-
tas Del Siglo Xvii (Madrid: Instituto de Economía “Sancho de Moncada,” 1949).
5. Jacob van Klaveren, “Fiscalism, Mercantilism and Corruption,” in Revisions in Mercan-
tilism, ed. D. C. Coleman (London: Methuen, 1969).
6. Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic,
1789–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3.
7. Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought.
8. Grice-Hutchinson has argued that the drawing of a strict separation would be artificial.
Early Economic Thought, 122.
9. Joaquim Albareda i Salvadó, La Guerra De Sucesión De España (1700–1714) (Barcelona:
Crítica editorial, 2010).
10. See, for example, Sureda Carrión, La Hacienda Castellana. (Madrid: CSIC 1949).
11. Most recently, the Steins come close to accusing even Uztáriz of it. Stein and Stein, Silver,
164ff.
12. Martín de Azpilcueta (alias Navarrus), Comentario Resolutorio De Cambios (Madrid: Con-
sejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1556 [1965]). That this was generally accepted
thought becomes clear from Tomás de Mercado’s Tratos y contratos de mercaderes (1569) as
shown by Grice-Hutchinson, Early Economic Thought, 124ff.
13. See, for example, Francisco Martínez de Mata and Gonzalo Anes Alvarez, Memoriales y
Discursos (Madrid: [Moneda y Crédito], 1971); or Martín González de Cellorigo, Memorial
de la Politica necessaria y util Restauracion a la Republica de España y Estados de ella y del
Desempeño uniuersal de estos Reynos (Por Iuan de Bostillo, 1600).
14. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press 1970),
187. This was recently pointed out by Gabriel Paquette, “Enlightened Narratives and Imperial
Rivalry in Bourbon Spain: The Case of Almodóvar’s Historia Política de los Establecimientos
Ultramarinos de las Naciones europeas (1784–1790),” Eighteenth Century 48, no. 1 (2007): 63.
15. Gerónimo de Uztáriz, Theorica Y Práctica De Comercio Y Marina, 2nd ed. (Madrid: 1757).
16. Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, Discurso Sobre La Educacion Popular De Los Artesanos, Y
Su Fomento (Madrid: En la imprenta de D. Antonio de Sancha, 1775), App. 4, 86.
17. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain 1501–1650 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934); Earl J. Hamilton, War and Prices in Spain,
1651–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947, repr. New York: Russel and
Russell, 1969), J. Klein, The Mesta: A Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273–1836 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920); Robert Sidney Smith, The Spanish Guild Mer-
chant: A History of the Consulado, 1250–1700 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1940).
For a more detailed discussion, see Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power and
Backwardness in Spain 1650–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
18. John Wesley Horrocks, A Short History of Mercantilism (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd.,
1924), 99.
19. Larraz López, Mercantilismo.
20. Stein and Stein, Silver, 19.
21. Stein and Stein, Silver, 16–19, 86–103, 157–79.
22. Uztáriz, Theorica.
25. Heckscher and Shapiro, Mercantilism, 22.
26. Note that the Carrera de Indias took place within the organizational form of a regulated
company but was in fact no monopoly. See Grafe, Distant Tyranny, 228–29.
27. Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World. The Role of Ideas in Institutional
and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch 1.
28. John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992), 48–71.
29. James D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International
Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
30. Tracy, Emperor Charles V.
31. John H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); John H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Rafael Valladares, Felipe IV y la Restauración
de Portugal (Malaga: Editorial Algazara, 1994).
32. Juan E. Gelabert, La Bolsa del Rey: Rey, Reino y Fisco en Castilla (1598–1648) (Barcelona:
Critica, 1997).
33. John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963; repr.1976), 352.
34. Cited in Miguel Artola, La Hacienda del Antiguo Régimen (Madrid: Alianza, 1982), 216–17,
n. 211, my translation.
35. The reality was in fact not quite as straightforward, see Grafe, Distant Tyranny.
36. Albareda i Salvadó, Guerra De Sucesión.
37. Artola, La Hacienda.
38. Alberto Angulo Morales, Las Puertas de la Vida y La Muerte: La Administración Aduanera
en las Provincias Vascas (1690–1780) (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco,
1995); Sergio Solbes Ferri, Rentas Reales de Navarra: Proyectos Reformistas y Evolución
Económica (1701–1765) (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1999); Grafe, Distant Tyranny.
260 Regulation
39. Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte

Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (München: Beck, 1999). The classic text on
the demographic explanation is Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Despoblación y Repoblación
del Valle Duero (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Historia de España, 1966). See also for the seño-
rio colectivo controlled by towns, Pablo Sánchez León, Absolutismo y Comunidad: os Orí-
genes sociales de la Guerra de los Comuneros de Castilla (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 1998),
7–17. The notable but minor exception to this was Galicia.
40. Carmen García García, La Crisis De Las Haciendas Locales: De la Reforma Administrativa
a la Reforma Fiscal (1743–1845) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996).
41. Sancho de Moncada, La Restauración Política de España, [1619]. (Madrid: Instituto de
Estudios Fiscales, 1974).
42. Cited in Valentin Edo Hernández, “La Propuesta tributaria de un Impuesto Único de
Sancho de Moncada,” Revista de Historia Económica 7, no. 2 Suplemento (1989): 32, my
translation.
43. Carmen María Cremades Griñán, Borbones, Hacienda y Súbditos en el Siglo XVIII (Murcia:
Universidad de Murcia, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 1993), 147, cuadro 141. For a com-
parison of bacalao prices, see Grafe, Distant Tyranny.
44. Rowen calls this the “office theory of monarchy” as opposed to proprietory kingship. See
Herbert H. Rowen, The King’s State: Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980).
45. Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt.
46. Cited in Paul Kléber Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe,
1589–1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 42–43. Monod argues that this was
indeed an Islamic heritage, since Islam would have interpreted personal divinity as blas-
phemous.
47. This contrast sharply with English and French kings. See Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch,
The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1973).
48. Juan de Mariana, De Rege Et Regis Institutione (Toledo: 1598), book 6.
49. Henry Kamen, Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008), 41.
50. Ralph Giesey, If Not, Not: The Oath of the Aragonese and the Legendary Laws of Sobrabe
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
51. Antonio Pérez was an interested party in celebrating Aragonese political independence.
Following political intrigues in Madrid and having ordered the murder of Juan de Esc-
obedo (he alleged with the assent of Philipp II), the king eventually had him and his ac-
complices put under arrest and a judicial process begun. Pérez escaped to his native
Aragon, where he was legally protected, even though he had been convicted to death in
absentia in Madrid. Attempts to have him arrested by the Inquisition caused an uprising in
Aragon, and Pérez eventually fled to France and England. Gregorio Marañón, Antonio
Pérez (El Hombre, el Drama, la Época) (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1947).
52. Giesey, If Not, app. 1.
53. Giovanni Soranzo, “Relazione Di Spagna Di Giovanni Soranzo, 1565,” in Relazioni Degli
Ambazciatore Veneti Al Senato, ed. Eugenio Albéri (Florence, 1861).
54. James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations,
1490–1714 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 18ff; Albareda i Salvadó,
Guerra De Sucesión.
55. Albareda i Salvadó, Guerra De Sucesión; Elliott, Imperial Spain.
56. The play was first published in Madrid in 1619. Monod, Power of Kings, 131.
57. John Leddy Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,”
Adminstrative Science Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1960): 47–65
58. Archivo Foral Bizkaia, CB, Libro 65/59 Antonio de Landaverde 1628.
59. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire, ch. 1.
60. Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in
Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004).
61. Ramon de la Sagra, Historia Económica, Política Y Estadística De La Isla De Cuba O Sea De
Sus Progresos en la Población, la Agricultura, el Comercio y las Rentas (Habana: Imprenta
de las Viudas de Arazoza y Soler, impresoras del gobierno y capitania general, de la Real
Hacienda y de la Real Sociedad Patriotica por S.M., 1831), 144, 366–468. See also Alejandra
Irigoin and Regina Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Empire and Na-
tion Building,” Hispanic American Historical Review 88, no. 2 (2008): 200.
62. Ruth MacKay, “Lazy, Improvident People.” Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish His-
tory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2.
63. Richard Kagan, Law Suits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1981), 102–4.
64. Kagan, Law Suits, 156.
65. Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516–1700 (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9.
66. Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin, “A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of
Spanish Imperial Rule in America,” Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (2012); Tulio Hal-
perin Donghi, “Backward Looks and Forward Glimpses from a Quincentennial Vantage
Point,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Supplement, (1992): 222.
67. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: N.L.B., 1974).
68. This is a crucial difference between the French and Spanish cases. In the case of the French,
Glete’s thesis of the co-optation of the aristocracy is much more appropriate than in that of
the Spanish. Though the Spanish aristocracy was certainly co-opted by the crown, it had
never been the most fundamental adversary. Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern
Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660, Warfare
and History (London: Routledge, 2002).
69. Nader, Liberty.
70. Nader, Liberty, 129.
71. José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo, “Una Herencia de los Austrias: Las Relaciones entre la Fis-
calidad Municipal y Fiscalidad Real en Castilla en los Siglos Xvii Y Xviii,” mimeo (2006).
There was one very important exception: towns were not allowed to tax bread. Benedict R.
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
72. Nader, Liberty, 4.
73. For an overview, see Artola, La Hacienda; and García García, Crisis.
74. Heckscher and Shapiro, Mercantilism, 34–40.
75. Heckscher and Shapiro, Mercantilism, 40.
76. Regina Grafe, “Polycentric State-Building and Fiscal Systems in Spain 1650–1800,” in Res-
sources Publiques et Construction Étatique en Europe: Fiscalité et Dette Publique, Xiiie-Xviiie
Siècle, ed. Katia Beguin (Paris: Ministère de l’Economie et des Finances, forthcoming).
78. Regina Grafe, “The Strange Tale of the Decline of Spanish Shipping,” in Shipping and Eco-
nomic Growth, 1350–1800, ed. Richard Unger (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 81–116.
262 Regulation
79. Grafe, Distant Tyranny, 12–19.

80. Grafe, “Spanish Shipping.”
81. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1890). Marshall’s discussion of “industrial districts” is generally considered the origin
of modern studies on geographical economics. Notably, only in the 1990s the study of
increasing returns to scale fundamental for understanding agglomeration became a stan-
dard part of economic models on trade and industrial location owing much to the work of
Paul Krugman. Krugman, “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” Journal of Polit-
ical Economy 99 (1991).
82. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organiza-
tions, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
83. Adelman has recently applied Hirschman’s concept to Spanish American independence
but seems to have overlooked the obvious link to the constitutional structure of Spanish
rule. Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113,
no. 2 (2008): 332.
12
Financial Markets
The Limits of Economic Regulation
in Early Modern England
Anne L. Murphy
A market for the trading of shares and the instruments of the national debt emerged in
London during the second half of the seventeenth century. It immediately attracted
criticism. Concerns focused on the damaging effects of speculation on the economy
but also reflected a deep-rooted fear of the social and political disruption that it seemed
would result from the market’s ability to put wealth and power into the hands of a new
class of monied men. Such issues arose frequently in political and social debate but
manifested themselves, in practical terms, in calls for the imposition of legal restric-
tions on the freedom of the markets.
Yet, the critics did not have things all their own way. Many of its defenders argued for
non-interference in the financial market, noting particularly that its freedom was an
essential support to the government’s own schemes for raising the money necessary to
fund the conflicts of the long eighteenth century. In this way, successive political ad-
ministrations were made acutely aware that it was not just the government’s own
promises to repay its debt that maintained trust in the public credit. A market, which
allowed creditors to alienate their holdings at will, was essential.
The early modern British state, therefore, was confronted with an entity—the finan-
cial market—that was at once contrary to the needs of good government because it
threatened to undermine the structure of society and to hold economic policy hostage
to the whims of speculators, and yet essential to the state’s purposes since it maintained
the debt-creation schemes so key to funding its wars.
Even during the early modern period London’s financial market had numerous fac-
ets, but the market referred to here is the primary and secondary market in shares and
instruments relating to long-term government debt. Within this definition are in-
cluded the shares of the Bank of England, East India and South Sea Companies that
because of their intimate connections to the system of state debt, might be thought of
as encompassing some characteristics of both public and private securities.
263
264 Regulation
Over the course of the long eighteenth century, the financial market was driven
largely by the issuance and subsequent trading of the various forms of government
debt, including shares in the Bank of England and East India and South Sea Com-
panies, but it is important also to acknowledge the role of a market in the shares of
private companies in the development of the institutions and expertise necessary to
conduct such business.1 An active stock market emerged in England during the second
half of the seventeenth century in response to increasing affluence and for the conve-
nience of entrepreneurs who were beginning to utilize joint-stock investment as a
means of raising and maintaining the funds needed to capitalize industry and, more
commonly, overseas trade. In the latter respect, particular notice should be taken of the
East India Company (EIC), established in 1600 but did not become a joint-stock com-
pany until 1657; the Hudson’s Bay Company, established in 1668; and the Royal African
Company, established in 1672.2 Although prior to the 1690s, turnover in the shares of
those companies was low, investor interest was keen, especially during the 1670s and
1680s, when both profits and dividends were high.3
Further impetus for development of a stock market came with the Glorious Revolu-
tion in 1688 and the advent of war with France. William III’s decision to take England
into his European alliance against Louis XIV marked a significant turning point in
foreign policy, but that action also provided the momentum for the development of a
stock market as conflict guaranteed that money formerly invested in overseas trade
remained at home and available for domestic investment. Equally, entrepreneurs
sought to take advantage of the lack of imports from France by establishing joint-stock
companies dedicated to the manufacture of luxury goods.4 As the Lancastrian grocer
and ironmonger William Stout observed, restrictions on imports from France has “put
us upon the silk, linen, paper and many of their other manufactorys to the enriching
this nation.”5 War also naturally increased the demand for military necessities thus
stimulating the mining industry and encouraging ideas for the manufacture of saltpe-
ter and gunpowder, new types of weapons and new alloys suitable for ordnance. Hence,
the largest category of patents issued during the early 1690s covered military and naval
supplies.6 Many of the entrepreneurs involved in those businesses sought to raise the
money to capitalize their ventures through the flotation of a joint-stock company and,
conditioned by the profits of the overseas trading companies to expect high returns
from such opportunities, investors willingly subscribed.
London’s first stock-market boom was, however, typically short-lived. Contempo-
raries blamed speculators and stock-jobbers.7 But, in fact, companies collapsed for a
variety of reasons unconnected with speculation including inadequate capitalization,
lack of government support, imposition of high taxes on goods produced, poor tech-
nical skills, and incompetent management.8 Other companies were, it seems, badly
affected by the war that after providing an initial economic stimulus, served to restrict
265 Financial Markets
demand. In particular, because the conflict necessitated the export of considerable

amounts of bullion abroad, war helped to devastate an already compromised metal
coinage, thus significantly reducing the amount of circulating specie, restricting the
level of credit available, and precipitating one of the most desperate economic crises of
the seventeenth century.9 The last nail in the coffins of many of those enterprises, how-
ever, was the establishment of a long-term national debt, which, with its potentially
high returns and greater accessibility, attracted the funds of a variety of experienced
and new investors and crowded out investment in private enterprise.10
The various instruments that made up Britain’s first long-term debt had been devel-
oped as a means of funding the Nine Years’ War (1689–1697). They were necessary
because, although short-term loans had at first been thought adequate to cover the costs
of conflict, the war proved to be far lengthier and much more expensive than antici-
pated. By 1692 the government’s credit was considered to be very poor indeed, and it was
becoming difficult to convince investors to commit further funds to the state. It is no
exaggeration to say that the war effort was saved only by a series of ingenious means of
raising capital immediately and funding the costs over the long-term through allocation
of specific tax funds to cover interest payments. Starting with an undersubscribed ton-
tine loan, which in 1693 raised only £108,100, the state moved on to raise funds through
the far more successful sale of life annuities, floating of the Million Adventure lottery in
1694, and through the establishment of the Bank of England, again in 1694, and the New
East India Company in 1698.11 The financial contribution of these funds to the war effort
was admittedly small. Only £6.9 million out of a total expenditure of £72 million between
1688 and 1702 was raised through long-term debt instruments.12 And the costs were
high: up to 14 percent was paid in interest on some schemes.13 Nevertheless, they marked
the beginning of England’s financial revolution, changed the investment habits of a na-
tion, and set the tone for fund-raising activities over the coming century.
Between 1702 and 1815 Britain fought a further six major conflicts and became
embroiled in a number of minor squabbles. The ultimate outcome, even taking into
account the loss of the American colonies, was that Britain, by 1815, was the leading
power in Europe and had forged the beginnings of an empire, which, at the end of the
nineteenth century, was to cover around a quarter of the world’s landmass. As Patrick
O’Brien argues, in the establishment of this global dominance, Britain’s financial and
fiscal achievements must be counted as no less impressive than its military and naval
prowess.14 But no matter how impressive the achievement, the price of winning wars
still amounted to a heavy financial burden. By 1819 the total unredeemed capital of the
public debt stood at a little more than £844,000,000.15 This was a staggering sum for an
industrializing nation.16
The national debt was funded through a variety of expedients, none very different
from those experiments of the 1690s. The annuity remained the first recourse for
266 Regulation
raising funds during the long eighteenth century, although the structure of annuity
loans was gradually revised and improved. As Larry Neal notes, among the positive
outcomes of the collapse of the South Sea Bubble was the development of redeemable
perpetual annuities, the foundation for the “3 Percent Consols,” which came to be
regarded as a safe fund for even the most cautious investor.17 The Bank of England, the
East India Company, and from 1711 the South Sea Company continued to lend signifi-
cant and regular sums to the state while also functioning as means by which expensive
outstanding debts could be exchanged for more flexible, cheaper, and easier to fund
company shares. Lottery schemes continued and became more efficient in the early
eighteenth century as those that offered a prize to all participants gave way to those
that offered a limited number of prizes, leaving many adventurers to lose their stake
just as they do in modern lotteries. Fortunately, this change was achieved without a
significant decline in public interest, and government continued to use such plans to
raise money until 1823 when organizational and administrative difficulties rendered
the lotteries no longer cost-effective.18
As the eighteenth century progressed, the costs of funding the debt were controlled.
A particularly notable success came during 1749 when peace, an improvement in
public credit, and the rising prices of government debt enabled Henry Pelham, the
First Lord of the Treasury, to effect a scheme to reduce interest payments on a number
of funds from 4 to 3 percent.19 However, in spite of the best efforts of the late-eigh-
teenth-century administrations to continue Pelham’s good work, the ubiquity of con-
flict during the long eighteenth century (and ultimately the very high costs of the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars) precluded any attempts to significantly pay
down the debt that continued to rise unabated into the early nineteenth century (see
figure 1 here).
Fig 1 Levels of public debt, 1691–1815 (in millions of £s)

Source: Mitchell and Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics.
Over time the debt itself came to be seen as inevitable. Some, like James Stueart, were
even able to argue that public indebtedness offered advantages for the economy since:
Public debts do not so much affect the prosperity of the State as private debts do
that of the debtor. The interest of a private debtor is simple and uncompounded;
that of a state is so complex, that the debts they owe, when due to citizens, are on
the whole rather advantageous than burdensome: they produce a new branch of
circulation among individuals, but take nothing away from the general patrimony.20
Nonetheless, given the tremendous financial burden created by the wars of the eigh-
teenth century, it is not surprising to find that while some level of indebtedness seemed
unavoidable, the method of funding that debt continued to be controversial. That the
debt could be traded to the supposed advantage of a new “monied interest” aroused
deep suspicion from both social and political perspectives. In particular, any actions
that led to extraordinary, and seemingly unjustified, movements in the prices of stocks
and debt instruments were greatly mistrusted. It was a mistrust, which focused on the
financial market and its participants and came to encompass the idea that an attack,
which drove down the price of the funds, no matter how justified by the economic
fundamentals or the problems of conducting a military campaign, was indeed an at-
tack on the sovereignty of the state itself.
Aside from a prolonged debate carried on in society and in the pamphlet literature,
the practical manifestation of this contemporary discontent was numerous attempts
during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to introduce legislation to
curb the supposed excesses of the financial market. This in order to protect the value of
the state’s debt and other tradable financial instruments, and hence protect the military
might of the state itself. Between 1694 and 1800 legislation, which aimed to restrict the
financial market in various ways, was proposed in 1694, 1696, 1697, 1702, 1704, 1707–8,
1711, 1720, 1721–22, 1730, 1733, 1734, 1736, 1746, 1756, 1761, 1771, and 1773.21 As Davison
notes, the regularity with which these bills were introduced indicates that calls for
legislation were not just a knee-jerk response to financial or economic crisis. Instead,
the desire to control the market was something that was more or less continuously on
the minds of some in early modern Britain.22 Yet the majority of this proposed legisla-
tion failed. There were solid reasons why the financial markets generated sufficient
opprobrium to keep restrictive legislation regularly on the policy makers’ agenda and
also reasons why any proposed legislation failed to make it to the statute book.
The question of how to regulate markets did not appear with the emergence of trade-
able financial instruments. Speculation in foodstuffs had long been common in the
British Isles and had generated heavy regulation, which aimed to ensure that prices
remained within the reach of the consumer.23 In consequence, regulation sought to
268 Regulation
limit delays in bringing goods to market and restrict purchase and sale other than for
the purposes of necessary transportation. The latter restriction was particularly di-
rected against derivative transactions,; because no actual exchange of goods was
necessary, they were regarded as little better than fraud. The nature of the regulation
rested on assumptions about the morality of traders and especially encompassed the
notion that “everyone thirsteth after gaine”; thus, the more hands a commodity passed
through, the higher its price would rise.24 Moreover, that thirst for gain would prompt
dealers to be deceitful (usually to spread false information about the state of the market
or the crop) or wish for evil consequences (bad weather, poor harvests, or famine) in
order to realize greater profits.25
Anxiety about the potential manipulation of markets was not groundless, but it did
perhaps overstate the capacity of traders and middlemen to influence price and under-
estimate the frequency and power of natural events to shape the way markets behaved.
Also often ignored was that all markets encompassed an element of what we would
now refer to as self-regulation. Markets were generally restricted in size, participants
were often known to one another and the majority of business was conducted face to
face. In that type of environment, accusations of double-dealing spread quickly, and a
reputation undermined was sufficient to result in removal from a trading or business
network. All businessmen and women of the early modern period, therefore, were
careful of their reputation, and this acted as a powerful disincentive to deceit and price
manipulation.
Thus, potential mechanisms for regulating markets and, in particular, restricting the
use of derivative transactions, were in place long before trading in financial instru-
ments reached problematic levels. In response to the increasing affluence of the London
economy and a consequent increase in the number and activities of all varieties of
brokers, the City had passed an Act of Common Council in 1673, which aimed to pre-
vent “usurious contracts, false Chevelance, and other crafty deceits.” This was achieved
by limiting the number of brokers to one hundred Englishmen, twelve from the French
and Dutch churches, and six aliens, requiring all admitted brokers to pay a £20 fee, and
asking them to carry a silver medal and copies of their admission papers as proof of
their status as registered brokers. A fine of £5 for each offense could be levied against
anyone employing an unlicensed broker.26
There were no restrictions on the spheres in which licensed brokers could operate
and, therefore, the regulations would have covered those broking financial transac-
tions. Brokers engaged in such activity were, however, relatively few prior to the early
1690s since there was only a limited market for securities. The reasons for this in-
cluded the restricted number of joint-stock companies and a general unwillingness
to part with securities, especially those related to the overseas trading companies,
once acquired. As such, people with funds seeking investment opportunities could
seldom be accommodated. Indeed, when John Verney was asked in 1676 to secure
East India Company shares or bonds for a friend of his father, he was forced to reply
that there was no hope because the Company already had more capital than it knew
what to do with.27
In this restricted environment, the control created by the City’s regulations of 1673,
along with the oversight of a committee appointed by the City, was evidently sufficient.
Thus in February of 1691, the committee for regulating brokers noted that from time to
time it had been necessary to impose fines on individuals who were acting without a
license, but at that point there was clearly no need for tighter controls.28 However, at
the end of 1691, the committee was facing more pressing problems. A large number of
complaints had been received about the proliferation of unlicensed stock-brokers and,
specifically, about the fees that were being charged.29 Attempts to control these individ-
uals were clearly ineffectual: since in February 1692 the City authorities met again to
consider the problem, and the same issues were also addressed in a meeting during
May 1693. It was at this point, with the City of London seemingly unable to regulate the
behavior of brokers and stock-jobbers, and with the activities of the market starting to
be complicated by the trading of public as well as private securities, that we see the
specific issue of financial regulation taking priority and the focus for agitation in favor
of restrictions switch from the City to central government.
Four broad concerns motivated the desire to regulate, or even eliminate, stock-
jobbers and stock-jobbing.30 The first was a need to control an activity that was seen to
be mired in deceit. Stock-jobbers, it was alleged, spread rumors and misinformation in
order to manipulate prices to their own advantage. Daniel Defoe, for example, charac-
terized stock-jobbing as “a compleat System of Knavery; . . . ’tis a Trade found in Fraud,
born of Deceit, and nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falshoods and all
sorts of Delusions.”31 This concern remained a constant throughout the long eighteenth
century. The first comprehensive English guide to trading shares and debts, produced
by Thomas Mortimer in 1761, similarly warned its readers not to believe anything they
were told by jobbers and brokers.32
Deceit was naturally problematic when practiced against the unwary or naïve in-
vestor, but concerns also grew that it could be practiced directly or indirectly against
the nation. A typical example concerned the siege of the town of Mons. During early
1691 the town was besieged by Louis XIV’s armies. It fell to the French on March 29,
1691, but on March 31 a man dressed as a Dutch officer rode through London crying
out that William III had relieved the town. This was apparently a deliberate deception
to allow those who had gambled on the relief of the town to call in their “winnings”
before the real outcome of the siege was made known.33
That jobbers would seek to gain from the nation’s financial need or, worse still, that
they reveled in the profits to be made from British military failure was certainly morally
270 Regulation
reprehensible, but it also potentially had the effect of driving down the price of short-
and long-term debt, thus compromising the state’s control of its own finances and
making it more difficult and expensive for it to raise funds in the future. The conse-
quences of this might be disastrous for the nation since, as was acknowledged by all,
“the whole Art of War is in a manner reduced to Money . . . the Prince, who can best
find Money to feed, cloath, and pay his Army, not he that has the most valiant Troops,
is surest of Success and Conquest.”34
The second motivation for imposing controls on the market was that trading in
financial instruments was detrimental to the nation’s economy. Of course, such views
were not universal. During the 1690s John Houghton, compiler of the Collection for the
Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, had offered cautious support for the financial
market. While careful to deny any personal connection to stock-jobbing, he did argue
that in spite of any problems caused by speculation, joint-stock companies were effec-
tive in raising capital. Besides, he suggested, “who will have a Share, if to save his Life,
Estate or Freedom, he might not part with it . . .”35 In other words, without the liquidity
offered by the financial market, few would have been willing to make the investment
necessary to capitalize new enterprises.
Yet, those like Houghton who praised the efficacy of the secondary market, were
often shouted down by others who believed that rather than facilitating economic pro-
gress and directing idle capital toward deserving projects, trading in financial instru-
ments encouraged speculation and thus retarded the growth of the British economy.
Among such commentators there was very little support for Houghton’s notion that
joint-stocks were useful for the purpose of capitalizing trade and industry. This was
because, as Thomas Baston claimed, stock-jobbers did not value the enterprise in
whose shares they dealt. Rather they “prey upon, destroy and discourage all Industry
and honest Gain.” Baston argued that it was the honest trades, such as the West India,
Mediterranean, and Baltic trades, which were not funded through joint-stocks, that
supported the wealth of the nation. Should anyone wish to destroy those trades and
consequently the nation itself, “let ’em contrive to erect ’em into Companies, divide
them into Shares and so consequently Stock-job ’em .”36
Equally, critics rejected the idea that speculation was an inconvenience worth bearing
for the advantages that a market in financial instruments could bring. Speculation, was
never just an inconvenience because it turned honest men away from their trade or
business. Thus, in one satirical pamphlet, published during the 1690s, a concerned
citizen recalled a conversation with a neighbor who asked why he should “stand pilling
straws or thrumming caps behind the Counter, [when] . . . besides East India, Affrica,
and Hudson’s Bay Stock there was now . . . almost a hundred other Stocks for which
either Patents [were] granted or procuring” and to which, he believed, his capital could
more profitably be committed.37 The cumulative effect of such distraction from trade
would be the ruin of the country’s economy, while the individual ran the risk of losing
his business and compromising his soul by the desire to make profits at the expense of
another’s misfortune.
Later such arguments developed in sophistication, especially in relation to the costs of
the public debt. David Hume in his essay Of Public Credit argued that public debt oper-
ated to increase prices and taxation, remove specie from circulation to the detriment of
the economy, oppress the poor, and hinder the development of national wealth. There
were few positive economic consequences of the debt since stockholders themselves
were either foreigners who drained wealth from the nation or the idle who contributed
nothing.38 Adam Smith expounded similar views suggesting that public indebtedness
merely transferred capital from landlords and capitalists to public creditors:
To transfer from the owners of those two great sources of revenue, land and capital
stock, from the persons immediately interested in the good condition of every par-
ticular portion of land, and in the good management of every particular portion of
capital stock, to another set of persons (the creditors of the publick, who have no
such particular interest), the greater part of the revenue arising from either must,
in the long-run, occasion both the neglect of land, and the waste or removal of
capital stock.39
Indeed, it was frequently argued that those who did profit from the accumulation of
the national debt were neither honest traders trying their hand at speculation nor public
creditors receiving their regular and much-needed dividends, but rather the idle and
wasteful and, more often, the duplicitous and socially undesirable. In the early eigh-
teenth century, Daniel Defoe compiled “a black List of 57 persons, who within this ten
years past have rais’d themselves to vast Estates [through stock-jobbing], most of them
from mechanick and some from broken and desperate Fortunes.”40 Charles Davenant’s
fictional stock-jobber Tom Double claimed to have secured a fortune of £50,000 in spite
of not having “Shoes to my Feet” fourteen years earlier.41 Hence the third theme espoused
by critics of the financial market was that it afforded opportunities for undermining the
social order. Perhaps there was some justification for this; the financial market was cer-
tainly a great social leveler, a place where money, rather than birth, nationality, or reli-
gion, mattered. Nonetheless, the weight of evidence tends to suggest that it was necessary
to have money and elite contacts in order to make money in the financial market.42 The
typical successful stock-jobber was very far removed from Davenant’s Tom Double
meaning that anxiety about the social threat posed by the market was usually a reflection
of wider issues. Among these must be counted the xenophobic tendencies of early mod-
ern Londoners. The presence of Huguenot, Dutch, and Jewish participants in London’s
financial market, while they were not certainly not dominant, was sufficient to arose
272 Regulation
suspicion. During 1720 anxieties of a different sort emerged as the speculative mania
generated by the South Sea Company took hold. Elite society’s willingness to mix with
the socially undesirable and to bow to their social inferiors in order to get their names
on subscription lists was frequently commented upon. Similar reports came from France
where the Duchess of Orleans, observing French duchesses kissing John Law’s hand as
they begged for shares in the Mississippi scheme, was moved to speculate what other
parts of his body would be kissed by those lower down the social scale.43
But it was the undermining of the landed interest that most exercised critics of the
market. Practical objections were raised against the fact that the taxes paid by the landed
interest went into the pockets of the monied men. The author of Angliae Tutamen crit-
icized the Bank of England, asserting: “the great Dividends the Bank has already made,
and is preparing to make . . . tell all the World in honest English, that one Part of the
Nation preys upon t’other.” That author went on to complain that “We are all of one
Nation, and if we could extract Profits from Foreigners ’twould do well, but from one
another, enriches not the Publick one jot.”44 More broadly, however, there was doubt
about the social stability of the monied interest. Land was the symbol of political and
civic responsibility; it signified a solid form of property, which wedded the individual to
the state in a mutually beneficial relationship. As Hume argued the landed interest, by
their property, their longevity, and their hereditary authority, formed “a kind of inde-
pendent magistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature.”45 The pursuit of money,
on the other hand, was the pursuit of self-interest. The monied man indulged his desires
on the strength of nothing more substantial than credit and responded to his passions
rather than to his sense of duty and responsibility. As such, the monied man was less
reliable and less stable than he whose wealth was based in land.
The monied interest did not merely pose a social threat to the landed elite; it also
threatened to undermine landed dominance of the political system. And it was the
political threat posed by the market and particularly its participants that formed the
fourth motivation for those who sought to regulate finance. As noted earlier, it was
feared that the financial revolution had brought to positions of political and economic
power those whose concern was not the good of the country but merely the lining of
their own pockets. In this respect many feared that the stock-jobbers had an incentive
to keep the country at war since it was during times of the country’s greatest financial
need that they made the most profit.
Equally insidious was the fact that the public debt functioned as the means to perpet-
uate the power of the monied men because it made the wealth of many individuals
dependent upon protecting the status quo. Thus, Bolingbroke reflected in 1749:
It was said that a new government [that of William III], established against the
ancient principles and actual engagements of many, could not be so effectually
secured in any way, as it would be if the private fortunes of great numbers were
made to depend on the preservation of it: and that this could not be done unless
they were induced to lend their money to the public, and to accept securities under
the present establishment. Thus the method of funding and the trade of stock-
jobbing began. Thus were the great companies created, the pretended servants, but
in many respects the real masters of every administration.46
Bolingbroke’s “real masters” of the political administration could then manipulate

