Sophus A. Reinert

The political economy of empire in the early modern world

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Foreword: Of Empire and Political Economy Richard Drayton Introduction: The Political Economy of Empire Sophus Reinert and Pernille Roge PART I: THEORISING THE EARLY MODERN EMPIRE 1. An Empire of Trade Commercial Reason of State in Seventeenth-Century Holland Jan Hartman and Arthur Weststeijn 2. A Natural Order of Empire: The Physiocratic Vision of Colonial France after the Seven Years War Pernille Roge 3. Adam Smith on American Economic Development and the Future of the European Atlantic Empires Thomas Hopkins 4. Views from the South: Images of Britain and its Empire in Portuguese and Spanish Political Economic Discourse, c. 1740-1810 Gabriel Paquette 5. The Empire of Emulation: A Quantitative Analysis of Economic Translations in the European World, 1500-1849 Sophus Reinert PART II: IMPERIAL EXPERIENCES 6. War, Peace, and the Rise of the London Stock Market Giles Parkinson 7. The Impact of Gifts and Trade: Georgia Colonists and Yamacraw Indians in the Colonial American Southeast Claire Levenson 8. Retrenchment, Reform and the Practice of Military-Fiscalism in the Early East India Company State James Lees 9. How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic: Mercantilism and the Crisis of Food Provisioning in the Franco-Caribbean during the 17th and 18th Centuries Bertie Mandelblatt Bibliography Index ?

Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesis 1757–1758 translation of John Carys 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the models meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Deninas 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medicis imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italys aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesis original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.

Another Grand Tour: Cameralism and Antiphysiocracy in Baden, Tuscany, and Denmark–Norway

During the summer of 1784, the Danish statesman Peter Christian Schumacher (1743–1817) decided to go on a Grand Tour. It would not be his first such tour, but whereas he before had ventured out to learn “languages, politics, and statistics,” he now wished to study the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. In terms of current scholarship on the Grand Tour, Schumacher’s general sentiment is less surprising than his proposed itinerary. For rather than heading for Paris, Bordeaux, London, or Birmingham, along the principal arteries of the European economy, he resolutely went south, across Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy, making purposeful stops in the reformist states of Baden, Venice, and Tuscany. The current Anglophone narrative of the Grand Tour privileges British and French travelers questing for Arcadia in Italy and continental observers spying on British technological achievements. The ways in which travel contributed to the emulation of economic and administrative practices between the minor states of Northern, Central, and Southern Europe are therefore seldom explored.

Historical Political Economy

This chapter explores the cyclicality of historical awareness in economics. It shows how, over the centuries, there have been numerous moments when a tendency toward theoretical abstraction has resulted in real-world catastrophes which, in turn, have inspired a return to more historically-grounded approaches to economic inquiry and policy.

Introduction: Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government

In the great Harvard economist Joseph A. Schumpeter’s posthumously published masterwork History of Economic Analysis, he “credited” the Southern Italian lawyer and economic writer Antonio Serra (f. 1613) with being “the first to compose a scientific treatise … on Economic Principles and Policy”.1 What follows is the first ever anthology of essays dedicated to Serra, who, though long having been eulogized in the historiography of economics as a thinker of precocious sophistication, has seldom received sustained attention from scholars, especially outside of Italy. In fact, no monograph-length study has ever been dedicated to him in any language, and he remains a dark horse in the historiography of political economy – often quoted, but seldom understood or appreciated in his historical context. Partly, this might be because of the many mysteries surrounding the man and his work.

Introduction: The Political Economy of Empire

‘Commerce’, the archbishop of Aix, de Boisgelin, wrote in a 1785 commentary on Montesquieu, ‘seems to have a propensity to create one single empire of all empires, one single people of all peoples, to found one single, immortal nation which has no other name but that of mankind’.1 More than two centuries later, we like to think that commerce is indeed a uniting force between peoples, creating if not an ‘immortal nation’ called ‘mankind’, at least a ‘global community’. Trade, we assume, is the antithesis of warfare; it creates prosperity for all parties involved, rendering conflict impossible, polities more stable, and governments largely redundant. On the one hand there is the discord of empires; on the other there is peaceful commerce — warfare is the tool of the former, political economy that of the latter.

The Empire of Emulation: A Quantitative Analysis of Economic Translations in the European World, 1500–1849

The Tudor merchant George Nedham presented an unusually succinct meditation upon the problem of power in international relations in his ca. 1568 manuscript Letter to the Earls of East Friesland. ‘Wealth and strength’, he knew well, went hand in hand in the modern world, but the Dutch and, as a result, the ‘empire’ of Philip II, currently seemed to have a stranglehold on both. Yet Nedham argued steadfastly that English and German merchants and sovereigns still could turn the tables, and do so ‘without great expense, war, trouble and bloodshed’. The key to this indirect translatio of empire lay in pursuing the right ‘policy’, the right measure for countervailing Philip II’s economic superiority and, with time, achieving dominion over him in turn. The Dutch had grown wealthy and powerful by attracting foreign merchants and manufacturers to their sterile lands, and their riches had thus been ‘gotten politically’ rather than by natural resources and industry. ‘By the like policy’, Nedham reasoned, their wealth ‘may be taken away from them again’.1

Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and Political Economy in the Accademia dei pugni in Austrian Lombardy, 1760–1780

This essay focuses on the Accademia dei Pugni, or The Academy of Punches, a celebrated institution which flourished for a few years in 1760s Austrian Milan, and its journal Il Caffe (1764–1766). It does so to reoisit one of the cardinal questions of Italian Enlightenment studies, the oexing relationship between ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the so-called ‘age of reason’.1 How, in short, historical actors mediated between local loyalties, transnational allegiances and unioersalist ethics. More specifically, this essay considers the question as it relates to the economic identity of eighteenth-century Lombard reformers. Where preoious studies haoe tended to simply conflate the two categories ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as twin expressions of an ‘enlightened’ spirit based on ‘doux commerce,’ what follows will reassess the Accademia’s project by analysing it not only in the context of a cosmopolitan coffee-shop culture, but also of the realities of international competition at the time, of Lombardy’s complex economic past amidst rioal zones of foreign influence, and the role of Milan in the larger projects of the House of Habsburg in the wake of the Seoen Years’ War. Though the Accademia has often been heralded as a pre-eminent example of the forces at play in the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ in eighteenth-century Italy, and political economy has often been discussed as the science of Enlightenment par excellence, the two issues haoe not hitherto been considered organically

An “All too Human” Question: Nietzsche, Die Soziale Frage, and the German Historical School of Economics

Although Friedrich Nietzsche seldom is considered for his economic thought, he in fact addressed many of the same problems as the German Historical School in the period, and at times discussed them explicitly. By studying Nietzsche’s political writings in the context of the ongoing debates about Marxism, laissez-faire, and the ‘Social Question’ in Germany and Italy, we hope to shed light on the broad spectrum of resistance against the extremes of communism and liberalism in late-19th century Europe.