The Political Economy of Colonization: from Composite Monarchy to Nation

Anthelll Other Canon Econolllics

The Anthelll Other Canon Econolllics series is a collaboration between Anthem Press and The Other Canon Foundation. The Other Canon - also

described as 'reality economics' - studies the economy as a real object rather than as the behaviour of a model economy based on core axioms, assumptions and techniques. The series includes both classical and contemporary works in this tradition, spanning evolutionary, institutional and Post-Keynesian economics,

the history of economic thought and economic policy, economic sociology and technology governance, and works on the theory of uneven development and in

the tradition of the German historical school.

Series Editors

Erik S. Reinert - Chairman, The Other Canon Foundation,

Norway and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia Rainer Kattel- University College London, UK &

Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia Wolfgang Drechsler - Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia'

Editorial Board

Ha-Joon Chang - University of Cambridge, UK Mario Cimoli - UN-ECLAC, Chile

Jayati Ghosh - Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Steven Kaplan - Cornell University, USA

Jan Kregel - Bard College, USA & Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Bengt-Ake Lundvall- Aalborg University, Denmark Keith Nurse - University of the West Indies, Barbados

Patrick O'Brien - London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK

Carlota Perez - London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE),

UK; University College London, UK; SPRU - University of Sussex, UK and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Alessandro Roncaglia - Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Jomo Kwame Sundaram - Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia

The Economic Turn

Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe

Edited by Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert

ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2019 Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-855-3 (Hbk) ISBN-lO: 1-78308-855-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Chapter One

I

I Chapter Two

Chapter Three

i

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CONTENTS

Vll

Vlll

The Economic Turn in Enlightenment Europe

Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert

The Physiocratic Movement: A Revision 35 Loic Charles and Christine There

The Political Economy of Colonization: From

Composite Monarchy to Nation 71 Paul Chenry

Against the Chinese Model: The Debate on Cultural

Facts and Physiocratic Epistemology 89 Stifan Gaarsmand Jacobsen . "Le superflu, chose tres necessaire": Physiocracy and Its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Luxury Debate 117 Michael Kwass

Franc;:ois Veron de Forbonnais and the Invention of

Antiphysiocracy 139 Loic Charles and Amaud Orain

Between Mercantilism and Physiocracy: Forbonnais's

'Est modus in Rebus' Vision 169 Antonella Alimento

Physiocrat Arithmetic versus Ratios: The Analytical

Economics of Jean:Joseph-Louis Graslin 193 Arnaud Orain

Galiani: Grain and Governance 221 Steven L. Kaplan

"Live and Die Proprietors and Free": Morellet Dismantles the Dialogues and Defends the Radical Liberal Break 305 Steven L. Kaplan

FV~----------------------------~~~==~~--~~----~--~------------~~------------------------------------------~~~;'~

70

139

140

141

THE ECONOMIC TURN

Richard de Butr!~ , LO/~, lIalllrelles de l'agriwlillre el de I'ordre social (Neuchatel: N.p., 1781 ), 3--4, 8-11 and 43-44.

See also his contemporary pamphlet: Etposilioll de la loi nall/relle (Amsterdam [paris]: Lacomb 176 7). e,

He wOlLid later regret it: "I am convinc 'dlhnl they [the econ ml ~ harmed themselv s b accepring the name of 'sect' and by appearing to pursue a coml11on calise", letter to COtl l~ Scheffel~ 8.September 1779, in.Riksarkivet, Stockholm, Schefferska samlingen Skrivelser til! Karl Frednk Scheffers, Deposition I Box] IV. In this fascinating lettel~ Du Pont separated the fate of the group of "the cO l1 omists" from "the o'ulhs they promulgated". According to him the former had ceased to exist, while the latter '·wili remain". ' It is indeed a point that fully justifies the purpose of the present volume, since a significant part of the way we see Physiocracy was constructed by the Antiphysiocrats.

Chapter Three

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLONIZATION: FROM COMPOSITE

MONARCHY TO NATION

Paul Cheney

Le moude colollial est lIll mOl/de comjJarlimellte. - Franz Fanon, Les Damnes de la lel're'

The political economy of colonization was not always the full-throated criticism of

Europe's colonial-mercantile enterprise that it became during the second half of the eighteenth century. And yet, while allowing for a large dose of contingency in the development of political economy from the sixteenth century onward, this social science

seems to have been destined to accord a great deal of critical attention to the problem of colonization. From its origins in the early modern period, political economy resembled the critical analysis of the relationship between state and society that it became during the age of Enlightenment. Even when economic writers internalized a strictly statist logic, a relentless focus on social development as the source of state power could have unintentionally subversive effects. In the first part of the following essay, I argue that colonization was not a subject that economists simply turned to from time to time when economic or political conjuncture pointed overseas. Rather, the problems of sovereignty among the composite monarchies and empires of early modern Europe were such that the colonial question was present in political economy ab ovo.2 In the second, I discuss the critical, sometimes anti-imperial turn that colonial political economy took after Seven Years' War, mainly in the French case. Comparison with Spain shows that the relative

maturity of the enlightened public sphere, as well as its relationship to a reform-minded

state, shaped the colonial political economy that developed in these places after the mid

eighteenth century. What follows is necessarily a sketch rather than a fully realized tableau, with some

details filled in here and there to suggest the plausibility of the broader outline. Further work on this subject should depart from the premise established below: the orienting

concepts of-and historical problems confronted by- early modern political economy derived from the widespread and durable phenomenon of the composite monarchy. When the problem of sovereignty is placed at the center of analysis, the novelty of the

post-Seven Years' War period becomes clearer, as does the play of similarity and diffe

rence between anti-imperial and reformist colonial political economy.

72 THE ECONOMIC TURN

The very term "political economy," first used in the early eighteenth century by Louis Turquet de la Mayerne in La Monarchie aristodbnocratiqlle3 and Antoine de Montchrestien in his Ti·aicte de l'oecollomie politiqlle (1615), juxtaposes what were classically considered two opposed spaces and forms of authority: the household and the polity. In the Politics Aristotle drew a sharp distinction between the household (oikos) and the polity (polis). Fo; Aristotle, the household is the domain of material production and social reproduction where the authoritarian relationship of master to slave is paradigmatic; the polity is th~ sphere of rational self-direction toward life's higher purposes, so discussion among free people is the characteristic form of rule. Because of the permanence of human material needs, Aristotle never proposed exiling the household from the polity; and although it

was decidedly inferior to political rule, since Aristotle considered mastership the form of rule appropriate to household management (oikollomia), he never proposed dissolvin the household into the polity, either.4 Although it is possible to think of the househol~ and .the polity as physically separate spaces-we know that in ancient Greece this separatlOn was enforced rather strictly- the more essential point for the present analysis is the virtual separation of these spheres; conceptually, household and polity remained

quite distinct, so that it was possible to speak about different principles of governance within them.