the nation’s need to line their own pockets and strengthen their company’s monopoly.
They could gain control over the country’s elections, as they seemed to do in 1701 and
1707.47 They could influence political appointments, as the Bank of England seemed to
do when its directors attempted to undermine Robert Harley’s ministry in 1710/11.48
And, as the collapse of the South Sea scheme demonstrated, if left to their own devices,
the monied men would bring the country and its financial system to the brink of ruin.
While the most obvious targets of criticism were a small group of prominent monied
men, concerns were also evinced about the power of the much broader group of public
creditors and, most notably, about the susceptibility of the state’s credit to the court of
public opinion. In extremis, David Hume argued, while despotic governments may
renege on their debts, Britain’s government being “more tenacious of public faith than
prudence” could not resort to such measures.49 Instead, it would struggle on under an
increasing burden of debt while “our children, weary of the struggle [to maintain the
balance of power in Europe], and fettered with incumbrances may sit down secure, and
see their neighbours oppressed and conquered; till, at last, they themselves and their
creditors lie both at the mercy of the conqueror.”50 Ultimately, then, because of uncon-
trolled public debt, which left the state at the mercy of the opinion of the public credi-
tors, British sovereignty would be compromised and public credit would, in effect,
destroy the nation.
Within these critiques, it is easy to identify concerns, subsequently oft-repeated, that
finance contributes nothing to the economy. We see, for example, a heavy focus on the
importance of trade and industry but scant acknowledgement that finance might fulfill
a necessary function in the establishment and maintenance of useful enterprise. There
is a strong argument that suggests the financial market served to redistribute wealth
but that redistribution was one that only involved the transfer of funds from honest to
duplicitous men and women or from the social elite to the socially undesirable. There
is an acknowledgement that the state must raise funds, but the financiers who held the
purse strings inevitably posed a threat to the wealth of the nation and the authority of
the state. As such, the country derived no benefit from the financial market. It was
merely wasting time, money, and talent in speculation. From these concerns grew calls
for regulation, calls which naturally grew louder during the periodic crises that beset
274 Regulation
the financial market. Seeking the means by which to control the market, however,
proved problematic for successive political administrations.
Between 1694 and 1800, only five of the regulatory measures proposed to Parliament
became law. They passed in 1697, 1700, 1708, 1734, and 1736. Of those, the Act of 1700
merely continued that of 1697, the effect of the Act of 1708 was to relax restrictions, and
the Act of 1736 made the 1734 law perpetual. In real terms, then, only two substantive
pieces of legislation for regulating the behavior of the financial market and its partici-
pants were passed during the long eighteenth century.51
An examination of the detail and impact of those two pieces of legislation further
complicates our understanding of the issues. The 1697 Act was passed during a period
of military and economic crisis when discounts on both the short-term and newly
established long-term government debt were high. It was clearly an attempt to respond
to the parlous state of the public finances, yet the Act did little to limit the alleged
transgressions of stock-jobbers. In fact, it merely strengthened many of the restrictions
against brokers introduced by the 1673 Act of Common Council. It restricted the
number of sworn brokers allowed to operate in the City to one hundred, along with
twelve brokers to be drawn from the Jewish and alien communities. This included
brokers of all commodities and not just financial brokers, as is sometimes suggested.52
Every person acting as a broker had to provide references to prove their “Ability, Hon-
esty and good name” and provide £500 as a good-behavior bond. Brokers were also
obliged by the Act to keep a record of their transactions and were disallowed from
dealing in any financial instrument, including tallies, bills, and joint-stocks, for their
own account. Any individual found acting without authorization was to be fined £500
and pilloried.53
A more substantive element of the 1697 legislation was an attempt to limit the use of
option contracts by voiding those that ran for more than three days, although time
bargains (futures in modern-day parlance) remained unaffected. Yet, while high fines
could be imposed on those engaging in illegal transactions, compliance with the legis-
lation was not enforced. Indeed, it was left to informers to bring transgressors to the
authorities’ attention, and then an arduous route through the courts was necessary to
secure prosecution. Moreover, it would have been almost impossible to prove illegal
dealings if both parties had willingly engaged in the transaction.54 The 1697 Act, there-
fore, made very little impression on the financial market.
It was to be another thirty-seven years before further significant regulation was
enacted. Even the South Sea Bubble, the most “celebrated” financial crisis of the period,
did not result in additional legislation being imposed on the market. A number of pro-
posals for controlling the markets were certainly put before Parliament during late 1720
and in 1721 but, perhaps understandably, MPs concentrated instead on punishing the
directors of the Company and the reconstruction of the financial system. The relative
calm of the financial market during the years following the bursting of the Bubble and
the absence of international conflict, and thus demands on the public purse, meant that
the issue of regulation did not reemerge until the early 1730s. There appear to have been
two reasons why the question of how to control the financial market re-emerged so
strongly at this time. The first was a sharp and prolonged decline in the price of secu-
rities during the second half of 1732. The second was renewed concerns about the ma-
nipulation of the financial system. This was the product of a number of factors including
continued uneasiness about the management of the South Sea Company, the discovery
of significant fraudulent dealings by both the York Buildings Company and the Chari-
table Corporation, and a united opposition against the seemingly corrupt ministry of
Robert Walpole.55 All these factors combined to lend an additional impetus to those
who saw corruption and double-dealing in all aspects of the financial system and, most
particularly, in the connections between politics and the monied companies.
First proposed in 1733, the new legislation had a long and complicated passage
through Parliament. Similar to the legislation of the 1690s, the proposed bill targeted
unlicensed brokers (of which there were apparently many by this time), but it also in-
cluded a series of much more stringent provisions directed against a variety of forms of
derivatives trading. As such, had it passed without amendment, it might have made a
significant impact on the market, even though the proposed legislation still did not
include an enforcement mechanism. In the end, the bill was substantially watered
down by the House of Lords, and, ultimately, Sir John Barnard’s Act (as it was com-
monly known) functioned only to control more speculative kinds of trading by ban-
ning options, prohibiting the use of contracts paying price differentials, and by making
void all contracts for the sale of stock that the seller was not actually possessed of or
entitled to.56 In other words, the Act attempted to make it impossible to gamble on the
decline of securities prices. An assessment of whether it succeeded in this aim is diffi-
cult because since, as the Act attempted to limit those trades that were not officially
registered with companies or the Treasury, it is impossible to analyze impact on trading
volumes. Some circumstantial evidence certainly points to a short-term effect on the
market. One Amsterdam broker observed to a client that because the Act had placed
severe penalties on the use of derivative instruments, “an artificial fall in English Funds
was impossible.”57 Nevertheless, Dickson asserts that the market merely adapted to the
legislation by encouraging dealing on margin as an alternative to trading in options.58
Moreover, since once again no enforcement agency had been created, it is likely that
brokers and jobbers were able, for the most part, to circumvent legislation.
The reasons why it was so difficult to introduce legislation to control the market were
several and changed over time. When the financial market first emerged, it was natu-
rally a gray area for legislators. The foundations of regulation were directed at the com-
modities market and could not translate easily to the higher volume and less tangible
276 Regulation
market in tradeable paper. Equally, there can be no doubt that many policy makers
would not have understood the financial market even in its simplest form and stood
little chance of understanding complex instruments, such as time bargains, puts, and
refusals. This, of course, made it difficult to frame effective legislation.59 Even during
the late eighteenth century it was still being argued that Parliament could never hope
to keep up with the market’s ingenuity in circumventing legislation. Thus, Charles Jen-
kinson of the Treasury Board asserted during the early 1770s that it was possible to
make laws to pursue stock-jobbing but never to overtake it.60
Legislators were also dealing with what was essentially a contradiction. Early mod-
ern Parliaments spent much time in attempts to expand national wealth through sup-
portive commercial legislation and the passing of laws that functioned to ensure the
protection of private property. Yet, to interfere with trading in securities was to inter-
fere in the disposal of private property and limit the freedom of commerce. For some
at least, it was difficult to reconcile such actions.
As the eighteenth century progressed, the market, its purpose, and its vagaries
became more familiar to eighteenth-century society and, of course, to legislators.
Banner argues that it was this very familiarity, the ordinariness of the market, that
prevented any proposals other than Barnard’s Law of 1734 passing into the statute
books.61 Still, this is too simplistic an explanation; in fact there was another factor that
prevented the enactment of restrictive legislation against the financial market: the inti-
mate connection between the market and the needs of a state often at war and in need
of funds. This connection is made clear in the arguments used in support of the market.
Indeed, the market described by its defenders was quite different from that presented
by its critics. Far from being a place where duplicitous jobbers robbed the naïve ordi-
nary citizen, proponents of the market presented an institution, which facilitated the
free exchange of securities and thus encouraged investment because individuals would
be aware that “they can change their Property without Difficulty, and at a Small
Expense.” Regulation, it was argued, would increase costs, decrease liquidity, and deter
investors. The consequences could be disastrous for the nation because if the difficulties
of trading in the national debt increased, the public might be “unwilling to engage in
any new Loan, when the Emergencies of the State may require [its] Assistance.”62
When discussing in detail how the market operated, it is not surprising to find a
strong focus on derivative transactions since it was this form of trading so often tar-
geted by proposed legislation. Defenders of the market were, therefore, eager to explain
how such instruments could be put to legitimate uses. In 1697, one pamphleteer stated
that the economic constraints under which the country had labored had forced many
to sell Bank of England shares and notes, and also shares in other companies. In order
to protect themselves during this time of necessity, many had made “Agreements to
receive back the said Stocks and Notes on certain Terms, whereby they know their
certain Loss.” Others had retained stock and notes that they would otherwise have
disposed of in order to deliver them when called for by such agreements. Moreover, it
was alleged that many people had lent money to the government on tallies “which they
would not have done, if they could not [through the use of options and time bargains]
have Insured themselves.” Such individuals, that anonymous author argued, had bro-
ken no laws and to enact legislation voiding all such contracts would result in “Prop-
erties [being] destroyed, and many Families [being] utterly ruined.”63 Note that many
of the references made here were to forms of government debt, with the implication
being that the state of the public finances, as bad as they were in 1697, might have been
much worse had the derivatives market not allowed the public creditors to offset the
risks of dealing in government debt.
While admitting that some may have used derivatives for fraudulent purposes, later
defenders of the market also sought to normalize the use of options and time bargains.
They attempted to isolate a small group of fraudsters operating in the market and sug-
gested that the many who used such instruments for legitimate purposes should not be
punished or restricted because of the actions of the few. They also sought to remind
Parliament that derivatives were frequently used in other areas of commerce. Mer-
chants, after all, often bought goods on time, and options contracts were described by
one pamphleteer as merely a type of insurance such as that used everyday by those
engaged in foreign trade. The pamphleteer asked how a man like Sir John Barnard,
who had signed “a thousand Policies of Insurance on Shipping,” could “rail against
Policies for the Insurance of Stock”?64
During the 1750s an opponent of legislation expanded upon these themes and made
quite explicit the connection between the efficient functioning of the derivatives mar-
ket and the ability of the fiscal-military state to raise funds. First, he argued, public
credit required an open market where people could complete their transactions with
“ease, readiness and dispatch.” Second, dealing for time (in other words using deriva-
tive instruments) helped maintain an open market. Third, there were insufficient non-
derivative transactions to maintain the number of brokers necessary for an effective
market. Fourth, if the government were to destroy the practice of jobbing “the Market
[would be] lost.” And last, the loss of the market would result in greater harm to share-
holders and the proprietors of the public funds, and indeed to the government, than
did the existence of stock-jobbers.65
The support of government and the political system was a theme returned to by
many defenders of the market. Whereas opponents feared the political connections
that resulted from high finance, defenders turned those connections into a virtue. It
was observed that the national debt itself had been created to defend the Revolution of
1688 and protect against the loss of liberty and popery. Michael Godfrey, one of the
founders of the Bank of England, listed among the Bank’s advantages that “like the
278 Regulation
other public funds, [it tied] the people faster to the government.”66 Its defenders also
made the loss of the financial market a political threat. In 1733, for example, some
argued that restrictions would force buyers out of the public funds, lead to a loss of li-
quidity, and ultimately destroy the public credit. And furthermore, restrictions on the
market might actually lead to a small group controlling the market, which would
increase the likelihood of conspiracy and corruption.67
In all of these arguments we see conscious responses to the objections made to the
market. And, as Banner notes, as time progressed such arguments were refined and
grew to challenge the notion that the market added nothing to the economy of the
country. Certainly by the mid-nineteenth century, many began to acknowledge that
brokers and jobbers did indeed add value to the market by assisting transactions and
providing much-needed liquidity.68 We should also remember that there was a growing
sympathetic audience for such views, but this audience was not limited to those tradi-
tionally supportive of the financial revolution. Even in the 1690s the public creditors
were not exclusively Whig merchants, and by the early eighteenth century they were
characterized by significant diversity. Moreover, members of Parliament and peers,
whatever their political views, found that as proprietors of company shares and public
funds, their interest lay in maintaining, rather than restricting the market.
There can be no doubt that once the mechanics of government debt became depen-
dent upon the maintenance of liquidity within the financial market and the legislators
themselves turned into public creditors, the framing of regulation to control the finan-
cial market became more and more problematic. Policy makers clearly understood
that regulation might compromise liquidity and reduce support for the public credit.
They were often reminded that the consequences of poor public finance could be disas-
trous. One pamphleteer commented during 1719:
No superiority in the Field, could be a Match for this superiority of Treasure; for
Money being the Basis of the War, in the Modern Way of carrying such things on
in the World, it had long since been a receiv’d Maxim in the Case of War, that the
longest Purse, not the longest Sword, would be sure to conquer at last.69
It was for this reason that although calls for restrictive measures were made over the
course of the long eighteenth century, it was only the relatively weak bills of 1697 and
1734 that passed into law.
Regulating the excesses of the financial market is a problem that has not gone away.
Indeed, political and public debate has, of late, been much concerned with finding
means by which the “evil” financiers whose actions are thought to have come close to
destroying the global economy might in future be controlled. Interestingly, some blame
has fallen on the regulators and overseers of the market themselves, especially those
credit-rating agencies that moved away from pure analysis to become more involved in
the provision of financial instruments, and politicians who, in wishing to take credit
for the economic boom that kept the electorate docile, failed to recognize, or ignored,
the signs of an impending bubble. Therefore, while the circumstances might have
changed, the central problem—that of managing an institution when the state or other
agencies are both regulators and beneficiaries—has not disappeared.
NOTES
1. For a further discussion of these issues see Anne L. Murphy, The Origins of English Finan-
cial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), ch. 1.
2. Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1993); K. G. Davies,
The Royal African Company (London: Longman, 1957); Rich, E. E., The Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany, 3 vols. (London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1961).
3. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, 15–16.
4. See, for example, the Company of White Paper Makers in England, the history of which
can be found in W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish
Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1912),
3:63–70.
5. Quoted in MacLeod, C., “The 1690s Patents Boom: Invention or Stock Jobbing?,” Economic
History Review 39 (1986): 558.
6. MacLeod, “The 1690s Patents Boom,” 558.
7. The term “stock-jobber” was used in a variety of ways by contemporaries. In its broadest
sense it meant anyone involved in any aspect of the financial market but it most commonly
was used as a pejorative term for a speculator.
9. Scott, Constitution and Finance, I, 347–49. For a history of the recoinage see, M. H. Li, The
Great Recoinage of 1696–99 (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1963).
11. For details of these schemes see, P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in Britain: A
Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), ch. 3.
12. Dickson, Financial Revolution, 47. The remainder came from Customs: £13.2m, Excise:
£13.6 m and the Land Tax: £19.2m.
13. Dickson, Financial Revolution, 48–49.
14. P. K. O’Brien, “The impact of the French Wars on the British economy,” in H. T. Dickinson
ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 187.
15. B. R. Mitchell, with Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), 402.
16. Indeed in a letter to The Guardian newspaper in 2010 a group of economic historians
argued that in spite of fears about the current state of British public finances, public indebt-
edness was low in comparison with the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Guardian,
March 3, 2010.
17. Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of
Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 117.
18. Raven, J., “The Abolition of the English State Lotteries,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 371–89.
280 Regulation
19. It is worth noting that the passage of this change was not easy. There was significant public
protest at the prospect of a reduction in yields, with many public creditors claiming that it
would bring them to ruin. Dickson, Financial Revolution, 230–37.
20. James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (London, 1767), 625
cited in E. L. Hargreaves, The National Debt (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1930), 81.
21. L. K. Davison, “Public Policy in an Age of Economic Expansion: the search for commercial
accountability, 1690–1750,” PhD diss., Harvard University (1990), 125; Julian Hoppit ed.,
Failed Legislation, 1660–1800: Extracted from the Commons and Lords Journals (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 1997), passim.
22. Davison, “Public Policy,” 125.
23. S. Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation: Cultural and Political Roots, 1690–1860
24. Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 15.
25. Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 16–17.
26. Davison, “Public Policy,” 134.
27. Paraphrased from S. E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cul-
tural Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 75.
28. London Metropolitan Archives (henceforth LMA), COL/CA/01/01/099, fos. 350–51. The
committee members were Thomas Stampe, John Houblon, and William Gore.
29. LMA, COL/CA/01/01/100.
30. Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 32–36.
31. D. Defoe, The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (London, 1719), 3–4.
32. Thomas Mortimer, Every Man His Own Broker (London, 1761).
33. J. Childs, “Fortunes of War,” History Today 53 (2003): 51–55.
34. C. Davenant, An Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War (London, 1695), 26–27.
35. John Houghton, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (London,
1692–1703), June 25, 1697.
36. Thomas Baston, Thoughts on Trade and a Publick Spirit (London, 1716), 6–7.
37. Anon., Plain Dealing: in a Dialogue between Mr. Johnson and Mr. Wary . . . (London, 1691),
2. For similar sentiments, see Anon., A Proposal for Putting some Stop to the Extravagant
Humour of Stock-Jobbing (London, 1697); J. Briscoe, An Explanatory Dialogue of a late
Treatise intituled, A Discourse on the late Funds . . . (London, 1694), 25–26.
38. David Hume, “Of Public Credit,” in Anon., A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts
and Other Publications on the National Debt and the Sinking Fund (London, 1857), 282.
39. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, quoted in T. Dome, The Political Economy of Public
Finance in Britain (London: Routledge, 2004), 57.
40. Daniel Defoe, The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected (London, 1701), 26.
41. C. Davenant, The True Picture of a Modern Whig (London, 1701), 15.
42. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, 163.
43. Malcolm Balen, A Very English Deceit: Th e Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the
First Great Financial Scandal (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), 73.
44. Anon., Angliae Tutamen: or the Safety of England (London, 1695), 7.
45. Hume, “Of Public Credit,” in Anon., Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 284.
46. Bolingbroke, Some reflections on the present State of the Nation [1749] quoted in Dickson,
Financial Revolution, 18.
47. Dickson, Financial Revolution, 19.
48. Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England: A History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1966), 1:73–74.
49. Hume, “Of Public Credit,” in Anon., Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 291.
50. Hume, “Of Public Credit,” 292.
51. Davison, “Public Policy,” 131, n. 21.
52. See for example, Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 39; Dale, R., The First
Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004), 33. A pamphlet published in 1708 estimated that of the one hundred sworn brokers,
more than half dealt in goods, sixteen were chiefly occupied in negotiating bills of exchange,
and only around twenty-five dealt predominantly in equity and debt. Davison, “Public
Policy,” 177.
53. LMA, Rules to be observed in the Admittance of Brokers, COL/BR/09/006.
54. Davison, “Public Policy,” 157–58.
57. Quoted in Davison, “Public Policy,” 243.
58. Dickson, Financial Revolution, 519. See also H. V. Bowen, “‘The Pests of Human Society’:
Stockbrokers, Jobbers and Speculators in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” History 78
(1993): 38–53.
60. Bowen, “‘Pests of Human Society,’” 52.
62. Anon., Some Considerations on Public Credit and the Nature of its Circulation (London,
1733) quoted in Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 103.
63. Anon., Reasons Humbly Offered, Against a Clause in the Bill for Regulating Brokers . . .
(London, 1697).
64. Quoted in Davison, “Public Policy,” 226.
65. Anon., Reasons Humbly Offered to the Members of the Honourable House of Commons
(London, 1756?) quoted in Banner, Anglo-American Securities Regulation, 97.
66. M. Godfrey, A Short Account of the Bank of England (London, 1695), 2.
67. Anon., Some considerations on Public Credit, and the Nature of the Circulation in the Funds
(London, 1733).
69. Anon., The Chimera: Or the French Way of Paying National Debts, Laid Open (London,
1719) quoted in J. Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 205.
13
Consumption
Commercial Demand and
the Challenges to Regulatory Power
in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Martyn J. Powell
In the last two decades the rise of a consumer society in Europe, the American col-
onies, and particularly Britain has been firmly located in the long eighteenth century.
Work by the likes of McKendrick, Porter, Brewer, and Berg has dominated the study of
consumption during this period. Although filling a yawning cultural gap, many writers
have shied away from the politico-economic framework that shaped consumer ac-
tivity. After a harder structural beginning, underpinned by work by Jan de Vries and
others, studies of consumption have tended toward softer, cultural history tones.1
Indeed, most of the key works on this area have ignored the way in which consumption
operated within modes of economic thought: in this case “mercantilism,” and in terms
of Ireland in the late eighteenth century, a broadly Smithian understanding of “mer-
cantilism,” focusing on its regulatory and restrictive features, and its close association
with policy-making or statecraft. Historiographically speaking, there seems to have
been little interest in the way that mercantilist notions influenced the way consumers
related to the world of goods. This, of course, works both ways. If an anti-mercantilist
line is taken that reduces the significance of colonial markets, then the world of goods
becomes a good deal less interesting. Donald McCloskey, in stressing Britain’s ability to
sell goods very profitably, observes: “It is the manufacture of a product that provides
employment within an economy, with the point of final consumption largely a trivi-
ality.”2 From an economic or business history angle, this makes perfect sense, much as
it would have to contemporaries with a metropolitan perspective of the mercantile
empire. The Irish and the American colonists were, however, another matter.
Utilizing illustrative material relating to the American colonies, building upon the
work by T. H. Breen and the activities of the East India Company, the primary focus
here is Britain, and more particularly Ireland. David Ormrod has presented the case
282
283 Consumption
for an interventionist, protectivist British state in the period from 1650 to 1770, and he
follows the broader model for Europe set out by Stephen Epstein in Freedom and
Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750.3 There has of course been
a good deal of work casting doubt on the usefulness of the term “mercantilism” and
specifically “mercantilist system.” When these terms are used in this chapter they are,
unless otherwise stated, refracted through a Smithian lens. Adam Smith was, after all,
a sounding board during the Irish Free Trade debates, although there had been discus-
sion over the merits of free market economics before the publication of Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations (and the views of Matthew Decker and Malachy Postlethwayt, and
even Berkeley and Swift were absorbed in Ireland prior to the late 1770s).4 Also relevant
here—as D. C. Coleman, Joyce Appleby, and others point out—is that historians fre-
quently ignore the fact that overseas trade was overshadowed by internal domestic
commerce.5 Epstein himself notes the “additive nature of state formation on the Euro-
pean Continent,” and that it was partly jurisdictional fragmentation that raised tariff
barriers.6
Yet even if the series of Navigation Acts, prohibitions, duties, and bounties were for-
mulated in a rather haphazard manner—a bargaining process with no grand mercan-
tilist scheme in mind—the end result by the middle of the eighteenth century was still
a system of economic imperial governance that favored the metropolis, and gave care-
fully assigned roles to the colonies.7 W. J. Ashburton notes that “it may not have been a
full-blown industrial policy systematically applied but it did represent a recognized,
actively pursued, and ultimately successful strategy.”8 Indeed after a period of what
appeared to be “salutary neglect,” the British government was returning to the “activist
state” model in the 1760s and 1770s. Following an expensive war, the various parts of
the empire had to pay their way, and import and export duties imposed by the British
parliament were seen as a suitable method of going about this. Ormrod notes that “it
was the selective taxation of overseas trade and its correlate, the application of sub-
sidies, which gave parliament a degree of control which has been persistently underes-
timated.”9 For some, particularly if those “some” were English merchants, this may
have felt like an imperial free trade zone: “Easy imports were accompanied by acces-
sible export markets, good credit, and naval protection.”10 But for import-reliant
Americans, or for a patriotic Irish nation obsessed with the restrictions introduced
upon wool, the limitations imposed by mercantilism upon their particular world of
goods were readily apparent. Ireland’s position within Britain’s broader import-substi-
tution rationale had created a booming linen industry, but its consumers were ambi-
tious, and “English” did not have the same social cachet as in the American colonies.
In addition, the term was not connected with imperial pride. As for the American
colonists, their hunger for the goods of empire was all too evidently being used to sty-
mie any domestic industry and fund the carrying trade.
284 Regulation
In this sense there is a direct connection between consumption and state formation,
which can be seen to parallel developments in the relationship between state growth
and the use of more aggressive economic systems. More assertive imperial policies in
the second half of the eighteenth century led to more assertive consumer activity.
Indeed, one might see this period as the progenitor of the proactive consumer, on their
own or within groups (perhaps a little earlier in the case of Ireland). It is the relationship
between state, manufacturer, or merchant and the economic framework that has dom-
inated discussion of mercantilism, and it would mark an important shift if we can move
away from these interests and open up a new dialogue between mercantilism and the
consumer. Sheryl Kroen identifies a four-phase political history of the consumer, with
the seventeenth century being characterized by a restrictive courtly consumption “tied
to mercantilism,” ending, significantly, with Smith “whose Wealth of Nations invested
‘economic man’ with ‘democratic potential’” and the consumerist politics developing in
Ireland and revolutionary America and France.11 This first stage, as delineated by Kroen,
is exceptionally useful in tracing consumerist political activity, but one must also be
mindful of the need to retain a sense of the economic system in which it developed.12
The very nature of the mercantilist economic structure could not fail to impact upon
attitudes toward consumption. From a very early stage, writers on economic issues
were connecting mercantilism with consumerism. William Petyt described a com-
merce based on foreign imports as a “consumptive trade”; language later used by Swift
in bemoaning Ireland’s lack of an export trade: “[A] consumptive body must needs
dye, which hath spent all its spirits and received no nourishment.”13 Daniel Defoe
argued that the whole point of colonies was “the finding out some Market for the Sale
or Vent of Merchandise, where there was no Sale or Vent for those goods before.”14 In
1757 Malachy Postlethwayt framed part of his disaffection with “mercantilism” in terms
of the “Rivalship of Consumers.” For Postlethwayt, consumer interest would be piqued
by competitive price and impressive quantities. . . . It is the Fruit of the Efforts of Indus-
try to suit the Taste of the Consumer, and even to anticipate and spirit up that Taste.”15
He remained unconvinced about foreign imports, though: “The importation of foreign
commodities, whereby the consumption of national commodities is hurt, or the pro-
gress of a nation’s manufactures and the culture of its lands prejudiced, must neces-
sarily bring on the ruin of that nation.”16 The Irish writer Francis Hutcheson took a
similar view: “Foreign manufactures and products ready for consumption, should
be made dear to the consumer by high duties, if we cannot altogether prohibit the
consumption.”17
Perhaps most famously Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations wrote: “Consumption is the
sole end and purpose of all production and the interest of the producer ought to be
attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”18
This was not to say that Smith reveled in consumer culture—he could see the difference
285 Consumption
between productive and unproductive consumption, and had doubts about the wis-
dom of some imports: “Goods as are likely to be consumed by idle people who produce
nothing, such as foreign wines, foreign silks etc.” But he did think that what he saw as a
mercantile system was working against the interest of the consumer—a case in point
being the much-advantaged Irish linen manufacturers.19 According to Smith, “A great
empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers
who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods
with which these could supply them.”20
At a very basic level the prices of imports, thanks to the imposition of punitive tariffs,
were often comparatively high, meaning that particular items might be enjoyed only by
the wealthier classes and thus have a social cachet. This was certainly the case in Britain
and Ireland. The mercantile system thus meant that the consumption of some goods
was dependent upon rank and station, a feature that in the very early eighteenth cen-
tury was reinforced by sumptuary laws prohibiting the consumption of certain goods.
Kroen identifies sumptuary laws with an age of “courtly consumption” during which
civilized consumption was restricted to “a narrow, hereditary, social class.”21 It is also
clear that semi-luxuries like tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco were becoming eminently
purchasable precisely because of the mercantile system and burgeoning trade with the
periphery.22 Tea is an obvious example. Although it had already started to work its way
down the social hierarchy, it was Pitt the Younger’s decision to relax the duties upon
this item that cemented its position as a much-loved necessity. These goods could not
of course be produced at home—most raw materials were fine. In the case of cider and
perry (pear wine) the government was able to wipe out imports by increasing the duty
paid by 800 percent.23 Home-produced luxuries were less problematic. Adam Smith
was much happier with the consumption of home-produced malt, hops, beer, and ale
than he was with imported wines, coffee, and chocolate.24 Place of manufacture could
indeed distinguish between virtuous and corrupting consumption.25 Such behavior
created employment, and Richard Cantillon, an Irish-born banker, argued that this
notion could include consumption by a much wider section of the population. And if
these luxury goods were virtuous, then they might also stimulate labor.26
From Smith’s perspective, the British empire was run on “mercantilist” lines. And
although the Americans were perhaps the best known of the grumbling colonies, it
might be posited that Ireland was, and is, a more interesting case. Its rather amorphous
position—somewhere in between kingdom and colony—ensured that mercantilist re-
strictions were keenly felt. As with the American colonies, a powerful bonding agent
was transformed into an agent of competitiveness, thanks in part to an economic ratio-
nale, which could not conceive of mutual expansion. The cornerstones of British mer-
cantilism in the Irish context were the Navigation Act of 1663, the Cattle Act of 1667,
and the Woollen Act of 1699. Along with carefully targeted bounties, these acts pushed
286 Regulation
Ireland toward producing goods that complemented the British economy (linen, naval
provisions) and banned it from exporting in areas that might prove dangerously com-
petitive (cattle, wool). Import substitution, in this case the bounty on linen, meant that
European fabrics could be pushed out of the home market.
British mercantilism was much-helped by the fact that it was able to pass legislation
for the whole empire, and its ability to do so for Ireland was enshrined in the contro-
versial Declaratory Act of 1720. Parliamentary and popular discontent at these restric-
tions simmered throughout the century, even beyond the passing of “Free Trade” in
1779. The most politicized items in the Irish consumer economy were those that were
influenced by mercantilist restrictions. Wool was certainly top, because this was the
most profitable export prior to 1699. As cattle were not easily sold in Dublin’s burgeon-
ing shopping streets, they were less easy to consider as a consumer item, though
exports were certainly controversial. In 1786 Irish MPs registered their concern at the
numbers of cattle exported from the kingdom; resentful at being regarded as “the
providores of other nations, while fifteen out of twenty are kept starving at home.”27
The bounties on Irish linen were cherished and contributed significantly to a boom
period for this product. The linen subsidy was entangled in mercantilism in two ways:
not only as a mode of import substitution—reducing reliance upon Baltic linen, at risk
during wartime—but also a sop to those aghast at the blow dealt to the woolen indus-
try.28 Much of this Irish linen was re-exported through British ports to the American
colonies, and thus stunted American manufacturing.29 But this mercantile peculiarity
seemed not to grate; so much so that Ulster merchants appeared rather reluctant to
join in Free Trade agitation in 1778/79. Linen merchants were also unperturbed by the
substantial profits that they were making from clothing slaves in coarse fabrics—
frequently dyed a particular color as a badge of identification, and Cork’s provision
trade was also doing rather nicely in this area.30 The mercantile system tended to push
goods through Britain as the entrepôt, and linen was no exception. In this case, though
the bounty still guaranteed that Irish linens were better value than other alternatives
and well placed in terms of efficacy of carriage; many of these ships would have stopped
in Liverpool or Bristol on the way to America as a matter of course.31
Most of the remaining controversial items can be designated as “colonial” and were
given their status by the restriction upon their direct entry into Ireland—they had to
first pass through British ports, thus enabling British vessels to benefit from carriage.
Such products might include sugar and tea. Rum was a direct import after 1731, and
there was huge demand for West Indian rum in Dublin by the 1770s, helped in part by
mercantile restrictions on French rum, sugar, and molasses.32 Even after Lord North’s
concession of Free Trade, which took the much politicized wool products out of the
equation, mercantilist notions dominated the ways in which particular consumer
products were viewed. Sugar was always controversial, and Louis Cullen gives it as an
287 Consumption
example of the way in which the Navigation Acts penalized the Irish consumer: “British
prices were above world level, and Ireland was the only substantial market the British
exporter retained.”33 Although there was no direct sugar trade to Ireland, sugar refining
was a rapidly developing industry. For the most part, however, the admittance of Ire-
land to a Free Trade had subtly changed Ireland’s relationship with the mercantile
system. It was not, as Britain may have hoped, the demeanor of a grateful newly made
junior partner. The debate now shifted away from the dismantling of restrictions and
the opening up of markets to an Irish variant of protectionism, one that would play a
part in fomenting serious consumer discord in the mid-1780s. It should be emphasized
that the Irish patriotic lobby was not in any way anti-mercantilism; far from it. The
revival of anti-importation associations in 1784 was sparked by a desire to protect Irish
goods against competition. Likewise the Irish Commons—with widespread popular
support (including a certain amount of carefully applied pressure from bodies of
freemen and clubs like the Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley)34—rejected Pitt’s trade pro-
posals of 1785, which would have relaxed mercantilist restrictions on Irish economic
activity. In this case, the perceived threat to Irish parliamentary sovereignty was
deemed to be far more important than economic gains. Irish patriotism was in part
forged by various understandings (including Smithian) of mercantilism, and therefore
trade and constitutional liberty were inviolably intertwined. Ultimately the mercantile
system had bred distrust between Britain and Ireland, and Irish patriots felt that any
new deal would see “the free export of every material of manufacture, or other articles
of growth or produce to Britain, while Britain shall retain ALL her monopolies and
prohibitions”: it was a “hackneyed pretence of equalization.”35
The intersection between mercantile restrictions and consumerism is one area where
historians can confidently bat back any suggestion that consumption can turn “active
citizens” into “passive dupes.”36 From a remarkably early stage, the commercial restric-
tions and levies imposed by the British government on Ireland and the American col-
onies inspired consumers to consider purchasing for the national good. The consumer
was effectively being asked to intervene to contribute toward solving problems of gov-
ernance.37 In Ireland, the more polite examples might see politically sensitive viceroys
hold balls at Dublin Castle in which invitees were expected to garb themselves in Irish
cloth. Aristocratic and gentry women might make similar requests in their own infor-
mal associational life. The role of Irish women in boycotts and political consumerism
features in work by Charlotte Sussman and Padhraig Higgins.38 Although the reaches
of the British empire allowed women to become firmly associated with luxury prod-
ucts like tea and sugar, the restraints of the mercantile system offered an opportunity
to shake off the blame apportioned by the likes of Jonathan Swift and Bishop Berkeley
for a “whole Lexicon of Female Fopperies.”39 In 1769 the Dublin Society appointed fif-
teen ladies to act as patronesses of the Irish silk and woolen warehouses. The rage for
288 Regulation
Volunteering also saw women buy and wear Irish goods, often in a martial style.40
However, the historian Mairead Dunlevy warns against overstating any “national” di-
mension here, claiming that wealthy Protestant women regarded Irish designs as
something akin to “fancy dress.”41 Some boycotts were explicitly anti-monopoly rather
than anti-foreign. Ireland’s Faulkner’s Dublin Journal commended a Norwich non-
consumption agreement forged against the designs of profiteering sugar dealers.42
The forming of clubs and societies as a means of preventing the importation of
foreign goods or even to boycott the purchasing or wearing of such items was the most
assertive form of consumer influence on the mercantile system. England’s Anti-
Gallican Society, founded in 1745 and dominated by the commercial classes, was dedi-
cated to the cultivation of British manufactures and the elimination of rival French
produce. This was symptomatic of a whiggish and masculine view of empire, suspi-
cious of the effeminate and the luxurious. Kathleen Wilson sees it as “simultaneously
libertarian and mercantilist.”43 In Ireland new anti-importation associations were un-
necessary as a multiplicity of older clubs, for example, the Volunteer regiments, simply
added such resolutions to their own growing lists. Here it is worth signaling the signif-
icance of one particular consumer item in the spread of bodies that espoused a retalia-
tory form of protectionism—the newspaper. In the English context Wilson points to
their “accumulationist and mercantile view of empire.”44 This was an empire that was
all about consumption. Irish newspapers dazzled their readers with a range of colonial
goods, but in the 1770s and 1780s the patriotic press appended articles urging readers
to buy Irish, and to back non-importation and non-consumption agreements. News-
papers facilitated the spread of movements for whom an engagement with mercan-
tilism was becoming their raison d’être: they allowed clubs and societies to boast of
their own patriotism, and, more worrying for the authorities, they pointed out those
who were failing to abide by national non-importation and buy-Irish commitments,
often inviting a stoked-up populace to take violent reprisals. The Freeman’s Journal
threatened: “A certain linen-draper and woollen draper, whose names make a figure in
the list of imports, are informed, that their names and places of abode will be given at
large to the public.”45 The Irish viceroy, Lord Buckinghamshire, claimed that this was
“calculated for the abominable purpose of drawing the indignation of the mob upon
individuals.”46 In America, newspapers printed subscription lists of the avowedly patri-
otic and confessions by the shamed unpatriotic, the latter having been found guilty of
infringing non-importation agreements.47 In Ireland, those caught out published vig-
orous denials, and in the case of one Dublin merchant in 1784, a profession of inno-
cence was accompanied by an exposé of the real culprit guilty of selling English cloth.
In The Marketplace of Revolution, T. H. Breen explores the first mass economic boy-
cott by looking at rituals of non-importation and non-consumption. American colo-
nists realized that their position as consumers of British imports within the mercantile
289 Consumption
empire left them in a rather vulnerable position; without money from the sale of goods,
and with new taxes on the horizon, indebtedness threatened.48 The non-importation
and then non-consumption movements played a major role in politicizing the Ameri-
can populace. Yet Frank Trentmann contends that this activity forged “the shared iden-
tity of Americans and freemen, not that of a consumer.” He suggests that the language
of “consumers” was never used.49 Here perhaps there was a difference between America
and Ireland. The colonists had a much more straightforward love affair with British
products. Americans were able to square denial of direct access to European markets
and English dominance of carriage, with, as Breen puts it, a view of consumption “as in
some measure a demonstration of loyalty to Great Britain.”50 At least that was the case
until a change in the political climate during the late 1750s, a shift that became much
more pronounced following the imposition of the Sugar Act, outlawing American trade
with the Caribbean, and the more famous Stamp Act.51 In contrast, buy-Irish sentiment
had been a feature in Irish political life since the time of Swift and his A Proposal for the
Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. Trentmann contends that “far from unleashing ‘the
consumer’ on the world of politics, the American Revolution impeded its arrival; it was
a battle between frugal patriots and Empire.”52 In Ireland, however, the consumerist
buy-Irish dimension was just as important as more abstemious approaches. Cloth
tended to be the major battleground in Dublin, and, unlike the colonies, and thanks to
the mercantile system, Ireland had plenty of alternatives to imported cloths.
The American non-importation agreements were short-lived, and though they were
relatively successful in terms of mobilizing public opinion, there was no sense that the
colonists were eager to adopt their own manufactures in a more permanent manner. To
be sure, there was a surge in demand for foreign goods on the collapse of the agreements.
If there was an inherent weakness in the American non-importation agreements, it was
in the rationale that merchants would undermine their own businesses in a proto-
national cause. Some did; others continued to risk community opprobrium by ignoring
the agreements. The logical shift was from non-importation to non-consumption, as
this exercised the political might of consumers rather than merchants.53 The Irish non-
importation groups were also of greater use as propaganda than as an economic
weapon; partly because Ulster linen merchants, and no doubt those elsewhere, did little
other than pay lip service to the resolutions.54 But they should be seen as part of a much
longer campaign against the iniquities of the mercantile system, voiced by Jonathan
Swift, Berkeley, Frederick Jebb, and Adam Smith. Nevertheless, it was the Free Trade
crisis that allowed support for domestic industries to become a truly national creed,
and on this occasion there were hints of a new mind-set; one that had moved beyond
mercantile jealousy. The MP John Hely-Hutchinson justified his campaign for trade
concessions using Adam Smith, and more particularly his view that the current com-
mercial restrictions were a special-interest group monopoly and ultimately bad for the
290 Regulation
overall health of the empire.55 Intellectual rationales were backed by a nation in arms.
The Irish Volunteers acted as the paramilitary wing of the non-importation movement
and were staunch promoters of the wearing of Irish manufacture.
Charlotte Sussman suggests that the establishment of non-importation movements
implied that consumer culture had attained a significant degree of importance: “Only
in a culture that focused so much of its energy and anxiety on the activities of con-
sumers could such choices become important social signifiers, carrying political or
moral weight.” Yet there was something singularly interesting about the Irish case
study. Ireland’s non-consumption bodies were the flip side of the non-consumption
protests seen in America and England, focusing on tea and sugar. Whereas these were
directed against the colonial reach into the colonies, the Irish boycotts were aimed at
making sure that Ireland was a part of the colonial system, with equal status to the
mother country.56 Whether this was the case for all Volunteers is another matter. A rise
in proto-nationalistic feeling during this period hinted at more explicitly anti-imperial
non-consumption agreements later passed by the United Irishmen.57 It should perhaps
also be recognized that even those concerned with improvement in Ireland had doubts
about buy-Irish campaigns, with both Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, writing in
times more amenable to free trade, allowing characters to cast doubt upon the efficacy
and wisdom of making bad “stuffs” without danger of competition.58
Consumers could take notions of self-sufficiency and home consumption a step
further, and move from organized home-consumption drives and boycotts to violent
attacks on imports. Of course, popular protest involving consumer items in eighteenth-
century Britain and Ireland was perhaps less to do with any awareness of mercantilist
restrictions and more to do with the impact that the movement of goods might have
upon a fragile moral economy. This was certainly true of the movement of food staples
like potatoes and grain out of Irish ports. The Irish provisions trade did very well out of
the embargo that operated between 1776 and 1778 and the American Revolutionary war,
but local consumers saw an increase in the price of salt pork and beef and the cost of
butter double.59 During this period and at other times of perceived scarcity or price rises,
disturbances frequently occurred in ports where food was being shipped to Britain, con-
tinental destinations, or other parts of Ireland. A ship was attacked and its goods confis-
cated in Belfast in 1756 likely due to rumors of an oatmeal shortage throughout Ireland.60
In March 1778 a crowd in Cork demonstrated against the export of provisions for use by
the British army and fleets, and in the ensuing riot contractors had their houses and
cellars demolished. Also in 1778 a crowd attacked a ship, which was transporting po-
tatoes, in Ballina, Co. Sligo, and relieved the vessel of its cargo.61 Trentmann notes the
absence of the “consumer” in just-price food riots.62 But perhaps this is the fault of the
historian and the cultural turn. Popular protest—unless of a consumer boycott style—
has only infrequently intersected with studies of consumerism and the world of goods,
291 Consumption
and yet it is clear that consumer boycotts and food rioting in Ireland included many of
the salient features of the Thompsonian moral economy63—with its emphasis on legiti-
macy, tradition, and a degree of restraint (though in Ireland often meaning punishments
not much short of death) in the case of violence exerted.64 There is no doubt that the
operation of a local moral economy could be shaped by mercantile restrictions, hence
the prevalence of smuggling in eighteenth-century Ireland. The same could be said for
the ritualistic protests of certain manufacturing communities. In 1754 four hundred
journeymen weavers processed through Cork with an effigy dressed in imported cloth.
The weavers, some clad in funereal garb, took the figure to the gallows where it was
hanged and set on fire.65 In August 1776, journeymen weavers planned a parade through
Dublin with a hearse, on top of which was “a piece of coarse scarlet cloth, covered with
a black crape, as an emblem of the present situation of our woolen manufacture.” They
had allegedly called for keeners to attend from Co. Kerry.66 These instances echoed the
funerals of some of Ireland’s leading political figures, who ensured that not only their
deathbed attire would be of Irish manufacture but that Irish linen scarves would be dis-
tributed to the mourners.67
In other cases, violent protests were more obviously motivated by broader structural
impulses—the restrictions imposed by Britain, or in later years the failure of the Irish
parliament to pass protectionist legislation. They certainly had encouragement from
Irish writers. Swift’s attacks on the “mercantile system” were packed with violent im-
agery. In A Modest Proposal he suggested that “the kingdom would not be the worse” if
the populace consumed “plump young girls in this Town, who, . . . cannot stir Abroad
without a Chair, and appear at the Play-house, and Assemblies in foreign Fineries,
which they never will pay for.”68 Though Dublin’s toughs shied away from cannibalism,
there were assaults on the importers and wearers of foreign garments, a major outbreak
occurring in the 1730s, although on this occasion there was some debate in the press as
to whether English or French goods had been the target.69 In the early 1770s there were
attacks in Dublin on those selling foreign goods and clothing. Nathaniel Clements MP
wrote that “the mob in this town have been very busy in destroying all muslins and
India goods that the men and women wear.”70 Throughout the century consumers were
periodically injured by protestors throwing aqua fortis (nitric acid) over gowns and
petticoats made from foreign silks.71 It was most likely that such actions would be car-
ried out during moments of crisis in the Anglo-Irish relationship, particularly those
that involved questions of parliamentary independence. During the Money Bill dis-
pute of the mid 1750s over the disposal of a revenue surplus by the Irish parliament, a
number of women were attacked for wearing cotton gowns of foreign manufacture.72
In 1759 attacks upon British cattle-buyers in Dublin came hot on the heels of an anti-
Union riot.73 The Free Trade agitation of the late 1770s also witnessed attacks on those
wearing printed and stained linens calicoes, and in this case hinted at a division
292 Regulation
between manufacturers and the populace After “a riotous and armed Mob marched
through several of the principal Streets denouncing Vengeance with the most horrid
Threats against all Wearers and Venders of Foreign Manufactures, and during the
resultant days of shop closure, Dublin’s linen and calico manufacturers petitioned par-
liament for a law to be passed for the better punishment of those guilty of such activ-
ities.74 A year later, parliament was stirred by two uneasy views of College Green, one
of Volunteers parading with cannon bearing the slogan “A Free Trade of Else” and an-
other of rioting Liberty Boys.75
Perhaps here it is worth noting that when violence did occur, it was rarely directed at
the opening up of trade. In a very practical sense the easiest target for protestors was
always foreign goods arriving in Ireland, and thus, even when the broader struggle was
for free trade, the action taken was in favor of protectionism. The violent non-impor-
tation movement of 1784, which saw the arrival of tarring and feathering on the streets
of Dublin, was sparked by a campaign for measures to support domestic manufacturing.
Many felt that the British textile industry had been given an unfair advantage and that
a protectionist tariff-wall would allow Irish manufacturers to play catch-up. The House
of Commons eventually rejected the campaign for protecting duties. The chief revenue
commissioner, John Beresford, noted that the linen industry was of greater impor-
tance, and he might well have pointed to the mercantile advantages, over, say, Ameri-
can manufacturers, that this had received.76 Smithian Free Trade notions had taken a
firm grip at the head of government, most notably in the form of Lord Shelburne and
William Pitt.77 They had not, however, taken hold among the Dublin populace. The
summer of 1784 saw violent attacks on weavers for importing and selling English and
foreign goods. If, as Breen suggests, there were rather fewer tarring-and-feathering
incidents in America than excitable British reports indicated, in Ireland it was clear
that protectionism had a violent edge (though there appear to have been very few
deaths) and, moreover, was connected to community sanction.78 Frequently it was
practiced by members of a trade upon a brother who had stepped outside accepted
modes of practice, as was the case among hosiers on August 10 and shoemakers on
August 16, 1784.79 The Irish tarring-and-feathering bands could be extremely brutal.
On August 10, 1784, Mr. Cromie, a merchant, was seized by a crowd armed with swords
and pistols, stripped, tarred, and feathered, and then cut in the neck with a sword.80
Other merchants, like Mr. Corbett, the owner of a woolen warehouse, were “whipped
severely then tarred and feathered.”81 Such community sanction could apply at the
highest of levels, from newspaper advertisements for “A Short Essay on the Virtues of
Tar” to a cake humorously decorated with a tarring and feathering brought out at a
Dublin civic reception.82 By this point in Anglo-Irish relations, a movement that had
its basis in consumer boycotts had progressed to encapsulate a much broader discon-
tent with Ireland’s position in the British empire.
293 Consumption
The final point here is on the position of luxury consumer goods. As these were invari-
ably foreign imports, they posed the greatest danger according to midcentury mercan-
tilist writers, threatening to drain the coffers of the home country. The eighteenth-century
“luxury debate” was linked to national development and thus conducted against a mer-
cantilist background. Specie-sucking imports were one thing, but what if high quality
finished, luxury goods could be produced for export? Maxine Berg suggests that
“[a] pre-existing global trade in consumer luxuries from Asia and the Caribbean stimu-
lated Britain’s own manufacture of distinctive British products.”83 Malachy Postlethwayt
considered this conundrum in his analysis of the French economy: “an Excess of Luxury,
ruinous to other States, is become, as to France, a sort of Necessity, towards preserving
to it that Superiority of which it is in Possession, in Point of Fashion; and which supports
its Manufactures.”84 In the late seventeenth century it was principally French luxuries
that caused most concern for government, and in 1678 the importation of French wines,
brandies, and silks was banned. There is no doubt that for policy makers material gain
trumped any concerns about moral fiber.85 But feverish commentators in newspapers
and periodicals were another matter entirely.
The arrival of East Indian calicoes in the 1690s shipped in by the East India Company
led to intense lobbying for restrictions on these imports in order to protect domestic
production, and an act banning calicoes—making it illegal to wear this type of cloth—
was passed in 1721. The debate over the imposition of sumptuary laws saw signs of
unease among some commentators. In his Essay on the East India Trade, Charles Dav-
enant observed that “there is no country without a multitude of sumptuary laws, but
hardly a place can be instanced where they are observed, or produce any public good.”86
He argued that the banning of East Indian silks and cottons had simply increased the
trading influence of Britain’s commercial rivals. It was, he said, exclusively the mid-
dling sort who looked to buy these materials and who would opt for European alterna-
tives if they could not get them. English woolens consumed by the masses would not
be undermined.87 Nevertheless, Davenant did back some sumptuary laws, depending
on the balance of trade with the country doing the exporting. His preferred method
was a consumption tax to replace tariffs.
As he predicted, the middling sort were quite capable of finding luxury goods at
home and abroad, and the increased importance of commerce, sociability, and taste
combined in a rehabilitation, which meant such goods began to be seen in terms of
profit and economic advantage rather than dissipation and excess.88 Far Eastern ce-
ramics were permitted on pain of high tariffs, but a gap in the market opened for
English majolica and Wedgwood’s creamware. Of course, the mercantile system oper-
ating within the empire meant that technically these alternative luxury goods would
not have to match the quality of foreign counterparts—there was a captive market. But
English manufacturers were also strong enough to secure new, international markets,
294 Regulation
and at home domestic fashion could trump foreign luxury.89 Indeed Berg appears to
downplay the role of trade barriers, arguing that they could stimulate demand, which
for those on the wrong end of tariffs might be met, in part, by smuggling. Although
mercantilism probably created habitual purchasing in, for example, the American col-
onies, the eagerness with which British manufactures were bought hinted at a more
intimate relationship, one of taste, even of addiction.90 Benjamin Franklin believed that
his fellow Americans had gone too far in their avid enjoyment of British goods, and he
was not the only commentator to feel that misleading signals of bounty and prosperity
had been given to the British government.91 The non-importation agreements were
doubtless undermined by the way in which American colonies determined to enu-
merate certain goods they felt to be necessary to the economy. Admittedly those pro-
hibited were easily recognizable as luxuries—silks, ribbons, East India Company
goods. But given that much of the cloth exported to the southern states was used by
slaves, the decision to permit slave garb, blanketing, and tools goes some way to explain
why British exports to America were not dented overmuch during the boycotts.92
West Indian planters, firmly networked into the mercantile system, were seen as pe-
culiarly tainted by luxury. They imported sizable quantities of goods from Ireland:
basic textiles for the slaves, to be sure, but always high-end produce for the plantation
owners themselves. Their importation of British food products—despite in many cases
their unsuitability to the climate—was as much about a desire to cultivate an image, a
determination to cling to symbols of British identity, as any genuine culinary crav-
ings.93 West Indian white Creole women were regarded as parasitical in their unbridled
consumerism, echoing the views of Swift and Berkeley on their Irish counterparts.94 In
contrast, Ireland’s concerns about luxury were tempered by mercantilist restrictions,
and the resulting underdevelopment of the Irish commercial sector.95 It was as likely
for Ireland to consider the corrupting effects of luxury in a British context: the now-
bloated empire was paying the price for its commercial greed. Commentators like the
Dublin Society founder Samuel Madden were confident that the Irish could thrive on
products that might be perceived as luxury items as long as they were produced in
Ireland, and he hoped for the development of manufacturing in tapestry, gilt, fine
threads, lace, and cambrics.96 Benjamin Rush, a leading Philadelphia patriot, made
similar comments in his bid to stimulate American employment and wages.97 Faulkner’s
Dublin Journal boasted that “the setting of jewels, gems, and other articles of richness
and fancy,” once imported from London and Paris, are “now executed here in the best
and most elegant fashions.”98 Attitudes to non-Irish luxuries were more complicated.
Newspapers were positively schizophrenic in their approach to foreign luxuries; on the
one hand, shopkeepers and merchants would boast of the English or French origins of
their goods, while opinion pieces would chastise them, on the other. Faulkner’s Dublin
Journal sarcastically reported that the Pearl Galley had “brought over great Quantities
295 Consumption
of fine FOREIGN SILKS, BROCADES, GOLD and SILVER LACE, &c. which com-
modities are greatly wanting in this rich and flourishing country, where money is so
plenty, and trade so brisk, that our poor do not want the least Employment.”99 It was
clearly an issue for British policy makers as only months before the Free Trade agita-
tions, the Irish parliament was obliged to pass a bill that prohibited the importation of
gold and silver lace from anywhere other than Britain.100 Even at the height of this
dispute, Ireland’s patriotic newspapers were full of advertisements for foreign luxuries.
The Hibernian Journal advertised controversial Indian chintz, imported from the East
India House in London.101 Meanwhile, political figures were undermined by rumors
that they were purchasing English or foreign fineries; as in the case of Henry Grattan’s
carriage, allegedly ordered from England.102
In Britain and Ireland, particularly during and after failure in the American War of
Independence, luxury goods appeared to threaten national manliness and martial ca-
pability. In the case of the East India Company, it is clear that the drain on the Irish
economy was only part of the engagement with mercantilism, and that perceptions of
foreign behavior—especially foreign modes of manliness—and the corrosive impact of
luxury goods could be as damaging to the moral health of the nation as to its economy.
The East India Company represented the arm of the British commercial empire that
was most problematic for Irish patriots. Breaking into the restricted East India market
was a cherished prize, and in this sense it was only echoing earlier English hostility
toward the EIC’s monopoly, and yet it was also feared because of the dangers of corrup-
tion, luxury, and effeminacy.103 Swift even wrote that Irish women “revel upon Indian
poisons.”104 The MP Edward Cooke argued that the Chinese trade was “profitable to the
merchant, but injurious to the country,” even perhaps “destructive to the nation.”105 In
practical terms, Britain’s monopoly on raw Indian silks allowed a significant advantage
over Ireland’s silk manufacturers. Moreover Irish patriots argued that low duties on
Indian calicoes and chintzes, in comparison to England, practically guaranteed that
East India goods found a ready sale in Ireland, to the detriment of domestic manufac-
turers.106 The East India Company was also resented in Ireland for its practice of trying
to buy up Irish coinage, following the imposition of restrictions preventing it from
taking coin out of England.107 The opposition leader, Henry Grattan, saw East Indian
goods in a mercantilist light: “The question is not whether you shall trade with the east,
because you now take the produce of the east abundantly,” but “whether that trade shall
continue an entire accumulated balance against you?” It was a trade of “uncompen-
sated import,” and Ireland was in the process of sacrificing to the East India Company
“your consumer as well as your merchant.”108 On the government side, John Foster, the
Irish Speaker and a commercial expert, lobbied tirelessly for access to the trade, and he
was rewarded in 1793 when an act was passed giving Ireland participatory rights in the
East India trade. For committed radicals in an age of revolution this was insufficient. In
296 Regulation
Wolfe Tone’s eyes, the East India trade and associated abuses summed up all that was
bad about the empire, and he and his fellow United Irishmen saw greater value in
public disassociation from it.109 In this sense rejection of luxuries could symbolize pa-
triotic engagement. American women, for example, had signed resolutions against tea
drinking, and more tea was burned than was poured into Boston harbor.110 The United
Irish newspaper the Northern Star called on its readers to forgo the consumption of
sugar and rum as a means of undermining the slave trade, though rather typically it
also included advertisements for these products.111 Even in the pages of revolutionary
periodicals, commerce trumped the consumer.
State power exercised through the mercantile system helped to make semi- or every-
day luxuries—often colonial in origin—available to the masses. However, after the
American Revolutionary war, and after Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Josiah Tucker,
Pitt, and Shelburne were pondering the benefits of exclusive access to colonial goods
and, prefiguring the interests of recent historical studies, noting the possibilities of the
domestic economy. Given the strides made by British manufacturers in comparison
with their European counterparts, Josiah Tucker could not see the colonies opting to
purchase anything other than British goods if offered the choice.112 Shelburne toured
industrial south Wales in July 1791; Lord Sheffield regarded the cultivation of colonial
goods as inefficient.113 The colonial trade, as Adam Smith saw it, could prove costly to
a “nation of shopkeepers” and, one may add, shoppers themselves.114 A host of more
personal, semiotic even, factors may have persuaded Americans to covet British prod-
ucts, but quality was also a factor, and they would return to these quality items after
non-importation and revolution. Nevertheless, Smith was cautious in his approach to
laws granting Britain sole access to trade with its colonies. He supported the Irish Free
Trade movement, but as with most other commentators, Anglo and Irish, this meant
prudent piece-meal gains.
In recent years Irish economic historians have taken pains to demonstrate that mer-
cantile policies directed toward Ireland molded rather than restricted development. If
this is true, then was consumer activity, and indeed consumer revenge, targeted at a
misapprehension of the economic system? In this sense, popular perception of the
theory of mercantilism was more important than the reality. But then exactly the same
can be said for buy-Irish and non-importation campaigns. In many cases the pur-
chasing of national products often represented convenient symbolism rather than a
committed consumerist outlook. Traders continued to import British goods, and news-
papers continued to advertise them. And yet, if one looks at some of the key goods of
empire that had benefited from the mercantile system and contributed to British pros-
perity—sugar, slaves, rum—all had rather less secure positions in the Britain of the
1790s than they had in Britain of the Seven Years’ War. This was as much to do with
Revolutionary wars as paradigm shifts in political economy. Indeed, although it is
297 Consumption
tempting to say that consumer violence made a good deal of sense within a mercantilist
framework, and much less so once Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations began to permeate,
this is not strictly true. The mercantile system had become ingrained in the minds of
the masses. In their alternating campaigns for a freer trade and then greater protec-
tionism, Irish protests were merely a century of policy-making acted out at street level.
NOTES
1. Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,”
American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999): 5.
2. Quoted in S. D. Smith, “British Exports to Colonial North America and the Mercantilist
Fallacy,” Business History 37, no. 1 (1995): 48. Also see Stanley L. Engerman, “Mercantilism
and Overseas Trade, 1700–1800,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, ed. Rod-
erick Floud and Donald McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3. David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age
of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stephen
Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (New
York: Routledge, 2000).
4. Salim Rashid, “Smith, Steuart, and Mercantilism: Comment,” Southern Economic Journal
52, no. 3 (1986): 843–52.
5. D. C. Coleman, “Mercantilism Revisited,” Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (1980): 781; Joyce
Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Consumption and the World
of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 165.
6. Epstein, Freedom and Growth, 36, 3.
7. See Coleman, “Mercantilism Revisited,” 790–91; W. J. Ashburton, Customs and Excise:
Trade, Production, and Consumption in England 1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 43.
8. Ashburton, Customs and Excise, 43.
9. Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires, 25.
10. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 296; T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Pol-
itics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 88.
11. Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004):
709–36.
12. Carole Shammas, “America, the Atlantic, and Global Consumer Demand, 1500–1800,”
Organization of American Historians Magazine of History (January 2005): 60.
13. D. A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 1997), 34; Jonathan Swift, A Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin,
Concerning the Weavers in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Davis et al. 16 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939–68), 12:71.
14. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 325.
15. Malachy Postlethwayt, Great Britain’s True System (London, 1757), 234–36.
16. Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved; In a Series
of Dissertations on Several Important Branches of Her Trade and Police, 2 vols., (London,
1757), 2:371.
17. Quoted in Irwin, Against the Tide, 69.
298 Regulation
18. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1970,
1999): 2:4, 245.
19. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:2, 391; Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social
Thought,” in Brewer , Consumption and the World of Goods, 168; Mary Jean Bowman,
“The Role and Interests of the Consumer: The Consumer in the History of Economic
Doctrine,” American Economic Review 41, no. 2 (1951): 8; Charles Wilson, “‘Mercantilism’
Some Vicissitudes of an Idea,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 10, no. 2 (1957): 182.
20. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:4, 246.
21. Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” 711.
22. Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires, 7.
23. W. J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England
1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 107.
24. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 335.
25. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, “Introduction: Space, Time and Value in Consuming
Cultures,” in Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transna-
tional Exchanges, ed. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (New York: Berg, 2006), 4.
26. Bowman, “The Role and Interests of the Consumer,” 3–5.
27. Dublin Evening Post, February 9, 1786.
28. Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires, 168–71.
29. Thomas Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 6.
30. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 4, 16, 187.
31. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 180.
32. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 75, 212.
33. L. M. Cullen, “Economic Development, 1750–1800,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4,
Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1690–1800, ed. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 195.
34. Dublin Evening Post, January 26; February 2, 1786; For the Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley
see Martyn J. Powell, “The Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley: Ultra-Protestantism before the
Orange Order,” in Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. James Kelly and
Martyn J. Powell (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010).
35. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, November 1–4, 1788. Also see Padhraig Higgins, “Consump-
tion, Gender, and the Politics of “Free Trade” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-
Century Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 91–92; Padhraig Higgins, A Nation of Politicians: Gender,
Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
36. Brewer and Trentmann, “Introduction,” 4.
37. Brewer and Trentmann, “Introduction,” 10; Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,”
711, 716.
38. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery,
1713–1833 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Higgins, “Consumption, Gen-
der, and the Politics of ‘Free Trade,’” 87–105; Higgins, A Nation of Politicians.
39. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in Prose Works, 9:16;
George Berkeley, “The Querist,” in The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, ed.
A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London: Nelson, 1953), 114, 142.
40. T. C. Barnard, “‘Grand Metropolis’ or ‘The Anus of the World’? The Cultural Life of Eigh-
teenth-Century Dublin,” in Two Capitals: London and Dublin 1500–1840, ed. P. Clark and
R. Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 191.
299 Consumption
41. Helen Burke, “Putting on Irish ‘Stuff ’: The Politics of Anglo-Irish Cross-Dressing,” in The
Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture,
ed. J. Munns and P. Richards (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 247.
42. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, November 8–10, 1788.
43. Kathleen Wilson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Poli-
tics of Identity in Georgian England,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: The
Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge,
1997), 248.
44. Wilson, “The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent,” 242.
45. Freeman’s Journal, June 8–10, 1779.
46. Quoted in M. R. O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American
Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 137.
47. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 260, 275.
48. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 98.
49. Frank Trentmann, “Genealogy of the Consumer,” in Brewer, Consuming Cultures, Global
Perspectives, 22–23.
51. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 200–201, 217, 222.
52. Trentmann, “Genealogy of the Consumer,” 22–23.
54. R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 88; Freeman’s
Journal, June 8–10, 1779.
55. Stephen Small, Political Thought in Ireland: Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 58.
56. Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 44–45.
57. Breandan MacSuibhne, “Whiskey, Potatoes and Paddies: Volunteering and the Construction
of the Irish Nation in Northwest Ulster, 1778–1782,” in Crowds in Ireland, c.1720–1920, ed.
Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 146–94; National Evening
Star, March 23, 1793.
58. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, ed. W. J. McCormack and K. Walker (Oxford, 1812
[1988]), 120; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (London,
1800, 1809 [1992]), 191; Lady Morgan, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys. A National Tale 4
vols. (London, 1827), 1:268n.
59. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 238–39.
60. L. A. Clarkson and E. M. Crawford, Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland
1500–1920 (Oxford, 2001), 256.
61. Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1778; Hibernian Journal, April 3–6, 1778.
62. Trentmann, “Genealogy of the Consumer,” 23.
63. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,”
Past and Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 76–136.
64. For more on this, see Martyn J. Powell, “Ireland’s Urban Houghers: Moral Economy and
Popular Protest in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in The Laws and Other Legalities of Ire-
land 1689–1850, ed. Michael Brown and Seán P. Donlan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
65. Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), 284.
66. Hibernian Journal, August 7–9, 1776.
67. S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760
300 Regulation
68. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a
Burden to Their Parents or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
(1729) in Prose Works, 12:114.
69. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, May 18–21, 1734; Dublin Evening Post, May 14, 1734; Faulkner’s
Dublin Journal, May 21–25, 1734.
70. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, MIC291, Godfrey Lill to Macartney, August 24,
1773.
71. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, May 20–24, 1735.
72. Pue’s Occurrences, June 18–22, 1754.
73. Bedford to Newcastle, December 7, 1759. British Library [afterward BL], Add. Ms. 32899 f365
74. Journal of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, 1773–1778 (Dublin, 1796)
[afterwards Commons Journals], 9:439–40.
75. National Library of Ireland [afterwards NLI], 13039/1, January 16, 1780; NLI, 13030/14,
October 10, 1779.
76. James Kelly, Prelude to Union. Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992), 79–80.
77. Kelly, Prelude to Union, 84.
79. Freeman’s Journal, August 10, 1784; Volunteer Evening Post, August 14–17, 1784.
80. Volunteer Evening Post, August 7–10, 1784.
81. Volunteer Evening Post, August 10–12, 1784.
82. Volunteers Journal, August 18, 1784.
83. Frank Trentmann, “Crossing Divides: Consumption and Globilization in History,” Jour-
nal of Consumer Culture 9 (2009): 195; Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 7.
84. Postlethwayt, Great Britain’s True System, 291.
85. Irwin, Against the Tide, 33–34.
86. Quoted in Irwin, Against the Tide, 56n.
87. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 39.
88. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 32–33, 37.
89. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 79, 92–93.
90. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 281–83, 297–98. Trentmann makes similar points in relation to
Belize in “Crossing Divides,” 202.
91. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 11–14.
93. Truxes, Anglo-American Trade, 16.
94. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury (London: Routledge, 2003), 145.
95. Small, Political Thought in Ireland, 44–45.
96. Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin,
1816), 31–32.
97. Donald J. D’Elia, “Benjamin Rush: Philosopher of the American Revolution,” Transac-
tions of the American Philosophical Society 64, no. 5 (1974): 43.
100. Commons Journals, 9:252, January 6, 1776.
101. Hibernian Journal, March 23–25, 1778.
102. Freeman’s Journal, November 23–26, 1782.
103. Douglas A. Irwin, “Mercantilism as Strategic Trade Policy: The Anglo-Dutch Rivalry for
the East India Trade,” Journal of Political Economy 99, no. 6 (1991): 1309.
301 Consumption
104. Jonathan Swift, Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons in Prose Works, 12:80.
105. Hibernian Journal, February 21, 1791.
106. Hibernian Journal, February 3–5, 1789.
107. Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 66.
108. Hibernian Journal, February 18, 1791.
109. Wolfe Tone, The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–98, vol. 1, ed. T. W. Moody,
R. B. McDowell, and C. J. Woods (Oxford, 2001), 56; Spanish War: An Enquiry, a pam-
phlet published in volume 1.
111. Northern Star, April 14–18, 1792; Northern Star, April 18–21, 1792; Northern Star, June
23–27, 1792.
112. S. D. Smith, “British Exports to Colonial North America,” 56.
113. BL, Bowood, B64A, ff. 57–74v, Journal and notes from a tour of Wales, with notes on
manufactures, July 9, 1791–July 30, 1791; John E. Crowley, “Neo-Mercantilism and the
Wealth of Nations: British Commercial Policy after the American Revolution,” Historical
Journal 33, no. 2 (1990): 345–46.
114. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:3, 483; Crowley, “Neo-Mercantilism and the Wealth of
Nations,” 345.
part five
Conflict
14
War and Peace
Trade, International Competition,
and Political Economy
John Shovlin
Much of the classic scholarship on mercantilism suggested that economic competition

led to warfare among European states.1 “Commercial competition . . . plunged nations
into one war after another, and gave all wars a turn in the direction of trade, industry,
and colonial gain, such as they never had before or after,” wrote Gustav Schmoller.2
Mercantilism gave rise to “endless commercial wars,” Eli Heckscher argued.3 According
to Edmund Silberner, mercantilist ideas were “responsible for the innumerable wars
which ravaged Europe from the seventeenth until the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury.” Mercantilism entailed “continual commercial wars and armed conflicts without
end. It led fatally toward war.”4 In the spirit of rethinking mercantilism, this chapter re-
considers the relationship between commerce and war in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Europe, and, more generally, the place of economic competition in international
politics during this period.
Before sketching the outlines of the argument, some comment is necessary on the
use of the word “international” here. Strictly speaking, the term is anachronistic when
applied to the seventeenth century or to most of the eighteenth century. The word itself
was not invented until the 1780s and not popularized until much later.5 Moreover,
while it was initially adopted to delineate a world in which sovereign territorial states
would be the sole recognized political actors, one of the characteristic features of the
early modern period was the key role played by companies, settlers, military contrac-
tors, and other quasi-private actors in global politics. If it is legitimate to speak of an
international order in this period, it is because Europeans were coming to view war
and associated forms of rivalry as pitting whole peoples against one another, rather
than being an affair merely of rulers. This shift was mediated, in part, by the adoption
of political economic modes of imagining relations among polities.6 Once trade had
emerged as a key field of contestation, rivalry could be viewed as the competition of
305
306 Conflict
entire populations mobilizing their collective economic resources. In eighteenth-