As a concatenation, "political economy" asserted an analogy between the polity

and the household: "Ie bon gouvernement domestic, a Ie bien prendre, est un patron et modelle du public." From a certain point of view, Montchretien merely made explicit the overlap between the household and the state implicit in all patrimonial forms of rule. But other impulses were at work, notably the desire of an admirer of Jean Bodin to claim for the monarch absolute authority of the sort enjoyed by any pere de fomille: "comme il est permis a un bon oeconome de regler Ie mesnage de sa maison selon qu'il juge estre Ie meilleur ... Ie souverain maistre d'une police ... [peut] changel~ renouveler ou confirmer les ordres; sans estre oblige d'en rendre conte a personne." In arrogating this power to the monarch, Montchl'estien and Bodin also legitimated the sovereign's con

cern with wealth creation, and hence destabilized the value-laden hierarchy that Aristotle observed between the political and economic spheres.s But despite the rapprochement between politics and economy that Montchrestien sought to effect, these spheres did

remain distinct: lI1esllage and police signified the management of two types of communities, the household and the polity.G Montchrestien never suggested a third term that resolved the differences between these spheres.

At its very origins, then, political economy concerned the integration with an eye to the prosperity of distinct types of communities, each occupying a different spacephysical or virtual. Montchrestien, William Petty, and Giovanni Botero all used the term "state" ("estat," "stato") to designate the larger community that comprehended all the

others, and the state of concern to Montchrestien was the kingdom ("royaume") of France. Although Montchrestien may have been an advocate of royal absolutism, he was careful to respect France's regional diversity; more fundamentally, he had no desire to thwart the pervasive corporatist ethic of anciell regime France: "La maison est premier que la cite; la ville que la province; la province que Ie royaume. Ainsi l'art politic depend mediatement de l'oeconomic."7 In the wake of the French Wars of Religion

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLONIZATION 73

(1562- 15 8), 1. nLchresrieJl largely avoided discussing political .onflicrs between the king and restiv provin . Ll t ad h chose t mphasiz th mULually omplementary rypes of industry and agriculture possibl wiLrun a ' grand royauIDe, omp s' cl > pay diflerens d Ii( lag t d iel ." Sound economic policy tmnsisted in a • bonn' or 'Just

police" thar re nciLed omp ling in erests within lhe kingdom .a At otber tim s, when h pok of regional cli:ft'eren es Montchresti 11 employed the language of IUpir':' Le ti ltr dRy I Fran e omprend un mpir de peupl s, divers a la v rite mais s joignal1 tous." Lik > all empire, France ourted lh.e danger f an' tat dis per e," and as a r medy M nlchresticn c unseled a more compa t "eer ie d'estat " that w uld lend

France "consistence."9 Montchrestien's imprecision-describing France alternatively as "royaume," "grand

royaume" and "empire"- h d the p rvasive r ality, described by J.H. Elliott, of composite monarchy in eru'Ly mod rn Ew·ope. lo In this conLext, kings negotiated no less delicately over the incorporation of provinces into their kingdoms than emperors did the assimilation of kingdoms into their empires. These were questions of degree rather than of kind. In both cases, the sovereign often had to tread lightly on local legal cus

toms and institutions; ruling effectively at a distance meant working through rather than abolishing networks of elite patronage. In France, the provincial estates and sovereign courts that remained up until the Revolution of 1789 were vestiges of this process. II The

early modern kingdom did not simply anticipate the modern nation-state, a model of homogeneity and undivided sovereignty to be contrasted with the division and heterogeneity of empire. I ·/ Montchr sLien distinguished in some places \ ery clearly between

monarchical, r publican, and impC';!'ial forms of rule, and his occasional mentions of empire did not cball nge France's monarchical identity so much as they empha ized the diversity of communities (bOllS holds, cities and provinces) comprising the French state. 13

These allusions to empire were not historical references to Roman, Persian or Hapsburg models, but conceptual references to the vocation of political economy itself: regulating the differences between various sorts of communities with an eye to general prosperity. As Montchrestien demonstrates, the fact of composite monarchy meant that it was pos

sible to find empires within kingdoms; conversely, as we shall see in the case of William Petty, it was also possible to situate colonial and imperial questions within the spatial and

political context of the kingdom. There is little doubt among specialists that William Petty, who Marx qualifies as "the

father of political economy," developed his analytical technique in the imperial and colo

nial context of seventeenth-century Britain. 14 More than that, Petty explicitly designed his political economy as an instrument of colonial rule; his Down Surv~, the demographic and geographic study of Ireland that gave the initial impetus for what later became

his Political Arithmetick, facilitated the redistribution of lands confiscated from Catholics after Cromwell's invasion of Ireland. Cromwell's Irish plantation (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "plantation" served as an exact synonym for "colony") was the

beginning of a broad seventeenth-century effort at reestablishing English dominance in Ireland after the "Old English" plantation of earlier centuries fell into senescence. 15 The case for considering Ireland a specifically colonial dependency of the English crown is a strong one: the two countries were separated by water; beyond the obvious attraction

~-

-


of expropriating valuable real-estate, the seventeenth-century land settlement had the

specific intent of civilizing (read: Protestantizing) Catholic and Gaelic natives; and th

Navigation Acts penalized Irish industry and agriculture wherever they conflicted Wit~ English commercial dominance. And yet, while recognizing all of these facts, Sean

Connolly persuasively argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland was "first

and foremost part of the European ancien regime," and rejects "the alternative label of a

colonial society, so casually and persistently applied [to it]." Connolly's ancien regime is

precisely the Europe of composite monarchies- mixed confessional states, "territories

or historic nations under the domination of foreign rulers," and "multinational empires" discussed by J.H. Elliott. 16