century political economic discourse, it was routine to refer to such competition in
national terms.7 Something of this sense was captured by the French political econo-
mist François Véron de Forbonnais, when in 1753 he coined the expression “the new
politics of nations” to refer to the dominant role commerce had come to play as an
arena of struggle among European powers.8 The emergence of this new politics, and its
effects on the international order, forms the principal subject of this chapter.
I seek, first, to clarify the place of trade rivalry in leading to interstate war in Europe.
There is a good deal of ambiguity attaching to the very idea of commercial war, as I will
show. While control of trade was certainly becoming an important stake of interna-
tional competition, the number of European wars before the middle of the eighteenth
century in which trade was the principal issue was quite limited. A stronger case can
be made for the second half of the eighteenth century as an era of war fought for eco-
nomic ends. The chapter goes on to consider the attitude of contemporary political
economists to war and organized violence. Political economic writers usually, though
by no means always, conceived of trade as a terrain of struggle among nations, even to
the point of equating trade with war. But it does not follow that they viewed violence
as an important instrument in winning this contest. Political economy can as readily
be seen as a critique of an older paradigm linking conquest with enrichment, and as a
vision for a less bloody future in which nations would compete economically rather
than militarily. If political economy ultimately conduced to a more unstable and pred-
atory international environment, this was less because economic writers called for war
than because thinking about interstate rivalry in economic terms tended to erode tra-
ditional constraints on the practice of international politics. The chapter assesses the
role of violence in mediating competition among European actors in the non-European
world—a zone where profits were principally at stake—and goes on to trace the in-
creasingly predatory character of international politics in Europe as economic rivalry
became a more important source of conflict there. I end with a consideration of com-
mercial diplomacy, arguing that treaty making deserves more attention as the decisive
moment when unequal trading regimes were forged. It was at the conclusion of wars
more often than at their inception that commercial considerations weighed heavily in
the calculus of policy makers.
Any effort to clarify the relationship between war and trade in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe must start by clearing up some of the confusion that at-
taches to the idea of “commercial war,” or “war for trade.” Strictly speaking, it is reduc-
tionist to claim that the chief impetus for any war is economic. To do so takes the
preferences of those who initiate a war as an adequate account of their choice of means
to achieve those desired ends. Any decision for war will be driven not only by the ob-
jectives of policy makers but also by an assessment of the resources available for war,
307 War and Peace
estimations of the military and financial capacity of the enemy, calculations concern-
ing the likely behavior of other parties should war break out, and an appraisal of the
alternative means available to achieve the same results. Thus the commercial ambitions
of a polity, considered in isolation, never constitute an adequate explanation of the
origins of war.9
Moreover, the distinction between wars for trade and wars on trade is sometimes lost
in discussions of warfare in this period. It was standard practice in wars conducted
between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maritime powers to use naval
and privateering forces to prey on enemy commerce. One must distinguish, however,
between attacks on trade intended to weaken an enemy—virtually universal in the
history of warfare—and attacks undertaken with a view to improving a polity’s long-
term commercial prospects. When British or Dutch mariners seized Spanish treasure
ships they dealt a blow to Spain’s immediate war fighting capacity, but they did not
alter, or intend to alter, the structures of economic competition. When naval forces
were used to establish permanent enclaves in the West Indies to allow the penetration
of Spanish American markets, the results contributed, and were sometimes intended
to contribute, to that long-term commercial advantage.10 We need to keep in view the
distinction between economic objectives and economic means in warfare.
Historians argue that some of the decisive changes in the commercial fortunes of
European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed from success
in war—a view I do not challenge. Violence played no small role in the ascent of the
Dutch Republic to global trade supremacy in the seventeenth century.11 Later, the fail-
ure of the Dutch to meet the challenge of British and French aggression has been iden-
tified as a key to the loss of Dutch primacy.12 Britain’s subsequent rise to commercial
hegemony is often linked to victories won in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
wars.13 But one must be careful not to read motives back from results. Just because the
winners regularly used victory as an opportunity to extort trade concessions from a
defeated foe, it does not follow that wars were fought, in the first place, for the sake of
such concessions. As Michael Roberts remarks of Charles XII, “In 1705, when he con-
cluded the peace of Warsaw with Augustus II, he inserted economic provisions
designed to give Sweden and her provinces a grip on the trade which flowed down the
Düna. . . . But from this it is a far cry to proving that it was in order to obtain such ad-
vantages that he had crossed the Düna in the first place.”14
Economic objectives were almost never the sole, and rarely the principal, end of war
in Europe before the middle of the eighteenth century but were always conjoined in
complex ways with other purposes. Dynastic imperatives, domestic political maneu-
vering, the desire to maintain a balance of power, and a commitment to sustaining or
advancing “reputation,” intersected and competed with political economic goals. One
seventeenth-century conflict often viewed as an archetypal commercial war, Louis
308 Conflict
XIV’s Dutch War (1672–78), seems rather to confirm the importance of non-economic
factors. The French king’s invasion of the United Provinces in 1672 has been seen as
Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s effort to usurp the Dutch “rich trades” for France or as an ex-
tension of the tariff war triggered by the onerous duties he imposed on a range of
imports in 1667.15 Indeed, in a memorandum of July 8, 1672, the minister proposed that
in case of French victory, Louis might demand bases in the Caribbean, South America,
the Moluccas, and the Malabar coast, while excluding the Dutch from the Levant trade
altogether. Given the timing and context of this memorandum, however, it ought to be
viewed as a rationalization of the conflict rather than evidence of the original impetus
for war.16 There can be no doubt that Colbert’s trade policy was anti-Dutch, but scholars
who have examined the origins of the war have shown that the minister was actually
opposed to the conflict, seeing in it the likely ruin of his projects of domestic reform.
Colbert failed to restrain his royal master because he feared losing his credit to hawks
at court who seemed to enjoy the king’s favor.17
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), too, is often viewed as a struggle for
“the trade of the Indies and the wealth they produce,” as Louis XIV put it in a letter of
1709.18 Commercial considerations were, indeed, important to the Dutch and the Eng-
lish, and to a lesser degree the French, but they were not the cardinal issue for any
power. More important for William III and his advisors was the preservation of a bal-
ance of power on the continent. A partition of the Spanish inheritance would have
been acceptable to the English and the Dutch, even if this meant a significant accession
of territory and commercial resources to France. William endorsed two such partition
agreements before this design was scuttled by the will of Carlos II and Spanish insis-
tence that his realm remain intact. The chief Dutch war aim was to keep the Spanish
Netherlands out of French hands, and later to consolidate a military barrier there
against future French aggression. Austria’s priorities were, in the first place, dynastic—
to support the archduke Charles’s claim to the Spanish throne. Secondary aims were to
gain control over Milan and Naples. Spain fought to prevent the dismemberment of its
empire. Dynastic considerations were more important in the calculations of Louis XIV
than was the potential for commercial gains. Of course, commercial objectives cannot
be neatly separated from this tangle of strategic, dynastic, and other imperatives, espe-
cially from questions of the balance of power, but neither does it make sense to see
trade competition as the master logic of the war.
The best candidates for the label “war for trade” were the Anglo-Dutch struggles of
the seventeenth century. Navigation, fisheries, and international commerce were the
chief stakes of these struggles, though a range of other motivations also came into play
without which war would likely never have started. The Second Anglo-Dutch War
(1665–67), for example, developed from clashes on the western coast of Africa between
forces of the Dutch West Indies Company, assisted by a Dutch naval squadron, and the
309 War and Peace
English Company of Royal Adventurers, which sought to break into the Dutch trade in
slaves and gold. English forces retaliated for losses sustained in Africa by seizing Dutch
ships in the Channel, actions that eventually led to a full scale naval war.19 The path
from trade competition to international military confrontation was mediated by a
series of other factors. At the court of Charles II, a faction led by the king’s brother, the
Duke of York, hoped to use war as a means to increase their own influence at court.
The war had a fiscal dimension to the extent that Dutch prizes were expected to refill
the royal coffers and reduce Charles II’s dependence on parliament. Religious mistrust
appears to have been a factor in the conflict, while an ideological element was the an-
tipathy felt by English royalists to Dutch republicanism, which made it plausible to cast
the Dutch as a threat to monarchical England.20
The Anglo-Dutch wars excepted, nowhere in Europe between the 1650s and the 1740s
was the maximization of commercial advantage the preeminent priority of any Euro-
pean government on entering a major war. It could not be when policy makers were
faced with more immediate threats to territorial security, or to the continued existence
of the regimes they dominated. Successive British administrations regarded the defense
of the British Isles from invasion, and the preservation of a balance of power on the
Continent as their chief strategic imperatives, the more so after the Hanoverian Suc-
cession when the fate of the British ruler’s German electorate had also to be consid-
ered.21 Trade and colonies played an unusually important role in British national
defense because of their role in sustaining naval strength and war finance, but Britain
did not go to war for colonial gain before the 1750s.22 French strategic thought was di-
vided after 1713 between continentalists, for whom the containment of the Habsburgs
was the key imperative, and Atlanticists who saw France’s strategic future in American
empire. The former remained dominant until the Austrian alliance of 1756 gave official
sanction to the view that Vienna was no longer Versailles’ chief rival in Europe.23 As
important as trade and fisheries were to Holland and Zeeland, from the disintegration
of the Franco-Dutch alliance in the 1660s until the neutralization of the Austrian Low
Countries in 1756, the provinces of the Dutch Republic had to contend with the possi-
bility of French aggression—an existential threat.24 For several decades after 1713, Spain
remained focused on recovering its position in Italy and carving out states there for the
younger Spanish princes.
It was only from the late 1740s that trade and colonies came to count as much for
Spanish and French leaders as they did for the British. The French monarchy initiated
a serious program of naval rearmament, launching thirty-seven ships of the line
between 1749 and 1755 as part of a strategy of protecting colonies and trade, and lim-
iting growing British hegemony in the Atlantic. French efforts were paralleled by
those of Spain, which built thirty-eight warships between 1749 and 1756.25 The French
worried that Britain might make itself the arbiter of Europe by securing a virtual
310 Conflict
monopoly of Atlantic commerce. In 1755 the duc de Noailles, a member of the French
Council of State, argued that the British were engaged in a bid for “universal monar-
chy” through the domination of American trade. Noailles interpreted British actions
in the Ohio territory as part of a plan to destroy the French colonies in North America.
The British had already penetrated Spanish America commercially; the destruction of
the French empire was a predictable next step in their grand design.26 Spanish policy
makers, too, worried that the British sought to be “master of universal commerce in
both hemispheres.”27 The settlement of European differences, which Spain achieved
with Austria and Sardinia in the 1752 Treaty of Aranjuez, permitted the Spanish to
focus on the defense of their American empire and the development of trade.28 The
novel French alliance with Austria in 1756 was intended to keep the Continent at
peace and thus allow France to pursue a maritime and colonial struggle against the
British, a policy that backfired when Prussia invaded Silesia and dragged France into
a continental war in defense of its Austrian ally. After the Seven Years’ War, however,
the reorientation of French policy would permit British leaders to withdraw from the
continental commitments that had dominated policy since the Glorious Revolution
while pushing them to defend and consolidate Britain’s dominant position in the
Atlantic and India.29
At the same time the French and Spanish monarchies came to view trade, colonies,
and the navy as major strategic priorities, they embraced political economy as a key
language of state. In the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), the
French Intendant of Trade, Jacques-Claude Vincent de Gournay, diagnosed a principal
cause of the decay of French power in an inattention to what he called the “science of
trade.” He set about systematically encouraging the translation of foreign works of po-
litical economy into French, and he commissioned young men in royal service to pro-
duce political economic works of their own.30 Gournay’s group produced perhaps forty
works, including translations, over the course of the 1750s. But this was only a fraction
of the total new French intellectual production in this area. The best recent assessment
suggests that new French titles in political economy jumped by a factor of four or five
from the 1740s to the 1750s, with nearly four hundred titles published that decade, and
more than six hundred in the 1760s.31 In Spain, reforming ministers read and recom-
mended works by Child, Cary, Davenant, Forbonnais, Gee, and Hume.32 The 1750s
constituted a “take-off ” moment for political economic discourse in Europe more
broadly. While a handful of works of political economy were translated from one Euro-
pean language into another each decade from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-
eighteenth, the number of translations exploded thereafter from a level below twenty
translations per decade in the 1730s and 1740s to 134 in the 1750s and 339 in the 1760s.33
The character of this discourse and its implications for international relations will be
the subject of the following sections.
311 War and Peace
Commerce was widely viewed as a terrain of struggle among states, and metaphors of
warfare, weaponry, and battle appealed to many political economic writers and states-
men. For Josiah Child, all trade is “a kind of warfare.” Colbert discerned a “perpetual
and peaceful war of wits and industry among all nations.” Pietro Verri saw trade as “a
veritable war fought secretly by the various peoples of Europe.”34 If commerce could be
viewed as war by other means, conversely, a peace that fostered prosperity could be a
proxy for warfare. In the words of Nicolas Dutot, “To make peace in order to reap all the
advantages of a great trade is to make war on our enemies. . . . It is in the bosom of our
countryside that industry will open to us easy roads to greater conquests. . . . France,
superior by the advantages of her trade, will teach neighboring states that she is as ca-
pable of increasing her power by peace as by war.”35
Yet there is a difference between actual war and an international struggle conducted
using commercial weapons. In so far as it promoted trade as a substitute for war, polit-
ical economy promised a less bloody world, albeit one in which the struggle of all
against all continued unabated. Forbonnais said as much when he celebrated the devel-
opment of a “new politics of nations” in which trade rather than mutual butchery
would be decisive. “It is no longer conquests, carnage, and terror which determines the
superiority of an empire,” he wrote; “It is the happiness of its subjects. Its wealth and
population are the measures of the eagerness and confidence of its allies, of the respect
and attention of its rivals.”36 Such an understanding is not to be confused with the no-
tion that commerce is, or ought to be, the basis of peaceful relations among nations—a
view premised on a less agonistic conception of international relations and the belief
that commerce in an expression of natural sociability.
Though political economic writers often imagined trade as warlike, it did not follow
that they regarded violence as an important means to secure economic advantage. For
all the bellicosity of his language, Josiah Child discerned a modest role for military
power in fostering trade. A navy and an army adequate for defense, “and Offence upon
just occasion,” he argued, “will render us Wise and Honourable in the esteem of other
Nations, and consequently oblige them not only to admit us the Freedom of Trade with
them, but the better terms for, and countenance in the course of our Trade.”37 He
focused on the management of the domestic economy, above all on keeping interest
rates low. Such an emphasis on domestic regulation was typical. Political economic
literature overwhelmingly concentrated on the proper management of economic re-
sources as the path to wealth and power.
A good deal of the political economy of this age might in fact be seen as an implicit, or
explicit, critique of the idea that economic interests could be advanced by war—a call for
statesmen to turn their attention to the more prosaic, less glorious, arts of household
management on a national scale. In John Locke’s words, “no Body is vain enough to
entertain a Thought of our reaping the Profits of the World by our Swords. . . . Commerce
312 Conflict
is therefore the only way left to us.”38 The same theme was later echoed by John Law who
suggested that Louis XIV had simply misunderstood the true basis of power: commerce,
not conquest, was the foundation of wealth and thus of national strength. “It is on an
extensive commerce, on the number and wealth of inhabitants,” Law argued, “that the
power of France ought to be founded.”39 Similar language was used by Jean-François
Melon—Law’s former secretary—in his influential Essai politique sur le commerce (1734).40
Against the dominant view that trade was an arena of international struggle, a small
number of writers argued that commerce ought actually to be seen as a basis for
peaceful interdependence. Pufendorf elaborated a modern natural jurisprudence
founded on the idea that trade is an expression of natural sociability and ought to form
a bond between peoples. In France, similar ideas were associated with the political
faction linked to Archbishop François Fénelon in the last decades of Louis XIV’s reign,
and were used to contest the anti-Dutch foreign policy of the Sun King.41 Across the
channel, pacific understandings of trade were also articulated in the 1690s.42 Irenic vi-
sions of trade seem to have enjoyed at least moments of political influence, especially
in the aftermath of major wars. The French anti-Colbertists scored a triumph at the
Treaty of Ryswick (1697) when access to French markets was restored to Dutch traders
on the same basis as French subjects.43 British efforts to design a more peaceful and
stable international order in the 1710s may have owed something to Pufendorf ’s vision,
which was attractive to George I.44 Philippe d’Orléans admired Fénelon’s ideas, and a
member of his entourage, the abbé de Saint-Pierre, elaborated a scheme to create “per-
petual peace” in Europe based on a European diet and free trade.45 Saint-Pierre saw the
Triple Alliance established in 1717 between France, Britain, and the Dutch as a first
approximation of such a design.46
Whatever their ideological affinity, few political economists regarded war as an ap-
propriate way to augment trade, and this should hardly be surprising. In the short run,
conflict was nearly always detrimental to commerce, especially to the trade of mari-
time states. “Above all things War, and chiefly by Sea, is most prejudicial; and Peace
very beneficial for Holland,” Pieter de la Court argued in 1662. As a community depen-
dent on the profits of trade, he observed, Holland was uniquely vulnerable during a
conflict. War led to the confiscation of Dutch property in enemy states, to the en-
croachment by neutrals on formerly Dutch trade routes, and to massive losses from
privateering and naval depredations.47 In the first Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch lost
perhaps 1,200 ships; in the second, more than 500.48 England was no less vulnerable.
During the Nine Years’ War (1698–97) approximately 4,000 British merchant vessels
were lost; during the War of the Spanish Succession, 3,250; and during the War of the
Austrian Succession, 3,238. Only in the Seven Years; War was the Royal Navy able to
protect shipping effectively.49 A further disadvantage of war for the richer states was
that it served to siphon specie out of the domestic economy via subsidies to foreign
313 War and Peace
allies (a fact Thomas Mun had recognized and deplored).50 Above all, war created op-
portunities for neutral carriers. Foreign ships carried more than half of all the goods
imported into England during most of the Nine Years’ War.51 Under Louis XIV, and
again during the naval war of the 1740s, the French were forced to issue passports to
Dutch traders to keep their colonies supplied with food and other vital commodities,
though it was recognized that once the Dutch had a foothold it would be hard to dis-
lodge them.52
In England, the prospect of war with Spain in 1729 prompted ministerial pamphlets,
which represented war as the scourge of trade and a policy of peace as the best one for
long-term prosperity.53 Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry during the 1720s and 1730s gen-
erally sought commercial advantage through negotiation rather than war, holding that
profits might be maximized through better relations with Spain.54 In the lead-up to the
War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48), it was proponents of peace with Spain rather than those
who called for war, who tended to emphasize economic arguments. Horatio Walpole,
writing for the ministry, argued that “War is particularly disadvantageous to a trading
Nation; and of all Wars, a War with Spain is most so to the British Nation, as it deprives
us of our most valuable Commerce, as our Trade with Spain is by all confess’d to be.”55
Champions of a bellicose policy called for war less to benefit British trade than to
punish Spanish aggression and to preserve the credibility of British arms. In the words
of one pamphleteer, “Let us revenge the flagrant Wrongs done to our Country, and the
Dishonour cast on the British Name; let us, in God’s Name, enter into a War, and
punish the plundering, proud, haughty Spaniards, if they delay the Satisfaction so
justly due to us.”56
To be sure, the claim was sometimes made that war benefited trade. Building on the
long-standing assumption that England had been the loser in its prewar balance of trade
with France, some English writers in the 1690s argued that war kept this damaging
French trade in suspension while permitting England either to find alternative suppliers
for goods formerly obtained from France, or to establish homemade substitutes.57 Such
theories had their equivalent in France where some argued that war diverted Dutch and
English manpower from trade into unproductive military occupations, thereby de-
creasing their merchant shipping.58 Such claims were rationalizations for the sacrifices
imposed on merchants and taxpayers by costly conflicts. More common, and more
influential, were demands that the long-term interests of trade not be damaged by ex-
cessive taxation raised to meet the costs of war.59
The most sophisticated British political economists of this period understood that polit-
ical action had limited utility in countering a market logic, which in the long run must
determine the winners and losers of international economic competition. It was the ability
to sell cheaply that would ultimately prove decisive, and poor countries appeared to have
a prima facie advantage because of their low wage costs. Some continued to discern a
314 Conflict
limited role for the exercise of political power. By dominating the East India trade and
re-exporting cheaply produced Indian textiles, Charles Davenant argued, England could
undersell its European competitors. He also advocated the prohibition of Irish woolen
exports, which might destroy their English competition if permitted access to the same
markets. Others emphasized purely economic solutions to the problems of rich countries.
Henry Martyn argued that the deleterious effects of high wages might be mitigated by
adopting labor-saving machinery, which would increase productivity. His was a recipe for
permanent technical revolution in the production process. David Hume held that rich
countries could preserve their prosperity through improvements in knowledge, while
Josiah Tucker argued that abundant capital, technological progress, and the ability to
import cheap labor would allow rich countries to preserve their lead indefinitely over low-
wage rivals.60
Hume, Tucker, and Adam Smith ultimately broke with the view that trade was a substi-
tute for war, criticizing what Hume labeled “jealousy of trade,” the tendency of nations to
look with hostility on the commercial success of their rivals.61 “In opposition to this narrow
and malignant opinion,” Hume would show that “the encrease of riches and commerce in
any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its
neighbours.”62 It is by no means clear, though, that Hume and Smith’s innovation was fully
assimilated by their contemporaries. In France, for example, Hume’s arguments were read
not as a rejection of Colbert’s “perpetual and peaceful war of wits and industry among all
nations” but as a more sophisticated prescription for how to win it. Hume’s political eco-
nomic writings were translated by members of the Gournay circle alongside works by
Cary, Child, Culpeper, Gee, Ulloa, and Uztáriz. Read in this company, the more irenic di-
mensions of Hume’s thinking were de-emphasized if not lost altogether.63
Traditional scholarship on the history of economic thought holds that a decisive
break divided “mercantilist” thought from the “liberal” doctrines of the latter half of
the eighteenth century. In terms of the way international order was imagined and rep-
resented, it may be that the more significant caesura lies in the seventeenth century
between an era, in which war was seen as a path to public enrichment, and an age when
such an assumption lost force. This break has been obscured by the continuing appeal
of war as a metaphor for trade, and the profoundly agonistic way in which interna-
tional trade continued to be imagined. While this way of envisioning commerce was
challenged, in turn, during the second half of the eighteenth century by writers of a
more liberal bent, the latter rarely denied the significance of economic success to
power politics and, on the Continent, the new political economy was shaped by an
emulative framework in which the goal was to identify the secret of British success and
to close the cross-Channel gap in wealth and power.64
If the political economy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries rarely
touted war as a means to achieve economic ends, there might nevertheless have been
315 War and Peace
ways in which political economic modes of thought exacerbated the violence and in-
stability of the international order. There certainly appears to be a correlation between
the tendency to see interstate rivalry in economic terms and a growing ruthlessness in
European affairs, and it may have been that Forbonnais’s “new politics of nations,”
ironically, eroded traditional constraints on the practice of international politics.
A realm where economic rivalry had long played a very prominent political role—the
zone of interaction between European actors overseas—appears to have been governed
by more predatory norms than political space in Europe. Over the course of the eigh-
teenth century, the distinction between these two realms at least partially dissolved,
and the more ruthless norms of the zone of extra-European economic competition
appear to have been imported into Europe while international competition there came
increasingly to be viewed in economic terms.
In Europe, relationships among polities were still shaped to some degree in the eigh-
teenth century by norms of dynastic sovereignty.65 Some of the central patterns of
eighteenth-century European interstate politics are inconceivable absent the logic of
dynasticism: witness Charles VI’s thirty-year effort to win acceptance for the Prag-
matic Sanction, the Jacobite challenge to the Hanoverian monarchy, or Spanish efforts
to transform the Utrecht settlement in Italy. Dynastic claims could give rise to, and
justify, conflict; such claims were often at issue in the major wars of the age, as in the
cases of the English, Spanish, and Austrian succession struggles. Dynastic right could
also serve to veil aggression undertaken for other reasons. But if it often led to conflict,
dynasticism also functioned as a moderating norm in European politics, limiting the
kinds of claims that could legitimately be made to territory, containing the stakes of
war, establishing norms of compensation when rulers suffered loss of territories to
which they had recognized dynastic claims, and requiring the regularization of shifts
in sovereignty through formal treaties.66 Reason of state eroded the force of dynastic
sovereignty, but it was a slow-acting poison the full effects of which took a long time to
become fully manifest. Limited by norms of dynasticism, and to some degree also by
the law of nations, European interstate politics in the early modern period was not a
Darwinian struggle for survival; few states disappeared as a consequence of military
defeat.67 This was to change in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the growing
tendency to conceive of power in economic terms may have been a key factor in medi-
ating this shift.
Trade competition was a dimension of rivalry in which norms of dynastic sover-
eignty were irrelevant or largely so. Dynasticism was tied to a territorial imagination.
It had developed in Europe as a normative system for the establishment of legitimate
claims over territory and populations. Dynastic ideas had little purchase in interac-
tions where trade, bases, and control of sea lanes, rather than sovereignty over cities
and provinces in Europe, were the stakes of conflict. Moreover, trade competition was
316 Conflict
modern and was perceived as such. The charters and genealogies on which the legalis-
tic claims of dynasticism were founded had little to say about the world of commerce.
Where dynastic claims were weak or nonexistent, and where rivalry among Europeans
was principally a rivalry for trade—namely in the “Indies”—one comes closest to that
world of “continual commercial wars and armed conflicts without end” envisioned by
Silberner and other classic historians of mercantilism. The key European actors in this
zone were not states or governments but companies, settlers, freebooters, and priva-
teers, which further minimized the relevance of dynastic constraints.
Organized violence was the handmaiden of trade in the Indian Ocean and in the
Americas, where force was often the arbiter of conflicts among European chartered
companies or settlers. The clearest example of a war fought for trade was the long
struggle carried on between 1598 and 1663 by the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie (VOC) to oust the Portuguese Estado da India from the Spice Islands,
Ceylon, and Southern India. In 1614, Jan Pieterszoon Coen of the VOC argued that
“trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of Your
Honour’s own weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the
trade; so that we cannot carry on trade without war nor war without trade.”68 Like the
Dutch before them, the English also fought and harried the Portuguese in Asia. Rela-
tions between the English and the Dutch were often violent, with their nadir in 1623
when the VOC governor at Amboyna had ten employees of the English East India
Company (EIC) tortured and executed. In their relations with local rulers in India also,
servants of the EIC believed the power of reprisal was an important guarantee of ad-
vantageous trade relations.69
One can discern three phases in the relationship between the European regional
states system and the realm of intra-European competition in the Indies. Until the
middle of the seventeenth century, European rulers were content, either by express
agreement or implicit understanding, to allow a state of virtual war to prevail between
their subjects in those parts of the world “beyond the line.”70 From the 1640s, peace
agreements made in Europe began to be extended to the Indies. The United Provinces
concluded a truce with Portugal in 1641, which was eventually imposed on the VOC
and extended to the East Indies in 1644. The Treaty of Münster (1648) between Spain
and the Dutch extended to the Indies, and this was increasingly the pattern in subse-
quent treaties ending major European wars. Conversely, war in Europe increasingly
spilled over into the Indian Ocean and the Americas. The EIC suffered mightily from
Dutch attacks during the first Anglo-Dutch conflict (1652–54); the French temporarily
lost Pondicherry to the VOC in 1693, during the Nine Years’ War; every major Franco-
British altercation from the 1690s on had a New World dimension.71 Despite this con-
vergence of the two zones, however, aggressive and predatory behavior pitting
Europeans against one another remained common in the Indies without such aggression
317 War and Peace
leading to war in Europe. In the 1720s, for example, Dutch traders conducted a virtual
war against the Ostend Company, which was seeking to establish a competing trade to
the Indian Ocean and China.72
The third phase in the relationship between Europe and the zone of European compe-
tition overseas began in the 1750s when, for the first time, a colonial dispute in America
was the chief impetus for a major conflict in Europe—the Franco-British dimension of
the Seven Years’ War. Colonies and the commerce they sustained were coming to be seen
as a decisive factor in the European balance of power. As economic rivalry became more
central to politics in Europe itself, norms of dynastic sovereignty appear to have been
eroded, and European politics became more predatory. The first clear movement in this
direction was Prussia’s invasion and annexation of Silesia in 1740–41. Frederick II had no
dynastic claim to Silesia, a Habsburg province rich in both mining and manufacturing
wealth. The Prussian monarch had broken with the dynastic thinking of his father to
embrace a thoroughgoing reason of state, a shift some scholars attribute to his engage-
ment with Enlightenment rationalism, but which might also be linked to the growing
centrality of economic competition as an arena of great power politics.73 Economic con-
siderations became much more central to the power-political thinking of Prussian and
Austrian policy makers in the middle decades of the century. Territories came more and
more to be seen as fungible demographic and economic resources, rather than as bun-
dles of dynastic rights.74 The partitions of Poland among Prussia, Austria, and Russia in
the early 1770s and in the 1790s would seem to be the logical outcome of such a doctrine,
though dynastic claims were also weak in this elective monarchy. The French decision to
support the American revolutionaries in their rebellion against George III might be seen
as another example of the weakening of dynastic constraints and the increasingly pred-
atory cast of international relations. The stakes of French intervention in America were
economic—overturning British dominance of North Atlantic trade.75 The framing of
rivalry in economic terms may have facilitated a suspension of dynastic norms.
If the role of trade rivalry as a direct cause of war in Europe before the middle of the
eighteenth century has been overstated, commercial diplomacy merits more attention
as a practice shaping the regime of global trade. Most of the major peace accords con-
cluded between European sovereigns, from the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) through
the Peace of Paris (1783), had significant commercial dimensions. In addition, nu-
merous trade agreements were forged between European powers in peacetime.76 Com-
mercial treaties typically set out the terms on which the nationals of one polity might
trade in another. Treaties could extend most-favored-nation status, or even accord to
foreign merchants the same rights and privileges enjoyed by a state’s own citizens—as
in the commercial clauses of the Franco-Dutch treaties of Ryswick (1697) and Utrecht
(1713).77 Commercial treaties usually sought to guarantee prompt and impartial justice
in commercial disputes, and rights of residence and freedom from molestation for
318 Conflict
merchants. Trade treaties often established norms for wartime trade also. The Anglo-
Swedish treaty of 1661, for example, permitted trading with the enemy in wartime,
except in specifically defined contraband goods.78
Trade treaties became increasingly necessary as European governments from the late
seventeenth century hedged their domestic markets with higher tariffs, or in some
cases outright prohibitions, on foreign goods. French tariffs rose sharply under
Colbert—notoriously with the tariff of 1667. Between 1690 and 1705, English tariffs on
imports increased from a low 5 percent to 15, 20, or even 25 percent on some goods.79
In the 1710s and 1720s, similar policies followed in Austria, Denmark, Prussia, Russia,
and Sweden.80 As tariff barriers rose, so did the potential rewards of successful diplo-
macy. When diplomacy failed, the result could be a tariff war or destructive prohibi-
tions of imports. Following the introduction of the tariff of 1667, tariff wars erupted
between France and Milan, the Papal States and the United Provinces.81 In 1678 the
English Parliament passed a three-year embargo on French imports. In the interval
between the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession, French goods
entering England faced 50 percent ad valorem duties. When negotiations for a com-
mercial treaty failed in 1699 the French imposed higher duties on English textiles, pro-
hibiting some altogether.82
Diplomatic alignments, and the commercial accords they made possible, could be
the key to obtaining economic advantages for a state’s nationals. As Josiah Child
remarked in 1693, “The well contrivement and management of Foreign Treaties, may
very much contribute to the making it the Interest of other Nations to Trade with us, at
least to the convincing of Foreign Princes wherein, and how it is their Interest to trade
with us.”83 The Methuen Treaty (1703) guaranteed privileged access to the English mar-
ket for Portuguese wines, while opening Portugal and Brazil to English textiles.84 The
later Anglo-Russian commercial treaty of 1734, which granted Britain most-favored-
nation status and a one-third tariff reduction on specified imports into Russia, has
been credited with winning British merchants a dominant position in European trade
with Russia during the eighteenth century. By 1756, more than half of all St. Peters-
burg’s European commerce was carried on with Britain.85
Not all commercial diplomacy was geared to establishing more favorable terms of
trade, however. Governments could also use trade concessions instrumentally, as a
means to create closer political ties or to secure strategic advantages. Thus the Otto-
mans made agreements with the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth century, in
part, to create a counterweight to Spanish naval strength in the Mediterranean.86 The
Franco-British commercial treaty negotiated as part of the broader Peace of Utrecht
(1713), but rejected by the House of Commons, appears to have been designed to
improve the political relationship between Britain and France.87 Spain signed trade
deals with Britain in 1715 and 1716 in the vain hope of winning British support for the
319 War and Peace
recovery of all or part of the Spanish empire in Italy.88 By the Second Treaty of Vienna
(1731), the Austrian emperor agreed to revoke the charter of the Ostend Company in
return for an alliance with Great Britain and recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction.89
The French government sought a trade treaty and closer commercial ties with Russia
in 1756 as a way to shore up a fragile new alliance. In the words of the duc de Choiseul,
“It is commerce which enables the English to engage the Russians to participate in
political affairs. . . . The English method ought to inspire our own.”90
Of course, commercial diplomacy was not a practice unconnected with warfare, or
with asymmetries of power. Treaties benefiting the victor’s trade often followed success
in war, or could be extorted from a weak and dependent ally. Indeed, it was at the end of
wars rather than at their outset that commercial considerations usually played the
weightiest role. Few treaties were as significant in their long-term implications for trade
as the agreements Spain made with the Dutch, the English, and the French in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. For Dutch trade with Spain, the commercial clauses of
the Treaty of Münster (1648) were critical; English traders gained privileges by agreements
of 1667, 1670, and 1713; for the French, the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) was the key mo-
ment. These accords gave foreigners legal protection to engage in licit Spanish trade with
America through Seville and Cadiz, and cover to engage in illicit trade. They became one
of the foundations of Spanish underdevelopment and of northwestern European com-
mercial power (as Spanish political economists recognized in the following century).91
As the Spanish example suggests, wars not driven principally by commercial ambitions
could issue in treaties with enormous implications for global trade.
It was at the end of wars, rather than in their planning stages, that governments were
most inclined to consult mercantile interests. In 1698, comptroller general Jérome de
Pontchartrain invited Thomas Le Gendre, a successful Rouen merchant, to participate
in the negotiations to set a new tariff with the Dutch in execution of the Treaty of Rys-
wick.92 Merchants played a decisive role in the making of the Treaty of Utrecht. Nicolas
Mesnager negotiated the preliminaries to the Franco-British peace deal in 1711 and
formally represented Louis XIV alongside the maréchal d’Huxelles and the abbé de
Polignac at the Utrecht peace conference. On the British side, the commercial clauses
of the Anglo-French treaty were negotiated by Arthur Moore, a director of the South
Sea Company, while in Spain, negotiations were handled, nominally, by Lord Lexing-
ton, but in reality by Manuel Manasses Gilligan, a British West Indian with close ties to
the English factory at Cadiz.93 Such men had the technical knowledge necessary to
most effectively convert the asymmetries of power evident at the end of wars into du-
rable economic benefits.
A key objective of this chapter has been to delineate the place of trade among the ori-
gins of war in early modern Europe. “Commercial war,” I have argued, is a deceptively
simple idea; some of the practices taken to typify war driven by commercial ambitions
320 Conflict
do so ambiguously, if at all. I underline the limits of a vision that sees economic rivalry
as a direct cause of war between European states, while conceding that this perspective
may better characterize the period after 1748, as it certainly does the struggles of the East
India companies, or competing groups of European settlers in the Americas. I also
underline the defects of a perspective that reads economic writing in this period as a call
for war. At a minimum, there is a deep ambivalence about war in the political economy
of the age of mercantilism. Political economists often envisioned trade as a kind of war-
fare, but international struggle conducted by commercial means was a very different
prospect to actual warfare. Moreover, few economic writers saw violence as an impor-
tant element in winning the economic struggle among nations. If the rise of political
economic modes of imagining and representing the power of nations fostered the devel-
opment of a more predatory and unstable international order in Europe—which it may
well have—this development should be seen as ironic.
If the importance of trade as an impetus for war in Europe has been exaggerated, and
if few political economists viewed war as the road to wealth, how did organized vio-
lence come to play such an important role in shaping trade relations in and beyond
Europe? Part of the answer lies with the role of violence in mediating the struggle
among Europeans in the Americas and the Indian Ocean. The distinction between
Europe and the Indies was imagined by contemporaries in geographical terms, but the
Indies can also be viewed as a functionally different space in which relations were
organized according to different imperatives than in Europe. “Beyond the line” com-
panies and settlers rather than governments were the key actors, and rivalry for trade
could be pursued in a purer form than in Europe, unconstrained by the dynastic and
strategic imperatives that dominated politics in the Old World. But wars fought in
Europe, and diplomatic accords brokered there, ultimately had a more important
bearing on shaping the terms of trade. This was not, in the main, because European
wars were fought to win commercial advantage. Rather, whatever the original cause of
war, trade concessions were among the benefits the winner could wrest from a defeated
foe. This was the juncture when governments were most likely to consult their com-
mercial interests, and when commercial expertise was brought to bear on shaping re-
lations between states. Treaties merit more attention as the moments when the regime
of global trade was forged, when the “new politics of nations” shaped the international
order most decisively.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to Phil Stern and Carl Wennerlind for their editorial suggestions. I received
valuable comments and questions from participants in the European History Workshop at
New York University; special thanks to Guy Ortolano, Andrew Sartori, and Larry Wolff.
I also want to thank Gabriel Paquette for an incisive reading of an early draft of this chapter.
321 War and Peace
2. Gustav Schmoller, The Mercantile System and Its Historical Significance (New York: A. M.
Kelley, 1967 [1884]), 64.
3. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. Mendel Shapiro, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin,
1955), 2:25.
4. Edmond Silberner, La guerre dans la pensée économique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1939), 117–18. Such understandings are often echoed today,
albeit in more nuanced terms, and more often in general surveys than in specialist
scholarship. See François Crouzet, La guerre économique franco-anglaise au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 1–2; Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and
Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 238–62; Bruce P. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars
1550–1688: Conflicts, Empire and National Identity (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 201; Lars
Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge,
1994), 95–97.
5. Hidemi Suganami, “A Note on the Origin of the Word ‘International,’” British Journal of
International Studies 4 (1978): 226–32; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 236–43.
6. The emergence of national identities among European populations, and the instrumental-
ization of national feeling by governments in their efforts to mobilize civilian populations
in wartime, also played an important role in encouraging Europeans to think of wars in
national terms. See David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism,
1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Linda Colley, Britons:
Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
7. See, for example, Daniel Defoe’s discussion of the economic activities of “all the Trading
Nations of the World” in a lengthy appendix to his Plan of the English Commerce (London:
Charles Rivington, 1730).
8. François Véron de Forbonnais, Théorie et pratique du commerce et de la marine (Paris:
Veuve Estienne, 1753), iv.
9. For a quirky but acute discussion of these crucial distinctions, see Geoffrey Blainey, The
Causes of Wars (New York: Free Press, 1973).
10. Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue were initially established as bases from which to
plunder Spanish shipping and colonies, not with a view to long term commercial penetra-
tion of Spanish America. But in time these colonies came to assume a new function, while
new colonies like Louisiana were envisioned as having this role from their inception.
11. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (New York: Knopf, 1965), 84–112; Jona-
than Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), 67–73.
12. Patrick O’Brien, “Mercantilism and Imperialism in the Rise and Decline of the Dutch and
British Economies 1585–1815,” De Economist 148, no. 4 (2000): 469–501.
13. François Crouzet, “The Second Hundred Years War: Some Reflections,” French History 10, no.
4 (1996): esp. 448–50; Kenneth Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688–1815,”
The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914, ed. Donald Winch and Pat-
rick K. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Patrick K. O’Brien, “Inseparable
Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,” in Oxford History
of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 53–77.
14. Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience 1560–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1979), 41.
322 Conflict
15. For versions of the “commercial war” thesis, see Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a
Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964), 1:432, 439, 445;
2:551; Israel, Dutch Primacy, 295–96.
16. J.-B. Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, ed. Pierre Clément, 7 vols. (Paris:
Imprimerie impériale, 1861–1873), 7:658–59.
17. Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 7. See also John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (Lon-
don: Longman, 1999), 29.
18. Auguste-Théodore Girardot, ed., Correspondance de Louis XIV avec M. Amelot, son ambas-
sadeur en Espagne 1705–1709 (Paris: Aubry, 1864), 2:121.
19. For the commercial war thesis, see Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 238–45; Israel,
Dutch Primacy, 271; Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch
Wars (London: Longmans, 1957), 111–42, 147.
20. Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 133–52; J. R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury (London: Longman, 1996); Charles-Édouard Levillain, Vaincre Louis XIV: Angleterre,
Hollande, France, histoire d’une relation triangulaire 1665–1688 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
2010), 42–75; Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of
English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 195–268;
Gijs Rommelse, “Mountains of Iron and Gold: Mercantilist Ideology and Anglo-Dutch
Relations (1650–1674),” in Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750),
ed. David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011).
21. Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire,
1714–1783 (London: Allen Lane, 2007). See also H. M. Scott, “‘The True Principles of the Rev-
olution’: The Duke of Newcastle and the Idea of the Old System,” in Knights Errant and True
Englishmen: British Foreign Policy, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Black (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1989).
22. Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of a ‘Grand
Marine Empire,’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone
(London: Routledge, 1994).
23. Dale Miquelon, “Envisioning the French Empire: Utrecht, 1711–1713,” French Historical
Studies 24, no. 4 (2001): 653–77; John Shovlin, “Selling American Empire on the Eve of the
Seven Years War: The French Propaganda Campaign of 1755–1756,” Past and Present 206
(2010): 121–49.
24. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 1095.
25. Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and Amer-
ica, 1500–1860, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993), 1:265–66;
Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the
Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
234–35, 241–42.
26. Adrien-Maurice de Noailles, “Mémoire sur la conjoncture présente,” February 1755,
Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, Mémoires et Documents, Angleterre
52, fols. 103–112.
27. Quoted in Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its
Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 37. See also Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade,
and War, 249.
28. Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Con-
test (New York: Longman, 2011), 100. See also Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, 238, 242.
323 War and Peace
29. Daniel A. Baugh, “Withdrawing from Europe: Anglo-French Maritime Geopolitics, 1750–1800,”
International History Review 20, no. 1 (1998): 1–32.
30. Loïc Charles, Frédéric Lefebvre and Christine Théré, eds., Le cercle de Vincent de Gournay:
savoirs économiques et pratiques administratives en France au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Institut national d’études démographiques, 2011); Simone Meyssonnier, La balance et l’horloge:
la genèse de la pensée libérale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Montreuil: Éditions de la Passion, 1989),
161–236; Antoin E. Murphy, “Le développement des idées économiques en France (1750–1756),”
Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 33 (1986): 521–41; Arnault Skornicki, L’économiste, la
cour et la patrie: l’économie politique dans la France des Lumières (Paris: CNRS, 2011), 89–102.
31. Christine Théré, “Economic Publishing and Authors, 1566–1789,” Studies in the History of French
Political Economy: From Bodin to Walras, ed. Gilbert Faccarello (London: Routledge, 1998).
32. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform, 36–45.
33. Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46–60.
34. Child’s statement is from the minute book of the Committee Concerning Trade (1669), and
is quoted in William Letwin, Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought,
1660–1778 (London: Methuen, 1963), 44; Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires, 6:269;
Pietro Verri, Elementi del commercio (Milan, 1760), 335. Quoted in Silberner, La guerre
dans la pensée économique, 108–9.
35. Nicolas Dutot, Réflexions politiques sur les finances, et le commerce, 2 vols. (The Hague:
Frères Vaillant & N. Prevost, 1738), 2:403–4. The best treatment of this “commerce as con-
quest” theme is to be found in Reinert, Translating Empire, 13–29.
36. Forbonnais, Théorie et pratique du commerce, iii.
37. Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London: John Everingham, 1693), 159.
38. John Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and
Raising the Value of Money (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1692), 14–15.
39. John Law to Philippe d’Orléans, December 1715, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Harsin, 3
vols. (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1934), 2:266–67.
40. Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 40.
41. Lionel Rothkrug, The Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French
Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 330–32. See also Michael
Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the
French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 109–12.
42. For Nicholas Barbon, “Another Benefit of Trade, is, That, it doth not only bring Plenty, but
hath occasioned Peace.” Peace, in turn, he argued, promoted trade. Nicholas Barbon,
A Discourse of Trade (London: Tho. Milbourn, 1690), 37–39, 62. Dudley North also rejected
the idea of trade as a battleground, going so far as to affirm that “the whole world as to
trade is but as one nation or people, and therein nations are as persons.” Dudley North,
Discourses upon Trade, Principally Directed to the Cases of the Interest, Coynage, Clipping,
Increase of Money (London: Tho. Basset, 1691), 22, and unpaginated preface.
43. Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV, 434.
44. Ragnhild Hatton, George I, Elector and King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1978), 165, 224; Hatton, War and Peace, 1680–1720 (London, 1969).
45. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon, and the Court of Louis
XIV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 263; Charles
Irenée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (Utrecht:
A. Schouten, 1713).
324 Conflict
46. Ira O. Wade, “The Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Dubois,” Journal of Modern History 2, no. 3
(1930): 430–47.
47. Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and
West-Friesland (London, 1702 [1662]), 231–32.
48. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 210, 278.
49. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 197–98.
50. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, J.G. for T. Clark, 1664), 52–53.
51. G. N. Clark, The Dutch Alliance and the War Against French Trade 1688–1697 (Manchester:
The University Press, 1923), 135–37.
52. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739–1763 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1936), 343–44.
53. Anon., The Advantages of Peace and Commerce: With Some Remarks on the East-India
Trade (London: J. Brotherton and Tho. Cox, 1729); Thomas Merchant, Peace and Trade,
War and Taxes: or, The Irreparable Damage of Our Trade in Case of a War (London: J.
Brindley, 1729).
54. Philip Woodfine, “The Anglo-Spanish War of 1739,” The Origins of War in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Jeremy Black (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1987). See also Jean O. McLachlan, Trade
and Peace with Old Spain, 1667–1750: A Study of the Influence of Commerce on Anglo-Span-
ish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: The University Press,
1940).
55. [Horatio Walpole], The Grand Question, Whether War, or No War, with Spain (London:
J. Roberts, 1739), 8.
56. C. Ferguson, A Letter Address’d to Every Honest Man in Britain (London: John Cooper,
1738), 32. For similar arguments, see Anon., Strenuous Motives for an Immediate War
against Spain (London: G. Spavan, 1738); Anon., A Letter from a Spaniard in London to his
Friend at Madrid (London: J. Standen, 1739); Anon., Peace and No Peace (London:
R. Chissen, n.d.) [1739]; [Benjamin Robins], Observations on the Present Convention with
Spain (London: T. Cooper, 1739).
57. Anon., An Impartial Enquiry into the Advantages and Losses that England Hath Received
Since the Beginning of this Present War with France (London: Richard Baldwin, 1693);
William Carter, The Usurpations of France Upon the Trade of the Woollen Manufacture of
England Briefly Hinted at (London: Richard Baldwin, 1695); James Whiston, A Discourse of
the Decay of Trade (London: Samuel Crouch, 1693).
58. [Gatien Courtilz de Sandras], Testament politique du marquis de Louvois, premier ministre
d’État sous le regne de Louis XIV (Cologne: Chez le Politique, 1695), 514–16.
59. See, for example, John Cary, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its
Poor, and Its Taxes, for Carrying on the Present War Against France (Bristol: W. Bonny,
1695), unpaginated dedication; Charles Davenant, An Essay Upon Ways and Means of Sup-
plying the War (London: Jacob Tonson, 1695), 29–30.
60. Istvan Hont, “The ‘Rich Country—Poor Country’ Debate in the Scottish Enlightenment,”
in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspec-
tive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 267–322.
61. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 53–57.
62. David Hume, “Of the Jealousy of Trade,” Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (Edin-
burgh: R. Fleming, A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1758). Smith and Tucker took a similar
position. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904 [1776]), book 5, ch. 3, §38; Josiah Tucker, The
325 War and Peace
Case of Going to War, for the Sake of Procuring, Enlarging, or Securing of Trade (London: R.
and J. Dodsley, 1763), 35–36.
63. On the Gournay circle’s reading of Hume, see Loïc Charles, “French ‘New Politics’ and the
Dissemination of Hume’s Political Discourses on the Continent,” in David Hume’s Political
Economy, ed. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind (London: Routledge, 2008). Adam
Smith’s work, famously, made little impression in Continental Europe before the 1790s and,
where it was read, the novelty of Smith’s position was rarely grasped. In Germany, for ex-
ample, Smith’s ideas seem at first to have been assimilated to existing cameralist frame-
works. Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse,
1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 133–48.
64. Reinert, Translating Empire, passim.
65. Lucien Bély, La société des princes XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
66. An excellent case for the moderating effects of dynastic sovereignty is made by Charles
Ingrao, “Paul W. Schroeder’s Balance of Power: Stability or Anarchy?” International History
Review 16, no. 4 (1994): 681–700. Theoretical foundations for such a position can be found
in Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power
Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 391–425.
67. Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” In-
ternational Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 251–87.
68. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, 86, 96; C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–
1825 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991 [1969]), 109–14; Israel, Dutch Republic, 936.
69. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars, 187–92; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia
and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978), 110–19; Bruce I. Watson, “Fortifications and the ‘Idea’ of Force in Early Eng-
lish East India Company Relations with India,” Past and Present 88 (1980): 70–87. If war
for trade was more a reality in the Indian Ocean or the Americas than in Europe, even
there its role was limited. In all the companies there were struggles over the utility of
organized violence as a mode of sustaining profit. Company directors were usually crit-
ical of the use of violent tactics in the Indies when these proved expensive. Moreover,
some of the violent actions taken by companies had little to do with immediate commer-
cial advantage, being driven by diplomatic and military rivalries they encountered in
Asia. Relations among Europeans in the Indies never constituted a normless Hobbesian-
ism because actors carried with them, and used eclectically, a battery of claims, practices
and ideas derived from European legal traditions. See Lauren Benton, A Search for Sov-
ereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
70. Ian Kenneth Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and
Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189–92; Martin Wight, “The Ori-
gins of Our States System: Geographical Limits,” in Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 124–25; Garrett Mattingly, “No Peace Beyond
What Line?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 13 (1963): 145–62.
71. Agreements made between the companies could also limit the effects of European war in
Asia, as when François Martin of the French company concluded an unofficial truce with
Thomas Pitt of the EIC during the War of the Spanish Succession. See M. S. Naravane,
Battles of the Honourable East India Company: Making of the Raj (New Delhi: A. P. H. Pub.
Corp., 2006), 151.
72. Georges-Henri Dumont, L’épopée de la Compagnie d’Ostende, 1723–1727 (Brussels: Cri,
2000).
326 Conflict
73. T. C. W. Blanning, “Frederick the Great and Enlightened Absolutism,” in Enlightened Abso-
lutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
74. Harm Klueting, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten: Das auβenpolitische Machtproblem in
der “politischen Wissenschaft” und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot, 1986). There is some debate about the centrality of economic thinking
among Frederick’s motives, but it is clear that he viewed wealth as a key underpinning of
power. See Theodor Schieder, Frederick the Great, trans. Sabina Berkeley and H. M. Scott
(London: Longman, 2000), 90–101, 196–204; Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the
Great (London: Longman, 1996), 40.
75. Some historians focused on the period of the Napoleonic Wars argue that norms formerly
typical of European behavior in the Indies came to be imported into European politics. See
Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a Euro-
pean Context? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of
European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 392; Stuart Woolf,
“French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire,” Past and Present 124 (1989),
96–120.
76. Douglas K. Reading, The Anglo-Russian Commercial Treaty of 1734 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1938), 9; Arthur McCandless Wilson, French Foreign Policy During the
Administration of Cardinal Fleury 1726–1743 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1936), 61–62.
77. A Collection of Treaties of Peace and Commerce (London: J. Baker, 1714), 139–42.
78. H. S. K. Kent, War and Trade in the Northern Seas: Anglo-Scandinavian Economic Relations
in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 2.
79. Ralph Davis, “The Rise of Protection in England, 1689–1786,” Economic History Review 19,
no. 2 (1966): 306–17.
80. Israel, Dutch Primacy, 384–86.
81. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 1:433–36, 440–45
82. D. C. Coleman, “Politics and Economics in the Age of Anne: The Case of the Anglo-French
Trade Treaty of 1713,” in Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, ed. D.
C. Coleman and A. H. John (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 189.
83. Child, New Discourse of Trade, 160–61.
84. A. D. Francis, “John Methuen and the Anglo-Portuguese Treaties of 1703,” Historical Journal 3,
no. 2 (1960): 103–24.
85. Reading, Anglo-Russian Commercial Treaty, 295.
86. H. de Groot, “The Organization of Western European Trade in the Levant, 1500–1800,” in
Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies During the Ancien Régime,
ed. Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1981), 232.
87. The architect of the negotiation, Henry St. John, told Matthew Prior, the chief British ne-
gotiator, that “This is calculated to hinder those prejudices, which our people have been
possessed with against France. . . . When once our people have felt the sweet of carrying on
a trade to France, under reasonable regulations, the artifices of Whiggism will have the less
effect upon them.” See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia
in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 12.
88. Basil Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1932), 206–8.
89. Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (London: Longman,
1983), 136.
327 War and Peace
90. L. Jay Oliva, Misalliance: A Study of French Policy in Russia during the Seven Years’ War
(New York: New York University Press, 1964), 122.
91. Stein and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War, 59–64. Asymmetries in power, however, could not
always be translated into favorable trading regimes. The Anglo-Swedish and Anglo-Danish
treaties of 1661 and 1670, respectively, constitute a telling exception. These treaties estab-
lished free British access to Scandinavian markets, with British merchants to pay only the
same duty as subjects of the Swedish and Danish crowns. By the early eighteenth century,
however, both Baltic powers had adopted trade policies that effectively closed their domes-
tic markets to English wares. Neither the English, nor subsequently the British, crown took
any retaliatory action, despite numerous threats to do so, because Britain remained depen-
dent on the Scandinavian powers for naval stores, because the merchant interest directly
injured by the Danish and Swedish exclusions was minor, and because Denmark and Swe-
den could look to France for diplomatic and military protection. See H. S. K. Kent, War
and Trade in the Northern Seas, 1–13.
92. Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV, 398.
93. On Mesnager, see Thomas J. Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce 1700–1715: A Study
of Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 234–36. On
Moore’s role, see H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), 107. On Gilligan,
see Philip Woodfine, “Sutton, Robert, second Baron Lexington (1661–1723),” Oxford Dictio-
nary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Stein and Stein,
Silver, Trade, and War, 137.
15
Neutrality
Atlantic Shipping in and after the
Anglo-Dutch Wars
Victor Enthoven
For many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British observers, including the jour-
nalist Daniel Defoe and Lewis Morris, Judge-Commissary of New York, the Dutch
were the world’s greatest carriers.1 Extolling the ideology of a free and open seas, the
Dutch and their ships were indispensable in transporting goods and people across the
Atlantic for New World merchants and settlers. On the other side of the North Sea,
however, England (and later Britain) adhered to a different approach to political
economy: one characterized by protectionism, exemplified in the Acts of Navigation,
and often tagged with the sobriquet of “mercantilism.” Charles Wilson argues that such
policies rested on “jealousy, ambition and common sense,” arising at least in part from
English admiration and competition with Dutch commerce and economy.2 An ideo-
logical battle thus unfolded between the Dutch Republic and Great Britain, the two
maritime giants of the early modern world, one that was contested primarily in the
Atlantic.3
At the heart of this ideological battle was controversy over the doctrine of “Free Ship
[makes] Free Goods,” or the inviolability in times of war of enemy goods transported
in neutral bottoms, with the exception of contraband or the materiel of war: weapons,
ammunition, foodstuffs, naval supplies, and metals. The earliest mention of the doc-
trine was in Article 23 of the Treaty of Southampton (1625), which established a mili-
tary alliance between England and the United Provinces against Spain. It proclaimed
that “Merchandizing or commerce however will be opened and allowed everywhere
else, kingdoms, lands and countries of allies, and neutral princes and friends, without
interruption nor disturbance.”4
While such a doctrine was the cornerstone of Dutch overseas trade, especially in the
Atlantic world, during most of the eighteenth centuries, its boundaries and limitations
were forged in the British Admiralty Courts. The British government viewed the problem
328
329 Neutrality
of Dutch illicit trade as primarily a legal rather than commercial or diplomatic problem.
Yet, the conflict between Dutch free trade ideology against the British closed system of
protection and mercantilism was not merely an abstract struggle between rival systems
of law or ideology; rather, its content was determined by the day-to-day engagement of
Dutch entrepreneurs, English judges, and the contours of Anglo-Dutch relations over the
long eighteenth century. I sketch briefly how these two opposing ideologies developed
during the seventeenth century and set the stage for a series of eighteenth-century Anglo-
Dutch conflicts in the Atlantic: the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48), the Seven
Years’ War (1756–63), and the War of American Independence (1775–83). In all three in-
stances, the ideological battle between free and closed seas deepened, eventually giving
rise to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84), which more or less ended the Dutch
maritime role in the Atlantic world. If John Shovlin shows in chapter 14 that overt war
was not inherently the end of European commercial competition, I explore here the role
of neutrality in war, particularly among Dutch carriers, in determining British and Dutch
commercial ideology and policy in the eighteenth century. Dutch attempts to force free
trade in the Atlantic was worked out not necessarily through violence alone but through
the mechanisms of British prize courts; it was thus politics and law—far more than any
abstract ideology or direct and declared conflict—that determined the extent and limits
of protectionism and governance of trade that we so often associate with “mercantilism”
in this period.
Spain and Portugal were the first European powers to put their mark on the vast
Atlantic shores. In feudal tradition and with papal support, they had claimed posses-
sion of the overseas territories as well the Atlantic Ocean itself, as their very own realm
where nothing was allowed to transpire without their approval. In theory, Iberian over-
seas administrations, movement of peoples, and trade and navigation were exclusively
subordinate to royal will, yet in practice, as Regina Grafe shows in chapter 11, things
were far more complicated and decentralized. Nonetheless, it was where state control
over commerce was weakest—Britain and the Netherlands—that Atlantic trade expe-
rienced its greatest and most rapid economic growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.5
Non-Spanish subjects of the Hapsburg Empire, including the Dutch, had limited ac-
cess to overseas territories. In the 1560s, Dutch subjects began to revolt against
Habsburg rule in the Low Countries. In 1581, the States General, the highest executive
body of the liberated Protestant territories, later to be known as the Dutch Republic,
repudiated Philip II (1527–98), king of Spain and Portugal, and his heirs as their over-
lord in perpetuity. Liberated from royal suppression and restrictions, free Dutch citi-
zens started to venture into the Atlantic. After a decade or so, they had established
extensive trade networks spanning the whole Atlantic from West Africa to the New
World and the West Indies.6 The fact that free citizens governed the Dutch Republic
330 Conflict
would have a profound effect on how Dutch entrepreneurs operated in the Western
Hemisphere. They reinvented the joint-stock company and, in the wake of Hugo Gro-
tius (1583–1645) and his seminal anonymously published pamphlet Mare Liberum
(1609), they became the champions of free trade, at least in theory if not always in
practice.7
As a result of the newly established spice trade with Asia, the Dutch East India Com-
pany (VOC) was founded in 1602. The VOC was an incorporated joint-stock company,
a chartered trading company and a war machine. For the States General, the privately
funded VOC became instrumental in their war against the king of Spain by opening a
second front in Asia; in return, the States General had to grant a charter stipulating
exclusive trading rights, reducing shareholders’ risks. In addition, the charter regulated
responsibilities, rights, and the relation between directors and investors. The share-
holders were liable only to the par value of their shares. Thus, the charter had a dual
character: it was a statute, and it stipulated the privileges of the Company.
Following this model, in 1621 the States General granted the Dutch West India Com-
pany (WIC) its charter. This charter also stipulated exclusive trading rights and limited
shareholders liability. Like other joint stocks, this body’s innovation was effectively to
transform working capital into fixed capital committed perpetually to its enterprise.
The combination of permanent capital and the separation of executive powers from
ordinary shareholders made the shares ideal for active trading in the secondary market
that arose on the Amsterdam Beurs (Exchange).8 Yet, as much as it was a financial in-
strument, the WIC, as the preamble of the charter of 1621 made clear, had as its most
important objectives “shipping, trade, and commerce with the West Indies, Africa, and
the Americas.” But this peaceful statement gives a one-sided picture, which does not
represent the company’s activities during the first decades. Initially, the WIC had three
objectives: commerce, privateering, and colonization. Much like the VOC in Asia, the
WIC was an instrument of war in the battle against Habsburg rule by opening a third
front in the Atlantic. This should come as no surprise, since Dutch shipping and trade
could expand in that region only at the expense of the Iberians, and conflict was un-
avoidable. And, finally, overseas settlements should be established and maintained,
preferably at the expense of the enemy. The WIC, however, was never to dominate
Dutch Atlantic commerce. Both in the Dutch Republic and in the Atlantic it lacked the
necessary means to enforce its rights.9
The WIC initially claimed exclusivity over shipping and trade to its overseas settle-
ments, just as every colonial power did, but in the 1630s it did something revolutionary:
it opened most of its chartered territory (with the notable exception of West Africa and
the transatlantic slave trade) to private ventures. Dutch merchants were now free to
pursue direct trade with its Spanish, French, and English colonial neighbors. For the
Dutch ruling elite, including private merchants, municipal, provincial and national
331 Neutrality
representatives, and the Company’s directors, it had become clear that in order to de-
velop the overseas settlements in the New World, notably Dutch Brazil and New Neth-
erland, private investments, knowhow, trade networks, and carrying capacity were
indispensable. After a fierce debate the new free trade policy was concluded and imple-
mented.10 From then on both company ships and private bottoms shuttled between
Dutch ports and Brazil and New Netherland, calling regularly as well at Spanish,
French, and English settlements.11
When private Dutch merchantmen showed up at the foreign settlements, they found
the colonists to be easy pickings. Dutch masters and supercargoes were willing to offer
better prices for commodities such as tobacco, sugar, cochineal, dye woods, and the
like.12 They could supply the settlers, at a reasonable price, with all kinds of consumer
goods, which were in high demand in the colonies, such as textiles, tools, provisions, and
so forth. They were even willing to give the planters credit. As a result, independent
Dutch merchants made effective use of the opportunity of the diverging interests between
the metropolis and the colonists, and before long became the carriers of the Atlantic. In
the eyes of most colonial authorities, however, they were ordinary interlopers.13
In the 1680s, the WIC directors went a step even further. From then on they allowed
foreign ships to trade with the small and barren Dutch islands of St. Eustatius and
Curaçao, which became officially free ports. Ships, particular foreign ships, which had
not departed from a Dutch port, were obliged to pay a 2 percent recognition fee to the
company, on both incoming and outgoing goods. Over time the obligations for foreign
ships changed but were never retracted.14
By the later seventeenth century, English economic thought was fraught with envy
over Dutch mercantile successes, especially in the Atlantic world. Sir Josiah Child,
merchant and economist, for instance, was of the opinion that: “The Dutch, who, are
Masters of the Field in Trade, would carry away the greatest advantage by the planta-
tions.”15 For the English Crown, as for most other colonial powers, such commercial
success threatened its ability to benefit from its overseas possessions. Not trusting its
own subjects to hew to its interests against their own, the English government had to
force reluctant colonists into submission.16 It sought exclusive control over its Ameri-
can possessions, subjecting the overseas settlement to the metropolis, banning them
from trading directly with merchants and mariners from other European nations, and
imposing all sorts of trade regulations, commercial limitations, and exclusions of
groups of merchants, commonly known as the Acts of Navigation.17
After three intense conflicts during the seventeenth century, the relationship between
the Dutch Republic and England changed in 1674. From then on, until 1780, the two
countries were natural allies—referred to as the “the maritime powers”—and this had
firm basis in the formal treaties between the two countries—especially those of 1674,
1675, and 1678. First, on December 10, 1674, the king of England and the States General
332 Conflict
signed a treaty regulating navigation and commerce of the citizens and subjects of the
two countries, who were allowed to sail to each other’s ports, while the colonies were
off limits to each other. One exception were the Dutch West Indian islands of Curaçao
and St. Eustatius that already had the status of free port.18
Article 8 of the 1674 treaty stated that all goods found on ships would “be accounted
clear and free, although the whole lading, or any part thereof, by just title of propriety,
shall belong to the enemies of his Majesty.”19 The treaty firmly established the privilege
of “Free Ships, Free Goods.” Furthermore, Article 7 stipulated that the customary rule
of “infection” would not apply. Under the rule, the presence of any contraband was
presumed to contaminate all goods aboard a neutral ship (and, indeed, the ship itself)
with its illicit character. Consequently, everything would be subject to condemnation
as prize property. But the treaty provided that free ships “shall not, upon pretence of
their being infected by such prohibited goods [namely, contraband as defined by Ar-
ticle 3 of the treaty], be detained, much less confiscated for lawful prize.” Dutch and
English traders could thus afford to take the risk of transporting contraband goods for
France without fearing the forfeiture of their own ships and cargoes.20 The treaty
between the king of England and the States-General on December 30, 1675, followed by
a defensive political alliance forged in 1678, formalized this arrangement.21
The English draft of the 1674 treaty served as the foundation; the Dutch introduced
some minor alterations into the definitive text. Indeed, it is not surprising that England
should have been the first to assert or extend the rights of neutrals. In 1674, the Dutch
remained at war with France, while England was making the most of its neutrality. The
explanatory convention of 1675, by which neutral ships were to be free to trade, even
from one enemy port to another, was also made at the express wish of England.22
After the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14) Dutch security policy
on the Continent was rather straightforward: its goal was to establish several defensive
lines to add depth to its security. The first was a perimeter of two dozen or so forts,
fortified towns, and strongholds along the border. Most of the standing army was bil-
leted in these strongholds. The second line of defense was the Hollandse waterlinie—in
case of an external attack large parts of the country could be strategically flooded, iso-
lating Holland from the rest of the country. As a result of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) a
third line of defense was added, especially aimed against a French attack. In a separate
Barrier Treaty, signed in 1715, the Dutch Republic was allowed to billet garrisons in
eight towns in the Austrian Netherlands.23
In an age when relations between Great Britain and France deteriorated rapidly, the
Dutch were now able to maintain a policy of strict neutrality. After the signing of the
1674 treaty, Dutch maritime interests were secured by close ties with Great Britain.
They were, as “maritime powers,” natural allies, not only against the European powers
but also out of self-interest since both were maritime nations that derived their wealth
333 Neutrality
and power from the sea. Generally, they could be expected to collaborate with each
other, effectively constituting a single unit on the international scene rather than two
separate ones.
The War of the Austrian Succession, also known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, started as
a conflict between Great Britain and Spain. On June 3, 1744, however, France entered
the war. It did not take long for British naval supremacy to sever French lines of mari-
time communication. This presented opportunities for dozens of entrepreneurs on
Dutch St. Eustatius. In 1745 and 1746, they equipped 262 and 290 ships respectively to
one of the French sugar islands. In an attempt to deceive the British war ships and
privateers, the Statian ships carried papers, which stated their destination as one of the
Dutch colonies in Guyana.24 In 1745, at least 168 Statian vessels reached Guadeloupe. In
1745, a dozen ships from St. Eustatius, valued at 87,353 pesos, fell victim to the British
on allegations of illicit trading with the French. Despite these losses, trade with the
French islands increased. In the years 1746, 1747, and 1748, on average ten million
pounds of sugar were re-exported to the Netherlands from St. Eustatius. Merchants in
the Dutch Republic benefited also from the war. The Middelburgse Commercie Com-
pagnie (MCC), for instance, specially equipped several ships to sail directly to
St. Eustatius, with china, furniture, sailcloth, and specie. Furthermore, French mer-
chants living in Holland obtained licenses to sail to the French islands. One of them
was François Libault of Amsterdam, who sent at least three ships to St. Dominque in
1744–47.25 Several of the neutral Dutch ships sailing to the French West Indies, how-
ever, were captured by British privateers and condemned.26
British officials certainly noticed the activities at St. Eustatius. On August 17, 1746,
Britain’s Minister-Plenipotentiary at The Hague, Robert Trevor, Viscount Hampden
(1706–83), wrote to the States General:
The King has again received information that the Governor of the Island of
St. Eustatius, by an odious predilection for the enemies of his Majesty, continuously
provides the inhabitants of the French islands not only all sorts of provisions, but
also weapons and warlike munitions; with everything their arms provisioners need
for building; his Majesty has ordered the undersigned minister to thereupon make
the appropriate representation to Your High Excellencies.27
Johannes Pietersz Heyliger, commander of St. Eustatius (1743–52), washed his hands in
innocence and replied that from the island no activities were conducted against the
commercial Treaty of 1674. After all, as neutrals they were allowed to trade with the
French sugar islands. Furthermore, Statians merchants had not shipped any war provi-
sions to the French. On the contrary, tens of thousand of pounds of gunpowder had
been shipped to the British colonies.28
334 Conflict
The Dutch government complained frequently about the illegal activities of British
privateers. After numerous incidents, in April 1743, King George II issued several Acts
ordering all privateer captains to sign a statement indicating they were familiar and
would comply with the Treaty of 1674. This new requirement failed to solve the prob-
lem, however, and complaints continued throughout the conflict.29
At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War,
there was a powerful British interest present in Dutch politics. Anna of Hannover
(1709–59)—the second child and eldest daughter of King George II of Great Britain,
and sister to the future George III—acted as guardian for her son, the infant Stadholder
in conjunction with an informal steering committee, the principal members of which
were Willem Bentinck (1704–74); Heer van Rhoon en Pendrecht, dedicated by Prime
Minister Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693–1768); Duke of Newcastle, as the main adviser;
Pieter Steyn, the new Pensionary of Holland (1749–72); and Ludwig Ernst von Braun-
schweig-Wolfenbüttel (1718–88), Duke of Kurland, known to the English as Brunswick.
This group was strongly pro-British. During the Seven Years’ War, Bentinck and Bruns-
wick had been eager to augment the army and strengthen the Republic’s fortifications
against a French threat. By contrast, the States party, later to become the Patriot fac-
tion, especially at Amsterdam, gave priority to the interest of commerce, shipping, and
colonies, and was pervaded, like the merchants and shipping interest, by widespread
anti-British sentiments, fueled by the British attack on maritime trade in Europe and
in the West Indies.30
Dutch shipping services were vital to the successful French conduct of the war, espe-
cially at sea. By the mid-eighteenth century, France had an impressive fleet of war ships
and a large merchant marine maintaining the lines of communications of an extensive
empire. However, France was still dependent on specific ship timber coming from the
Baltic, especially pine trunks to serve as masts. Dutch entrepreneurs became specialists
in the supply of such unwieldy timbers from the Baltic. Amsterdam remained the main
source of supply of mast timber to west European dockyards. Furthermore, the neutral
Dutch flag could be used in wartime to ship native-grown French timber from the
depots along the French coast to the dockyards, especially to those in the north such as
Brest.31
It was thus the Dutch servicing of French colonies that determined British responses
to maritime affairs. The first Dutch ship to be condemned was the America, master
Louis Ferret and equipped by Jan van Eeghen of Amsterdam; Phillip Yorke (1690–1764),
1st Earl of Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor (1737–56), and a close confidante of Prime
Minister Newcastle, as Lord Commissioner of Prize Appeals, citing that it had been
freighted for French account.32 After this ruling, direct voyages from the Dutch
Republic to one of the French West India islands were out of the question, but the
Dutch had never relied on such direct trade anyway. Here the Dutch settlements of
335 Neutrality
St. Eustatius and Curaçao were preeminently useful. In October 1756, a New York
mariner reported seeing six French sloops lying at Curaçao “afraid to stur out of port,
being told that the seas swarmed with English privateers.”33 British observers, in-
cluding Joseph Yorke (1724–92), English envoy, later ambassador at The Hague and
son of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, were well aware that much of what came home to
Dutch ports from St. Eustatius and Curaçao was really the produce of the French West
India settlements.34
The New York judge Lewis Morris complained that the Dutch islands had become
little more than “public factors for the enemy.” They transshipped all sorts of provisions
to the French. In June 1756 a New York master saw five ships arriving at St. Eustatius
with provisions from Ireland. Two years later a Waterford merchant declared that
50,000 to 60,000 barrels of provisions had been sent to the island. Nearly all the food
went to the French.35 Despite the fact that in January 1759 the British conquered Gua-
deloupe and opened an illicit trade to Martinique, the re-export of sugar from
St. Eustatius increased significantly.36
One of the victims was the Dutch vessel Sara & Ahron, master Erasmus Kiewijk. In
the Summer of 1758 the ship was captured by a British privateer and brought to Barba-
dos. On the island, master Kiewijk protested against this unlawful action. In the pro-
test, made by the notary Richard Husband and translator Paul Bredford, he claimed the
release of his ship revering to the Treaty of 1674. All in vain; ship and cargo were con-
fiscated and even an receipt was denied to him.37
Trade with the French came at a high price for St. Eustatius. A distressed Jan de
Windt, commander of St. Eustatius 1754–75, wrote: “In spite of all my efforts to main-
tain good relations with the British of the neighbouring islands . . . their privateers are
committing blatant acts of hostility against our ships.” Many more complaints fol-
lowed. During the first few months of 1758, the British confiscated more than sixty
Statian vessels. By 1761, 238 Statian vessels had been seized, causing damages worth 1.2
million pesos, or over 3 million guilders, even though many merchants had not yet
handed in their claims, and the war would last for another two years.38
From the war’s very beginning, the Lord Commissioners of Prize Appeals had
adopted the “Rule of the War of 1756,” which made a distinction between “fair” and
“unfair” neutral traders. The contrast essentially was between trading with an enemy
and trading for him. In its basic form, this policy claimed that neutrals could not expect
to be allowed to trade freely during war in areas from which they were excluded in
peace. In turn, Britain would not trade with neutral nations who were also trading with
the enemy. The rationale behind this rule was that the neutral nation was aiding the
enemy. The British Prize Courts also ruled that the treaties concerning neutral rights
did not apply to America. In practice, British courts had annulled the work of the dip-
lomats in the Treaty of 1674.39
336 Conflict
One of the most prolific pamphleteers in England defending the Rule of the War of
1756 was James Marriott (1730–1803), a lawyer educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
For him the Dutch were masters of disguise:
Every Subject of Holland, that acts as a real Dutchman, will most certainly be treat-
ed as such, but the Dutchman who puts upon himself as borrowed character, has
little Reason to complain, if he is treated like what he appears to be, the Deserter of
his own Country, and the Enemy of its Ally [England].40
Albertus Ploos van Amstel, a lawyer from an Amsterdam merchant family, argued in
response that the Dutch had a perfect right as a neutral power to trade in wartime and
exploit the benefits arising from whatever treaties that politicians had concluded.41
In Holland, the origin of the Treaty of 1674 was not forgotten. In 1756, Willem
Bentinck wrote to Prime Minister Newcastle:
In 1674, when this treaty was made, the Republicq had just made up with England
and was at war with France. The articles, which stipulate free ship, free goods and
determine what is counterband and what not, were at that time to the advantage of
England and prejudical of the Republiek, and the Republiek had then as strong rea-
sons for not agreeing to these articles, if she had consulted her present interest then
alone, as England may at present have for not executing them litterally. I do not
suppose my opinion, which in the station I am in must pass for a partial one, will
have any influence. But I declare that, if England and the Republicq changed situa-
tions, I should in the like case plead for England in favour of the letter of the treaty
just as I now do for the Republiek. For my determination is never to make nor tot
admit of commentary’s treaty’s. I heartily wish my apprehension may be groundless
and hope your Grace will forgive the freedom with which I open my self to you.42
At the opening stages of the war in 1756, Great Britain operated carefully, so to avoid
giving offense to the Dutch at sea. During the summer of 1756 there were two fairly
spectacular seizures of Dutch timber carriers from the Baltic. But an arrangement
seems to have made whereby the cargoes were purchased by English dockyard con-
tractors. The Dutch owners of these cargoes would not particularly mind where the
cargoes were sold, provided they would make a profit. The seizures of Dutch ships
continued during the late summer, and began again in the spring and summer of 1757.
The victims were still mainly Dutch ships engaged in the French coastwise trade and a
few in the trade between the Baltic and French dockyards.43
By the spring of 1758, captures of Dutch ships by English privateers increased, in ef-
fect launching an all-out war on the neutral trade between Amsterdam and Rotterdam
337 Neutrality
and European settlements in the Caribbean. At one moment in 1758, seventy-four