Ireland may have been for all intents and purposes a colony within a British empire

but Petty's discussion of the relationship between these two places fell squarely withi~ the ancien regime paradigm of composite monarchy. The only empire mentioned in

the Political Al'itll1l1etick is that of the Turks, and Petty deliberately refers to Ireland as a

kingdom rather than a colony (or plantation). When elsewhere Petty seeks to establish

the value to England of the colonies, he explicitly leaves Ireland out of this accountin . h . &

reservmg t e term plantatlOn or colony for the Crown's possessions in America, Africa

and AsiaY No negative connotations attached to the term colony at this time, and il~ any case we can hardly suppose that if they did, the man who managed the mass expro

priation of Catholic land and who proposed an annual (forced) exchange of 10,000

women between England and Ireland would have abstained from its use out of political squeamishness. 1 B

Petty considered Ireland a territory belonging to England, but lamented the div

ision of this territory into several governments and kingdoms, and the consequent

splintering of sovereignty: "a[ n ] impediment to the greatness of England, is the different

Understanding of several Material Points, vi;::. Of the Kings Prerogative, Privileges of

Parliament, the obscure differences between Law and Equity; as also between Civil and

Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions; Doubts whether the Kingdom of England, hath power over

the Kingdom of Ire/and."'9 When Petty turned to the English territory as a whole-the

Three Kingdoms and the colonies taken together- the problems of political economy

across and within this space looked quite similar: "Now it is quite manifest, that the afore

mentioned distances, alld differellces of Kingdoms and Jurisdictions, are great impediments

to all the said several sorts of Wealth." Petty had in mind transportation costs, customs

barriers, the costs of replicating governmental institutions in several jurisdictions, the

uneven distribution of military and tax burdens, and the fixity and hence frequent mis

allocation of labor (his case in point was the cultivation of marginal lands in America while fertile land went begging for husbandmen in Ireland).2o

Petty cast a jealous eye over the channel to the more consolidated territory of the

French kingdom, but his list of 'impediments to wealth' could equally serve as an inven

tory of the sources of economic incoherence in early modern France. This was particu

larly the case among provinces peripheral to the lie de France, the latterly incorporated

"pays d'etats," which guarded more autonomy than the "pays d'election" that gener

ally lay closer to the center. Tellingly, the provinces outside of the customs union called

the "Five Great Farms" created by Colbert in 1664 were referred to as "pays reputes

1


ttrangers" and often traded more freely with non-French than with French provinces.

As Pierre Dockes has so carefully documented, economists and men of state in the early

rnodern period gave plenty of thought to France's spatial disaggregation. 21

If center-periphery relations can shed light upon the political economy of continental

france, an overdrawn contrast between colony and metropole threatens to obscure the

rneans by which the French crown sought to extend imperial sovereignty in places like

New France. From the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century, the Crown relied

upon 5everal proprietor hip and chart red ompanies to s .ttle New Fran in xchange

ror t1'acungprivileges (collges monopolies). Som ·times the Cr wn dispens d ieudallordship

and its attendant land grants as the most efficient- or at any rate cheapest-means of

encouraging colonial settlement, although at the price of alienating land or sovereignty to

private per ns, includ ing ompanies.ln Queb c, s i Tneurialland tenure wa established

by th Crown as a mean ' f supporting the military aristo Ta ~y tit 'Y hoped co attract

to w Fran e; by this means agri ultural surplus fl w d /lOID P asant propri t r t

noble landholders much as it did in Continental FranceY As lords in "fief et seigneurie,"

holders of these privileges exercised sovereign rights of taxation and the administration

of justice, and even enjoyed the right to subinfeudate their holdings.23 When one entity

proved itself unabl l' unwilling to ruUill its obl igaLions to build infrastm tuJ'e or trans

port nd are (or new olonists, its privilege w 1I 1d be l' voked and trans(i 1'r d to the

nexl ynclicat pI' claiming itsrlf willing to do lhejob. Bm ill the coutl::x[ of early modC'.J.'.Il

France, privileges and feudal sovereignty-being forms of private property- were not

easily revoked and provincial parlements (courts) and estates as well as municipalities, and

merchant courts vuridictiolls cOlIslllaires) , were all too willing to hear cases that involved

contradictory property and sovereignty claims in New France. The admiralty evenjoined

in the fray, disputing the authority of crown-appointed administrators and lending com

fort to the latter's opponents in provincial admiralty courtS?l Such cases were a logical

extension of the domain of struggle between the absolute monarchy and provincial elites

and institutions in metropolitan France. State making in early modern France and in the

first French empire was part of the same process.

I have begun by paying close attention to words not to fetishize them but, quite to

the contrary, to demonstrate that labels notwithstanding, colonial or imperial political

economy cannot and should not be differentiated from a foundational problem of early

modern political economy tout court. The juxtaposition of the polity with the household

that lay etymologically at the root of political economy was the most basic instance of

recombination that characterized the restless process of invention that was early modern

state-making. \"'hen the crisis of the European imperial systems known as the Seven

Years' War came in 1756, addressing it did not entail fashioning a new colonial political

economy from whole cloth so much as working from existing elements in order to find a

more adequate solution to the problem of "distance and difference" posed by William

Petty. Social and economic developments within the major European imperial systems

over the course of the long eighteenth century had a transformative impact on colonial

political economy. The massive debts that Britain, France, and Spain were willing to

take on in order to seize or defend colonial possessions testify to the importance attached

to colonial commerce; and when the consequences of commercial warfare were felt in


diverse corners of these empires, new publics entered into the debate about the distri_ bution of prosperity, responsibility, and power within empires: new demands for reform emerged with an increased sense of urgency. The language these publics employed was often that of political economy, a fact that was natural not only because of the issues involved, but because of the centrality of this science to the development of the Enlightenment public sphere.

Over the long eighteenth century, political economy developed as a dialogue between

state and society over the management of an economy that had outgrown the private sph r of the household and had become the objec of stat policy.Zj T\ 0 amp ting

historical ac ounts about til mC'I'gf'l1ce of soci ly as a cat gory of analy i during the Enlightenm n( help u . t ( ) 10 at tJ1 OW'ces of the critical, reformist spirit in colonial political economy; but they also warn us away from reductive judgments about the role of the imperial state or the temptation to find a unitary Enlightenment colonial ideology.26

One interpretation locates the source of Enlightenment political economy in the relationship of the periphery to the center in the composite monarchies of Europe. As John Robertson has argued, political economy developed in places like Naples and

Scotland, nominally independent kingdoms that were, nonetheless, ruled as provinces within the British and Spanish Empires. Here, in the context of economic underdevelopment and far from the political institutions and networks situated in the imperial

center, political economy promised material improvement and offered an implicit criticism of the exploitation of small, peripheral states at the hands of their imperial masters.n In James Livesey's account, the discourse of improvement and society that

became commonplace in enlightened Europe in the late eighteenth century began as "a compensatory self-understanding of a colonial elite" in places like Ireland; it was on

the periphery that political economy, "an alternative horizon of political judgment to sovereignty," developed in order to come to terms with economic backwardness and dependency.28 It was in these contexts that the "rich-country, poor-country" debate took place, and although it concerned principally the problem of industrial and com

mercial primacy among the Three Kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland and England, the sophistication and wide applicability of the discussion assured for its interlocutorsamong them David Hume and Adam Smith-canonic status well beyond the eighteenth century.29

Another tradition, developed particularly in reference to France, sees political economy as a reaction in the metropolitan center to the policies of the monarchy. The half title of

Lionel Rothkrug's unjustly neglected masterpiece, Opposition to Louis XIV: the Political and Social Origins oj the French ElIlightenment (1965), conveys the centrality of political economy to the development of the Enlightenment as a whole. And as Habermas argued around

the same time (1962) European commercial expansion was responsible for bringing the public sphere into existence; its lasting political significance can be attributed to the salience in Enlightenment thought of "society," a sphere whose mode of functioning and

moral claims philosophes contrasted with statist Machiavellianism.30 Reinhart Koselleck places no emphasis on political economy as such, but for him and like-minded historians, the autonomous processes of "society" described in Enlighteriment social science loom

large as a counterweight to the claims of the absolutist state.31 This widely shared


conceptual framework was certainly the source of critical elements in Enlightenment social thought, but many historians have gone too far in accepting Alexis de Tocqueville's

j\.1dgment that, in France, enlight 'ned philosopht' engaged in a purely "abstra t, lit rary politic ' lhat was a iml la 'ably oppos d to lh . stat' a it was impot nt L impose reforms

on it. Figur such a ' Ann RobertJacques Turgor in ent de GOLll'11<tY, Pierre amue! du Pont de Nemours, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, typified a pattern, in France, of philosophes who combined a high public profile with responsible administrative positions. Civil society-the bourgeois public sphere of the Enlightenment-emerged in

Europe under highly variable conditions of toleration and encouragement by the state, and in alternating phases of state repression and manipulationY In France and else

where, this manipulation took many forms, one of which was the cultivation by royal administrators of a critical "public opinion" that served as a machine de guerre in their reform campaigns against entrenched, sometimes reactionary elites. When ministers such as Vincent de Gournay sought to change royal economic policy they did so through a sustained campaign of printed publication that was aimed at educating citizens on political-economic matters, and seeking consensus on their proposals that bore the imprimatur of "public opinion." The varieties of political economy that developed over the course of the eighteenth century were both the tools and the outcome of this process of reform, even where "public opinion" remained more imaginary than rea1. 33

The commercial wars fought with regularity in the colonial periphery during the

eighteenth centUly- and along with them the massive debts, territorial reshufflings, and occasional anti-imperial uprisings they entailed- helped the political economy of colonization rise to salience among the diverse forms of Enlightenment political economy.34 The drive to reform in the post- Seven Years' War period took a superficially similar form in the British, Spanish and French Empires; all three sought the centralization of admin

istrative and fiscal power, while the Bourbon monarchies pursued their own versions of liberal empire, loosening trade restrictions between parts of their respective empires in order to encourage economic growth and, ultimately, increase tax receipts.3j The fact of such broad similarities allows us to affirm the generality of the mid-century crisis, which

literally brought home the costs of empire to all the major players; but the timing, efficacy and ultimate effects of the reform movements this crisis provoked differed consid

erably from place to place. The analysis of costs, benefits, and means of reform always involved multiple points

of view that are not easily reducible to a simple metropolel colony binary. A political economy that took into account the actual and potential contributions of colonial societies to empire-wide prosperity was, as often as not, a project that originated in the

metropole. In the French case, enlightened administrators were conscious of the narrow, self-interested perspective of metropolitan merchants who had hitherto dominated debates about trade policy, and their drive to reform helped to encourage institutions that gave voice to colonial public opinion. Colonial Chambers of Commerce and Agricultural

societies were established in the wake of the Seven Years' War in order to provide a counterweight to the relentlessly protectionist views of metropolitan merchants. At home, Ministers of the Navy convoked official conferences-an eighteenth-century version of policy seminars-to hash out differences between metropolitan merchants and colonial


producers and to provide cover for liberalizing policy proposals that were also presented

and discussed in journals such as the EpMmf:/'id du 'itf!yen and the ]oumfll dr. I flgri ulture

du commerce et desjina/lc ' .3U France was no ha en of fourth eSlate privil g , but the ab cnc~ there of the daily, public cut and thrust of parliamentary politics found in England

combined with the necessity of blunting directly political, often encouraged a prinCipled'

detached and searching- in a word "philosophical"-style of discussion that mad~ France the cynosure of the European Enlightenment. 37 In Spain, the intensity of offi

cial censorship and an ingrained political culture that favored the smooth functioning of

the composite monarchy encouraged deference and unspoken compromises between the

Crown, its servants and local elites; in the French public sphere, arguments took shape

with a special clarity and advanced much more quickly to an examination of premises

and of consequences. Official censors in France such as Malesherbes not only tipped off

philosophes like Diderot and D'Alembert to imminent raids on their printing offices, but

steered others from the shoals of censorship with an editorial hand that encouraged the

displacement of political conflicts into philosophical abstraction or the terrain of distant

historical examples. 38

In the Spanish Empire, the economic problems faced by the Crown looked rather

different than in France or in Britain, since the merchant community in Mexico

City made common cause with merchant guilds in Cadiz to regulate shipping to the

Americas; the issue was not so much the center / periphery distinction as it was rent

seeking among municipal elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, the compara

tively underdeveloped public sphere in mainland Spain, combined with long-standing

traditions of consultation in the Spanish composite monarchy, determined the way

in which policy debates, the principal catalyst for the development of colonial polit

ical economy, unfolded. As in France, ministers in the center sought to undermine or

replace the dominant voices of privileged merchants; to this end, ministers pushed for

the creation of overseas Consulados (Chambers of Commerce) as well as Madrid's Real