Dutch vessels were lying idle in British or colonial ports, awaiting process in Admiralty
Courts, of which seventeen had been trading directly to or from French Caribbean
settlements. In the years 1757 and 1758 more than a hundred Dutch West Indiamen
were seized by British privateers. The tensions between the two countries deepened,
for the British now began to seize ships of Suriname. Suriname was supposed to have
no commercial relations with the French colonies, and there could be no excuse for
interrupting its trade with the metropolis. The seizure of the Suriname ships was in
Dutch public opinion the crowning proof of Britain’s determination to destroy all
Dutch commerce. Even for Joseph Yorke, the British guerre de course had spiraled out
of control: “[British] plundering & robbing upon the high seas by authority from the
government is a crying abuse.”44 The English government took on trust the innocence
of this trade and got the ships released by offering to pay the captor’s cost. It turned out
later that some of the cargoes, and even the ships, which purported to come from Suri-
name, were really from the French settlement of Cayenne.45
The crisis, however, did not develop into an Anglo-Dutch maritime war. The Dutch
were willing to give up direct trade to the French West Indies, at any rate on French
account. That is to say: “We [the States General] have given up the direct trade to the
French colonies, without admitting that the Treaty of 1674 does not extend to the West
Indies.”46 So, “Free Ships, Free Goods” would no longer be interpreted by the Dutch as
applying outside European waters. Furthermore, extra Dutch convoy vessels were
equipped, to be used simply as convoys, according to accepted convention. No convoy
protection would be given to their merchants trading directly to the French West India
islands or to issue licenses to these merchants, or to intercede through diplomatic
channels on behalf of subjects who suffered losses by participating in it. On the one
hand, Dutch ships trading directly to any French settlements, with free passes provided
by the French, were regarded even by their own government as having been hired to
France. On the other hand, with the Dutch threatening to form an anti-British coali-
tion of neutrals, the British government felt obliged to limit the activities of the private
ships-of-war it had tacitly encouraged—via the Admiralty Courts—in the early stages
of the war. Accordingly, the Privateers’ Act of June 1759 imposed restrictions on the
issue of letters of marque; thus owners of commissioned ships could no longer offer
themselves as guarantors of the conduct of their own ventures, commanders were
required to provide more detailed declarations in the Prize Court as to the character-
istics if their vessel, and, most significantly, commissions granted for vessels of less
than one hundred tons burthen, with fewer than twelve four-pound guns and forty
men, were deemed null and void from June 1, 1759. In addition, the future issue of let-
ters of marque for such vessels was to be obligatory no longer but at the discretion of
the Lords of the Admiralty. The number of Dutch prizes declined rapidly.47
338 Conflict
By the 1770s, the United Provinces were a deeply divided country. Put simply, the
Orangists were conservative, pro-army, and pro-British; the Patriots embraced the new
ideas of civic liberties, were pro-navy, and anti-British, and eventually became pro-
French. Neither party dominated politics. This paralyzed decision making, particularly
in foreign affairs and security policy.48
In addition to this political gridlock, the War of American Independence left the
Dutch in a strategic quandary. Compliance with the demands of Britain would involve
the Dutch Republic in a land war with France. To have to choose for the American
rebels and their French allies would lead to the disruption of Dutch trade and naviga-
tion, and the loss of the empire. But there was another reason why the United Prov-
inces should keep out of the war. The Dutch were still the most efficient carriers of the
world, transmitting the products of Europe to all parts of the earth, and vice versa, but
such supremacy required they remain neutral. From the instant they should become
involved in the war, their ships would be liable to seizure by the belligerents, and their
trade and navigation would decline accordingly. To stay neutral was the only option.49
As conflict in British North America loomed, the colonials were in great need of
gunpowder, arms, and all sorts of other provisions essential for opposing British colo-
nial rule. On October 19, 1774, the British government expressly prohibited the expor-
tation of warlike stores and ammunition to the American colonies. A few days later
HMS Welles appeared before the Texel roadstead (the entrance to the Amsterdam har-
bor), effectively blockading North American ships.50 Under British pressure, the States
General forbade the export of war supplies to the rebels. A covert way to get ammuni-
tion to the Americas was to load it for the coast of Africa and then take it to St. Eusta-
tius, where “their cargoes, being the most proper assortments, are instantly bought up
by the American agents.” By the end of 1774 it was noted that there had lately been a
prodigious increase in the trade from St. Eustatius.51 The British, French, and Prussian
diplomatic representative in The Hague, Sir Joseph Yorke, abbé Desnoyers (chargé
d’affaires 1774–76), and Friedrich Wilhelm von Thulemeier (1733–1811; extraordinaris
envoyé 1763–88), were aware of this.52
Business boomed at St. Eustatius, which by now had become the Golden Rock. In
1779 alone, more than 12,000 hogsheads of tobacco and 1.5 million ounces of indigo
were shipped to St. Eustatius from North America in exchange for arms, powder, naval
stores, and other goods from Europe. That year the export was valued at 3.7 million
pesos, or 9.25 million guilders.53 Gunpowder generated exorbitant profits—in excess of
120 percent. No wonder merchants were lured into this high-risk but lucrative trade.
Dozens of Dutch merchant houses were active in the elusive business of arms ship-
ments to the rebels, but three were of particular importance: Crommelin and Zonen,
Nicolaas and Jacob van Staphorst, and De Neufville and Zoon.54 Admiral Rodney
would later declare: “This rock [St. Eustatius] of only six miles in length and three in
339 Neutrality
breadth has done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies
and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.”55 The British were unable to
stop this trade because the weapons and ammunition were shipped to a Dutch overseas
settlement and as such were not contraband.
Hostilities between Britain and France began in June 1778; this brought serious
trouble for the Dutch. There were many complaints about the capture and molestation
of Dutch vessels by British men-of-war and privateers. By the end of September,
twenty-nine Dutch ships had been taken; by October, the number had risen to forty-
two. For the Dutch, of course, this was in violation of the “Free ships, Free goods”
principle. No wonder the pro-British lobby in the Netherlands was rapidly losing
ground. The British, though, released the Dutch ships, except those that had naval and
warlike stores on board.56
During the fall of 1778, merchants from various Holland ports requested the States
General and the Stadholder, as Admiral-General, for protection of their ships. The
fear of provoking Great Britain was too great, and in November the States of Holland
refused the employment of armed convoys. The pro-British party had triumphed. For
the French government, however, this was a breach of neutrality, and with the secret
endorsement of the city of Amsterdam, they let the States General know that His
Majesty would be compelled to suspend the advantages that the United Provinces
enjoyed as neutrals. By January 1779, a fleet of around three hundred merchantmen
with ordinary cargos bound for France had assembled at the Texel, and nine war ships
were detailed to take this fleet to its destination. Fifteen vessels were refused this pro-
tection because they had naval munitions on board: typical contraband. Despite the
fact that these fifteen ships had mingled among the other ships, the fleet passed the
English Channel without incident. In return, all of the French edicts against Dutch
commerce were repealed, and the sums that the French customs houses had levied
above the usual rate were returned to the Dutch merchants. Nonetheless, this did not
end the matter.57
In November 1779, the States General agreed that ships not carrying contraband like
war or naval stores should sail under the protection of several men-of-war. One fleet
was destined for the West Indies, another for southern Europe. With the vessels of the
combined fleet were intermixed about twenty vessels laden with contraband. The
Dutch convoy, with three ships of the line and three frigates under command of Rear
Admiral Frederik S. van Bylandt, met six ships of the line and six frigates under Admi-
ral Charles Fielding off the Isle of Wight. After a short exchange of fire, Fielding took
several vessels whose cargo consisted of naval stores from the outnumbered and out-
gunned Dutch. The convoy was then allowed to continue its voyage. When the news of
the incident became known in Holland on January 8, 1780, a great outcry arose. It was
thought impossible that Britain, still the friend and ally, should have taken such steps.58
340 Conflict
It was clear that from this point on for the British government, the Dutch would be
treated like all other neutral states not privileged by treaty, and all particular stipula-
tions respecting the freedom of navigation and commerce in time of war contained in
the treaties, especially in the Treaty of 1674, were revoked. The commanders of the Brit-
ish warships and privateers were ordered:
to seize and detain all ships and vessels belonging to the subjects of the States Gen-
eral when they shall be found to have on board any effects belonging to the enemies
of his majesty, or effects which are considered as contraband by the general law of
nations.59
To no one’s surprise, the mood in the United Provinces became anti-British. The result
was that on April 24, 1780, the States General resolved to grant convoy protection to all
cargos and adopted a resolution to fit-out fifty-two ships of the line and frigates for the
protection of commerce and navigation.
After the Van Bylandt-Fielding incident to the States General, it became crystal clear
that maintaining the principle pronounced in the Treaty of 1674—that the navigation
of neutrals powers should remain as free and unobstructed in time of war as in that of
peace—would be impossible. But then, two neutral Russian vessels carrying corn were
seized in the Mediterranean by the Spaniards. Spain was trying to keep all provisions
from Gibraltar, which they had under siege. To Empress Catherine II of Russia, it was
clear no country owned a navy sufficiently large and effective to cope with the British,
and that the only way to again render the seas free and secure was to join the naval
forces of the various interested neutral nations. On February 26, 1780, the empress sent
secretly to various neutral governments a plan to form a coalition.60
In April, the States General was formally invited to join Catherine’s crusade for neu-
tral rights. In response, the British government made it perfectly clear to The Hague
that such a move might lead to war between Britain and the United Provinces. The
threat succeeded for a time in preventing an official Dutch reaction to the proposed
convention. Holland, led by Amsterdam, however, continued to make overtures to
Russia. By the end of October, five of the seven provinces had voted in favor of the Rus-
sian plan, and it became clear that it was only a matter of time before the Dutch would
join the League of the Armed Neutrality. For the British, this was unacceptable. The
Dutch navy, it is true, was utterly ineffective, but under the protection of this coalition
Dutch commerce could not only do immeasurable damage to Britain’s commercial
interests but also, by the undisturbed furnishing of naval stores to Spain and France as
well as ammunition to the American rebels, the foes of Britain would be considerably
strengthened, while Britain had to depend entirely upon herself in the struggle with
France, Spain, and her former American colonies. On December 16, 1780, the British
341 Neutrality
government learned of the States General’s decision to join the League. For the Cab-
inet, the Dutch decision was equivalent to entering the war on the side of France and
Spain. On December 20, the British government sent to Yorke a manifesto severing
diplomatic relations and declaring war on the Dutch Republic. The Fourth Anglo-
Dutch War ended Dutch neutrality, the Treaty of 1674, and the cornerstone of Dutch
overseas trade, that of “Free Ships, Free Goods.”61
Around the middle of the seventeenth century Dutch and English political economy
started to drift apart. Based on the idea of the free seas, the WIC did something revo-
lutionary: it opened most of its chartered territory to private ventures, and Dutch mer-
chants pursued direct trade with its Spanish, French, and English colonial neighbors.
For the Dutch ruling elite it had become clear that to develop the overseas settlements
in the New World, private investments, knowhow, trade networks, and carrying ca-
pacity were indispensable. Over time the Dutch became the carriers of the Atlantic
world. English political economy, characterized by its protectionism, singled out the
Dutch as an ideal to admired and a competitor to be feared. Between the Dutch Repub-
lic and Great Britain an ideological struggle unfolded, one which did not necessarily
take the form of overt warfare but which was waged in legal and political arenas
instead. The Atlantic became the main battleground where these opposing economic
ideologies and systems were contested. The pivot of this ideological battle evolved
around the concept “Free Ship [makes] Free Goods.”
On the one hand, the doctrine of “Free Ship, Free Goods” was the cornerstone of
Dutch overseas trade during most of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the
boundaries and limitations of this concept were forged in the British Admiralty Courts.
During the eighteenth century conflicts of the War of the Austrian Succession, the
Seven Years’ War, and the War of American Independence, this ideological battle deep-
ened and eventually lead to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, which more or less ended
Dutch maritime role in the Atlantic world.
Dutch illicit trade in the Atlantic world, at least in Spanish, French, and British eyes,
followed the ebbs and flows of war and peace, with the free ports of Curaçao and St.
Eustatius at its center. The War of the Austrian Succession opened new opportunities,
especially for Curaçao and St. Eustatius. After all, the Dutch were neutral in the con-
flict. Despite the 1674 Treaty of Navigation and Commerce, which secured the doctrine
of “Free Ships, Free Goods,” dozens of neutral Dutch ships were captured by British
men-of-war and privateers. The Seven Years’ War was for St. Eustatius in many ways a
repetition of the War of the Austrian Succession, but on a much larger scale.
In response to these developments, the Lord Commissioners of Prize Appeals
adopted the Rule of the War of 1756, which, as stated earlier, made a distinction between
the “fair” and “unfair” neutral traders. They made a distinction between trading with
an enemy and trading for him. In effect they had annulled the Treaty of 1674.
342 Conflict
Finally, during the War of American Independence, Dutch merchant houses sup-
plied the North Americans with war supplies. The British were unable to stop this
trade, because the weapons and ammunition were shipped to a Dutch overseas settle-
ment and as such were no contraband. The British, on the other hand, interrupted
Dutch contraband trade with France after this country had entered the conflict 1778.
After it became clear the States General would accept the Declaration of Armed Neu-
trality, for Whitehall there was no other way out to declare war in December 1780. The
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War ended Dutch neutrality. By then, the Treaty of 1674, and the
cornerstone of Dutch overseas trade, that of “Free Ships, Free Goods,” had become
obsolete.
By then, ironically, Dutch free trade doctrine defying protectionism was widely sup-
ported in European political economy. The French philosopher Guillaume Thomas
François Raynal (1713–96), for instance, pictured an enticing image St. Eustatius. For
him the barren island, supported by illicit trade and smuggling, had overcome the
odious yoke of monopoly that weighed heavy on the neighboring islands. Raynal saw
its role in the Seven Years’ War as a general emporium of the French Antilles, which
welcomed merchants in its roadstead, under the safeguard of freedom of access and
trade, irrespective of nationality.62 Likewise, for the Scottish political economists Adam
Smith (1723–90)63 and Adam Anderson (1692/3–1765), the island stood as tangible
proof of how, in a condition of free trade, profitable commerce could thrive even in
conditions of natural sterility or indeed warfare.64 By 1766 even the British state began
to see the wisdom in such an approach, opening free ports in the West Indies, imitating
rather than competing with the models established by St. Eustatius and Curaçao.65
NOTES
1. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), 192; C. M. Hough, Reports of Cases in
the Vice-Admiralty of the Province of New York and in the Court of Admiralty of the State of
New York, 1715–1788 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925), 64–65; Richard Pares,
Colonial Blockade and Neutral Rights, 1739–1763 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), 118.
2. Charles Wilson, Mercantilism (London: Routledge, 1958); Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade:
International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2005); Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and
the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970); Lars Magnus-
son, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 97;
Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1673), ed.
G. Glark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1.
3. Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World,
1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 161–62; Johannes Postma and
Victor Enthoven, eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping,
1585–1817, The Atlantic World: Europe, Africa and the Americas no. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
343 Neutrality
4. “Le negoce, ou commerce, sera cependant ouvert et permis par tout ailleurs, aux roy-
aulmes, villes, terres et pays des alliez, et des princes, et amiz neutres, sans interrup-
tion, ny destourbier.” Llewellyn A. Atherley-Jones and Hugh H. L. Bellot, Commerce in
War (London: Methuen, 1907), 284–87; European Treaties Bearing on the History of the
United States and Its Dependencies, to 1648, ed. Frances G. Davenport (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Institution, 1917), 290–99, no. 33, Treaty of offensive and defensive alli-
ance between the United Netherlands and Great Britain concluded at Southampton,
September 7/17, 1625, 290–99; C. Smit, “Vrij schip, vrij goed,” in Economisch-Histo-
rische opstellen, geschreven voor Prof. Dr. Z.W. Sneller (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1947),
75–88.
5. Claudia Schnurmann, Europa trifft Amerika. Atlantische Wirtschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit,
1492–1783 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1998); John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World:
Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006),
117–52; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe:
Atlantic Trade, Institutional change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review
95, no. 3 (2005): 546–79, esp. 563.
6. Victor Enthoven, “Early Dutch Expansion in the Atlantic Region,” in Postma and Enthoven,
Riches from Atlantic Commerce, 38–39.
7. Erik Thomson, “The Dutch Miracle, Modified. Hugo Grotius’s Mare Librum, Commercial
Governance and Imperial War in the Early-Seventeenth Century,” Grotiana 30 (2009):
107–30; Jacob Soll, “Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political
Economy in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 2
(2009): 215–38.
8. Henk den Heijer, De geoctrooieerde compagnie: De VOC en de WIC als voorlopers van de
naamloze vennootschap, Ars Notariatus no. 128 (Deventer: Kluwer, 2005); Victor Enthoven,
“Joint-Stock Company,” History of World Trade Since 1450, ed. John J. McCusker (Farming-
ton Hill, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005); Lodewijk Petman, De bakermat van de
Beurs: Hoe in zeventiende-eeuws Amsterdam de moderne aandelenhandel ontstond (Amster-
dam: Atlas, 2011), 53, 218,
9. Henk den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” in Postma and Enthoven,
Riches from Atlantic Commerce, 80–85.
10. Hermann Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien. Ein Kapitel aus der Kolonial-
geschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1921), 285–303; Henk den
Heijer, De geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2002), 45; Jaap Jacobs, New
Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America, The Atlantic World: Europe,
Africa, and the Americas, no. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3:205.
11. Jaap A. Jacobs, “De scheepvaart en handel van de Nederlandse Republiek op Nieuw-
Nederland, 1609–1675” (master’s thesis, University of Leiden, 1989). The thesis is available
at the Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam; Wätjen, Das holländische Kolonial-
reich in Brasilien, 331–34; Nationaal Archief, The Hague, (NA), Archief van de Staten Gen-
eraal (SG) (liassen admiraliteiten) no. 5512, Calculatie wat incomsten de Ho: Mo: Heeren,
March 20, 1634; Henk den Heijer, “Het Recht van de Sterkste in de Polder: Politieke en
Economische Strijd tussen Amsterdam en Zeeland over de Kwestie Brazilië, 1630-1654,” in
In Harmonie in Holland: Het Poldermodel van 1500 tot Nu, ed. Dennis Bos, Maurits Ebben,
and Henk te Velde (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2007), 72–92; Alexander Bick, “Governing
the Sea: the Dutch West India Company and Commercial Politics, 1618-1645” (PhD thesis,
Princeton University, 2012).
344 Conflict
12. L. Lee, “American Cochineal in European Commerce, 1526–1625,” Journal of Modern His-
tory 23, no. 3 (1951): 205–24.
13. Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989), 236–44. For Dutch commercial contacts with Virginia and Barbados, see: Victor
Enthoven and Wim Klooster, “The Rise and Fall of the Virginia-Dutch Connection in the
Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, ed.
Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011),
90–127; and Ch. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the
Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
14. NA, Collectie Verspreide West-Indische Stukken no. 172, Resoluties van Heren X en
Staten-Generaal betreffende de betaling van recognitie door vreemde schepen, 1675–1750;
Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795, Caribbean Series
no. 18 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 64–65.
15. Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. (1693; repr., London, 1740), 125.
16. Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and the West Indies 1574–1738, ed.
W. Noel Sainsbury, J. W. Fortescue, and Cecil Headlam, 44 vols. (London, 1860–1953, repr.
1964) (hereafter CSP); America and the West Indies, 1661–8, 542/3, Answer of Sir Ellis
Leighton, Secretary, by order of the Royal [African] Company to the petition of the Repre-
sentatives of Barbadoes, January 23, 1668; Christian J. Koot, “A “Dangerous Principle”: Free
Trade Discourses in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands, 1650-1689,” Early Ameri-
can Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5, no. 1 (2007): 153.
17. Dorothy Burne Goebel, “The ‘New England Trade’ and the French West Indies, 1763–1774:
A Study in Trade Politics,” William and Mary Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1963): 331–72; Oliver
M. Dickerson, Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1974); Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939).
18. NA, Archieven van de Staten-Generaal (SG) no. 12589.145, Akte van Tractaat, December
10, 1674; The Consolidated Treaty Series, ed., Clive R. Parry (Dobbs Ferry NY: Oceana
1969), 13:255, Treaty of Navigation and Commerce, December 10, 1674.
19. Parry, Consolidated Treaty Series, 13:255.
20. Tara Helffman, “Commerce on Trial: Neutral Rights and Private Warfare in the Seven
Years’s War,” in Trade and War: The Neutrality of Commerce in the Inter-State System, ed.
Koen Stapelbroek (Helsinki, 2011), 23–24, available on the web page HELDA: https://helda.
helsinki.fi.
21. NA, SG no. 12589.163, Akte van Tractaat, December 30, 1675; NA, SG no. 12589.168, Akten
van Tractaat, January 16, 1676; NA, SG no. 12589.172, March 3, 1678; Hugh Dunthorne, The
Maritime Powers, 1721–1740: A Study of Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Age of Walpole (Lon-
don: London School of Economics/Garland, 1986), 12.
22. Pares, Colonial Blockade, 180; Helffman, “Commerce on Trial,” 24.
23. Olaf van Nimwegen, De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden als grote mogendheid: Buiten-
landse politiek en oorlogvoering in de eerste helft van de achttiende eeuw en in het bijzonder
tijdens de Oostenrijkse Successieoorlog, 1740–1748 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2002).
24. NA, Archief van de Nieuwe West-Indische Compagnie (NWIC) no. 1187, no. 120, Notifica-
tie, December 11, 1746; NA, NWIC no. 1187, no. 121, Wij Johannes Pietersz Heyliger, Decem-
ber 16, 1746; NA, NWIC no. 1187, NA, no. 126, Memorie, January 25, 1747; NWIC no. 1187,
no. 124 and 125, Extract getrokken uijt alle de manifesten, 1745–46.
25. NA, NWIC no. 1187, no. 126, Memorie, January 25, 1747; C. Reinders Folmer-van Prooijen, Van
Goederenhandel naar slavenhandel: De Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, 1720-1755,
345 Neutrality
Werken uitgegeven door het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen no. 10
(Middelburg: Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen, 2000), 142; Klooster,
Illicit Riches, 92–93, 226; L. Knappert, Geschiedenis van Bovenwindsche eilanden in de
achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1979), 221–22; Stadsarchief Amsterdam (SAA),
Archief van de Notarissen ter Standplaats Amsterdam [5075] (NA) no. 10,231 f. 204-05, March
25, 1745 and no. 10,239 f. 171, March 11, 1747.
26. Carl E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,
1739-1748, Studies in Maritime History no. 10 (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1991), 197; SAA, NA no. 10,234 f. 1,018, December 21, 1745; no. 8,975 f. 614, June 24,
1746; no. 11,306 f. 15, February 2, 1747.
27. Le Roy ayant reçu des informations réitérées, que le Gouverneur de l’Isle de St. Eustache,
par une prédilection odieuse pour les enemis de Sa Majesté, fournit continuellement aux
habitans des isles françoises, non seulement toutes sortes de vivres, mais même d’armes, et
de munitions de guerre; avec tout ce dont ils ont besoin pour la construction de leurs
armateurs; Sa Majesté a ordonné à son soussigné ministre de faire là-dessus des représenta-
tions convenables à Vos Hautes Puissances. NA, SG no. 5965 (liassen Engeland), Robert
Trevor to States General, August 17, 1746.
28. NA, NWIC no. 1187, no. 110, Johannes Pietersz Heyliger to chamber Zeeland, December 17,
1746; NA, NWIC no. 1187, no. 119, Johannes Pietersz Heyliger to Heren X, February 27, 1747;
NA, NWIC no. 1187, no. 121, Jan de Windt to Heren X, December 16, 1746; NA, NWIC no.
1187, no. 123, Jan de Windt to Heren X, December 16, 1746; Victor Enthoven, “‘That
Abominable Nest of Pirates.’ St. Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680–780,” Early
American Studies 10, no. 2 (2012), 273.
29. Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 197-98; British Library, London (BL), Add. 36,208 (Hard-
wicke Papers) f. 152.
30. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 1080–81; A. J. C. M. Gabriëls, De heren als dienaar en de dienaar als
heer. Het stadhoudelijk stelsel in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw, Hollandse Histo-
rische Reeks no. 14 (The Hague: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1990); A. Porta,
Joan en Gerrit Corver: De Politieke macht van Amsterdam, 1702–1748 (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1975), 235.
31. Alice C. Carter, The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years War (London: Macmillan,
1971), 104, 110, 111.
32. BL, Add. 36,208 (Hardwicke Papers) f. 178. Cited in Pares, Colonial Blockade, 198; Neder-
landsche Jaarboeken (1758), 934.
33. T. J. Truxes, Defying Empire:Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008), 60–61.
34. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), State Papers 84 (Foreign, Holland) no. 473, Yorke to
Whitehall, March 30, 1759; TNA, SP 84/480, Yorke to Whitehall, January 31, 1758; Carter,
Dutch Republic in Europe, 108; Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the
Guianas, 1680–1791, ed. Maria J. L. van Yperen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 210.
35. Truxes, Defying Empire, 57–58; Wim Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas,
1600-1800,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents,
1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 171–73; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 93.
36. NA, NWIC no. 1190, Jan de Windt to Heren X, December 24, 1759; Cees D. M. J. Leebeek,
“Sint Eustatius als Caraibische stapelmarkt. Handel en scheepvaart tijdens de Zevenjarige
Oorlog, 1756–63” (paper presented at the University of Leiden, 2006).
346 Conflict
37. SAA, NA no. 10,286 f. 1018, November 28, 1758.

38. Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, 210; L. Knappert, Geschiedenis van Bovenwindsche
eilanden in de achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1979), 261; NA, NWIC no. 1190,
no. 46, Jan de Windt et al. to Heren X, June 5, 1758; NA, NWIC no. 1190, no. 47, Jan de
Windt to Heren X, May 20, 1758; NA, NWIC no. 1191, no. 13, Generale lijst der schaden,
March 5, 1761; Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates,’” 280.
39. Pares, Colonial Blockade, 108–225; Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling,” 172; Carter, Dutch
Republic in Europe, 101, 109. For the Dutch debate on commercial neutrality and the Rule
of 1756, see Koen Stapelbroek, “The Dutch Debate on Commercial Neutrality, 1713–1830”
and Tara Helffman, “Commerce on Trial: Neutral Rights and Private Warfare in the Seven
Years’ War,” in Stapelbroek, Trade and War.
40. James Marriott, A Letter to the Dutch Merchants in England (London: N. Cooper, 1759), 6;
James Marriott, The Case of the Dutch Ships Considered, 4th ed. (London: T. Harrison, 1778).
41. Albertus Ploos van Amstel, Verhandeling over het recht van commercie tusschen onzydige en
oorlogvoerende volken: Uyt het Latyn vertaald en vermeerderd met een aanhangzel over het
nemen en verbeurdverklaren der schepen, en breedvoerige aanteekeningen (Amsterdam:
F. Houttuyn, 1760), translation of Specimen academicum inaugurale de jure commercii,
quod gentibus in bello medii competit (Leiden: G. Wishoff, 1759), 35–42; Stapelbroek, “The
Dutch Debate on Commercial Neutrality,” 120.
42. Archives ou correspondance inédite de la Maison d’Orange-Nassau, ed. G. Groen van Prin-
sterer et al., 26 vols. (Leiden: S. and J. Luchtmans, 1835–1915), vol. 21 (1756–59): 143, Bentinck
to Newcastle, April 27, 1756. Available on the website of the Huygens Institute for the His-
tory of the Netherlands: http://www.historici.nl.
43. Carter, Dutch Republic in Europe, 87–88.
44. BL, Add. Ms. 35,365 (Correspondence of Philip Yorke with his brother Joseph Yorke),
Joseph Yorke to Philip Yorke, March 27, 1759.
45. Carter, Dutch Republic in Europe, 87, 99, 106, 109, 111, 118, 119, 121, 123; Pares, Colonial Block-
ade, 255–78; Nederlandsche Jaarboeken (1758), 924–78; Hough, Reports of Cases.
46. Archives ou correspondance inédite de la Maison d’Orange-Nassau, vol. 22 (1759–66), 29,
Bentinck to Newcastle, February 2, 1759.
47. Carter, Dutch Republic in Europe, 107, 109, 116, 124; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 255–79; David
J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century, Exeter Maritime Studies
no. 4 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 163.
48. J. S. Bartstra, Vlootherstel en legeraugmentatie, 1770–1780 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1962);
Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London:
Fontana Press, 1977).
49. F. Edler, The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution, Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Science no. 29/2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1911), 15; Victor Enthoven, “Dutch Maritime Strategy,” in Strategy in the American
War of Independence: A Global Approach, Cass Military Studies 39, ed. Donald Stoker et al.
(London: Routledge, 2010), 176–201.
50. D. A. Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke and Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1774–1780 (The Hague: Mouton,
1970), 30–31, 39.
51. Ernest E. Rogers, Connecticut’s Naval Office at New London during the War of the American
Revolution (1933; repr., Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2008), 263, Nathanial Shaw
Jr. to Peter van der Voort and Co., December 15, 1774.
52. Knappert, Geschiedenis van de Bovenwindsche eilanden, 272–76; Houghton Library, Harvard
University, MS Sparks no. 72, letters and extracts from Sir Joseph Yorke’s correspondence in
347 Neutrality
Holland, 1776–80; Houghton Library, MS Sparks no. 83 f. 36, correspondence between

Comte de Vergennes and Abbé Desnoyers concerning the American Revolution and the
attitude of Holland, 1776–81; Friedrich Wilhelm von Thulemeyer, Dépêches van Thulemeyer,
1763-1788, Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap 3ed series, no. 30, ed. Rob-
ert Th. Fruin and Herman Th. Colenbrander (Utrecht: Historisch Genootschap, 1912),
137–238; Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution; Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke; H. M. Scott,
“Sir Joseph Yorke, Dutch Politics and the Origins of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War,” Histor-
ical Journal 31, no. 3 (1988): 571–89.
53. J. J. Reesse, De suikerhandel van Amsterdam. Van het begin der 17de eeuw tot 1813 (Haarlem:
Kleynenberg, 1908), cxx; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, 224.
54. Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution, 37–56; J. F. Jameson, ‘‘St. Eustatius in the
American Revolution,’’ American Historical Review no. 8 (1903): 687; P. J. van Winter, Het
aandeel van den Amsterdamschen handel aan de opbouw van het Amerikaansche Gemeene-
best, 2 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1927).
55. Jameson, “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution,” 695.
56. Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution, 102–6; Houghton Library, MS Sparks no. 103
(IV) A 8–11, Graaf van Welderen to States General, February 5, 1779.
57. Miller, Sir Joseph York, 91–92; Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution, 109–30;
Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates.’”
58. Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution, 129–31; J. C. de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het
Nederlandsche zeewezen, volume 5 (Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1861), 406–16; Enthoven,
“Dutch Maritime Strategy,” 182–83.
59. John Adams to the President of Congress, May 13, 1780. Available on the website of the
Library of Congress, American Memory, http://memory.loc.gov.
60. Enthoven, “Dutch Maritime Strategy,” 183–84; Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution,
140–41.
61. Edler, Dutch Republic/American Revolution, 162; Miller, Sir Joseph Yorke, 95; Enthoven,
“Dutch Maritime Strategy,” 184–85.
62. Guillaume Th. F. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique, des établissemens & du com-
merce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 6 vols. (Amsterdam: n.p., 1770), 4:246–48 (between
1775–1783 a Dutch translation was published: Wysgeerige en staatkundige geschiedenis van
de bezittingen en den koophandel der Europeaanen, in de beide Indiën, 10 vols. [Amsterdam:
M. Schalekamp, 1775–83]); Guido Abbattista, “Edmund Burke, the Atlantic American War
and the ‘Poor Jews at St. Eustatius:’ Empire and the Law of Nations,” Cromohs no. 13 (2008):
1–39, esp. 5.
63. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 2:571.
64. Adam Anderson, Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, 4 vols.
(London: J. White, 1801), 4:329; Abbattista, “Edmund Burke,” 5.
65. F. Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies (London: Longmans, 1953).
16
Rivalry
Greatness in Early Modern
Political Economy
Sophus A. Reinert
“Jealousy,” an anonymous fifteenth-century Florentine warned, is “a very bad enemy.”

Envy lay “in the heart of everyone,” besieging commercial society with men seeking to
“appropriate” the wealth of the more successful.1 In the coming centuries, the problem
of jealousy also came to be experienced and understood at the level of cities, nations,
and empires, among which relative material inequalities could be both more conspic-
uous and more consequential. In the opening years of the Seven Years’ War, the Bour-
bon Plenipotentiary in Naples, Bernardo Tanucci, harnessed what had by then become
a venerable lexicon: “The inequality between men and between nations” and the con-
sequent “fear of the more powerful” were not only the cause of all the world’s “laws and
alliances” but also of “jealousy.”2 And as Europe embraced the wider world, through
conquests as well as commerce in the early modern period, it was spurred by economic
rivalries of this very nature. Though both the elder Mirabeau and Adam Smith railed
against the evils of the “mercantile system” in the eighteenth century, their contempo-
raries across the Continent knew this disorder by the name of “jealousy of trade.”3
From a bird’s-eye perspective, such phraseologies of economic envy first emerged in
Europe’s various vernaculars when early modern observers began realizing the in-
creasingly existential importance of international trade. Drawing on a venerable Cice-
ronian maxim, Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert perhaps explained
the logic of the underlying argument most famously in the mid-seventeenth century:
“Commerce is the source of finance, and finance is the sinew of war,” hence, there
existed a “perpetual and peaceful war of mind and industry among all nations.”4 Since
jealousy was widely conceived to be a child not only of envy but also of fear, jealousy of
trade was a natural reaction to the danger of falling behind in a world in which trade,
war, and ultimately independence were inexorably intertwined.5 Though long ignored
by historiography, jealousy of trade was in effect a widespread and lamentably accurate
early modern idiom for addressing this complex of forces and incentives, which have
348
349 Rivalry
structured relationships between polities since the late Renaissance. In a best-selling

critique of European imperialism, Guillaume Thomas Raynal eloquently summarized
precisely what was at stake: “One knows that jealousy of trade is nothing but jealousy
of power.”6 Comparative commercial wealth had become a measure of relative might in
the world, not only between individuals but also between polities.7 In a Neoplatonic
fashion, the microcosm of the jealous Florentine merchant had become a macrocosm
of international relations.8
Industry, technology, and financial instruments alike had evolved to the point in early
modern Europe where the lessons learned from the Peloponnesian War—that time-
honored repertoire of military wisdom—no longer sufficed to conceptualize all the
practical and moral variables of international conflict and competition. Once, virtuous
Spartans (admittedly benefitting from rather generous Persian subsidies) might have
routed commercial Athenians, but the times had changed. From one end of the Conti-
nent to the other, a growing chorus of voices came to agree with Colbert that wealth,
indeed, was the sinew of war.9 From the rise of fortifications to capital ships and artillery,
technological developments in the art of war put increasingly stringent demands on
state coffers and, by some accounts, contributed to the development of new administra-
tive structures today intrinsic to modern conceptions of the state, such as permanent
taxation to support standing armies, as well as concomitant notions of nationalism.10
Intellectual historians in the tradition of J. G. A. Pocock have painstakingly eluci-
dated the conservative reaction to these developments in terms of the tension between
wealth and virtue in certain currents of early modern European political thought.
Though it is abundantly evident that numerous elite and most often conservative the-
orists conceived of a dichotomous relationship between commercial wealth and patri-
otic virtù, historiography has gone too far in embracing this as a leitmotif for the age.11
It was by no means the only way of thinking about the military and political fallouts of
economic competition at the time, nor was it the most widespread in the European
world.12 Even Niccolò Machiavelli, whose ostensibly exclusive faith in virtuous citizen
militias has been made paradigmatic in the literature, came to focus largely on eco-
nomic concerns when analyzing the epochal 1494 French invasion of Italy in the final
years of his epistolary.13 In effect, we must turn back to this shift of emphasis in late
Renaissance Reason of State to understand the conceptual core of Enlightenment po-
litical economy, originally a science for making polities materially viable in a world of
ruthless economic competition. As Minerva’s owl proverbially took flight from Italy’s
sixteenth-century dusk, and the peninsula’s primacy in Europe came to an end, nu-
merous observers turned to analyzing why and how the Lilliputian Italian city-states
had achieved such Brobdingnagian grandezza in earlier centuries, and their explana-
tions were economic rather than martial in nature. For, as the Brescian patrician and
military theorist Giacomo Lanteri put it in 1560:
350 Conflict
In Italy we have four of the biggest cities, in which commerce has always been
praised, and which always, from the time in which they began to bloom (except
one), have been extremely powerful. These are Venice, Genoa, Florence, & Pisa.
From what can one say their greatness derives? Certainly from nothing else but
from commerce; from nothing but their frequent trades of all sorts.14
This would become nothing less than a mantra, reiterated with only few amend-
ments well into the Age of Revolutions. In 1797, the Genoese patrician Agostino Bian-
chi argued that the “grandezza” and “happiness” of both Genoa and Venice ultimately
had resulted from “Commerce,” that through trade and navigation his city had reached
“the peak of power,” and that the “bloody conflicts” between the two polities had been
driven solely by “jealousy of trade.”15 This is, of course, not to suggest that earlier prac-
titioners had been unaware of the intimate connection between economic success and
worldly greatness.16
Originally emerging out of commonsense observations as well as more erudite hu-
manist doctrines of national defense in the various city-states of Italy, such notions of
economic greatness became increasingly influential, thanks also to the extraordinary
impact of Giovanni Botero’s works, under the polyvalent aegis of reason of state.17 In
England, Botero’s acute reader Francis Bacon theorized the “embracing of trade” and
the “increase of territory” as two ways by which a state could “overgrow” its neighbors,
going so far as to argue that “work” was “the true greatness of kingdoms and estates.”
He was echoed in France in one of the most widely read works of this tradition by
Henri the Duke of Rohan. He criticized the Spanish Empire for having thought only of
conquests, without considering the needs of its empire’s subsistence, and argued that
England had become of “very great account” solely by virtue of her “great riches”
derived from “commerce.”18 In spite of a historiographical commonplace, in short,
there existed eminently economic alternatives to virtuous military grandezza in Re-
naissance political thought, both high and low, achievable through collateral forms of
economic virtù and parallel conceptions of empire.19 And these often equally bellicose
alternatives would be explicitly codified under the moniker of political economy in the
early modern period, remaining influential, from one end of the Continent to the
other, into the nineteenth century and beyond.20
Thomas Hobbes famously imagined a world in which political communities con-
fronted each other “in the state and posture of Gladiators,” and a recurrent dream of
subsequent political theory has been to pacify international relations by substituting
goods for gladii.21 Historical experience nonetheless continued to stymie these hopes
in the long eighteenth century, primarily because England, like Venice three centuries
earlier, proved ambidextrous enough to gut her neighbors with one hand and sell them
cheap funeral shrouds with the other. And even after the proverbial swords were beaten
351 Rivalry
into plowshares, the seminal importance of economic power in the modern world led
many to think even liberty was for sale. Independence was threatened by economic
rivalries regardless of whether communities faced each other “in the state and posture
of Gladiators” or that of Merchants. War and wealth went hand in hand in the modern
world, and by failing at one, a political community could quickly botch both, putting
its very existence at risk.22 Thus, according to many eighteenth-century observers, what
really was at stake in international trade was power and ultimately independence, but
a more nuanced understanding of the threats facing political liberty at the time, and of
how these were formulated and expressed, may shed light on the politics of interna-
tional trade in the early modern period.23
In effect, the testimony of the Dutch officer of the East India Company and twice
Governor-General of the East Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, retained its cogency as an
indicator of just how the winners in international relations explained their success
throughout the period here under analysis: “one cannot do commerce without war, nor
war without commerce.”24 Or, as the best-selling Johan De La Court explained in his 1662
Political Discourses, “conquests which allow commerce to increase and flourish, like
those which the Europeans made at the expense of the Indians, are a good thing.”25
Similar statements were legion across Europe, and contrary to an influential argument
in modern historiography, the possibility that an empire might be established through
economic as well as military means was clearly articulated at the time.26 Republicanism
and commercial society were not simply an antidote or a subsequent paradigm to the
imperialist ideology of universal monarchy.27 They could also be its midwives, as was
argued in a long tradition of political economy, which received one of its last and most
succinct champions in the Neapolitan lawyer and professor of political economy
Michele de Jorio in 1781. Commerce, he argued, had bestowed upon Britain “dominion,”
even where it sent no troops, “a different kind of Empire.”28 Though ostensibly friendly,
free international trade could, for de Jorio and the science of legislation on which he
drew, establish empires and enable political communities to give laws to one another.
True liberty, understood to mean independence from arbitrary power, in the end
depended on the structures of the world economy as much as on domestic institutions.29
The idiom of “dare” or “dicere leges victis,” of “speaking” or “giving the law to the con-
quered,” was a variation on the equation in classical antiquity of power with the ability
to give laws and derived from the idea that liberty demanded subjection only to one’s
own legislation. Indeed, the original Greek meaning of autonomy was precisely to “have
one’s own law.”30 The alternative was to be conquered and thus unfree, to be alieni iuris
or subject to the laws of someone else, as the condition later was codified in Roman law.
After all, political units were largely conceived of in the tradition of the body politic at
the time, by which, as suggested in Justinian’s Digest of Roman law, free men and free
communities alike had to be “in their own power” and not “under the power of someone
352 Conflict
else” in order to enjoy their libertas.31 This idea had been harnessed by Moses the Law-
giver and by Livy, by Roman jurists, and by prostrate Carthaginians forced to “receive
the law” at the feet of Scipio Africanus. It would become nearly ubiquitous in medieval
and early modern Europe, from the practice of “feudal” serfdom and other forms of
personal dependence over which this Roman legal language came to be applied to the
nearly endless ways in which it could metaphorically convey asymmetrical relations of
power, whether social, military, or economic.32 Machiavelli’s platitude that “rulers
should do their best to avoid being at the mercy of other powers” might well have been
derived from Alcibiades’s timeless admonition to the Athenians, on the eve of the Sicil-
ian expedition, that “there is a danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of
others unless others are in our power.”33 With the increasingly imperative importance of
international trade in the early modern period, it was only natural that an expression
previously used to signify de iure servitude and military conquests came to be deployed
also for unequal economic relations. True independence required the current, even pre-
emptive submission of others; wealth and liberty were competitive, hence the over-
arching, and later ridiculed, preoccupation with balances of trade and power.
In his 1758 Law of Nations, Emerich de Vattel argued, on the basis of an ancient tra-
dition, that the “famous scheme of the political equilibrium or balance of power”
should be “understood” as “a disposition of things” whereby “no power is able abso-
lutely to predominate, or to prescribe laws to others.”34 And Diderot was one of many to
argue that “political liberty is the situation of a people who have not alienated their
sovereignty, and who either make their own laws or are associated to some degree in
their legislation.”35 To “dictate the laws,” de Jorio wrote in this vein, was “the most
important role of Government.”36 But this imperial idiom was in no way delimited to
the realms of high theory. British and Dutch merchants of their respective East India
companies meeting in mid-eighteenth-century Bengal would, for example, quarrel
boastfully over who in the end would “give Laws to that Part of the World.”37 The pro-
mulgation of the idiom’s usage in this latter era was intimately linked also to the gradual
shift from dynastic and corporate to national rivalries in Europe, to the idea that indi-
viduals in a permanent political community could be empowered by the collective
demonstration of force over foreigners in international competition.38
An autocritical British dystopia of 1712 argued, in this vein, that “O-Brazilians,” Eng-
lishmen in its allegorical architecture, look “upon it as their undoubted Birth-Right to
Revile, Slander, and Insult all the World; nay to give Laws to all other Nations.”39
Although the phrase “universal monarchy” currently is equated with the historical
goals of either Spain or France, a growing fear in eighteenth-century Europe was that
it would be Great Britain to give the world its laws, either through the power of its
navies or of its manufactures. Given the assumption that liberty was to live in a state of
laws rather than license or arbitrariness, then precisely who set those laws—and under
353 Rivalry
whose government one lived—was of cardinal importance. So widespread was this fear
that a state could be enslaved by purely commercial means that the architects of the
Williamite Settlement, the members of Vincent de Gournay’s circle in Paris, and Anto-
nio Genovesi’s school in Naples—all eminent founding moments in the history of po-
litical economy—revolved around the contest to give rather than receive laws through
international trade.40 Malachy Postlethwayte put it well in his influential 1750s transla-
tion of Jacques Savary’s economic Dictionary: “certain it is, that wherever the Commer-
cial Empire gains the Ascendant, there will the Scepter of Dominion bear the Sway.”41
For if differences in economic power could impose hierarchical relations between
political communities—whether competing Italian city-states like Genoa and Venice
or veritable empires like France and Britain—whereby some gave laws to and thus
subjugated others, the politics of international trade could acquire heightened impor-
tance. In effect, through this idiom, nothing less than the viability of the polity as such
came to be at stake in economic development and the policies pursued to assure it.
Where a state was located in the architecture of the global economy—what it pro-
duced, what it traded, and how—was of literally existential importance. As Genovesi’s
greatest heir Gaetano Filangieri observed in his magisterial and hugely influential Sci-
ence of Legislation, “commerce” had become “essential to the organization and to the
existence of political bodies. . . . For in the midst of opulence your name will be feared,
your alliance will be desired, your rights respected, your pretensions supported well,
[and] you will give the law to your neighbours, but they will give it to you if you are poorer
than them.”42
Ancient ideals of liberty, civic happiness, and the common good had come to depend
on forces much larger than those addressed by the canonical philosophers, forces
which simultaneously set significant limits to domestic eudaimonia and opened new
avenues for its realization. Wealth had become a cause rather than a simple conse-
quence of greatness and the common good alike.43 Contemplating the economic his-
tory of the foregoing centuries, and probably ventriloquizing Raynal, the Roman
economist Francesco Isola summarized these dynamics of international competition
in 1811: “And thus jealousy of trade became jealousy of power, and forced those who
govern peoples to use the same dexterity in defending themselves against the commer-
cial industry of nations, that they use to defend themselves against their arms.”44 What
he described was something not unlike the world in which we live.
This suggests that scholarship long has overlooked one of the principal vectors of
political liberty in early modern Europe—a vector that not only sidelined but trumped
debates about virtue and self-representation.45 No virtuous citizen militia could com-
pete with capital ships and heavy artillery, as clarified with vicious eloquence from the
1630–31 Sack of Magdeburg and the 1684 French bombardment of Genoa to Horatio
Nelson’s suppression of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799 and the British firebombing of
354 Conflict
Copenhagen in 1807.46 A state could no longer safeguard its liberty by closing itself off
from international trade either, for no state could long resist the aggressive power of
the great trading nations, no matter their wishes.47 Even the most autarkic early mod-
ern economic writers conceived of independence in relation to the military and com-
mercial aggressions of their competitors, for, throughout Europe, the structures of
international trade were unavoidably consequential for local political life.48 So if what
we might call the doux commerce model of political communities envisaged that states
could secure their freedom under the aegis of peaceful commercial relations, the alter-
native tradition of economic rivalry made liberty itself competitive. And since the eco-
nomic sphere also followed certain laws, some economic activities being understood
to be more conducive to competitive autonomy than others, a cardinal aspect of the
science of the legislator and its attempt to secure freedom came to rest on the compet-
itive management of the material world. “Trade,” as Hume so aptly put it, had become
“an affair of state.”49
This widespread but generally ignored idiom of “giving” and “receiving laws” sheds
important light also on the political history of economic policy. For political economy
was not merely about trade in the tradition discussed here; it was also about produc-
tion. It was manifestly not, as acolytes of Adam Smith would come to argue, about
catallactics, about exchange per se. International commercial society was—pace The
Wealth of Nations—fundamentally not made up of dogs that had learned to barter
bones. The LSE economist Edwin Cannan’s priceless footnote to Smith’s passage on the
matter is, as such, more profound than often acknowledged: “It is by no means clear
what object there could be in exchanging one bone for another.”50 The international
economy was, rather, composed of a motley assortment of dogs who, through industry,
war, and trade, sought to have better, juicier bones than their neighbors, and who by
necessity sharpened some of them to stab their competitors. Not all bones are equal;
economic activities have differential capacities for innovation and wealth-creation.
Mainstream theories and policies at the time—and the very discipline of political
economy as first institutionalized—aimed to develop national productive capacity and
more specifically domestic manufactures allowing for entire societies to escape the
Malthusian trap. The different cultures of knowledge that contributed to the codifica-
tion of political economy in early modern Europe still need to be charted, but from one
end of the seventeenth century to the other, from erudite humanists like the Neapoli-
tan Antonio Serra to practical merchants such as the best-selling Bristolian John Cary,
the policies best thought able to safeguard economic prosperity and political liberty
against foreign competitors were remarkably uniform.51 This industrial tradition
would find erudite validation in the ancient example of the lawgiver Solon, who
decreed that Athenians were to export olive oil rather than olives, but was justified
theoretically, institutionalized, and widely emulated in the city-states of medieval and
355 Rivalry
Renaissance Italy, among which the importance of encouraging domestic industries

gradually became paramount.52 And there can be no question that this complex of
policies had their intended effect: Italy became the most urbanized, industrial, and, per
capita, wealthiest area on the planet by the year 1500, centuries before the so-called
Great Divergence of the nineteenth century.53 The transformative powers of
manufacturing did not go unnoticed, much like the Italian tradition of reason of state
had not, and, as other European powers sought to emulate Italy’s lead, theorists began
to explore how economic activities differed and, with time, why.
In a dialogue ca. 1530, Thomas Starkey argued that the poverty of London could be
counteracted by working its raw materials domestically for export as manufactured
goods, and John Hales followed suit in 1581 by dryly asking “what groseness of wits be
we of . . . that will suffer our owne commodities to go and set straungers a worke, and
then buy them againe at theyr hands.”54 This was the basic insight behind Richard Hak-
luyt’s influential proposal, in his 1584 Discourse of Western Planting, for the establish-
ment of a colonial system based on the synergistic relationship between a core
committed to manufacturing and its colonial producers of raw materials. But although
it was self-evident to these authors that it was better for a polity to specialize in manu-
factures rather than raw materials, they did not seek to explain the mechanisms under-
lying the different economic activities.55 Similar sentiments were shared across the
Continent. In 1558, Luis Ortiz explored why Spain, in spite of the treasures of the New
World, would suffer from exporting its raw materials and importing manufactured
goods, and in France Barthélémy de Laffemas, Controller General of Commerce under
Henry IV, explained at length through a series of pamphlets why the development of
competitive domestic industries was the only way of escaping dependence on, and
subsequent subjection to, foreign powers.56 Germans, Seckendorff echoed in 1665 after
a close engagement with Botero’s Reason of State, “act wrongly in exporting and selling
raw materials only to pay a higher price taking them back as manufactures once people
have worked them.”57 Throughout the early modern period, economic policy—
communicated and emulated through an ongoing process of translation and espio-
nage—coagulated around the political need to encourage domestic industry as a means
of securing wealth, power, and independence.58 At its highest levels of sophistication,
this tradition also provided durable explanations for why industrialization was be-
coming an existential necessity. The one offered by Serra in his 1613 Short Treatise on
the Causes that Can Make Kingdoms Abound in Gold and Silver even in the Absence of
Mines rightly became legendary in the history of economic analysis:
In manufacturing activities it is possible to achieve a multiplication of products,

and therefore of earnings. The same cannot be done with agricultural produce,
which is not subject to multiplication. If a given piece of land is only large enough
356 Conflict
to sow a hundred tomoli of wheat, it is impossible to sow a hundred and fifty there.
In manufacturing, by contrast, production can be multiplied not merely twofold
but a hundredfold, and at a proportionately lower cost.59
The key to Italy’s historical success lay in the fact that by providing Europe with manu-
factured goods in exchange for raw materials, it had harnessed the differential returns
to scale inherent to distinct economic activities to its advantage. Serra’s argument
would become a mainstay of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy, in
the different states of Italy and abroad. In fact, his theory provided the theoretical
grounding for the early modern transition from reason of state to political economy.
A 1764 Venetian review of Italy’s first professor of political economy, Antonio Genovesi
(incidentally a careful reader of Serra) defined the aims of the new science of political
economy in precisely such terms: “To increase the greatness, power, and wealth of the
Nation, without at the same time aiming to enlarge the borders of what one possesses,”
a definition which, through its numerous translations across Europe and the New
World, came to shape the course of economics.60 Grandezza and empire could be
achieved by economic means. Lecturing from his chair of political economy at the
University of Naples in the 1750s, Genovesi had indeed programmatically observed
that the line separating “sovereign” from “servile” states (i.e., free from dependent
ones) in Europe coincided neatly with that separating exporters from importers of
manufactured goods subject to “multiplication.”61
The development of a hierarchy in the desirability of economic activities is vital for
understanding early modern economic relations. In the 1630s, the English director of
the East India Company Thomas Mun explained the political necessity of moving up
the value-chain in this system in terms of shifting from “natural” to “artificial” activ-
ities.62 This transition, revolving around the development of national manufactures
and the seemingly oxymoronic agenda of attaining export-led growth through import-
substitution, would become institutionalized from England to Gotha and from Bergen
to Naples, before becoming a staple of industrial success in the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries, from Germany through the United States to the Asian Tigers.63 But it is
important to emphasize that the importance historically allotted manufactures did not,
as many will have it, entail a consequent disregard for agriculture. This was even recog-
nized as a “Paradox” by political economists across Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. As an anonymous Englishman put it in 1698, “No places are more
frequently afflicted with Famin, than those Countries which are employed in Tillage,” a
condition that happens to still be true.64 Contrary to what physiocracy and its modern
eulogists have argued, French agriculture bloomed under Colbert.65
Whether one wishes to describe this general process as industrialization, as the de-
velopment of activities subject to increasing returns to scale, or in terms of nationalizing
357 Rivalry
the value-added components of goods, is beside the point.66 What mattered was
not that these early political economists formulated theories to justify the development
of domestic manufactures in phrases that align with the vocabulary of modern
economics—though they sometimes did—but that they understood that certain activ-
ities were better than others at producing wealth and thus power, and ultimately liberty
and political security.67 These were propensities, tendencies, and generally acknowl-
edged best practices stretching across vastly different economic cultures, though sel-
dom a theology of political economy. The politics of early modern international trade,
as evident from best-selling works and reigning practices, bottomed out in the realiza-
tion that economic activities were different and that competition over them not only
posed tangible constraints on political life and public happiness but also had to be
calibrated and countervailed with active, dynamic policies. For as soon as one power
began to conceive of trade as an act of war, others had to follow suit to survive as inde-
pendent economic and political entities.68 As this jealous—sometimes emulative—
rivalry developed, however, so did the nature of competition and the policies thought
most conducive to succeed in it.
Years ago, the Italian economic historian and prime minister Amintore Fanfani
noted that the essence of pre-Smithian economics was dynamic, that it was principally
a system of “growth” and “development” rather than “stasis” and “equilibrium.” And
one should not be surprised that its more philosophical exponents could imagine the
gradual overturning of even basic policies with changing circumstances, without this
undermining the fundamental ideal of industry safeguarding security independence.69
Such contextual polyvalence, in other words the need to adapt to changing circum-
stances, was, after all, one of the staunchest teachings of reason of state since the time
of Machiavelli, if not before.70 Vincent de Gournay, one of the driving forces of French
political economy on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, wrote, “It amounts to insulting
the great Colbert to think that, because he set a few limits to our trade, he intended
them to last forever.”71 Gournay here reflected upon a problem at the very center of
pre-Smithian industrializing strategies, which in historically successful cases con-
tained the seeds of their own destruction in more ways than one.72 He had no doubts,
when annotating his 1753 translation of the 1694 tenth edition of Josiah Child’s Dis-
course of Trade, that conquest and commerce went hand in hand: “One cannot repeat
it often enough, the destiny of commerce and of the arts depending on it will always be
like that of war.”73 If France were to flourish in a hostile world of competing commer-
cial societies, it would have to master both. But the means of doing so were not set in
stone. Though Colbert’s policies had been the right in his day and age, Gournay now
had to look elsewhere to safeguard France’s continuing power and liberty. As Ferdi-
nando Galiani, known as Il Machiavellino, echoed Gournay in his extraordinarily
influential 1770 Dialogues on the Grain Trade:
358 Conflict
Let us imitate the great Colbert and not follow him. Imitating and following are
two very different things, although many people mistake them. Let us do what a
good mind like the great Colbert’s would do today.74
Contexts changed and political economy had to follow suit. For one, successful policies
were invariably emulated and countervailed by competitors, an agonistic process fur-
ther complicated by the fact that an emulatee inevitably changed the conditions for its
success in the very process of forging ahead. Secondarily, the very measures that pro-
tected the industries of a political community from foreign competition, allowed for
their initial establishment, and subsidized their penetration of foreign markets might
eventually hinder future economic development. As industries matured, they would by
necessity reach a point at which further integration with larger markets and more
sustained competition became essential for continuing growth.75 An anonymous
eighteenth-century Italian critic of physiocracy put it just this way while observing
Europe’s industries on the Grand Tour: “Limitations are as damaging to a country after
trades have been established, as they are useful to introduce them.”76 The underlying
problems of competitive liberty and development remained, but as economies matured
the means of resolving them changed, a transition lost to a modern historiography
obsessed with dichotomies and polar opposites like reason of state and political
economy, liberalism and protectionism, conquest and commerce. Development would,
for many if not most observers in the European world, explicitly continue to be con-
ceptualized as moving through qualitatively different phases. Tench Coxe, one of the
architects of the American system of encouraging manufactures in the wake of inde-
pendence, justified measures such as tariffs and bounties to give “new born states the
strength of manhood” and assure their “political independency.”77 Different stages of
development demanded different policies; they required politics, an insight brought to
its full expression in the nineteenth-century works of infant-industry protectors in the
tradition of Friedrich List and John Stuart Mill. “Protective duties can be defensible,”
Mill argued, exploiting what by then was a venerable trope, “when they are imposed
temporarily (especially in a young and rising nation) in hopes of naturalizing a foreign
industry.”78
Governmental interventions in the economy for the sake of encouraging certain
industries and rendering them internationally competitive were explicitly theorized by
many to be economic and thus military and, ultimately, political necessities: mandatory
passage points on the path to greatness. Many argued that such policies to encourage
industry—however Draconian in nature—even had empowering civic consequences.79
This political consolidation in light of economic competition was also at the center of
one of the most tortured and least resolved aspects of “the mercantile system,” namely
the challenged existence of chartered monopolies and special privileges in the circuitous
359 Rivalry
development of what we have come to know as the modern state.80 The early modern
period witnessed a number of sometimes competing actors all able to claim, with vari-
able degrees of coerciveness and evanescence in territories of highly disparate extents,
what Carl Schmitt called “sovereignty,” defined as the agency that “decides on the excep-
tion.”81 That the centralized Weberian state in the end won out—as an ideal if not a
reality—has for a long time blinded scholarship to historically competing paradigms,
not to mention to the historically contested coexistence of overlapping institutions of
power and determinants of political loyalty with very different aims and capacities for
governance: local guilds and fraternities; city-states, principalities, and parallel tradi-
tions of feudal rights; robust empires like the British and ephemeral ones such as the
Holy Roman; universal projects like the Counter-Reformation Church and the great
trading companies; and non-national forms of imperialism such as the Ottoman Empire.
The modern state was not the only one, in this wide spectrum of political constellations,
that realized the political importance of economic development and implemented pol-
icies to safeguard power and independence against external competition.
A subsequent confusion arises regarding the dynamic relationship between early
modern theories of governance and monopolistic companies. Though the basic eco-
nomic analysis of the causes of a community’s wealth remained remarkably constant
in early modern Europe, that of special privileges was completely overturned. Famous
authors such as Joshua Child and Charles Davenant could admittedly still argue fer-
vently for the benefits of monopoly and special privilege in the second half of the
seventeenth century, but from Hobbes to Seckendorff and Cary to the mainstream of
eighteenth-century political economy, guilds and chartered companies were against
the principles of “free trade” understood as the individual’s liberty for economic action
within the framework given by the state and its collective interests.82 This shift of eco-
nomic analysis must be understood as part of a larger shift in the accepted parameters
of political sociology. Through a complex historical process, there were ways in which
the atomization of society encouraging—and in turn encouraged by—the dissolution
of guilds and chartered companies in favor of more liberal labor markets assisted in
and resulted from the consolidation of a national ideal of sovereignty and locus of
political allegiance.83 If chartered companies had contributed to a state’s penetration of
foreign markets and its initial overseas conquests, its further flourishing depended on
them being dismantled and brought under centralized control through national en-
deavors or state-sponsored individual initiative.84 The politics of international trade
were dynamic in the early modern world, not only in the policies they inspired but
also in the very structures that implemented them. The overarching aims of the mer-
cantile system, understood in terms of industry, power, and security, might have been
remarkably uniform across early modern Europe, but its ways and means were mercu-
rial indeed.
360 Conflict
Enlightenment military theorists from Henry Lloyd to Carl von Clausewitz con-
ceived of war and international trade as different expressions of the same agonistic
competition between political communities, in which relative armies, wealth, and ulti-
mately power were positional goods.85 Given the imperatives of interregional and in-
ternational competition, and the high stakes of political survival, there were meaningful
ways in which the race to dominate the few staple-trades offering increasing returns to
scale at the time—essentially textiles—was in fact a form of warfare. Not everyone
could draw in raw wool to export cloth at the same time, which is why it is so striking
that even the most bellicose of early modern trade theorists would agree that exchanges
of manufactured goods, in which both partners benefited, were “good trades,” just as
the export of manufactures in exchange for raw materials was.86 What was truly detri-
mental was to export diminishing-return raw materials to buy back increasing-return
manufactures, a pattern of trade that with time would subject a polity to de Jorio’s
“different kind of empire.”87 So the policies discussed earlier and the political sensibil-
ities that drove them were not by necessity bellicose, nor did attempts to safeguard
liberty through economic policy at the time inevitably foster international aggression.
Though they have succeeded in creating large concentrations of wealth and power,
how that wealth and power have been employed are entirely different questions to be
engaged with on an entirely different level of politics. As Alexander Hamilton put it,
championing his own brand of interventionist policies to encourage industrialization:
“It is one thing for a country to be in a posture not to receive the law from others, and a
very different thing for her to be in a situation which obliges others to receive the law from
her.”88 War was, in short, not the only historical exit for the industrializing policies
triggered by jealousy of trade. Indeed, such policies, and the gradual intercatenation of
developed polities that might result from them, were at the core of leading nineteenth-
century theories of economic nationalism as a necessary step toward a greater union of
humanity, a step, in Giuseppe Mazzini’s terms, from an “aggregate” of polities to their
“association.”89
Yet, the specter of empire found ever-new ways of haunting the politics of the global
economy. With the development of more robust and pervasive financial institutions in
the eighteenth century, novel instruments were added to the toolkit of empire that,
though intrinsically bound to the historical development of “state” structures, were
ultimately able to wrest themselves free of them. Voltaire was among the first to see
that the warmongering capacities of an international businessman in financing con-
flicts and commercializing conquests made him comparable to a “Roman citizen,” that
wealth could be virtù, and that private individuals of means could decide on the fate of
nations just as the Roman legionnaires had; soon, however, the observation that there
were empires not only of arms and manufactures but also of credit became main-
stream.90 Emblematically, the same Voltaire annotated Machiavelli’s dictum from The
361 Rivalry
Art of War that “it is impossible to wage war constantly; it is impossible to always pay
[troops]” with a pithy “si puo perdio [sic]”—by God one can.91 Governments, of states
but not only, had encouraged companies and what were soon to be known as “capital-
ists” as a means of buttressing their respective communities in international competi-
tion, but these had themselves—given the mercurial ways of political economy—matured
to become separate if never entirely autonomous actors on the stage of world politics.
As Gouverneur Morris wrote to Alexander Hamilton from Paris in the summer of
1792, it was important for the United States to diversify its trade and credit-relations
precisely to avoid subjection to the whims of capital. Were the nascent country to
become dependent on a single market and thus “confine . . . business to one spot,” he
feared “Capitalists,” ever one step ahead, would “take their measures before hand to
give you the law.”92
But beyond individual capitalists, an emerging, amorphous “public” also came to
complicate matters of political economy. “Public opinion,” Genovesi thought, was
“always a great law,” and the Genevan finance minister of Louis XVI Jacques Necker
tellingly defined it “an invisible power,” one that “without treasury, guard, or army, gives
its laws to the city, the court, and even the palaces of kings.” Nothing less than an
“empire of public opinion,” the latter argued, had come into existence, yet another locus
of power and by necessity perpetually contested source of authority and legitimacy to
dispute the politics of trade.93 And it was the opinion publique that eighteenth-century
exponents of the liberalizing experiments associated with physiocracy in France blamed
for the resistance met with by their proposals.94 Not only was more at stake in the poli-
tics of trade; its stakeholders were becoming increasingly vocal.95 Early modern polit-
ical economy was a rich and often hardheaded science of competitively creating wealth
while negotiating distinct yet interrelated imperial mechanisms, whether through con-
quest, commerce, production, or capital itself; it operated in relation to what was inher-
ently an almost insuperable tension between what Steven L. Kaplan defined as “the
marketplace and the market principle,” the market as site(s) and as idea(s).96 As such,
the long eighteenth century was far more protean than often acknowledged, and it pre-
sented its observers and participants with a far richer array of plausible futures than the
simple dichotomy between totalitarian planning and self-regulating markets that even-
tually came to frame our thinking about such matters.97
The polyvalent power of wealth itself, competed for by warring political interests, was
outgrowing the structures installed to nurture and harness it, in the process weaving a
peculiarly postmodern phantasmagoria in which the politics of international trade, em-
bedded in ostensibly solidifying Westphalian state structures, could both look back to
the chaotic era of largely sovereign merchant companies and forward to the rise of mul-
tinationals. The tension between Leviathans and corporations in a global economy of
impossible-to-conceptualize complexity remains at the forefront of contemporary
362 Conflict
debates, suggesting the possibly intermezzate nature of “the state”—looming distort-

ingly large at a particular moment but brief from a particular perspective—and the
comparative longevity of powerful nonstate politico-economic forces. Playing on the
term “cyberpunk,” used to describe a genre of gritty speculative fiction inaugurated by
the violent neo-noir globalist-corporatist aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade
Runner, we might call this moment “baroquepunk.”98 Far from rejecting the importance
of the growing literature on the role of the state in historical development, such a per-
spective serves instead to amplify the significance of governance, indeed of government,
for economic life more generally, conceptually connecting the management, adminis-
tration, or statecraft of disparate but interconnected entities ranging from banks and
merchant companies to nation-states and empires in the early modern period—all em-
inently visible hands grasping at the reins of power.
Looking back upon previous periods in his visionary 1840 The Bankocracy, the Sicil-
ian nobleman and Fourierist Giuseppe Nicola Corvàia presented a utopian model for
global financial reform, delineating the ways in which international relations could
now be socialized by essentially turning all countries into technocratic banks. Consid-
ering the final convulsions of the Age of Revolutions and Napoleon’s gambit for univer-
sal empire, Corvàia observed that the “English aristocracy” alone, hiding behind their
“fortress of credit,” had kept him from “giving the law to the world.” In fact, Napoleon
in the end succumbed to that “omnipotent weapon of credit, which he didn’t know
how to, and didn’t care to, wield.”99 Corvàia observed, with quixotic clarity, that the
instruments of empire had changed yet again, and that sovereignty remained ever at
stake in transnational economic relations. Everyone, it seemed, might one day be sub-
jected to what soon would be known as “the empire of capital,” contested not only by
corporations and political communities but by actors as diverse as the sovereign
bankers of Amsterdam and the global financial network of the Jesuits.100 What Corvàia
had seen was a world that to our eyes remains strangely familiar, in which shifting
constellations of competitors vie for survival and supremacy on the world stage by all
means at their disposal: trade, war, opinion, and capital remain adjacent facets on the
great polyhedron of the Schmittian political, whose aleatory cruelty we seem unable to
transcend.101
Economic life cannot but be political, a historical datum that finally has caught up
with us again. The project for humanity to escape this condition through faith in un-
regulated market transactions (paradoxically political in its very claim to apoliticality)
has, in lived historical time, earned its place among the many failed utopias of political
economy, from Tommaso Campanella’s 1599 revolt to establish his millenarian republic
in Calabria to Stalinist communism.102 There is dignity to impossible aspirations, but
Friedrich Nietzsche had it right: the “theory” of “free trade” was, like Kant’s moral
system to which he compared it, ultimately “a beautiful, naïve thing . . . presupposing
363 Rivalry
that a general harmony must result of itself according to innate laws of improve-
ment.”103 Dazed by the fall of ideologies, our only lodestar is and must be history; we
must understand the past, the history of business and political economy, on its own
terms and, indeed, in its own terms.104 In composing his seminal work on the political
history of early modern trade and the mercantile system, the great leader of the Ger-
man Historical School of Economics Gustav von Schmoller could optimistically state:
“The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created the modern national economies,
and that the nineteenth has humanized their relations to one another.”105 Subsequent
history gives us reason to be more cynical. Indeed, the horrors of the twentieth century
and the harrowing travails of our own time reflect the urgency with which we again, or
still, must engage with the politics of the global economy.
NOTES
1. This chapter builds on parts of Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the
Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 1. For
the quote see “How to Succeed in Business while Trying,” in Social and Economic Foun-
dations of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Anthony Molho (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1969),
53–58.
2. Tanucci to Montealegre, October 10, 1758, in Anna Vittoria Migliorini, Diplomazia e cul-
tura nel settecento: Echi italiani della guerra dei sette anni (Pisa: ETS, 1984), 144.
3. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Histor-
ical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); Reinert, “The Sultan’s Republic:
Jealousy of Trade and Oriental Despotism in Paolo Mattia Doria,” in Enlightened Reform
in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2009), 253–69.
4. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions et memoirs de Colbert, ed. Pierre Clement, 10
vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1861–82), 3:1, 37, and 5:269, drawing on Cicero, “The
Fifth Phillipic of M. Tullius Cicero against M. Antonius,” in Cicero, Philippics, ed. Walter
C. A. Ker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 260–61.
5. Werner Gundersheimer, “‘The Green-Eyed Monster’: Renaissance Conceptions of Jeal-
ousy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 3 (September 1993):
321–31, quote on 321.
6. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du
commerce des européens dans les Deux Indes, 10 vols. (Geneva: Pellet, 1780), 10:167–68.
7. Reinert, Translating Empire, 1 and passim.
8. On this parallel see, among others, Marsilio Ficino, in Eugenio Garin, L’umanesimo ital-
iano: filosofia e vita civile nel rinascimento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 47;
and in Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Vittore
Branca (Milan: Rusconi, 1986), xvi; Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu
and Fronsac, The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, trans. Henry Bertram Hill
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 48. The classical statement was Xeno-
phon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), 45–46.
9. The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler, New York: Free Press, 1998.
364 Conflict
10. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West
1500–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Rigby Hale,
“The End of Florentine Liberty: The Fortezza da Basso,” in Renaissance War Studies
(London: Hambledon, 1983), 31–62. On the private sector of warfare, however, see
David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); on the related
question of representative institutions and the capacity to secure credit in the context
of the largely mercenary-run warfare of early modern Europe, see David Stasavage,
States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011). On war and the origins of nationalism, see Linda
Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992).
11. For an influential statement see J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model
for Historians of Political Thought,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political
Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 37–50, quote on 48.
12. Reinert, Translating Empire, 8.
13. See, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, ca. October 6, 1526, in
Niccolò Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 1245–46.
Interestingly, Machiavelli’s historical interlocutor, the anti-Medicean agitator Cavalcanti,
also emphasized the importance of international trade for the welfare of a polity, see his
Istorie fiorentine (Florence: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1838), 276.
14. See the tradition stretching from Giacomo Lanteri, Della economica (Venezia: Valgrisi, 1560),
98, to Giovanni Botero, Della Ragion di Stato (Venice: Gioliti, 1589); and Antonio Serra, A
Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613), ed. Sophus A. Reinert (London:
Anthem, 2011). For examples of commercial virtue, see Reinert, Translating Empire, 8, 22–23,
75, 138.
15. Agostino Bianchi, Riflessioni sulla grandezza e decadenza della repubblica di Genova
(Genoa: Stamperia nazionale, 1797), 36–37, 50–51, 235.
16. See, for example, Marin Sanudo, “Praise of the City of Venice, 1493”; and Anon., “The
Establishment of the Board of Trade, 1507,” in David Chambers and Brian Pullan, eds.,
Venice: A Documentary History 1450–1630 ed. David Chambers and Brian Pullan (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001), 4–21, 168–69.
17. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 11. On the influence of Botero’s economic conception of great-
ness, even though he does not engage with its longer history, see also Andrew Fitzmau-
rice, “The Commercial Ideology of Colonisation in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson,
Giovanni Botero and the Pursuit of Greatness,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 4
(2007): 791–820; and Fitzmaurice, “Neither Neo-Roman nor Liberal Empire,” Renais-
sance Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 479–90, 485–86.
18. Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985), 117, 147; Henri,
Duke of Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendom, trans.
H. H. (Paris: n.p., 1640 [first published 1639]), 5, 34; Thomas Hobbes, “Discourse upon the
Beginning of Tacitus,” in Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified
Work of the Young Hobbes, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31–67, quote on 44.
19. Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963), 25–26; for an iconological expression see Cesare Ripa, Iconologia,
ed. Piero Buscaroli (Milan: TEA, 1992), 359–60.
365 Rivalry
20. Eg., Anon, The Petition and Remonstrance of the Governour and Company of Merchants of
London Trading to the East-Indies (London: n.p., 1641), vii; Antonio Genovesi, Storia del
commercio, 3 vols. (Naples: Gessari, 1757–58), 1:ii and throughout; Christen Henriksen
Pram, Tale paa Kongens födselsdags-höitid 1811 med oplysende anmaerkninger (Copenha-
gen: Seidelin, 1811), 20.
21. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 90.
22. Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Com-
merce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010):
1395–425.
23. A viewpoint adumbrated by Gustav Schmoller, The Mercantile System and its Historical
Significance (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 48, 50–51, 72, 75–76; Max Weber, General Eco-
nomic History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 347; Eli Heckscher,
Merkantilismen: ett ledd i den ekonomiska politikens historia, 2 vols. (Stockholm: P. A.
Norstedt and söners, 1931), 1:6 and passim; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Popula-
tion: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 32, 102, 277, 337.
24. Quoted in Maria Fusaro, Reti commerciali e traffici globali in età moderna (Bari: Laterza,
2008), 71, emphasis added. See, for equivalent English statements at the time, Ronald
Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy
in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 244.
25. Johan De La Court, Politike Discoursen (Leiden: Pieter Hackius, 1662), second pagina-
tion, 178.
26. See, for example, Traites sur le commerce de Josiah Child suivis des Remarques de Jacques
Vincent de Gournay, ed. Simone Meysonnier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 242; Girolamo
Belloni with annotations by Giovanni Battista Zanobetti, Del commercio . . . , (Leghorn,
1751), 70n; Francesco Algarotti, “Saggio sopra il commercio,” in Opere scelte, 3 vols.
(Milan, 1823), 1:452.
27. Cf., among others, J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press), 1:109, 2:169; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies
of Empire in Spain, Britain and France ca. 1500–ca. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), 178–87; Pagden, “Imperialism, Liberalism and the Quest for Perpetual
Peace,” Daedalus 134, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 46–57, quote on 56.
28. Michele de Jorio, Storia del commercio e della navigazione: Dal principio del Mondo sino
a’ giorni nostri . . . , 4 vols. (Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1778–83), 1:21. On how popular
awareness of these mechanisms informed the American Revolution, see T. H. Breen, The
Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 329–31.
29. de Jorio, Storia del commercio, 4:299; and de Jorio, Il codice marittimo del 1781 di Michele
de Jorio per il Regno di Napoli, ed. Cesare Maria Moschetti, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini Edi-
tore, 1979), 1:91–93.
30. For a similar translation, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought
and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
226.
31. Digest 1.6.4.; Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), x–xii, 63–72, 173–77.
32. Livy, History of Rome, 34.57; Virgil, Aeneid, 12.112; John 1:17; Seran de la Tour, The Life of Scipio
Africanus, and of Epaminondas, trans. R. Parry, 2 vols. (London: W. Richardson, 1787), 1:183.
366 Conflict
See also, for biblical occurrences, many editions of Ex. 24:12, Deut. 5:31, 7:11, 12:1, and 17:11.
See also Carmelo Elio Tavilla, Homo alterius: I rapporti di dipendenza personale nella dot-
trina del duecento: Il trattato “De hominiciis” di Martino da Fano (Naples: Edizioni Scien-
tifiche Italiane, 1993).
33. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79; Thucydides quoted in Bernard Knox, “Thucydides
and the Peloponnesian War: Politics and Power,” in Knox, Essays Ancient and Modern
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 92–109, 107–8.
34. Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (Dublin: Luke White, 1787), 468, emphasis
added.
35. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 186.
36. de Jorio, Codice marittimo, 1:302.
37. John Dunning, A Defence of the United Company of Merchants of England, Trading to the
East-Indies, and their Servants, (particularly those at Bengal) against the complaints of the
Dutch East-India company: Being a memorial from the English company to his Majesty on
that subject (London: Brotherton, 1762), 10.
38. Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–58, 136.
39. Anon., A Long Ramble, or Several Years Travels, in the Much Talk’d of, but Never Before
Discover’d, Wandering Island of O’Brazil (London, 1712), 19, emphasis added.
40. Jean-Francois Melon, A Political Essay upon Commerce, trans. David Bindon (Dublin,
1738), 9; Jean Bernard Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 2 vols. (London,
1747), 2:91–93, 347–48, 353; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia
C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 328–29;
Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont, Essai sur l’etat du commerce d’Angleterre, 2 vols. (Paris,
1755), 1:75; Antonio Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna scritta da John
Cary, 3 vols. (Naples, 1757–58), 1:lxxxv–lxxxvi, 35n–36n, 220n–221n, 367; and 2:31n–32n.
41. Jacques Savary, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce . . . , 2 vols., trans. Mala-
chy Postlethwayte (London: Knapton, 1751–1755), 2:unpaginated dedication.
42. Gaetano Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, ed. Vincenzo Ferrone et al., 7 vols. (Ven-
ice: Centro di studo sull’Illuminismo europeo “G. Stiffoni,” 2003), 2:138–39 and n, but see
also 1:138–39, emphasis added.
43. See on this point the editor’s introduction to Serra, A Short Treatise.
44. Francesco Isola, Instituzioni di commercio e di economia civile (Rome: de Romanis, 1811),
xi. See, for similar arguments before the mid-nineteenth century, Giuseppe Gennari,
Sopra il commercio e la navigazione de’ Veneziani (Padova: Crescini, 1823), 20; Travers
Twiss, View of the Progress of Political Economy in Europe since the Sixteenth Century
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 57.
45. As explicitly theorized by de Jorio, Codice marittimo, 1:91–93, building on Genovesi, Sto-
ria del commercio, 1:28, 247–48.
46. On these events, see Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 471; Il bombardamento di Genova nel 1684:
Atti della giornata di studio del terzo centenario (Genoa: La quercia, 1988); John A. Davis,
Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions 1780–1860 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 92–93; Thomas Munch-Petersen, København i flammer:
hvordan England bombarderede København og ranede den danske flåde i 1807 (Copenha-
gen: Gyldendal, 2007).
367 Rivalry
47. Argued explicitly by de Jorio, Codice marittimo, 1:152, 169. This was a universal prob-
lem. For its longevity see Davis, Naples and Napoleon, 325–26. On closed commercial
states see Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Com-
mercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2011).
48. Sophus A. Reinert, “Cameralism and Commercial Rivalry: Nationbuilding through Eco-
nomic Autarky in Seckendorff ’s 1665 Additiones,” European Journal of Law and Economics
19, no. 3 (2005): 271–86; S. A. Reinert, “The Sultan’s Republic.”
49. David Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51–57, 52.
50. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin
Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), v1:17n.
51. Serra, Short Treatise; John Cary, An Essay on the State of England (Bristol: W. Bonny,
1695).
52. Plutarch, Lives I, trans. Bernadotte Perin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1914), 471; Piero Vettori, Trattato delle lodi et della coltivatione de gl’ulivi (Florence: Giunti,
1569 [written 1530–1532], 5. On the institutionalization of these measures, see Luca Molà,
“Stato e impresa: privilegi per l’introduzione di nuove arti e brevetti,” in Il Rinascimento
Italiano e l’Europa, III: Produzione e tecniche, ed. Philippe Braunstein and Luca Molà
(Treviso-Vicenza: Angelo Colla, 2007), 533–72; Franco Franceschi and Luca Molà, “Re-
gional States and Economic Development,” in The Italian Renaissance State, ed. Andrea
Ganberini and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 444–66,
esp. 458–61.
53. Angus Maddison, The World Economy, 2 vols. (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2006), 1:42, 56,
92, 248. Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of
the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and
Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 276–77.
54. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London: Royal
Historical Society and University College London, [1529–32], 1989); John Hales, Compen-
dious or Briefe Examination of Certayne ordinary Complaints of divers of our Countrymen
in these our Dayes (London: Thomas Marshe, 1581), 59.
55. Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse concerning Western Planting, ed. Charles Deane (Cam-
bridge: Press of John Wilson and Son for the Maine Historical Society, 1877), 36–44.
56. Luis Ortiz, “Memorial a Felipe II [1558],” ed. Manuel Fernandez Álvarez, Anales de Econo-
mia 17, no. 63 (1957): 117–200; Barthélemy de Laffemas, Reiglement [sic] general pour
dresser les manufactures en ce rayaume . . . (Paris: Claude de Monstr’oil and Jean Richter,
1597), 17; de Laffemas, Lettres et examples de feu de la Royne mere (Paris: Pautonnier,
1602), 123.
57. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, Additiones oder Zugaben und Erleuterungen zu dem Tractat
des Teutscher Fürsten-Stats (Frankfurt: Thomas Matthias Göken, 1665), 188; S. A. Reinert,
“Cameralism and Commercial Rivalry.”
58. S. A. Reinert, Translating Empire.
59. Serra, Short Treatise, 121.
60. Giornale d’Italia, July 21, 1764, 17.
61. Antonio Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna scritta da John Cary . . .
Tradotta in nostra volgar lingua da Pietro Genovesi . . . con un ragionamento . . . di Antonio
Genovesi, 3 vols (Naples: Benedetto Casari, 1757–58), 1:220n; 2:35, 188n.
368 Conflict
62. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: J. G. for T. Clark, 1664), 15.
63. Cosimo Perrotta, Produzione e lavoro produttivo nel mercantilismo e nell’illuminismo
(Galatina: Congedo, 1988); Erik S. Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . And Why Poor
Countries Stay Poor (London: Constable, 2007); Richard H. K. Vietor, How Countries
Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2007).
64. Anon., A Discourse on the Necessity of Encouraging Mechanick Industry . . . (London:
R. Chiswell, 1689), 29–30; and many others in the subsequent century.
65. Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of French En-
lightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 243–44.
66. On the appropriateness of emplying the word “industrial” to describe manufacturing ac-
tivities before the “industrial Revolution,” see Carlo Poni, La seta in Italia: Una grande
industria prima della rivoluzione industriale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 61–62.
67. On the role of the state in industrialization as the key to explaining the great divergence,
see Erik S. Reinert, “The Role of the State in Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic
Studies 26, no. 4/5 (1999): 268–321; P. H. H. de Vries, “Governing Growth: A Comparative
Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1
(2002): 67–138; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not:
Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
68. As eloquently put in the Marquis d’Argenson’s review of Belloni, Journal Économique (April
1751): 107–17; see also S. A. Reinert, “The Sultan’s Republic”; and Findlay and O’Rourke,
Power and Plenty.
69. Amintore Fanfani, Storia delle dottrine economiche dall’antichità al XIX secolo (Milan:
Casa Editrice Giuseppe Principato, 1955), 149.
70. See Machiavelli, “Il Principe,” ch. 17, in Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, 281–83; Botero, Ragion
di stato; Serra, Short Treatise, 68, 129; Rohan, The Interest of the Princes and States, 1–2;
Hobbes, “A Discourse,” 65; Richelieu, Political Testament, 28; Cary, Essay on the State of
England, 51.
71. Vincent de Gournay, “Mémoire,” in Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capi-
talism Before Adam Smith, ed. Henry C. Clark (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 387. For
what used to be the mainstream interpretation of Colbertism, see John Kells Ingram, A
History of Political Economy (Edinburgh: Black, 1888), 41.
72. Erik S. Reinert and Sophus A. Reinert, “Mercantilism and Economic Development:
Schumpeterian Dynamics, Institution Building, and International Benchmarking,” in The
Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought Have Addressed De-
velopment, ed. Jomo K. Sundaram and Erik S. Reinert (London: Zed Books, 2005), 1–23.
73. Simone Meysonnier, ed., Traites sur le commerce de Josiah Child suivis des Remarques de
Jacques Vincent de Gournay (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 242.
74. Galiani, Dialogues, 14, 17, 22, 31, 166, 209, 229, 233, 257–58.
75. On this classic argument for free trade, see Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellec-
tual History of Free Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
76. Anon., Relazione di una scorsa per varie provincie d’Europa del M. M. . . . a Madama G. in
Parigi (Pavia: Nella Stamperia del R. Im. Monastero di S. Salvatore, 1786), 31.
77. Tench Coxe, An Address to an Assembly of the Friends of American Manufactures, (Phila-
delphia: R. Aitken and Son, 1787), 4.
78. Friedrich List, Das Nationale System der Politischen Ökonomie (Stuttgart: J G Cotta’scher
Verlag, 1841); John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols. (London: Parker,
1848), 2:487.
369 Rivalry
79. S. A. Reinert, Translating Empire,286–87.