Sociedad Economica, which advanced arguments against the opponents of free trade

in Mexico City and Cadiz. 39 However, these debates over comercio libre never attained the

broadly public character to which the political economy of mid-century France could

plausibly lay claim. Preparatory works like Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes' Rejfexiones sobre el comercio espafiol a i/ldif/S (1762) remained in manuscript for lack of dedicated cadres,

such as Vincent de Gournay's circle in France, whose project of translation and pub

lication closed the gap between administrative and public reflection: the "publics" of

colonial political economy in Spain remained largely restricted to directly concerned

participants until the rise, in the 1780s and beyond, of periodicals such as the Coneo Mercalltil and the Espiritu de los 1Il~ores dim·ios literarios que se publican ell Europa, which

publicized and discussed ministerial memoirs (or "cartas" in quantity).40 In keeping with

long-standing traditions of consent and consultation in the Spanish composite mon

archy, the COlls11lados in New Spain and elsewhere adopted a much more conciliatory

stance toward metropolitan officials and policies than the Chambers in the French col

onies or the economic press in the metropole. If Spanish reform proposals were timid,

howevel~ these institutions allowed for the airing of views and, initially at least, blunted

merchant / state conflict. 41

t


In these and other cases, accommodating new economic realities meant reexamining

long-held relationships of imperial sovereignty: discussions of trading regimes, taxation,

and administrative models inevitably drew in cognate problems of national identity, citi

zenship, and rights that were not easily contained. Moreover, these discussions did not

and could not anymore- take place in the closed chamber of the arcana imperii. After

considerable domestic tumult, Britain's crisis of imperial sovereignty in the Americas

was resolved by their loss in the American War of Independence. Decades of concerted

reform efforts came to grief when France found itself unable to implement a workable

colonial constitution in their western empire in the wake of the Revolution of 1789.

As a consequence, France lost the jewel in its colonial crown, Saint-Domingue. Jeremy

Adelman has argued that the power vacuum left in Spain by the Napoleonic invasion

created a space in Atlantic viceroyalties where earlier imperial projects for economic

reform mutated into more ambitious and radical programs of national independence.

But these movements were not "nationalist" in their origin; it was the tumult of war,

and Ferdinand VII's reactionary restoration in 1814, that led creoles to begin imagining

national rather than imperial sovereigntyY

Debates over the organization of France's commercial empire after the Seven Years'

War were an extension of discussions that began in the wake of the War of Austrian

Succession (1740-48), a smaller conflict that was nevertheless highly disruptive to French

overseas trade. Although concrete issues such as taxation and trade policy remained in the forefront

because of their relationship to empire-wide economic growth, such policy controver

sies took place against the background of discussions about the definition of colonies

and, therefore, the peculiar nature of modern colonization. 43 In his 1753 article entitled

COLONIES in Diderot and D'Alembert's El1cylopMie, Franc;:ois Veron de Forbonnais

argued that modern colonies had a fundamentally different set of political and economic

relationships with the metropole than their antecedents in biblical and ancient times.

Ancient colonies, on this argument, were expected to develop into independent soci

eties, with only voluntary links of cultural affinity remaining between the metropolitan

center and its colonial offshoots. In contrast to ancient models, modern colonies were

established for essentially commercial purposes; at their origin they required investments

from the metropole to make them profitable; thereafter, they needed constant govern

ment expenditure, in particular for defense during the commercial wars that the col

onies' very existence provoked. These expenses justified the unfavorable trading regimes

imposed upon the colonies, known in France as the l'Exclusif. higher prices demanded for

metropolitan commodities and lower prices offered for colonial produce such as sugar or

coffee functioned as a tax that helped the state and merchants recover their expenses. On

the governmental side, the expenses of defense and administration justified their political

subordination, an arrangement that came to be known in the nineteenth century as the

"pacte coloniale." According to Forbonnais and others, colonial commerce still remained

an "external" affair subject to control from the center, whereas metropolitan or "national"

commerce was, as a regulative ideal at least, to remain free within the borders of the

realm. Colonies were established by and for the metropoles: if their populations and

productive capacities increased to the degree that they posed a threat of independence,


the metropole shou.ld a l in ord r to align these polities with the economic and pol't' , , , I Ical mterests of the cutel; even If thJ, meanl w k ning colonial economies,44

An eadi r dis QLlr of omposil mona l' hy mad it po sibl t design and to Un I mem iustitutioll.\ that r plicatcd French administrath e structures and ultw'c in far-O I • PI' vin s; aft l' all 1 gaily p aking, pia s like . aint-D mUl<11 I 01' "France ' UUg

, 0 - Wb nothmg more or less than simply provinces of France, Forbonnais held an unexamin b I, f' h I" ed e Ie m t e rep IcatlOn of French norms outre mer, but his historical and geographical taxonomy went far in conceding the reality of modern commercial empires; it provide a way of explicitly naming and justifying the sorts of hierarchies they were based u 0 d M d ' I ' h' , P n,

o ern commerCia emprre, on t IS readmg, required differentiated levels of indep d en -en ,and exel'cis of over ignty, within imp rial ,pace, fter the even ears Wa all of lh major Adami empil'es can b s en as having attempted a hifl Wl'th Va' ' r

'" ' <lyuIg degre of U S5, from L1w omparauv ly L S II rms of omposit monar hy to tl b' ~

mary world of metropoles organizing colonial governance and taxation from the cent S

' er, pam made this linguistic transition -"colonia" only entered common parlance in the

,1 780s and beyond- later than either France or Britain even if the reforms Spain enacted m the 1760s resembled those of rival powers, This tardiness can be partly ascribed to th

imbalance between riches produced in the Americas and persistent economic weaknes: on the Iberian Peninsula; also at work were the durable precedents set over two and a

half centuries in an empire patterned explicitly on the legal structures of composite mon~rchy: in the Spanish context, the banalization of term "colonias" seems to have begun m the post-Seven Years' War period, when authors like Campomanes focused renewed

attention upon rivals like Britain and France, who freely employed the term "colony" and seemed to manage their trade to the benefit of the metropole,4j The "late mercantilism" Campomanes borrowed from the British and French examples may have been

liberal in the sense that it opened up colonial trade routes to greater numbers of metropolit~n merchants, but it relied for its success upon a closed imperial system, including the nght of the metropole to dictate the colonies' access to extra-imperial markets, In order for the Spanish possessions to gain by the liberalization of trade within the empire, they had to consent to closer, more direct rule from the metropole-to become colonies,

Nevertheless, as late as 1776, Spanish economic writers systematically preferred the terms "reino" (kingdom or realm) and "provincia" to "colonias," which they reserved for French and British possessions,46 By the 1790s, however, "colonias" had become the des

ignation of choice for Spain's American possessions, which were consistently contrasted and subordinated to the Iberian "nacion"; in speech if not in reality, the metropolel colony dyad overtook earlier mappings of the Spanish Empire, 47

Around the time that Forbonnais wrote his article on colonies, Victor Riquetti Mirabeau developed a line of criticism in L'Ami des hommes (1 756) that would later become standard among Physiocratic opponents of the colonial-mercantile system, Mirabeau adopted the same periodization as Forbonnais, but argued that modern colonization such as unfolded in the Americas, and in particular the French colonies, was a "monstrous" and ultimately anachronistic concatenation of "domination" and "commerce," the first two stages of colonial development that were typical of the Spanish and British

Empires, respectively, If dependence, violence and restriction characterized modern


colonization in its initial stages, Mirabeau looked forward to a third and final stage, "population," where colonists and thell' terril ries could attain lheir natural potencial on an equal footing with the mother coumry, The current regim , Mirabeau and other Physiocrats emphasized, was unprofitable for colonists and for the metropolitan govemments that finatl 'ed suc essiv 01 nial wars, Mol' ovel~ as the al b ' Roubaud-a talented Physiocratic publicist--emphasized, France's appt' a. h to col.onizatioll prior to the Seven Years' War made white settlement so unattractive that these sparsely settled colonies were difficult and expensive to defend against British incursions, "Population" was not only a social ideal for agriculturally-minded economists, but an instrument of

il1lperial se luity,4lI f part f this PI' gran" ilirabcau and oUler envisioned moving

beyond slavery, which th y r gard 'd a both in h.uman and 'onomi.~')JJy in ill ien1.4~ Whal began in fran a a larg Iy dornesti l'ilicism of "colbel'tist" industrial poH y

and a highly fragmented agricultural sector was extended to a searching analysis of the

French colonial empire, The Physiocrats lamented the absence in ancien regime France of a truly national market, observing instead a collection of poorly integrated provinces whose privileged institutions and orders often resisted economic unification in the name

of traditional liberties, Like many Physiocrats, Turgot directly linked the pervasiveness of market restrictions in eighteenth-century Europe with the "gouvernement feodal" of the

prec ding centuries, Turgot described how individual 111. t1ieval to\'ll18 behaved inde

pendent s vercignti , im) ing their own tax a.nd mark L l' sld Dons on mer hants,50 An anonymoLls author in t11 EpMlllcrid d,j Cilq)1 II, e hoed Ul analysis f TUl'g t s Encyclopedie article FOIRE, explaining how fairs, which appeared to exist to facilitate

commerce, owed their origin to the "abuses of feudal law" and the desire to extract revenue: "each fief became in a sense an isolated state, jealous of its neighbors and almost naturally the enemy of all of the others,"51 In the modern epoch, "feudal law"

metastasized into the "new principles of fiscality" that subordinated productivity to state revenue, all in the name of mercantile wealth and state power, A patchwork of customs zones, competing toll systems and transport monopolies all rested upon the "inchoate vestiges of feudal government," and hindered the development of an integrated, efficient transportation system and, hence, market.52 The feudal character of eighteenth-century France did not repose simply in narrowly economic and privileges, but was reflected as well in the status of persons, "divided between arbitrary despots and slaves," Against this model, Physiocrats hoped to make France into a "true monarchy" by abolishing useless geographic and social divisions,53

The Physiocrats viewed France's colonial empire in much the same terms, Physiocrats believed that the solution to an inefficient and unprofitable empire lay with an opening up of market flows across all of the provinces, metropolitan or colonial, of the French

empire, In a word, the empire was to become a modern kingdom by losing the trappings of composite monarchy, the "distances and differences"-that segmented the kingdom into the virtual spaces of cities, provinces and-now-colonies, This included the div

ision of metropolitan and colonial peoples into free and servile labor, Like-minded Physiocrats imagined a 'defeudalization' of the European imperial system that would complement the drive for economic reforms within continental European kingdoms, In

a 1776 letter to Secretary of State Vergennes, Turgot laid out the ramifications for all

1

--- ___________ ======~--------------------------------------------------~~I


European empires of the American War of Independence. Summing up the Physiocratic

vision, Turgot called for a "constitution vraiment economique pour les colonies," which

passing beyond trade restrictions to the larger question of imperial sovereignty, addressed

the problem of the "pacte coloniale"; once colonies became "provinces allies ... non plus

sujettes de la Metropole," colonization in the modern sense, as Forbonnais and others

understood it, would cease to exist.54

Many participants in debates over colonial commerce disagreed with the

Physiocrats, affirming the dependent and exceptional character of the colonies. These

were strong arguments, particularly in the French empire. New France and the Antilles

never attracted great waves of metropolitan immigrants. New France was always eco

nomi.cally. margina:l. t~ metropolit~n fortunes, but was the site of expensive, ongoing confhct With the Bntlsh. The Antilles were far more profitable, but a hostile climate,

a slave economy, and dubious national allegiances all instantiated the "distances and

differences" discussed by Petty. Old forms of colonial rule, including chartered com

panies with sovereign powers, lasted well into the ninete'enth century. 55 Nevertheless

the Physiocrats showed polemical genius in making the case that colonies were bes~ considered coequal provinces within a politically and economically unified realm

(nation or kingdom). It was entirely predictable that chartered trading companies

and unequal terms of trade between colony and metropole, to which the Physiocrats

affixed the abusive label "feudal," should be censured as a part of Europe's colonial

mercantile apparatus; but the Physiocrats extended their analysis to slavery and-more

explosively still-the fiscal-military state, both of which had expanded so greatly over

the eighteenth century. Joining the costs of empire to the perennially toxic issue of

ancien regime finances amplified their criticism of both metropolitan and colonial affairs.