80. On this term’s vicissitudes, see Quentin Skinner, “From the State of Princes to the Person
of the State,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 2:368–413.
81. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
82. S. A. Reinert, “Cameralism and Commercial Rivalry”; Reinert, Translating Empire; Edwin
R. A. Seligman, Curiosities of Early Economic Literature (San Francisco: Privately Printed
by John Henry Nash, 1920), ix.
83. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 75; Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 201; Steven L. Kaplan, La fin des corporations (Paris: Fayard,
2001); Ulrich Pfister, “Craft Guilds, the Theory of the Firm, and Early Modern Proto-
Industry,” in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. S. R. Epstein
and Maarten Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 25–51.
84. Few cases in the annals of history are more explicative of this complex and dynamic in-
teraction of cities, states, empires, and corporations than the British East India Company;
see Huw V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain,
1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stern, Company State. For
perspectives see also Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 240; Greenfeld, Spirit of
Capitalism, 29–58; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of
Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 289–99.
85. Henry Lloyd, An Essay on the Theory of Money (London: Almon, 1771); Carl von Clause-
vitz, On War, ed. M. E. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989), 149; and von Clausevitz, “From the ‘Political Declaration’ (1812),” in Historical and
Political Writings, ed. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1992), 285–303, 292. See also Sophus A. Reinert, “‘One will make of Political
Economy . . . what the Scholastics did with Philosophy’: Henry Lloyd and the Mathema-
tization of Economics,” History of Political Economy 34, no. 4 (2007): 643–77.
86. S. A. Reinert, Translating Empire, 118 and n283.
87. de Jorio, Storia del commercio e della navigazione, 1:21.
88. Alexander Hamilton, A Defence of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation,
Entered into Between the United States of America & Great Britain, as it has Appeared in
the Papers under the Signature of Camillus (New York: Francis Childs and Co., 1795), 36.
89. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, eds., A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe
Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 94–95, 125.
90. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: Davis and Lyon, 1733), 71; S. A.
Reinert, Translating Empire, 138.
91. Machiavelli, “Dell’arte della guerra,” in Tutte le opere, 299–398, quote on 307; Voltaire,
Corpus des notes marginales, ed. Natalia Elaguina, 5 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1979–1994), 5:472.
92. Gouverneur Morris to Alexander Hamilton, August 17, 1792, in The Papers of Alexander
Hamilton, 28 vols., ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1961–1987), 12:220–22. I am grateful to Francesca L. Viano for this reference.
93. Antonio Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio o sia d’economia civile, 2 vols. (Milan: Agnelli,
1768), 1:147; Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances de la France, 3 vols., n.p.,
(1784), 1:lix, lxi–lxii, emphasis added.
370 Conflict
94. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve, L’economie politique: Projet pour enrichir et our perfec-
tioner l’espéce humaine (London [Paris]: Moreau, 1763), 59, Guillaume François Le Trosne,
Lettres a un ami, sur les avantages de la liberté du commerce des grains et le danger des
prohibitions (Amsterdam: Desaint, 1768), 148. E. P. Thompson’s “The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136, remains
a fruitful starting-point for understanding this resistance.
95. On shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, see Bruce Scott, Capitalism: Its Origins and
Evolution as a System of Governance (New York: Springer, 2011).
96. Steven Laurence Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour
Trade During the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 31.
97. S. A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.”
98. The baroquepunk heuristic would bridge the conceptual arc from the early, Thrasyma-
chean chapters of Stephen R. Bown, Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World,
1600–1900 (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009) to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), by way of Frederic Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990), 38, 419, and of course William Gibson’s genre-defining 1984 novel, Neuro-
mancer (London: Penguin, 2000), 196, where we read: “Power, in [this] world, meant
corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human his-
tory, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of
immortality.”
99. Giuseppe Nicola Corvàia, La bancocrazia: o, il gran libro sociale novello sistema finanzi-
ario che mira a basare i governi su tutti gl’interessi positivi dei governati (Milan: Ubicini,
1840–41), 1:46, emphasis added. On Corvàia, see Concetta Spoto, La bancocraia a sistema
di governo: Associazionismo e credito in Giuseppe Corvaja (1785–1860) (Milan: Franco
Angeli, 2009).
100. John Hughes, “A Lecture: On the Importance of a Christian Basis for the Science of Polit-
ical Economy . . . ,” Catholic Cabinet and Chronicle of Religious Intelligence 2, no. 1 (May
1844): 34–56, quote on 56; Carlo Ilarione Petitti, Difesa della societa’ nazionale per le strade
ferrate pontificie (Rome: Tipografia della societa’ editrice romana, 1847), 22; “Business
Notes,” Economist, November 27, 1875, 1393. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of
Capital (London: Verso, 2003); James C. Riley, International Government Finance and the
Amsterdam Capital Market, 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 192.
101. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
102. See on these earlier utopias John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transforma-
tion of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Kotkin, Mag-
netic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995).
103. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Gary Hand-
werk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 34–35.
104. See similarly Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British
Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William
and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 3–34.
105. Schmoller, Mercantile System, 79.
afterword:
mercantilism to macroeconomics
Craig Muldrew
Why now, at this moment in time, is it important to rethink mercantilism? All the
various chapters presented here deal in some way or another with how governance
evolved in different ways in relation to trade in the early modern period. In older ste-
reotypes, mercantilism was simply taken to be a policy, which attempted to create and
preserve a trade surplus in order to gain a favorable inflow of specie. But questions of
employment, poverty, resources, and population were generally more basic. As popu-
lation expanded in the sixteenth century, putting pressure on the productive capacity
of European agriculture, the resources acquired from colonies or from overseas trade
were seen by a number of writers as a solution, which could create more employment
and enable both subjects and states to grow wealthier. Early modern governments were
obsessed with both the economic and social cost of poverty caused by population
growth in the sixteenth century. As a result, they were willing to entertain plans to al-
leviate poverty by creating employment in export-based manufacturing, or by encour-
aging emigration to colonies, which could be developed to produce resources for
re-export or use at home. In the seventeenth century, older notions of an idea of bal-
ance of trade were rejected in favor of improvement and growth.1
Governments also remained concerned with their other primary legitimizing func-
tion: that of defending their subjects or citizens and their religious beliefs. To do this they
needed resources, which required them to raise taxes. Economic policy had to always
consider the inevitability of war and piracy. Nations certainly needed to try to protect
their subjects from foreign invasion and their seamen from pirates if they were to enjoy
the benefits of trade. In addition, the wars of religion involved more than a century of
confessional conflict, and since the Reformation followed soon after the establishment of
the first Spanish and Portuguese colonies, it is impossible to disentangle the motivation
behind state protection of colonial trade from non-economic motivations for warfare.2
Certainly many of the early seventeenth-century English writers considered to be
mercantilists stressed the need for England to improve and become wealthier through
371
372 Afterword
competition with the Dutch through trade, fishing, and finally manufacturing.3 According
to Adam Smith, though, they fundamentally failed in their analytical pursuits. In partic-
ular, Smith accused them of misunderstanding the proper role of money and of advocating
policies that benefitted monopoly corporations at the expense of the laboring poor—two
errors that often reinforced each other. A number of chapters in this volume explore these
themes in the seventeenth-century context, but here I discuss Adam Smith’s perspective on
them and offer some broad reflections on the long dureé of the concept mercantilism.
That early Stuart political economists are usually labeled bullionists and discussed,
often mistakenly, in terms of what they said concerning the relationship of foreign
trade to specie flow is probably a result of Adam Smith’s ahistorical discussion of them.
But there was, as Stern and Wennerlind note in the introduction, a shortage of cur-
rency in the 1620s in England, which created problems, not just for Charles I’s attempts
to raise more tax from his subjects but also for the ability of clothiers to pay their
workers, and this only exacerbated the growing amount of unemployment in the
country.4 We need to examine Adam Smith’s lengthy historical discourse on the nature
of money as wealth in The Wealth of Nations to see how this prejudice came about.
Smith’s initial discussion of the use of specie as wealth developed out of his discus-
sion of rent. Overall, he attacked the notion that gold and silver specie were the ulti-
mate repository of the wealth produced by a nation’s economy in order to argue that a
banking system was a better way through which the wealth—represented by labor,
fixed capital, and consumable goods—could be converted into circulating capital. By
the time Smith lectured and wrote, there was already a long literature on the question
of whether a currency with an intrinsic value was too limited to supply the needs of an
economy that aimed at continued growth, but no one before Smith linked the question
with so much conceptual clarity to the formation of capital.5 More relevant to our con-
cern here is that he also linked the support of bullionist arguments with the protec-
tionism desired by merchants. He saw prohibitions on specie flowing out of a country,
a common feature of most early modern states, as just one of the many trade restric-
tions designed to support the interest of merchants.6
In his early lectures, and in the Wealth of Nations, Smith criticized the idea that the
quantity of gold and silver money was representative of a nation’s wealth. He argued
against a simple quantity theory of money creating inflation by demonstrating how
prices rose over time (due to the progress and improvement of human industry as it
multiplied in proportion to demand) until industrialization started to reduce costs of
manufactured goods.7 At the beginning of Smith’s Book 4 on systems of political
economy, he began with a discussion on money:
That wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver, is a popular notion which nat-
urally arises from the double function of money, as the instrument of commerce,
373 Afterword
and as the measure of value . . . wealth and money, in short, are, in common
language, considered as in every respect synonymous.
A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is supposed to be a country
abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any country is supposed
to be the readiest way to enrich it.8
He went on, largely elaborating what he had discussed in his lectures, criticizing
previous authors, chiefly John Locke, John Law, and most specifically Thomas Mun,
whom he accused of creating the idea that gold and silver equal the wealth of a king-
dom, and claimed, “this doctrine of his, which however foolish has been adopted by all
succeeding writers.”9 As a result of Smith’s criticism, Mun has come to be seen as the
epitome of a mercantilist.
In reality, for someone like Mun, writing in the early seventeenth century, money
was important for state power because it was needed to pay for armies fighting on the
Continent at a time when the English financial system was not developed enough to
remit credit with regularity in war. As Locke put it, “’Tis ridiculous to say, that Bills of
Exchange shall pay our Debts abroad: That cannot be, till Scripts of Paper can be made
current Coin.”10 Before the creation of the Bank of England, much of the money col-
lected through taxation to pay for war was also money that left the country, creating a
further drain on the circulating medium.11 Mun specifically claimed that foreign wars
exhausted a kingdom’s treasure because armies needed to be provisioned with foreign
wares.12 As a result, war created two serious monetary problems: the need to supply
enough money to armies to pay soldiers and buy arms, and the need to deal with the
economic and potential social problems created in England by the drain on the circu-
lating currency.
It was precisely these two problems that occupied pamphleteers like Mun, Edward
Missleden, and Gerard de la Malynes in the 1620s, when even the small commitments
that England made in fighting the Thirty Years War created a need for much more
taxation.13 Circulating currency, already reduced through trade deficits due to prob-
lems in the cloth trade, could not meet the demands of taxation.14 In the light of these
problems, which undoubtedly existed in other European countries, early Stuart mone-
tary thought in this sense made a great deal of historical sense. The possession of more
gold and silver than potential enemies did indeed give states without access to stable
national banks a greater degree of power in terms of the ability to pay for war. Smith
must have realized this as he claimed some writers in the past had argued that nations
which “are obliged to carry on foreign wars, and to maintain fleets and armies in dis-
tant countries . . . say [this] cannot be done, but by sending abroad money to pay them
with; and a nation cannot send much money abroad, unless it has a good deal at
home.”15 But, since Smith’s concern was with his own time in which the financial
374 Afterword
revolution had made paying for war with paper credit possible, he treated Mun un-
fairly as someone whose opinion was relevant to debates in the eighteenth century.16
Adam Smith’s other main critique of the “mercantile system” was the wide array of
restrictions imposed by national and urban governments to protect local interests
against competition. Smith is famously associated with the modern anti-protectionist
paradigm, which holds that the benefits of free trade lead to the mutual advantage of
each trading nation and reduce restrictions on the free movement of goods. He cer-
tainly believed that protectionist regulations hindered the efficiency gains brought
about by the division of labor to the detriment of poorer consumers. In his famous
digression against the restrictions imposed by the English corn laws in times of poor
harvests, which limited merchants’ freedom to trade grain freely, he argued that the
merchant’s desire for profit would lead to grain being sent from where it was most
plentiful to where it was most scarce. Profits gained from higher prices would en-
courage improved production, in the long term, leading to reduced prices and fewer
years of dearth. When discussing the proper duties of government, or what he termed
the sovereign, he excluded most economic regulation:
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely

taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself
of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice,
is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both
his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order
of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting
to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and
for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could
ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people,
and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the
society.17
He undoubtedly thought that free trade within and among nations was the best
policy. He also claimed that “The private interests and passions of men naturally lead
them to divide and distribute the stock of every society, among all the different em-
ployments carried on in it, as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agree-
able to the interest of the whole society,” and this is often taken to be an argument in
favor of the spontaneous order of the marketplace, or in more recent terminology, the
self-regulation of the marketplace.18
Statements like these are used to argue that Smith’s aim was ultimately to support
natural liberty. But a broader reading of the entire argument of the Wealth of Nations
shows that he was more concerned with the way in which merchants and master
375 Afterword
manufacturers used government regulation to enrich themselves at the expense of

poorer artificers and workers, who were thus denied the full fruits of their labor. Town
corporations and merchants with overt legal combinations and monopolies, or em-
ployers with secret combinations, all had the aim of enriching a privileged few through
exclusion rather than competition, at the expense of consumers and workers. Smith
claimed that “merchants and manufacturers . . . interest is, in this respect, directly op-
posite to that of the great body of the people,” and that “Monopoly of one kind or an-
other was the sole engine of the mercantile system.”19
Nicholas Phillipson has recently suggested that Smith’s especial dissaproval of mer-
chants was a result of his experiences with the self-interested practices of the Glasgow
tobacco merchants.20 Smith even went so far as to blame “the monopolizing spirit of
merchants and manufacturers” on unnecessarily promoting war when they should
logically be promoting peace: “Each nation has been made to look with an invidious
eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their
gain as its own loss. . . . The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during
the present and the preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe, than
the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers.”21
Smith’s proposed solution involved freer competition. This position, however, was
not born primarily out of an abstract desire for liberty but because he thought that
freer competition would lead to a more equitable society of small producers. His polit-
ical economy sympathized with the working poor and argued that economic growth
depended on their saving and consumption as the division of labor and machines low-
ered prices.22 His opposition to what he termed the mercantile system was almost en-
tirely an expression of his dislike of the self-interest of monopolists to enrich themselves
through exclusion and corrupt regulatory capture. Smith was dissatisfied with this
system because he felt that it promoted class control through rent seeking, and ex-
cluded those whom he saw as a underprivileged minority: the laboring poor. With
hindsight we know that the future lay with manufacturers controlling capital through
corporations that hired labor; we cannot know what Smith might have thought about
this, but we do know what he thought of the employers of labor in his own time:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters; though fre-
quently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that
masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are
always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combina-
tion, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.23
Moreover, in his description of poor women spinners, he makes it clear that his
advocacy of the market was no abstract ideal but was motivated by a desire to show
376 Afterword
how even good policy could be used by the wealthy to further enrich themselves at the
expense of the poor:
[O]ur spinners are poor people, women commonly, scattered about in all dif-
ferent parts of the country, without support or protection. It is not by the sale
of their work, but by that of the compleat work of the weavers, that our great
master manufacturers make their profits. . . . By encouraging the importation of
foreign linen yarn, and thereby bringing it into competition with that which is
made by our own people, they endeavour to buy the work of the poor spinners
as cheap as possible . . . it is by no means for the benefit of the workman, that
they endeavour either to raise the price of the compleat work, or to lower that
of the rude materials. It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the
rich and the powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system.
That which is carried on for the benefit of the poor and the indigent, is too of-
ten, either neglected, or oppressed.24
After this follow fifteen pages of similar examples of specific trade regulations that
have been perverted by manufacturers at the expense of consuming workmen, before
Smith concludes with a clear statement about why he is opposed to the mercantile
system:
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production . . . But in the mercan-
tile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of
the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the
ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.
It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this
whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has
been entirely neglected; but the producers whose interest has been so carefully
attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have
been by far the principal architects.25
In modern terms, Smith’s overwhelming concern was with the pernicious effects of
regulatory capture rather than the promotion of an ideal of liberty, which he rarely
mentioned in the Wealth of Nations. Since he never wrote his proposed companion to
the Wealth of Nations on law and justice, we cannot know whether he would have sup-
ported regulation to keep the interests of the rich in check.
Smith certainly believed that every nation would enrich itself by allowing free trade
with its neighbor, but such enrichment held value only if it contributed to public opu-
lence or the wealth of poorer consumers. Currently, globalized free trade together with
377 Afterword
the creation of money is perhaps the key area of government macroeconomic policy,
and it is easy to imagine that Smith, if he were writing about today’s world, would be
happy that consumers have benefited from lower costs brought about by globalization.
In addition, there has been a significant addition to global employment and improve-
ment to material living standards. Free trade has also promoted efficiency, lower prices,
and inventiveness through increased competition. It has prevented national markets
from being held captive to poorly made or over priced goods. Products such as smart-
phones, which are developed globally and produced in countries like China with low
labor costs, make advanced technology affordable to a very large range of social groups.
Smith would undoubtedly approve of all of this. But, it is unlikely he would be san-
guine about the fact that this process has all been justified as a residual effect of
increased consumption of already wealthy consumers in wealthy nations. Its primary
effect has been to massively increase both the wealth and numbers of the owners of
capital in richer and poorer nations at a much more rapid rate than an increase in
wages and broad-based saving and consumption, whereas Smith’s vision of a wealthy
nation was a consumer society of workers who also participated in a stable banking
system through their own saving. It seems unlikely that the huge enrichment of the
modern “merchants and manufacturers” in developing countries in comparison to
workers would meet with Smith’s approbation. He most likely would be just as pessi-
mistic about the state’s vulnerability to be corrupted by wealthy interests today as in the
eighteenth century.
Free trade is now also justified in terms of mutual advantage between countries
with highly educated workforces that get high wages to innovate and produce special-
ized goods, and countries with workforces paid low wages to manufacture the majority
of consumer items. However, the ongoing financial crisis has pointed to the continued
existence of a large prehistoric fly in the ointment: all the “economies” between which
free trade takes place are based in nations. These nations are embedded within polit-
ical, cultural, and social institutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in current
contrast in the financial press between the so-termed overindebted and unproductive
PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) nations of the Mediterranean with north-
ern European economies. Contrasts can also be affected by prejudices and national
myths as witnessed by comments in the popular English and German press about
thrifty hardworking northern Europeans and the alleged spendthrift ways and corrup-
tion in Greece and Spain.
The reason the financial crisis has made this point so obvious is, of course, the
Euro. The idealist attempt of Euro proponents to push currency union ahead of inte-
gration of other institutional reform, and also their idealistic hope that labor markets
would be disciplined by free trade into competitiveness, has brought the problems of
free trade doctrine to a head. Many have argued that the opposite of the intended effect
378 Afterword
has happened. Europeans experienced no threat to living standards or to purchasing

power through devaluation caused by a lack of competitiveness that worried German
policy makers into painful welfare reforms in the 1990s. The current crisis of the Euro
makes it blindingly obvious that in terms of monetary creation and sustainability, we
still live in a mercantilist world. Currencies are created by national banks, and their
value is judged by traders on the basis of a wide range of data collected within the
boundaries of that particular nation.
The value of labor, technology, innovation, and the efficacy of state institutions to
promote such things are measured within nation states and are reflected in the value of
a currency or cost of state borrowing. States also provide regulation and laws robust
enough to resist corruption on the scale that would devalue the currency. In addition,
the responsibility of elected governments to make policy and spend taxes to look after
the welfare of its citizens has certainly become much stronger today than in the early
modern period, but undoubtedly policy is still driven by the same set of criteria: that
is, to alleviate poverty through employment. Now, in England, the United States, and
other countries, more emphasis is put on service-sector employment, as the high tech
competitive manufacturing sectors are simply too small to provide enough jobs. But
politicians continually repeat the need to create jobs for citizens who elect them.
And yet, as this volume has shown, “mercantilism” required some relationship
between regulation, political power, and the market, but it did not necessarily imply
that the nation-state was the only agent capable of such regulation. In the contempo-
rary world, the determination of both private and public value is now done by institu-
tions like the bond market along with new, more esoteric insurance markets such as
credit default swaps. Such instruments are much freer from individual state regulation
than corporate stock markets—hence the crucial role of the ratings agencies in the
current crisis. As a result, governments do not promote their power as residing in mil-
itary might as much as competitive economic success in terms of growth and employ-
ment. But if the recent financial crisis has demonstrated anything, it is that states, both
ideologically and fiscally, are still particularly capable of dealing with such systemic
shocks. In the banking crisis of 2008 this meant using tax revenue and sovereign debt
to prevent a systemic run on banks all connected to one another. Tax resources are also
vital in dealing with natural disasters, and one can argue that welfare payments also
help to smooth out fluctuations in consumer demand.
Taxpayers place trust in the state, however reluctantly, because most believe that it
provides them with such security. In 2008 some libertarians thought that most banks
were badly run institutions that took too much risk and thus should have gone bank-
rupt according to the laws of the market. If a hypothetical survey had been done asking
about the first part of this statement, it seems likely that a majority would probably
agree with it, but if the question were then asked, “Would you be willing to lose your
379 Afterword
savings in order to punish incompetent businesspeople?” it seems unlikely that many

would agree because they would not consider it their fault. The world of deposit
banking since World War II in western countries has not been one of caveat emptor but
state security. Americans, many of whom view the provision of state security through
regulation in a negative light, still maintain a strong sense of entitlement to govern-
ment protection from fraud or incompetence.
Even the economist Milton Freidman and his followers argued for the importance
of a state institution such as the Federal Reserve’s role in using a national money supply
as a means of creating economic conditions favorable to growth. Friedman thought
that excessive government involvement in the economy was acting to create inflation
in the period after the United States came off of the gold standard, but his solution was
to actually increase government control in a different way: over monetary policy. He
studied the history of money in the United States and became a strong believer in the
quantity theory of money. Although he was not in favor of too much government reg-
ulation of business or protectionist trade barriers, he did believe that a central control
over the creation of money could have beneficial effects. Friedman touted a very in-
strumentalist form of mercantilism. Here the state simply regulated a very complex
timepiece. As a result, numerical predictors of rising GDP governed policy direction.
This line of thought assumed the role of the state as a neutral and unproblematic pro-
vider of money, rather than as a set of institutions in which the right to govern and tax
has become accepted in a relationship built up through a shared history (“trusting le-
viathan,” in historian Martin Daunton’s memorable phrase).26
The basis of the acceptance of taxation is willingness to give up what is seen as
property earned through work to service government functions and for redistribu-
tion, both geographically and socially, and to trust that it will be spent to the benefit of
oneself—through infrastructure and security, both physical and social—as well as
others. For instance, the money that continues to be spent on the former area of the
GDR by the former Länder of West Germany was accepted by many after unification,
once it had become part of the same nation with the same democratic constitution
and a shared language, despite the fact that its institutional structure had followed a
radically different path for more than forty years. So far it has been much more diffi-
cult for EU leaders and the current German government to convince German tax-
payers to accept even emergency bailout funds. In Canada, large fiscal transfers can
take place between provinces, despite differences of law and language, because they
exist within the same state.
While for an economist, economic growth is an abstract good, for politicians,
though, economic growth is a means to election. Politicians sold the seeming success
of certain economies before 2008 to voters in specifically nationalist terms. The so-
called new economy based on developments in information technology in the United
380 Afterword
States, combined with loose monetary policy, was praised in comparison to what was
usually described as the mistaken policy of Japanese governments of not loosening the
money supply fast enough after the collapse of that country’s bubble economy in 1992.
In the period before 2008 in Britain, the policy of the Labour government of creating
flexible labor markets and continuing the privatization of government services, which
lead to the expansion of the service economy, was hailed by the government as the
cause of economic success. At that time, British conditions were contrasted favorably
in the British financial press with a German economy burdened with too many welfare
entitlements and labor rights. Now the tables have turned, and pundits praise Ger-
many for its success in retaining manufacturing in contrast to Britain’s failure. The
debate is now centered on government policy on training and investment.
The expansion of consumption and its provision through a larger service sector is
again another area where mercantilism might have something to teach us. While
global economic growth has soared, much of it was based in innovative consumption
in the so-called advanced economies. Goods made cheaply in countries where labor
costs were lower were imported and sold in advanced economies, which kept wages
down and gave rise to a boom in the advanced economies funded by the creation of a
vast amount of poorly secured credit. Now we have an interesting situation whereby a
poorer country like China has been supplying huge amounts of capital to Britain and
the United States to consume its goods through continued trade deficits. Most, but not
all, economists have argued that trade deficits can be financed by investing “hot
money” from producer companies in consumer countries, where the funds earn
interest.
Since that vast expansion of credit was done by financial institutions, which made
them seem extremely profitable, this raises a further question as to what proportion of
GDP growth in countries like Britain and the United States was based on the growth of
the financial services industry, and furthermore how much of this growth was needed
to finance consumption when real wages were stagnant or falling.27 The theory that
trade deficits do not matter depends on the belief that the consumer countries will still
have enough economic growth to service current interest payments, but if current ac-
count deficits continue to grow as fast, or faster, than home GDP, then service costs will
not go down. As demonstrated in the Euro crisis, the withdrawal of such money from
a country leads to a debt servicing crisis.28 This, of course, marks a strong modern
difference between most mercantilist thinking, which stressed that wise government
policy should work to expand one nation’s trade to increase wealth at home and pro-
vide both employment and more taxable wealth for defense from possible enemies,
something even Adam Smith countenanced.
The global freeing of constraints on trade has led to a productive boom, which has
provided employment in the third world and many new products, but finance has
381 Afterword
remained very definitely rooted in nation states. The continuing problems with the
euro show how hard it will be to overcome this without admitting that many (not all)
nation states, at this point, remain the most compelling large institutions in which the
majority of participants trust for a greater sense of security from violence and the pain
of extreme poverty. Free trade is valuable to the extent that material progress has been
greatly accelerated in many places by rewarding competitive effort. But if free trade
destabilizes the security provided by nation states too much through financial imbal-
ances, and unsustainable debt servicing and benefits a shrinking group of only the
successful, it is hard to see how a Smithian version of a broad-based consumer society
can be maintained.
One of the strongest themes to emerge from this collective rethinking of mercan-
tilism is that economies need security from a number of different threats such as war,
malfeasance, and natural disaster. Free trade in currency has created the conditions to
destroy too much of the savings built up by, in Smith’s term, “industrious workers.”
A recent study showed that almost half of UK households have less than £1,500 of sav-
ings and that most saving of the other 51 percent now is for old age.29 In the United
States Elizabeth Warren has shown how middle-class wealth has been squeezed by
rising debt.30 The potential for all of this capital to be lost surely cannot be good for any
system labeled “capitalism.” The most successful human response to such risk remains
not a market response (although obviously this has also been developed as far as pos-
sible with insurance) but a government response. People create government institu-
tions to promote communal security, which has a broad legitimacy. In many ways
mercantilism initiated this process by focusing on the importance of governance in the
market. Because monarchs had developed certain rights to taxation to pay for warfare,
this legitimization could be transformed in order that welfare concerns could be
addressed. Navies and armies were also used to capture colonies and to free trade
routes from other military threats to create more employment. Many trade restrictions
were then applied to attempt to create and then protect employment such as British
promotion of linen manufacture in Ireland and Scotland to avoid internal competition
with the woolen industry in England. This was a legitimization of protectionism born
in an era of conflict. But in the years of peace between the major industrialized nations
since World War II, it has made more sense to promote free trade as a way of creating
wealth.
In this sense, rather ironically, mercantilism can be seen as the progenitor of free
trade. Mercantilism was promoted in the early modern period as a means of enriching
the inhabitants of countries, just as free trade is promoted by politicians today as an
economically advantageous activity promoting employment and manufacture and
mutual advantage. Too often, however, homo economicus is abstracted as a stateless
individual. But only a very small group of very wealthy people can afford to purchase
382 Afterword
security not provided by states. One of the themes of this volume has been how diffuse
the practice of early modern mercantilism was and how much emerging states had to
rely on local institutions and elites. Adam Smith was perceptive in seeing how this
exposed good government to the self-interest of corruption. To make free trade work,
we must go back to Smith and his warning about the vulnerability of states to the
interest of wealth against the nation.
NOTES
1. See Stern and Wennerlind, “Introduction.”
2. For instance, see the comments of Richard Hakluyt. in his Discourse of Western Planting
(London, 1684), in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts,
ed. E. G. R. Taylor, The Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 77 (1935): 212, chs. 6–8, 11.
3. See McCormick (ch. 1) and Wennerlind (ch. 3); Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ide-
ology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978),
ch.4; Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London:
Routledge, 1994),
4. Conrad Russell, “Parliament and the King’s finances,” in The Origins of the English Civil
War, ed. C. Russell (London: Macmillan, 1973), 91–116; Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis
and Change in England 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 14–18,
54, 85, 131, 166–74.
5. Carl Wennerlind, “David Hume’s Monetary Theory Revisited: Was He Really a Quantity
Theorist and an Inflationist?” Journal of Political Economy 113, no.1 (2005): 223–38.
6. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skiner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
7. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 206, 217, 235–37.
8. Smith, Wealth of Nations., 429.
9. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein
10. John Locke, Some Considerations of Consequence of the Lowering of Interest, and the Raising
the Value of Money, reprinted in Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 1:226–29.
11. D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford: Black-
well, 1988), 30–39, 95–126.
12. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1664), reprinted in
J. R. McCulloch, Early English tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1954), 21. Also see Britannia Languens or a Discourse on Trade (London, 1690),
reprinted in McCulloch, Early English Tracts, 11; Locke, Some Considerations, 232.
13. Russell, “King’s Finances,” 103–8.
14. Supple, Commercial Crisis, 13–18, 126–31, 170ff.
16. Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism, International Capital Markets in the Age of
Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
17. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 687. However, he did advocate regulation to prevent the over
issuance of paper credit by banks; Smith, Wealth of Nations, 324
383 Afterword
18. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 360; Ronald Hamoway, “The Scottish Enlightenment and the
Theory of Spontaneous Order,” Journal of the History of Philosophy Monographs (1987):
18–22.
19. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 493–94, 630.
20. Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Penguin Books, 2010),
27–29.
21. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 493–94.
22. Craig Muldrew, “From Commonwealth to Public Opulence: The Redefinition of Wealth
and Government in Early Modern Britain,” in Remaking English Society: Social History and
Social Change in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter, Steve Hindle, and Alexandra
Shepard (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 317–39.
23. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 84–85; Muldrew, “Commonwealth to Public Opulence,” 333.
26. Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: the Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
27. Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, The Fragile Middle
Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
28. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial
Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 290–92; Philip Coggan, Paper
Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 248–55.
29. £1,500would be about $2,300 USD. http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/LTS
B/2012/0206ValueofUKhouseholdsavings.pdf
30. See Sullivan et al., Fragile Middle Class.
index
Acadia, 222 Anglo-Dutch Conferences of 1613, 185

Act of Common Council (London, 1673), Anglo-Dutch treaties (1674–1678), 331–36,
268–69, 274 340–42
Act of Uniformity (1662), 196 Anglo-Dutch Wars
Act of Union (1707), 129, 209 First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), 312
Acts of Navigation. See Navigation Acts Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784),
Acts of Trade and Navigation. See 329, 341–42
Navigation Acts Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667),
Aglionby, William, 34 308–9
agriculture. See also tobacco Anglo-French Treaty (1711), 319
Bacon on, 117 Anglo-Russian Commercial Treaty (1734),
Davenant on, 125 318
Hartlib on, 11, 78, 118, 120–21 Anglo-Swedish Treaty (1661), 318, 327n91
Smith on, 129 Annals of Agriculture (Young), 122
in Virginia, 120, 126, 129 Anna of Hannover, 334
in the West Indies, 55, 58, 127, 221 Anti-Gallican Society, 288
alchemy, 77–78, 161 Apology for the Builder (Barbon), 36
Alcibiades, 352 Appleby, Joyce, 6, 283
America (Dutch ship), 334 Aragon. See under Spain
American colonies. See North American Arbuthnot, John, 35–36
colonies of Great Britain; West Indies Ards (Ulster peninsula), 163
American War of Independence Argyll, Duke of, 125
Dutch Republic and, 338–340, 342 Aristotle
France and, 317, 338–39, 342 commerce and, 155
Great Britain and, 295, 338–40, 342 Hakluyt on, 165–66
impact on mercantilism by, 296 political economy and, 155, 157, 159–60
Andalusia. See under Spain Armitage, David, 209
Anderson, Adam, 129, 342 Ashburton, W.J., 283
Andrews, Charles M., 47, 53 Atterbury, Francis, 190
Angliae Tutamen, 272 Augustus II (King of Poland), 307
Anglican Church Austria
dissenting sects and, 209 France and, 309–10
English colonies and, 14, 199, 202, 205–6 Great Britain and, 319
imperialism and, 202, 205–9 Poland partition and, 317
maritime world and, 196–99, 202–4 Spain and, 310
missionary activities of, 197–198, 202–3, War of Austrian Succession and, 310, 312,
205–8 329, 333, 341
sailors and, 14, 196, 199–200, 203–8 War of Spanish Succession and, 248, 308
Anglo-Danish Treaty (1670), 327n91 Azpilcueta, Martin de, 243
385
386 Index
Bacon, Francis Berkeley, George, 86, 283, 287, 289, 294

on agriculture, 117 Bermuda, 117
commercial knowledge and, 105–7, 109 Bethel, Slingsby, 55, 70n89
councils of trade and, 112 Bianchi, Agostino, 350
epistemology and, 105–7 Bilbao (Spain), 251
Hartlib Circle and, 9, 11, 77–78, 107, 110 Bisset, William, 200
inductive method and, 100, 105 Blackbeard. See Teach, Edward
natural philosophy and, 99–100, 105–6, Blade Runner, 362
108, 119, 129 Blathwayt, William, 112
New Atlantis, 105–7, 119–20 Board of Agriculture (England), 120, 122
population and, 26 Board of Trade, 62, 111, 190
Royal Society and, 107–8 Bodin, Jean
scientific revolution and, 98–99 on population, 26, 30–31
on trade, 16, 350 quantity theory of money and, 243
Bahama Islands, 219, 221, 223, 224 on royal power, 250
Balasopoulos, Antonis, 197 Bolingbroke, Viscount, 209, 272–73
The Bankocracy (Corvàia), 362 Bombay (India), 188–89
Bank of Amsterdam, 83 Book of Common Prayer, 196
Bank of England Botero, Giovanni
criticisms of, 272–273 Bacon and, 16, 350
financial markets and, 263–66, 276–78 on population dynamics, 26, 30–31
financing of government and, 276–78 boycotts
political debates regarding, 85–86 in Great Britain, 288
Banks, Sir Joseph, 118, 121, 122, 128–29 in Ireland, 15, 287–92, 296
Barbados in North American colonies of Great
ecological crises in, 126–28 Britain, 288–89, 294, 296
indentured servants in, 49, 52, 58–59 Boyle, Robert, 77, 100
plantations in, 55, 58 Braddick, Michael, 13, 53–54
privateering and, 335 Bray, Thomas, 200–202
slavery in, 52, 58–59, 126 Brazil, 166, 318, 331
sugarcane in, 58, 126–27 Bredford, Paul, 335
tobacco and, 49, 58 Breen, T. H., 282, 288–89, 292
transportation of convicts to, 52 Brewer, John, 218, 282
Barbon, Nicholas, 36 Brewster, Sir Francis, 36–37, 60
Barnard, Sir John, 275, 277 Brief Observations (Child), 34
Barnard’s Law (1734), 274–76 Britannia Languens (Petyt), 35
Barthélémy de Laffemas, France, 355 Brown, Jockey, 228
Bassnett, Christopher, 204, 206 Buckinghamshire, Lord, 288
Baston, Thomas, 270 Buffon, Comte de, 128
Beckles, Hillary, 52 Bureau d’adresse (France), 120
Beckmann, Johann, 144–45, 147 Burnet, Gilbert, 206
Beer, George Louis, 47, 53
Beeston, William, 63 Cabot, Sebastian, 165
The Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 228 Calcutta (India), 188–89
Bellamy, “Black” Sam, 219, 228 cameralism
Bentinck, Willem, 334, 336 as an academic discipline, 136–44, 147
Beresford, John, 292 criticisms of, 142, 145–47
Berg, Maxine, 282, 293–94 epistemology and, 140–41, 143
387 Index
financial sciences and, 144 Charles V (King of Spain), 247

Fredrick William I and, 136–38 Charles VI (Holy Roman Emperor), 315
historiography of, 134–35 Charles XII (King of Sweden), 307
Holy Roman Empire and, 135–36, 139–40, Child, Josiah
143 on commercial diplomacy, 318
Kammers (German royal treasure on Dutch Republic, 34, 331
chambers) and, 134–36, 139, 142–43 East India Company and, 177, 181, 189
Leibniz and, 141–142 on joint-stock companies, 184, 187–88
mercantilism and, 12, 134, 136–37, 141, 147 on military power, 311
natural sciences and, 143–44 on monopoly, 359
police sciences and, 144 on population, 35
Prussia and, 136–39 on sailors, 199
resource management and, 135–36, on trade, 311
138–39 China, 226–27, 377, 380
Staatswirth (state administrator) and, 145 Choiseul, duc de, 319
utopian pragmatism and, 136 Church of England. See Anglican Church
Wissenschaft and, 136 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 157–58, 160, 165, 188
Cameralist Academy (Kameral-Hohe- Circle of Commerce (Misselden), 189–90
Schule, Lautern), 143–45 city-states, 349–50, 353–56, 359
The Cameralists (Small), 134–35 Clausewitz, Carl von, 360
Campanella, Tommaso, 362 Clements, Nathaniel, 291
Campbell, John, 129 Cobby, John, 228
Campbell, Mildred, 48 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 316, 351
Canada, 58, 379 Coke, Roger
Cañeque, Alejandro, 252 on commercial knowledge, 108
Cannan, Edwin, 354 on East India Company, 186
Canny, Nicholas, 164 on imperialism, 54–55
Cantillon, Richard, 285 on Navigation Acts, 34, 54–55
Caribbean. See West Indies on population, 34, 54
Carleill, Christopher, 166 on slave trade, 61–62
Carlos II (King of Spain), 248, 308 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste
Carruthers, Bruce, 85 on economic rivalry and war, 348–49
Carter, William, 228 Franco-Dutch War and, 308
Cary, John, 60, 112, 354, 359 French agriculture and, 356
Castile. See under Spain French mercantilism and, 245, 308
Catalonia. See under Spain Gournay on, 357–58
Catherine II (Empress of Russia), 340 tariffs and, 318
Cattle Act, 285–86 on trade, 311, 314, 357
Cecil, William (Lord Burghley), 161–62 Coleman, D. C., 6, 17n3, 18n4, 56, 283
Certain Proposalls In order to the Peoples Collection for the Improvement of
Freedome and Accommodation in some Husbandry and Trade (Houghton), 270
Particulars (Robinson), 80–81 Comenius, Jan, 77
Chamberlayne, John, 203 commerce
Chaplin, Joyce, 118 criticisms of, 9, 156
Chapman, George, 228 humanist values and, 156
Charitable Corporation, 275 justifications of, 155–56
Charles I (King of England), 180, 372 natural knowledge and, 100, 119
Charles II (King of England), 309 war and, 16, 312–14, 319–20, 325n69, 360
388 Index
commercial handbooks, 101–2, 105, 112 Sir Thomas Smith and, 154, 158–59,
commercial knowledge 161–63, 169
epistemology and, 97–98, 100–104, speculation and, 165
108–9, 111–13 the state and, 13, 154, 189–90
merchants’ direct experience and, Corvàia, Giuseppe Nicola, 362
109–13 Counterblast to Tobacco (James I), 123
non-merchant experts and, 111–12 Courteen, William, 180
Company of Royal Adventurers. See Royal Coxe, Tench, 358
African Company credit
Compton Census, 35 economic stimulus and, 84–85
consumption Italian banks and, 83
American Revolution and, 289 monetization of debt and, 84
class status and, 285, 290, 294 monetization of estates and, 84–85
Great Britain and, 75, 282 money supply and, 82–86
historiography of, 282, 284 personal debt instruments and, 83
imperialism and, 284 Tories on, 85–86
Ireland and, 15, 283–84, 286–90, Whigs on, 85–86
294–96 criminals. See convicts
luxury goods and, 75, 293–95 Cromwell, Oliver, 180, 183
mercantilism and, 15, 282, 284–87, 297 Crosby, Alfred, 120–21
North American colonies of Great Cuba, 252
Britain and, 282–83, 287–89, 294, 296 Cullen, Louis, 286–287
Smith on, 284–85, 296, 376–77 Culpeper, Sir Cheney, 81–83, 85–86
state formation and, 284 Curaçao, 331–32, 335, 341–42
sumptuary laws and, 285, 293
tariffs and, 285, 294 Dale, Thomas, 51
tea and, 285 Daunton, Martin, 379
West Indies and, 294 Davenant, Charles
Conventicle Act, 52 on agriculture, 125
convicts on Dutch Republic, 188
costs of trade involving, 52–53 East India Company and, 177, 184, 314
Transportation Act of 1718 and, 53 on Ireland and textiles, 314
transportation to English colonies of, 47, on joint-stock companies, 182, 184, 188
51–53, 57 on monopoly, 359
Cook, Harold, 100 on population, 37–39, 62
Cooke, Edward, 295 on stock-jobbing, 271
Cornu Copia (Hartlib), 120 on sumptuary laws, 293
corporations. See also joint-stock companies Decker, Matthew, 283
Aristotelian thought and, 159–60 Declaration of Independence, 168
collective action and, 154 Declaratory Act (1720), 286
Hakluyt and, 13, 154, 164–67, 175n54 Defoe, Daniel
legal personhood of, 154, 159, 164 on consumption, 284
local economies and, 183 on smugglers, 226
North American colonies of Great on stock-jobbing, 269, 271
Britain and, 167–68 De La Court, Johan, 351
political economy and, 162, 165, 167, de la Court, Pieter, 312
361–62 depopulation. See under population
royal authority and, 162, 167 Depopulation Arraigned (Powell), 27–28
389 Index
De rege et regis institutione (Mariana), 250 Habsburg rule and, 329–30

De Republica Anglorum (Thomas Smith), Hollandse waterlinie and, 332
157–61 League of the Armed Neutrality and,
Desnoyers, abbé, 338 340–41
de Vries, Jan, 282 money supply and, 83
Dialogues on the Grain Trade (Galiani), political divisions in, 338–39
357–58 Portugal and, 189, 316
dicere leges victis (giving law to the Russia and, 340
conquered), 351–52 science and commerce in, 100
Diderot, Denis, 352 security policy of, 332
Digges, Dudley, 29, 31 Seven Years’ War and, 334–37, 341
Discourse of this Commonweal of England slave trade and, 309, 330
(Thomas Smith), 157–60, 162 Spain and, 256, 307, 316, 319, 328–30
Discourse of Western Planting (Hakluyt), tariffs and, 318
166, 355 Treaty of Utrecht and, 332
Discourses on the Publick Revenues Triple Alliance and, 312
(Davenant), 37 War of Austrian Succession and, 329, 341
Divers Voyages (Hakluyt), 166 War of Spanish Succession and, 308
Dorrington, Theophilus, 204 West Indies and, 330–335
Double, Richard, 228 Dutch West India Company (WIC), 330–31,
Double, Tom, 271 341
double-entry bookkeeping, 101, 105 Dutot, Nicholas, 311
Drayton, Richard, 9, 119
Dryden, John, 197 Ease for Overseers of the Poore (Malynes), 28
Dublin (Ireland), 287, 291–92 East India Company (EIC)
Duke of York. See James II calicoes and, 293
Dundas, Henry, 121, 126 charity and, 183
Dunlevy, Mairead, 288 criticisms of, 181, 185–87
Dunn, Richard, 220 Dutch assaults on, 180
Dury, John, 77 Dutch East India Company (VOC) and,
Dutch East India Company (VOC), 185, 316, 316
330 Dutch Republic and, 185, 189
Dutch Republic English state institutions and, 179–81, 190
American War of Independence and, financial markets and, 263–64, 266, 269
338–40, 342 founding of, 86
Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 308–9, 312, 316 governance by, 179, 188
Atlantic trade and, 328–35, 338–39, historiography of, 178
341–42 Ireland and, 295
Austrian Netherlands and, 332 lobbying by, 180
England and, 16, 31, 34, 55, 108, 188–89, luxury goods and, 295
308–9, 312, 316, 331–33, 371–72 mercantilism and, 14, 177–79
(See also Great Britain) monopoly of, 53, 178–83, 188–89, 226, 295
France and, 307–9, 312–13, 332, 334–35, sailors and, 29
337, 339 Society for Promoting Christian
Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678) and, Knowledge (SPCK) and, 208
307–8 supporters of, 178, 181, 183, 188
free trade ideology and, 328–37, 340–42 tea and, 226–27
Great Britain and, 328–29, 333–41 trading regions of, 183, 185, 188–89
390 Index
East Indies money supply in, 9, 82–84, 372

Dutch presence in, 29, 316 national identity in, 197–200, 203–4, 207,
English presence in, 29 257
imperial rivalry in, 316, 320, 325n69 Nine Years’ War (with France) and, 264,
Portuguese presence in, 316 269, 312–13, 316
economic rivalry Poor Laws in, 8–9, 28–29, 32, 34
Colbert on, 348–49 population data from, 50, 57
imperialism and, 47, 351–52, 360 Portugal and, 316, 318
lawgiving power and, 16, 351–54, 360, Russia and, 318
362 tariffs in, 318
notions of liberty and, 351–54, 357 tobacco in, 117, 120, 123–25
notions of virtue and, 349–50, 360 War of Spanish Succession and, 308, 312
production capacity and, 354–58 England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade
Raynal on, 349 (Mun), 29–30
tariffs and, 358 English Civil War, 52, 57–58, 124, 196
as warfare, 360 Enlightenment, ecology and, 121, 128
war’s financial pressures and, 349, 351 epistemology
Eden, Charles, 223 Aristotelian tradition and, 11, 98–99, 103
Eden, Richard, 156 Bacon and, 105–7
Edgeworth, Maria, 290 cameralism and, 140–41, 143
Edinger, P. W., 122 Cartesianism and, 99
Elliot, Gilbert, 126 commercial knowledge and, 97–98,
Elliott, John, 247 100–104, 108–9, 111–13
emigration communal knowledge and, 97–98
opposition to, 122 experimentalism and, 99
peaks in, 52, 58 mercantilism and, 98
population dynamics and, 10, 32–35, natural philosophy and, 98, 100, 104,
48–51, 53, 57, 62, 233, 371 110–12
regulations regarding, 62 scholastic tradition and, 11, 103, 107, 110
enclosure movement (England), 26–29, 34, scientific revolution and, 98
39, 48, 229, 233 voyages of exploration and, 100–101
England. See also Great Britain Epstein, Stephen, 283
Admiralty in, 203 Essai politique sur le commerce (Melon), 312
agriculture in, 120, 122 Essay on the East India Trade (Davenant),
Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 308–9, 312, 316 293
Civil War in, 52, 57–58, 124, 196 Essays of Trade (Brewster), 36–37
credit arrangements in, 83–85 Essay upon the Probable Methods of making
depopulation of rural areas in, 26–28 a People Gainers in the Balance of
Dutch Republic and, 16, 31, 34, 55, 108, Trade (Davenant), 37
188–89, 308–9, 312, 316, 331–33, 371–72 Estado da India (Portugal), 316
(See also under Great Britain) Euro currency crisis, 377–78, 380–81
enclosure movement in, 26–29, 34, 39, Evelyn, John, 201
48, 229, 233 Exquemelin, Alexander, 220
Glorious Revolution in, 18n6, 61, 63, 264,
277, 310 Family devotions for Sunday evenings
Long Parliament in, 196 (Dorrington), 204
maritime orientation of, 197–98, 200, Fanfani, Amintore, 357
203–4, 207, 332 Fénelon, François, 312
391 Index
Ferguson, Robert, 181 Austria and, 309–10