In the closing decades of France's ancien regime, debates over colonial political economy

began to turn on rival conceptions of nation, colonie and cOlllmerce. Merchants seeking the

maintenance of trading restrictions understood "commerce" and "nation" in restricted , traditional senses that placed the economic well-being of distant colonies in a subordinate

position to that of the metropolitan nation. But the astonishing growth in places such as

Saint-Domingue over the course of the eighteenth century meant that colonial producers

could assert increasingly credible claims to centrality in the French economy. Concepts

of center and periphery that helped to structure colonial political economy lost their self

evidence, and the notion that the colonies profited by their exclusion from and subordin

ation to the metropolitan nation began to seem no better than a self-interested conceit.

The "nation" would have to be widened to include colonial territories and populations;

and "commerce" itself could no longer refer simply to activities of merchants shuttling

goods between Europe and its colonial periphery: aggregate production within a national

unit, even if spatially divided, mattered more than merchants' profit. These demands

were in line with Quesnay's call for a "monarchical empire" wherein colony and metro

pole enjoyed the same rights and sovereign protection as the provinces within the unified

kingdom the Physiocrats envisioned.56

At its birth in the mid-eighteenth century, colonial political economy promised a set

of tools that could help imperial officials rationalize, strengthen and thereby preserve the

I

*


loo.er, mo ' tacir sy. t(!m 0(' economic governance inh rited from th era of composite

monarchy. P pular and elite resistan e in the parush and French Empires ensw' d thal

!.he status quo outlived reform ':!forts by B Lll'bon miu.isters; m r fundamentally, Itow

eyer, the metropolel colony division posited by Forbonnais, Campomanes and others was

not conceptually very distinct from Montchrestien's oeconomie politique, which envisioned

royal e onomi police as a form of composition- lhat is to say, the combinalion of

unlike things into a harmonious whole. In this comext, the Phy~i()crats' colonial polit

ical economy accomplished something altogether different: for them, liberalization of

trade within empires only replicated the "distances and differences" of composite mon

archy 011 a gre~1. r sale. Q u snay's "monarchi al mpil' "was in r alir~ the negation of

empire in the previous senses ill which it had l 11 understood; d 'pal'Ul1g from premi e

that !lad only b en r cully arLi ulat eI, they initiat d a bo ld thought xperimcnt ab ut

the shape of a postcolonial commercial world.

Notes

Frantz Fanon, Les Dall/lles de fa terre (Paris: Decouverte/Poche, 2002), 41. 2 David Armitage writes, "Political economy wa tber 'for not m I ' ' Iy a tecLnical eli cipline,

but provided the means LO des.cribe and ""plain til' r lauonships among the Thr 'c Kingdoms [England, otland and II' 1311d] , in Lhe contexL r the l-videl' Atlantic economy." '[ht Idcologiv(ll Origin qf I/II! Edti" ElIlPirr ,( ambridge: Cambridge Dniv r ilY Press. 2000). 148. As th followiug ay will mak clear, Armitage's observation can be generalized beyond the .Briti h ase' mor importantly, as I shall argue, "political economy" in i.ts early modern usag is an

imp 'rial concept. 3 La mOl/archie arislodhnocraliqlle, 011 me gOllverl/emellt compose et mes/i des trois formes de legitillles

republiques: allx ESlal.s-gellsltJllx des provinces (()/iftdble des Pays-Bas (Paris: J 'an Berjon, 1611). 4 Ar istotle, Polilics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hack (t Publishing, 1 a98), bk. I.3-5 and III.4-5. Aristotle's

criticism of Plato (01' oCTate ) IVa pa l't1y bas d upon til latter' d ' sir to abolish the household and re i gate its functions to the ru! I's of th polis. For a directly related trealm nt of th question, se JUrgen HabermB , TIlt Structural Tra1lsformation qf tilo Public ?Jhel'e ( ambridge: IV[!T

Press, 1989), 19- 20. 5 nloine de Montclll'estien, 'Ii'aicte de {'Oeconomie Poliliqlle (Paris: E. PIon, Nourrit, et Compagnie,

1889), 18 and 134. n Montchre tien', relationship LO Bodin, and his views on . ri itoteLian political philo ophy, see ianfranco Branini, DIIll'ecollolllia aristotdkn rrll'u ollomia polillCll: saggio sui "Traiclr di MOlltclirolien (Pi a: ET ', 1988). ompare lh di Cll ion by Molltchr ricn to Jean Bodin, Les Six livm de fa rePllb/ique [1576] (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 8- 9 (1.2).

6 Rousseau confronted this error in his Encyclopidie article OECONOMIE (1753), arguing that political economy is specifically 1Iot household management (oikonomia) because of the different concepts of authority, justice, and well-being attached to the oikos and jJalis. Montchrestien, Ttaiell de [,Oeconomie Poliliqut, 17 (I). Turquet de la Mayerne emphasized how royal political economy sbould aim for a certain quali ty of acc to office and other opp rtllllitit'S tor personal enrichment, allth while respe ung e.xisting laell hieraJ'chi s.La IIlD/IiJrrhie

(lriswdhuocraliqllc, 558. ~or a general per pectiv' 01'1 til meaning of ntlciell rAgill/t corporatism, Roland Nlous:niel~ "Lr c(mcepts d' '()l'dre, d" '[;1ts,' de 'fideJitl:' ct de 'monarchie absolLlc ' n France de la fin du XVe siecle a la fin du XVIIIe," Revue Historique 247, no. 2 (502) (1972): 289-312; on the resilience of corporatist practices in eighteenth-century France, Steven L. Kaplan, La Fin des corporatiolls (Paris: Fayard, 200 I); and Allan Potofsky, COllstructing Paris in Ihe Age qf

Revolution (Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

--I


8 MOll lchr ' Li '11, Tiai(/i de l'Ouol/olllie Politiqlle, 131 (II). ·Mont hrestien does mention H 'n11 tv' r I! LaLlishment of order among the provinces (75: II), mainly as a prerequisite for OIllIner . s growLh. Ia1