Ferret, Louis, 334 Catalonia and, 247
Fielding, Charles, 339–40 colonies of, 309–10, 342
Fielding, Henry, 228 continentalists versus Atlanticists in, 309
Filangieri, Gaetano, 353 Dutch Republic and, 307–9, 312–13, 332,
financial markets 334–35, 337, 339
annuity loans and, 265–66 Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678) and,
Bank of England and, 263–66 307–8
boom and bust cycles in, 264, 275 Great Britain and, 310, 319, 332–33, 339–40
brokers and, 268–69, 274–75, 278 mercantilism in, 245
criticisms of, 263, 267, 270, 272–74, 276, militarization in, 309
278 Nine Years’ War (with England) and, 264,
deceit and, 269–70, 275 269, 313, 316
derivative transactions and, 268, 275–77 pirates and, 221–22
East India Company (EIC) and, 263–64, political economy and, 310, 357–58
266, 269 Prussia and, 310
Glorious Revolution and, 264 Russia and, 319
governments’ raising of money on, 263, Seven Years’ War (with Great Britain)
265, 270, 273, 277–78 and, 310, 317, 334–37, 342
joint-stock companies and, 264, 270 Spain and, 319
landed interests and, 272 tariffs and, 318
London and, 263–64, 268–69 Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and, 222
lottery schemes and, 265, 266 Triple Alliance and, 312
national debt instruments and, 263–67, unification efforts in, 257
270–73, 276–78 War of Austrian Succession and, 310, 333
Nine Years’ War and, 264–65 War of Spanish Succession and, 308
options contracts and, 274, 277 West Indies and, 333–35, 337
political threats posed by, 272–73 Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), 307–8
regulation and, 15, 267–70, 272, 273–76, Frankfurt an der Oder, university in, 136,
278–79 139
self-regulation and, 268 Franklin, Benjamin, 86, 294
South Sea Company and, 263–64, 266, Frederick II (Prussia), 317
272–73 Frederick William I (Prussia), 136–38
stock-jobbing and, 267, 269–74, 276–78 Free Apology on Behalf of Smugglers, A,
supporters of, 263, 270, 276–78 228–29
in the twenty-first century, 278–79 Freedom and Growth (Epstein), 283
Finglas, John, 200 “Free Ships, Free Goods” doctrine, 328–29,
Finkelstein, Andrea, 6–7, 75–76 332, 336–37, 339, 341–42
Flavel, John, 199, 204 Free Trade (Misselden), 187
Florida, 223 Freidman, Milton, 379
Forbonnais, François Véron de, 306, 311, 315 French and Indian War. See Seven Years’ War
Forster, John Reinhold, 122 Frere, George, 127
Fortrey, Samuel, 34, 54 Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega), 251
Forward, Jonathan, 53 Fuller, Robert, 228
Foster, John, 295 Furniss, Edgar, 56
France
American War of Independence and, 317, Galiani, Ferdinando, 357–58
338–39, 342 Gascoigne, John, 118
392 Index
Gasser, Simon Peter, 138 national debt of, 222, 227, 229, 263–67,
Gauci, Perry, 18n6 270–73, 276–78
Gay, John, 228 North American colonies of, 283, 285,
Gee, Joshua, 127–29 288–89, 292, 294, 296, 310
Geering, John, 228 pirates and, 221–223, 228
Gemery, Henry, 57 privateering and, 335–37, 339, 341
General History of the Pirates (Johnson), privatization in, 380
228 Royal Navy and, 222, 224, 312, 340
Genoa (Italy), 350, 353 Seven Years’ War (with France) and, 312,
Genovesi, Antonio, 353, 356, 361 317, 334–37
George I (King of England), 205, 312 slave trade and, 222, 224, 309
George II (King of England), 334 smuggling in, 218–19, 224–31, 233–34
Georgia, 128 Spain and, 307, 310, 313, 318–19, 328,
Gerard, John, 122–123 332–33, 340
Germany. See cameralism; specific states tax policy in, 218, 227, 229, 265, 283
Gervaise, Isaac, 86 Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and, 222
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 161 Triple Alliance and, 312
Gilligan, Manuel Manasses, 319 War of Austrian Succession and, 312, 329,
Global Financial Crisis (2008), 17, 377–79 333, 341
Glorious Revolution (1688), 18n6, 61, 63, Greenwich Hospital. See Royal Hospital for
264, 277, 310 Seamen
Godfrey, Michael, 277–78 Gregory, T. E., 5
Godwyn, Morgan, 207 Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie, 242
Gordon, Patrick, 202–3 Grotius, Hugo, 184–85, 330
Göttingen, University of, 142–45, 147 Guadaloupe, 333, 335
Gould, J. D., 75 Guyana, 333
Gournay, Jacques-Claude Vincent de, 310,
353, 357 Habsburg Dynasty, 247, 253, 255, 309,
Grampp, William, 5 329–30
Grattan, Henry, 295 Hakluyt, Richard (the younger)
Graunt, John, 31, 33, 35, 40 on Aristotle, 165–66
Gray, William, 230 on Brazil, 166
Great Britain. See also England; Scotland colonialism and, 48, 166, 355
Acts of Union (1707) and, 209 commerce and, 155
Admiralty Courts in, 328–29, 337, 341 corporations and, 13, 154, 164–67, 175n54
American War of Independence and, Mare Liberum and, 185
295, 338–40, 342 mercantilism and, 166, 355
Atlantic trade and, 328–29, 331–32, 341 on merchants, 167
Austria and, 319 Hales, John, 355
boycotts in, 288 Halle, University of, 136, 138–39, 143
commercial power of, 351–52 Hamilton, Alexander, 360
Dutch Republic and, 328–29, 333–41 Hamilton, Earl, 244
(See also under England) Hammond, John, 228
enclosure in, 229 Harley, Robert, 273
France and, 310, 319, 332–33, 339–40 Harte, Walter, 122
government corruption in, 229, 233, 275 Hartlib, Samuel
Hanoverian Dynasty in, 309, 315 on agriculture, 11, 78, 118, 120–21
luxury goods in, 295 Hartlib Circle and, 77
393 Index
on Office of Address for mercantilism and, 141

Communications, 107 on monopoly versus free trade, 181, 359
population and, 25 Hodges, William, 203
Hartlib Circle. See also specific members Holman, Thomas, 228
agriculture and, 78 Holy Roman Empire
alchemy and, 77–78 cameralism and, 135–36, 139–40, 143
Bacon’s influence on, 9, 11, 77–78, political diversity in, 136, 142
107, 110 Thirty Years’ War and, 135
cameralism and, 136 Hont, Istvan, 16
on cooperation, 77 Hooke, John, 202
on credit, 85 Hoppit, Julian, 18n6, 86
on education, 78–79 Hortus Plantarum (Ray), 125
improvement-oriented ideology of, 9, 31, Hough, John, 207
33, 36, 39, 55–56, 77–80, 85, 87–88 Houghton, John, 54, 108, 270
international correspondence of, 87 Hudson’s Bay Company, 53, 264, 270
millenarianism and, 77, 87 Hume, David
on money supply issues, 11, 77, 81–87 on landed interest, 272
natural philosophy and, 9, 55–56 on money supply, 86–87
Office of Address for Communications, on national debt, 271, 273
79 on trade, 314, 354
political economy ideas of, 9, 33 Humpert, Magdalena, 135
Scottish Enlightenment and, 87 Humphreys, Gilbert, 48
Harvey, William, 110 Husband, Richard, 335
Hawkhurst (England), 225, 231 Hutcheson, Francis, 284
Hay, James, 49
Heathcote, Sir Gilbert, 62, 111 imperialism
Hebrides, 125 Anglican Church and, 202, 205–9
Heckscher, Eli criticisms of, 54–57, 122
on commercial wars, 305 economic rivalry and, 47, 351–52, 360
on humanitarianism, 209 historiography of, 48
on mercantilism, 5, 75, 97, 153, 169, mercantilism and, 53–54
175n58, 241, 245, 249–50, 255 moral obligation and, 198
on secularization, 198 natural knowledge and, 11, 119–22, 130
on the state, 5, 169, 245 Roman colonial policy and, 163
Hely-Hutchinson, John, 289 slavery and, 46–47, 59–61, 63–64
Henri, Duke of Rohan, 350 support for, 58, 59–60
Henry Hangman’s Honour, 125 tax collection and, 227
Herball (Gerard), 122–23 indentured servants
Herrup, Cynthia, 52 conditions faced by, 50–51
Heyliger, Johannes Pietersz, 333 demographic profile of, 50
Hickes, George, 200 difficulties recruiting, 58–59
Higgins, Padhraig, 287 population theory and, 49–51
Hinton, R. W. K., 75 registries for, 62
Hirschman, Albert O., 256–57 in Virginia, 49
His Legacy of Husbandry (Hartlib), 120 in the West Indies, 49, 52, 58–59, 62–63
Hobbes, Thomas India, 128, 188–89, 316. See also East India
on international relations, 350 Company (EIC)
on joint-stock companies, 181 Industrial Revolution, 134
394 Index
international relations. See also war pirates and, 220–21

commercial diplomacy and, 306, 317–19, plantations in, 55, 221
332 slavery in, 62, 221
dynastic sovereignty and, 315–16 sugarcane and, 221
economic competition and, 16, 305–7, transportation of war prisoners to,
311–12, 314–17, 325n69, 348–51, 353–54, 51–52
378 James I (King of England)
tariffs and, 318 colonial policies of, 51, 167
trade rivalries and, 306, 311, 315–16, tobacco and, 123–24
320 Virginia and, 121, 167
treaties and, 306–7, 317–19, 332 James II (King of England)
The Invisible Hook (Leeson), 231 Royal African Company and, 59, 61
Ireland Second Anglo-Dutch War and, 309
boycotts in, 15, 287–92, 296 Jamestown (Virginia), 51, 123
cattle exports and, 286 Janeway, James, 204–5
colonial settlements in, 163–64 Japan, 380
consumption in, 15, 283–84, 286–90, Jasanoff, Sheila, 88
294–96 jealousy. See economic rivalry
East India trade and, 295–96 Jebb, Frederick, 289
food exports and, 290 Jefferson, Thomas, 129
food riots in, 290–91 Jenkinson, Charles, 121, 276
free trade debates in, 283, 286, 291–92, Johnson, Charles, 228
295–97 Johnson, E.A.J., 5
imported goods in, 284, 288 Johnston, Nathaniel, 187
Irish Volunteers and, 290 joint-stock companies. See also
linen and, 286, 291–92, 381 corporations
luxury goods in, 294–96 advocates of, 189
mercantilism and, 283, 285–88, 290–91, charters and, 185–86
294–96 criticisms of, 186–87
Money Bill in, 291 Dutch examples of, 184–85, 330
moral economy in, 291 financial markets and, 264, 270
Navigation Acts and, 286–87 fixed capital and, 330
patriotism in, 287, 290, 295–96 governance by, 179, 182–83, 189
protectionism in, 287 incorporation and, 182
protests in, 290–92 monopolies and, 13–14, 177, 182–86
rum and, 286, 296 overseas expansion and, 13
Smith on, 296 parliamentary regulation of, 190
sugar and, 286–88, 296 the state and, 13–14, 189
United Irishmen and, 290, 296 stockholders and, 186–87
wool exports and, 286 Jonathan Wild (Fielding), 228
Ironmongers’ Company, 183 Jorio, Michele de, 351–52, 360
Isola, Francesco, 353 Judges, A. V., 6
Justi, Johann von, 137, 140–44
Jackson, Charles, 126
Jackson, William, 228 Kagan, Richard, 253
Jamaica Kalm, Pehr, 129
ecological crises in, 127 Kamen, Henry, 250
indentured servants and, 62–63 Kammerbedienten, 138
395 Index
Kammers Littleton, Edward, 59–60, 126–27

cameralism and, 134–36, 139, 142–43 Livy, 352
criticisms of, 137, 142 Lloyd, Henry, 360
fiscal administration and, 145 Locke, John, 111, 190, 311–12, 373
Kant, Immanuel, 362 London (England)
Kaplan, Steven L., 361 commercialized society in, 100
Kemp, Laurence, 228 financial markets and, 263–64, 268–69
Kemp, Thomas, 228 growth of, 32, 36, 50
Kennett, Basil, 199, 208 xenophobia in, 271–72
Kew Gardens, 121 Lope de Vega, 251
Keymer, John, 111 López, José Larraz, 244
Keynes, John Maynard, 5–6, 16 Lords of Trade and Plantations, 120
Khan, Shaafat Ahmed, 179 Louis XIV (King of France), 264, 307–8,
Kidd, William, 201 312–13
Kiewijk, Erasmus, 335 Ludewig, Johann Peter von, 138–39
King, Gregory, 37, 39
Kitch, Aaron, 156 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 349, 352, 360–61
Klein, Julius, 244 MacKay, Ruth, 252
Knight, Tobias, 223 MacLachlan, Colin, 252
Koerner, Lisbet, 11 Madden, Samuel, 294
Kroen, Sheryl, 284–85 Madeira, 128
Kurland, Duke of (Brunswick), 334 Madras (India), 188–89
Magdeburg, 353
labor, wealth and, 3, 10, 56–57, 372. See also Magnusson, Lars, 6
indentured servants; slavery Malynes, Gerard
Labour Party (Great Britain), 380 on commerce, 102–4, 110–12, 137
Lanteri, Giacomo, 349–50 on enclosure, 28
Laud, William, 196 on joint-stock companies, 177–78
Lautern, Cameralist Academy in, 142, on merchants, 103
143–45, 147 on money supply, 75–76, 103, 373
Law, John, 86, 272, 312, 373 political economy and, 153
Law of Nations (Vattel), 352 on the poor, 28–29
League of the Armed Neutrality, 340–41 Poor Laws and, 8–9
Leeson, Peter, 231 royalist tendencies of, 12
Le Gendre, Thomas, 319 on sailors, 30
Leghorn (Tuscany), 207–8 Smith on, 10–11
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 141–42 on taxation, 373
Leicester, Earl of, 161–62 Mare Liberum (Grotius), 184–85, 330
Leng, Thomas, 11–12, 136–37 “Maria Machiavel” (cameralist critic
Letter of Advice and Comfort to the English pseudonym), 142
Captives Who Suffer in Slavery in Mariana, Juan de, 250
Foreign Parts (Woodward), 202 mariners. See sailors
Letwin, William, 98 Marketplace of Revolution (Breen), 288–89
Levant Company, 183, 185–86 Marlowe, Christopher, 156
Lexington, Lord, 319 Marriott, James, 336
Libault, François, 333 Marshall, Alfred, 256
Linnaeus, Carl, 11, 121, 128–29 Martyn, Benjamin, 128
List, Friedrich, 358 Martyn, Henry, 314
396 Index
Marvell, Andrew, 130 status anxiety and, 136137

Marx, Karl, 233 town governments and, 255
Mary II (Queen of England), 200–201 war and, 16, 305, 320
Maryland, 53 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 156
Masaniello Revolt (Naples), 247 The Merchants Avizo, 102
Massalski, Ignatius, 122 Merchants Mappe of Commerce (Roberts),
Massie, Joseph, 230 101–2, 107, 112
Mather, Cotton, 199–200, 204–5 Mesnager, Nicolas, 319
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 360 Methuen Treaty (1703), 318
McCloskey, Donald, 282 Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie
Medicus, Friedrich Casimir, 143–45, 147 (MCC), 333
Medley, William, 161–62 Milan, 246, 308, 318
Melchor de Jovellanos, Gaspar, 241 Mill, John Stuart, 74, 134, 358
Melon, Jean-François, 312 Miller, Thomas, 122
Menard, Russell, 52 Million Adventure lottery, 265
mercantilism Mills, John, 228
absolutism and, 12–13 Mills Sr., Richard and Mills, Jr., Richard, 228
American War of Independence’s impact Minorca, 205, 208, 222
on, 296 Mirabeau, Marquis de, 3, 348
Anglican Church and, 209 Misselden, Edward
balance of trade doctrine and, 243–44, on commerce, 102, 104, 108, 111, 137, 187
371 East India Company and, 177
cameralism and, 12, 134, 136–37, 141, 147 joint-stock companies and, 177–78,
colonial economies and, 47, 53, 56, 63, 189–90
282–83, 285, 296, 371 on merchants, 108
consumption and, 15, 282, 284–87, 297 on monetary supply, 75–76, 373
ecology and, 118 political economy and, 153
historiography of, 3–8, 39, 47, 75, 118, 179, Poor Laws and, 8–9
255, 282–83, 305, 314 on sailors, 29
imperialism and, 53–54 Smith on, 10–11
Ireland and, 283, 285–88, 290–91, 294–96 on taxation, 373
luxury goods and, 293–94, 296 A Modest Proposal (Swift), 291
maritime exchanges and, 196–97, 208 Molloy, Charles, 183–84
money supply and, 74–75, 378 monadology, 141
monopolies and, 3, 47, 53–54, 61, 181–82, Moncada, Sancho de, 249
190, 358–59 Money Bill (Ireland), 291
peace dividends and, 222 money supply
population dynamics and, 25, 38–39, 48, body politic metaphors and, 9, 76, 110
371 credit and, 82–86
royal charters and, 53–54 Dutch Republic and, 83
slavery and, 63 economic stimulus and, 82, 84, 86
Smith and, 3, 10–11, 16–17, 53, 74–77, 113, in England, 9, 82–84, 372
118, 137–38, 153, 177, 179, 191, 282, 285, Hartlib Circle on, 11, 77, 81–87
289–90, 348, 374–76, 380 Malynes on, 75–76, 103, 373
Spain and, 15, 241–50, 253–58 metallic currency and, 82, 87
state-merchant relations and, 12, 178–80 Mun on, 75–76, 373–74
state power and, 5, 12, 14–15, 54, 179, 296, shortages in, 74–75
381 Smith on, 74–75, 77, 86, 372–74
397 Index
Monmouth’s Rebellion, 52 political economy and, 11, 87, 118–19

monopolies soil and, 118–19, 127–30
Asian colonies and, 184–85 taxonomy and, 128–29
criticisms of, 184–85, 187 natural philosophy
East India Company (EIC) and, 53, Bacon and, 99–100, 105–6, 108, 119, 129
178–83, 188–89, 226, 295 epistemology and, 98, 100, 104, 110–12
joint-stock companies and, 13–14, 177, Navigation Acts
182–86 criticism of, 34, 54–55
mercantilism and, 3, 47, 53–54, 61, expansion of, 58
181–182, 190, 358–59 Ireland and, 286–87
“regulated companies” and, 186 mercantilist principles of, 12, 47, 53, 283,
Royal African Company and, 53, 59, 61, 285–86, 328, 331
63, 190 sailors and, 30
South Sea Company and, 222 sugar and, 286–87
Mons, 269 Navigation Spiritualiz’d (Flavel), 204
Montesquieu, 86 Necker, Jacques, 361
Moore, Arthur, 319 Nelson, Horatio, 353
More, Sir Thomas, 26, 156 neutral trade during wars, 313, 329, 335–41
Morgan, Edmund, 49 New Atlantis (Bacon), 105–7, 119–20
Morgan, Lady, 290 Newcastle, Duke of, 334
Morris, Gouverneur, 361 New East India Company, 265
Morris, Lewis, 328, 335 Newfoundland, 30, 208
Mortimer, Thomas, 129, 269 Newfoundland Companies, 190
mulberry plantations, 128 New Jersey, 58
Muldrew, Craig, 83 Newman, Henry, 205
Mun, Thomas New Netherland, 331
on commercial knowledge, 102, 104, New Providence (Bahamas), 221, 224
111–12, 137 New South Wales, 121
East India Company and, 177 Newton, Isaac, 111
on merchants, 76, 101, 108, 112, 137 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 155
on money supply, 75–76, 373–74 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 362–63
political economy and, 153, 356 Nine Years’ War (1689–1697)
Poor Laws and, 8–9 concerns about population during, 62
on population, 31 financial markets and, 264–65
on sailors, 29 India and, 316
Smith on, 10–11 naval warfare in, 312–13
on Spain, 241 neutral shipping during, 313
on war’s impact on commerce, 313 siege of Mons and, 269
Münchhausen, Gerlach Adolf von, 143 West Indies and, 221
Noailles, duc de, 310
Nader, Helen, 253–54 Noell, Martin, 51, 59
Naples (Italy), 246–47, 308 North, Lord, 286
Napoleon, 362 North American colonies of Great Britain.
natural knowledge See also American War of
agricultural improvement and, 118 Independence; Virginia
climate and, 127–28 Anglican Church and, 14, 199, 202,
commerce and, 100, 119 205–206
imperialism and, 11, 119–22, 130 boycotts in, 288–89, 294, 296
398 Index
North American colonies (continued) Philip IV (King of Spain), 247, 252

consumption and, 282–83, 287–89, 294, Phillipson, Nicholas, 375
296 Physiocrats, 140, 144
convict labor in, 51–53 Piers, William, 163
corporations and, 167–68 Pincus, Steve, 7, 85, 89n21
indentured servitude in, 50 pirates
mercantilism and, 283, 285, 294 Anglican Church and, 205
protests in, 292 Bahama Islands and, 219, 223, 224
Nova Scotia, 58 British imperial sovereignty and, 218–19,
224, 234
O’Brien, Patrick, 265 compared to smugglers, 219, 233
Observations upon the United Provinces economic impact of, 224
(Temple), 34–35 France and, 221–22
Of Public Credit (Hume), 271 Great Britain and, 221–23, 228
Olavide, Pablo de, 243 historiography of, 218–19
Oldenburg, Henry, 77 imperial rivalries and, 221
Oldmixon, John, 127–28 Jamaica and, 220–21
Olivares, Conde Duque de, 247–48, 255 moral political economy of, 14, 231–34
Orleans, Duchess of, 272 North America and, 219, 223
Orléans, Philippe d’, 312 recruiting of, 223, 230
Ormrod, David, 282–83 Royal Navy and, 224
Oropesa, Conde de, 248, 250 Spain and, 220–21, 223
Ortiz, Luis, 355 suppression of, 224, 233–34, 371
Ostend Company, 317, 319 trade with merchants and, 223, 232
Ottoman Empire, 185, 318, 359 West Africa and, 219, 223–24
West Indies and, 219–221, 223–24, 230,
Palermo (Italy), 247 233
Papal States, 318 Pitt, William (the Younger)
pase foral (Spain), 252 free trade and, 292
Peace of Paris (1783), 317 Ireland and, 287
Pead, Deul, 199 mercantilism and, 296
Pelham, Henry, 266 tea and, 285
Pelham-Holles, Thomas, 334 tobacco and, 126
Peloponnesian War, 349 Plantation Act, 53
Pennoyer, William, 59 Plattes, Gabriel, 33, 77, 120
Pennsylvania, 58 Ploos van Amstel, Albertus, 336
Pérez, Antonio, 250–51, 260n51 Plymouth Company, 167
Petty, William Pocock, J. G. A., 6, 349
on commercial knowledge, 109–10 Poland, 317
on education, 78–79 Political Anatomy of Ireland (Petty), 35
on experimentation, 78 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 30
Hartlib Circle and, 31 Political Discourses (De La Court), 351
political arithmetic and, 112 Political Discourses (Hume), 86
on population dynamics, 10, 25, 33–35, political economy
39–40, 56 Aristotle and, 155, 157, 159–60
on sailors, 30 corporations and, 162, 165, 167, 361–62
Petyt, William, 35, 54–55, 284 ethics and, 155
Philip II (King of Spain and Portugal), 329 natural knowledge and, 11, 87, 118–19
399 Index
production and, 354–58 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 256

public opinion and, 361 privateering, 334–37, 339, 341
Sir Thomas Smith and, 157–58, 160, 170 Privateers’ Act (1759), 337
tariffs and, 358 Privy Council, 51, 111
trade and, 354, 359 Proclamation to Restrain Tobacco Planting
value concepts and, 153–54, 170 in England and Ireland (1619), 117, 121,
Political Essays Concerning the Present State 123–24
of the British Empire (Young), 121 Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish
Politics (Aristotle), 155, 159–60, 165–66 Manufacture (Swift), 289
Polly (Gay), 228 Prussia
Pontchartrain, Jérome de, 319 cameralism and, 136–39
Poor Laws (England), 8–9, 28–29, 32, 34 France and, 310
population General Directory in, 138–39
depopulation and, 26–28, 34–35, 39, 48 Kammersachen and, 139
distribution of, 32–33 military in, 138–39
as economic resource, 10, 25–26, 30–31, Silesia and, 317
34, 37, 53–54, 56–57 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 312
emigration to colonies and, 10, 32–35, Puryour, Thomas, 231
48–51, 53, 57–58, 62, 122, 233, 371
enclosure movement and, 26, 28–29, 34, Quaker Act, 52
39, 48, 229, 233 Quakers, 62, 202
impact on wages from, 58–59 Quinn, D. B., 163–64
Ireland and, 35, 37
mercantilism and, 25, 38–39, 48, 371 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 166
naturalization and, 31–32, 34–38 Ramus, Petrus, 104
Navigation Acts and, 34 Ray, John, 125
policy proposals regarding, 10, 31–37, 39, Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 342,
62, 371 349
political arithmetic approach toward, 10, Read, Robert, 125
25–26, 35–40 regulated companies, 164, 184, 186, 188–89
Poor Laws and, 8–9 Reinert, Sophus, 136
slavery and, 10, 46–47 The Religious Mariner (Mather), 204
vagrancy and, 26–29, 31–32, 38, 48–50, 53, Renaudot, Théophraste, 120
57, 230 Revisions in Mercantilism (Coleman), 6
Portugal Reynell, Carew, 55, 57, 61
Atlantic trade and, 329 Rice, Jacob, 208
Dutch Republic and, 189, 316 Richards, Edmund, 228
East Indies and, 316 Roberts, Bartholomew, 219, 223, 230, 232
England and, 316, 318 Roberts, Lewes
Grotius on, 184–85 on commercial knowledge, 101–2, 111
Spain and, 246–47 on merchants, 76, 111
Postlethwayt, Malachy, 129, 283–84, 293, 353 on population, 32
Potter, William, 81–86 on sailors, 30
Povey, Thomas, 51 Roberts, Michael, 307
Powell, Robert, 27–28 Robinson, Henry
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and on banks, 81
Discoveries of the English Nation on communication, 79–80
(Hakluyt), 164 Hartlib Circle and, 31, 77, 79
400 Index
Robinson, Henry (continued) prayers for, 196

on markets, 80–81 surplus population and, 30
on merchants, 111 The Sailours Companion and Counsellour
on money supply, 81 (Mather), 204
Office of Address for Communications Saint Christopher (West Indies), 49, 58–59
and, 79–80 Saint Domingue (West Indies), 333
on population, 32–33 Saint Eustatius (West Indies)
on sailors, 30 American War of Independence and,
Rodger, Nicholas, 198 338–39
Rodríguez de Campomanes, Pedro, 241, free port status of, 331–33, 335, 338–39,
244 341–42
Rolfe, John, 123–24 Raynal on, 342
Rolt, Richard, 129 Seven Years’ War and, 335, 341–42
Roman law, 160, 351–52 Smith on, 342
Rotterdam (Dutch Republic), 207 War of Austrian Succession and, 333, 341
Royal African Company Saint John, Oliver, 188
Glorious Revolution’s impact on, 61, 63 Saint Kitts (West Indies), 222
joint-stock company status of, 264 Saint-Pierre, abbé de, 312
slave trade and, 59, 61, 63, 309 Saint Thomas (West Indies), 221
trade monopoly of, 53, 59, 61, 63, 190 Salamanca School, 243
Royal Hospital for Seamen (Greenwich Salisbury, Lord Treasurer, 51
Hospital), 201–2 Sandys, Sir Edwin, 49
Royal Society Sara & Ahron (Dutch ship), 335
Bacon’s influence on, 107–8 Sardinia, 246, 310
Board of Trade and, 111 Savary, Jacques, 353
commercial knowledge and, 108 Schmitt, Carl, 197, 359
experimental epistemology and, 99, 107, Schmoller, Gustav von, 5, 305, 363
109 Schofield, R. S., 50, 57
improvement-oriented emphasis of, 36 Schröder, Wilhelm Freiherr von, 137
Privy Council and, 111 Science of Legislation (Filangieri), 353
Royal Society of Arts, 120 scientific revolution
Rule of the War of 1756 (Great Britain), economics and, 98–100, 110, 113n6
335–36, 341 experimental method and, 99–100
Runciman, David, 169 historiography of, 98–99
Rush, Benjamin, 294 modernity and, 98
Russia, 317–19, 340 natural philosophy and, 99
Russia Company, 164–65 Scipio Africanus, 352
Scotland. See also Great Britain
Sacks, David Harris, 155, 165 agriculture in, 122, 129
sailors tobacco and, 125–26
Anglican Church and, 14, 196, 199–200, Scott, Ridley, 362
203–8 Scottish Society for Propagating Christian
devotional literature for, 203–5 Knowledge, 209
East India Company and, 29 The Sea-Assize (Stubbs), 202
hospitals for, 201–2 Seaman’s Character and Calling Consider’d
identity of, 198–200 (Bassnett), 204
Mary II (Queen of England) and, 201 Seaman’s Monitor (Woodward), 203–5
moral concerns regarding, 29, 200–208 seamen. See sailors
401 Index
Seckendorff, Veit Ludwig von, 355, 359 on consumption, 284–85, 296, 376–77
Second Treaty of Vienna (1731), 319 East India Company and, 178
Septennial Act (1717), 229 on English corn laws, 374
Serra, Antonio, 354–56 free trade and, 118–19, 122, 129–30, 190,
Seven Years’ War 283–85, 292, 296, 314, 354, 372, 374–76,
Dutch Republic and, 334–37, 341 382
France and, 310, 317, 334–37, 342 on Ireland, 296
Great Britain and, 312, 317, 334–37 joint-stock companies and, 177–79
Shakespeare, William, 156 mercantilism and, 3, 10–11, 16–17, 53,
Shapin, Steven, 8, 97–99 74–77, 113, 118, 137–38, 153, 177, 179, 191,
Sheerman, Henry, 228 282, 285, 289–90, 348, 374–76, 380
Shelburne, Lord, 292, 296 on money supply, 74–75, 77, 86, 372–74
Sheridan, Richard, 52 on monopoly, 374–75
Short Treatise on the Causes that Can Make on national debt, 271
Kingdoms Abound in Gold and Silver on Saint Eustatius, 342
even in the Absence of Mines (Serra), on smuggling, 231
355–56 on Spain and Portugal, 241
Shovell, Sir Cloudesley, 203 on tobacco, 126
Sidney, Henry, 163 on women spinners, 375–76
Silberner, Edmund, 305, 316 Smith, John, 31
Silesia, 310, 317 Smith, Robert Sidney, 244
Silver, Trade and War (Stein and Stein), Smith, Sir Thomas
244–45 alchemy and, 161
Sinclair, John, 122 Cicero and, 157–58
Skinner, Quentin, 6 corporations and, 154, 158–59, 161–63, 169
slavery humanist education and values of, 156–57
in Barbados, 52, 58–59, 126 joint-stock initiatives of, 161–63
English imperialism and, 46–47 political economy and, 157–58, 160, 170
imperialism and, 46–47, 59–61, 63–64 Ulster commonwealth project of, 163
in Jamaica, 62, 221 smuggling
population theory and, 10, 46–47 British imperial sovereignty and, 218–19,
racial prejudice and, 46 224–25, 234
in the West Indies, 47, 52–53, 58–62, 64, compared to piracy, 219, 233
127, 221 cost efficiency of, 226–27
slave trade Defoe on, 226
data on, 63 geographic concentration of, 224–26,
Dutch Republic and, 309, 330 228, 230–31
Great Britain and, 222, 224, 309 historiography of, 218
pirates and, 224 literary treatments of, 228–29
profits from, 59, 61 merchants as customers for, 226, 232–33
Royal African Company and, 59, 61, 63, moral political economy of, 14, 231–34
309 overpopulation’s impact on, 225, 230
Spain and, 222 profits and wages from, 230–31
Small, Albion, 134–35 recruitment for, 230
Smith, Adam suppression of, 227–28, 233–34
on agriculture, 129 tax evasion and, 226
on British colonies, 122, 126, 129, 284–85, tea and, 225–27, 232–33
296 Sobrabe story, 250–51
402 Index
societas, 160–161 navy in, 256

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Nueva Planta laws in, 248
(SPCK), 202–3, 205–8 pase foral and, 252
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in pirates and, 220–21, 223
Foreign Parts (SPG), 205–8 political economy and, 241–46, 248, 253,
Society of Mines Royal, 162 310
Society of the Mineral and Battery Works, polycentric polity of, 15, 255, 257
162 Portugal and, 246–47
Society of the New Art, 161–63 slavery and, 59
Somerscales, Henry, 124 slave trade and, 222
Souden, David, 50 Sobrabe story and, 250–51
South Carolina, 118, 128 tax policy in, 247–49, 251–52, 254–56
South Sea Company Thirty Years’ War and, 247
financial markets and, 263–64, 266, 272–73 town governments in, 254–55
South Sea Bubble and, 190, 266, 272–75 Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and, 222, 315
Spanish America monopoly of, 222 unification efforts in, 246–56
successes of, 86 Vizcaya and, 252
Spain War of Austrian Succession and, 333
American colonies of, 246, 252, 255, 310, War of Spanish Succession and, 243–44,
329, 355 248, 308, 312, 315
Andalusia and, 243 Spanish Netherlands, 247, 308
Aragon and, 246, 248, 250–51, 254–55 speculation. See stock-jobbing
Austria and, 310 Spenser, Edmund, 156
Basque provinces in, 246, 248–50, 252, Spice Islands, 316
255 Spreull, John, 125
Bourbon Dynasty and, 244, 248 Staatswirthschaft (Justi), 140–41, 143
bullion and, 75, 82–83, 241, 243, 245 Stamp Act, 289
Castile and, 246, 248–55 Stanhope, George, 200, 202, 206
Catalonia and, 243, 246–48, 250–51 Stanley, William, 206
Dutch Republic and, 256, 307, 316, 319, Staple Act, 53, 124
328–30 Starkey, Thomas, 355
European intellectual advances and, Stein, Barbara and Stanley, 242, 244–45, 255
243–45 Steyn, Pieter, 334
France and, 319 stock-jobbing. See under financial
governance in, 245–47, 249–57 markets
Granada and, 246 Stout, William, 264
Great Britain and, 307, 310, 313, 318–19, Strafford, John, 124
328, 332–33, 340 Stubbs, Philip, 201–2, 206
Habsburg Dynasty in, 245, 247, 253, 255 Stueart, James, 267
Italian territories of, 246–47, 308–9, 315, Sugar Act, 289
319 Summer Isles, 123
Jesuits and, 250 Supple, Barry, 75
Juntas Generales de Sevilla in, 252 Supply of Prayer for the Ships of this
León and, 249 Kingdom, 196
litigation in, 252–53, 254 Suriname, 337
mercantilism and, 15, 241–50, 253–58 Sussman, Charlotte, 287, 290
militarization in, 309 Sutherland, James, 125
Navarre and, 246, 248–51, 255 Sweden, 307
403 Index
Swift, Jonathan, 283–84, 287, 289, 291, Great Britain and, 222
294–95 Italy and, 315
Symonds, William, 48 merchants and, 319
Spain and, 222, 315
Talbot, William, 200 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 135, 317
Tanucci, Bernardo, 348 Trentmann, Frank, 289–90
Tapner, Benjamin, 228 Trevor, Robert (Viscount Hampden), 333
Teach, Edward (“Blackbeard”), 219, 223, 230 Trigge, Francis, 27
Temple, Sir William, 31, 34–35 Trimnell, Charles, 206–7
Theory and Practice of Commerce and Triple Alliance, 312
Maritime Affairs (Uztáriz), 243 Trover, William, 228
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 75, 135, 247, 373 Tucker, Josiah, 296, 314
Thomas, Sir Dalby, 60, 62
Thompson, Edward, 62 Ulster, 163, 286, 289
Thompson, E.P., 229, 291 United Provinces. See Dutch Republic
Thorold, William, 207 Utopia (More), 26, 156
tobacco Uztáriz, Gerónimo de, 243, 245
bans against, 117, 121, 123–25
in Barbados, 49, 58 vagrancy. See under population
criticisms of, 117, 125 Valencia and, 246, 248, 251
in England, 117, 120, 123–25 Van Bylandt, Frederik S., 339–40
environmental debates and, 122–23 van Eeghen, Jan, 334
medicinal properties arguments and, van Rhoon en Pendrecht, Heer, 334
117, 123 Vattel, Emerich de, 352
in Scotland, 125–26 Venice (Italy), 158, 350, 353
support for, 125–26 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. See
varieties of, 123–25 Dutch East India Company (VOC)
in Virginia, 49, 117, 119, 123–24, 126, 129 Verney, John, 269
Token for Mariners, A (Janeway), 204 Verri, Pietro, 311
Toleration Act of 1689, 209 Vincent de Gournay, Jacques-Claude, 310,
Tortuga, 220 353, 357
Tory Party (Great Britain), 7, 85–86 Viner, Jacob, 5, 75, 197
Tracy, James, 247 Virginia
The trade and navigation of Great-Britain agriculture in, 120, 126, 129
considered (Gee), 127–28 Anglican Church and, 199
Transportation Act (1718), 53 ecological crises in, 126
Treasure of Traffike (Roberts), 30 indentured servants in, 49
Treatise of Taxes (Petty), 33–34 James I and, 121, 167
Treaty of 1674. See Anglo-Dutch treaties promotional literature regarding, 48, 50
Treaty of Aranjuez (1752), 310 tobacco and, 49, 117, 119, 123–24, 126, 129
Treaty of Münster (1648), 316, 319 transportation of convicts to, 51–53
Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 312, 317, 319 Virginia Company and, 49, 123–24, 164,
Treaty of Southampton (1625), 328 167–68, 175n54
Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), 319 Vizcaya, 252
Treaty of Utrecht (1713) Voltaire, 360–61
commercial clauses of, 317 von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Ludwig
Dutch Republic and, 332 Ernst, 334
France and, 222 von Thulemeier, Friedrich Wilhelm, 338
404 Index
Walker, Mack, 135, 141–42 convict labor in, 49

Wallis, John, 111 Dutch Republic and, 330–35
Walpole, Horatio, 313 France and, 333–35, 337
Walpole, Robert, 228, 275 imperial rivalries in, 220–22, 307–8,
Walton, Izaak, 112 337
war. See also international relations; specific indentured servants in, 49, 52, 58–59,
wars 62–63
colonial territories and, 309, 315, 317, 320 luxury goods in, 294
commerce and, 16, 312–14, 319–20, pirates and, 219–21, 223–24, 230, 233
325n69, 360 privateering in, 334–37, 339, 341
dynastic politics and, 16, 315–16 sailors in, 205
economic rivalry as, 16, 360 slavery in, 47, 52–53, 58–61, 64, 127,
motivations for, 305–7, 309, 315–16 221
neutral trade during, 313, 329, 335–41 Sugar Act and, 289
political economy and, 306–7, 311–12, 320 sugarcane in, 58, 60, 63, 126–27, 221
Warham St. Ledger, Sir, 163 transportation of convicts to, 52–53
War of Austrian Succession (1739–1748) Whig Party (Great Britain), 7, 85–86,
Dutch Republic and, 329, 341 278
France and, 310, 333 Whydah Gally, 219
Great Britain and, 312, 329, 333, 341 Wiles, Richard, 57
naval warfare in, 312 Willan, T. S., 164
Spain and, 333 William III (King of England)
War of Jenkins’ Ear. See War of Austrian East India Company and, 180
Succession Nine Years’ War and, 264
War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714) sailors and, 200–201
Austria and, 248, 308 Society for Promoting Christian
Dutch Republic and, 308 Knowledge and, 206
England and, 308, 312 War of Spanish Succession and, 308
naval warfare in, 312 Willis, Richard, 207
Spain and, 243–44, 248, 308, 312, 315 Wilson, Charles, 8, 328
West Indies and, 221, 308 Wilson, Kathleen, 209, 288
Warren, Elizabeth, 381 Windt, Jan de, 335
Washington, George, 129 Withington, Phil, 160
Watts, Isaac, 199 Wolfe Tone, Theobald, 296
Weald region (England), 225, 231, 233–34 Wolff, Christian, 136, 141, 145, 148n11
The Wealth of Nations (Smith) Woodward, Josiah, 200, 202–6
on agriculture, 129 Woollen Act, 285–86
on consumption, 284, 376 Worsley, Benjamin, 31, 77, 111–12
on free trade, 122, 354 Wren, Christopher, 111
on monopoly, 374–75 Wrightson, Keith, 50
on tobacco, 126 Wrigley, E. A., 50, 57
on wealth, 372–73
on women spinners, 375–76 York Buildings Company, 275
Webster, Charles, 77 Yorke, Joseph, 335, 337–38, 341
Wennerlind, Carl, 110 Yorke, Phillip (1st Earl of Hardwicke), 334
West Indies. See also specific islands Young, Arthur, 121–22
agriculture in, 55, 58, 127, 221
Anglican Church in, 205 Zahedieh, Nuala, 63

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Mercantilism Reimagined

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Edited by Philip J. Stern

Oxford New York

© Oxford University Press 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Part One: Circulation

Part Two: Knowledge

Part Three: Institutions

Part Four: Regulation

Part Five: Conflict

Afterword: Mercantilism to Macroeconomics 371

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.

Sophus A. Reinert is assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard

Mercantilism Reimagined emerged from a workshop held at Barnard College in the

and improvement were intertwined in quite different institutional settings than in

process of “multiplication” and a quantifiable totality, the foundation of economic and

Without an estimate of England’s total population, these numbers were statistically

reproduce or moved elsewhere—a process that accounted for human expansion

Besides it is no policie for a Prince or Kingdome to have so great a multitude, or

Statistical analyses—the stuff of Halley’s “Life Table”—began to separate out from

championed in Interregnum projects as a public benefit—decades in the making and

Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century

57. Mun, A Discourse of Trade, 176.

109. Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods, 24–25.

prisoners were systematically sentenced to transportation to the West Indies.52 Laws

lacked any significant enforcement ability is misguided.73 But it is also a mistake to

by investigating and experimenting with agriculture, husbandry, and industry as ways

empire building increased dramatically, as the English established and/or fought to

seventeenth century resulted in higher wages, especially in rapidly growing urban

51. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 291–92.

within a long-established cosmology, worldview, and conceptualization of society, all of

nay even a speciall demonstration of the Wisdome of our Governours to encourage

1. Shall be (at least) of as true intrinsick value, as Gold and Silver.

45. Robinson, Certain Proposalls, 12.

logic. The mathematical sciences were intellectually subordinate to natural philosophy,

voyages of exploration, and this created a degree of interdependence between exper-

But of course, Roberts’ Mappe belonged to a particular species of mercantile publica-

For therein, as in one Magazin or Market-place, all things Necessary, Profitable,

and experiences in an inconclusive manner, each claiming to represent the public

of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

31. Roberts, Merchants Mappe, 2.

In 1619 English tobacco became noxious to the government. The Proclamation to

Europe, 1350–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 311–14; Drayton,

This is a chapter about cameralism in a book about mercantilism, which immediately

united the direction of Kammersachen—taxes, domain lands, regalia, etc.—under a

to sidestep them altogether. By appointing permanent professors to teach subjects like

Names are supposed to be meaningless. But experience convinces me of the con-

The choirmaster’s dismay increased as he learned about Wilhelm’s entire cameralist

Classically, the notion of mercantilism as an economic policy and practice is insepa-

where he lectured in natural philosophy, encouraged the study of practical mathe-

Here Smith remains close to Roman notions of political community as founded on

Common-weale is ordained for some good” (1); “A companie, societie, or fellowship, is

all wares, and commodities trucked, bought or given to the companie . . . to be

exchange. Indeed, we may go somewhat farther and propose that sixteenth-century