9 Ibid., 148 (II) and 274 (III).

10 J.H. ElliOll, "A Europe of Composite l1onan:mes " Past & PrlSi!1I1, no. 137 (1992)' 48-71 I:'

di . . . ~Or a

CuSSlon f variable uses of tb t'1'l11 mpire Anthony PagdeIl, Lards of AILllte World: id(l)t. . of Em/lire ill /:J'pllin, Britaill (IIld Frrmu (New Haven: rue niversity Pie 1995) 17- 1 .oglM

d J I Rob "r.' I ' l ' ' , , an ill , •. e:rtson,. c.~plre ~( ~:on; w oncepts r the Early Modrr!l European POlili aI

rdeJ; 10 1J Vl/lOnjor Empire: Poitltcol Thought alit/the Bli tis/I lIioll of 1707, -d. RobeJ't30n.J I ( ambridge: Oambridgt- UJliveJ' ily Pr , 19 5), 3- 36. 0 Ul

liOn this process in rrance, see David Parker, The Makillg qf French Absolutism (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 13-'27.

12 See Elliott, "A E~II'( pe of Composite Monarchies." And for Lhe unstable r lalionship between the 111 cJ rn nabon- tate and empire, particularly in the case of nineteenth- and tw Ilti tbcentury France, see Frederick Coopel; "Provincializing France," in Imperial Formatiolls, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 341-375.

13 Montchrestien, Traicli de l'Oecollomie Politique, 365 (IV).

14 ~arl Marx, Capilal: A .Critique qf Political Ecollomy ( VI' York: Vintage, 1977), 384. For specialists' vte-:vs, ~ed J\llcCormlCk, WIllwm Petty alld the Ambitious qf Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford

.. IllV >rSlty. Press, .200~~, ,~-.6; Arm.itag~ Jdcologicil/ Or~'lIs, 14 ~-57 ; and Rid1<lrd Drayton, Kn I\II.~gc and Empu e, 111 O.yford HI,ftOry qf the BntlSh EmpIre, ed. P. J. J 1 arshall, vol. 2

(Cambndge, 1998),240- 241, 245. Armitag discllsses the eompliCltli n that attend callin Ireland a colony, but his dJ cussion k-a e littlC' doubt that he con idcrs Ireland to have been = colonial dependency.

15 McCormick, William Petty, 84- 118.

16 Sean Connolly, Religion, Law alld Power: The Making qf Protestant Ireland, 1660-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 110- 15 (quotation on 110).

17 Sir William Petty, "Political Arithmetick Concerning the Value and Increase of People and 010Ilie5," in Several E~sC!)ls ill Po/iliml Arit/zmelitk: Tile 'fillc' qf Whirlt Follow in tilt ElIslling PaglJ . ndon, 1699),6 ( l\ England and Ireland veru nerica); Sir William P ll~ PolilicaIAn't/zmelick

or a Discourse, COllceming, the Extent alld value qf Lallds, People, Buildings; HlI~bandl)\ Malllgactllre: COlllmerce, F1She!Y, ... (London, 1690),25, on the Turkish Empire.

18 On the exchange of women, McCormick, William Petty, 185-96. 19 Petty, Political Aritlzmetick, 91-92, 89, emphasis added.

20 The only inefficiency due to "distance and difference" that Petty mentioned that was exclusively "colonial" was the over-accumulation of foreign lands, when a small amount of it would do for the growth of exotic plants. For the entire list , see Ibid. , 89- 91.

21 Pierre Dockes, L'Espace dans 10 pensee ecollomique du XVle all XVIIle siMe (Paris: Flammarion 1969). This ,york is in om respects fundamental for thi ' d:i Ctl ion, except that the problet~ of sovereign!)1 and govcmance in general is not an explicil object of analysis. Dockes seems more concerned with the organization of physical than virtual space.

22 Allan Greet; Peasant, LOld, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Qyebec Parishes, 1740-1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985),8-9.

23 Leslie Choquette, "Proprietorships in French North America," in COllstructillg Early JYIodem Empl1t!S: Proprietary f;{m/ures in the Atlalltic World, 1500-1750, ed. L. H. Roper and Bertrand Van

~ymb 'ke,. Th AtlantiC' World (Leiden ; D ton: Brill, 2007), 117- 3 1; H len tv!ary Dewar, Y Establl r Nost!· Auctol'ilC': Assertions of Imperial '0\1 'I' ignty through Propl'ieLor mps

and hartered Compani in N '\\I ·France, 1598- 1663 (ph.D., History, niv I' ity of Toronlo, 2012), 27- 31. ~~r a wider pCJ'spcctiv~ on this phenomenon, including similar legal forms in the Portuguese, Brll1sh and Dutch EmpIres, see L. H . Ropel' and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds.,


COllstmetillg Early Modem Empires: ProprietalY f;{mtures ill the Atlantic World, 1500-1750, The Atlantic World, v. II (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2007).

24 On [hes' [rug les, se Dt;war," sSCl,tions of Imperial Sover ignty, ' chap. 2. 25 Jurgen Hab nna e pU illy a 'gned a c3usall'olc to tb . "meJ·camili.si phas' or capitalism" and

th 'early ('al italisl commercial Y l m" in dlC growth of p litieal economy and hence, the bourgeois public sphere. It is therefore no small irony that, after the translation of Habermas's work into French and then English, anti-marxist scholars, led by Keith Michael Baker, began to use the public sphere and the concept of "political culture" as a foil against materialist explanations forthe FI' -nch Revolution. Keith Mi ha J BakeJjl/lltlllillg (Itt Prel/dl f.. ,lIOlali01l: Essa,ys Oil Frellch Politirol Cultlll'S ill the Eighltellth Ceil/lilY (Cambridge: C:lmbridg' IUV ·rsity Press, 19 0), 4- 8 and chap. 1.

26 YIichele Duchet's work remains a milestone in the sludy of EJllighreJlment social i nee, but il i marred by a monolithic view of the nature of colol1_ial ideology, lumping traditionalists, reformists and anti-colonialists together. See Michele Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siide des IUlIliires: Bliffon, Voltaire, ROllsseau, Hehletius, Diderot, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 137-39.

27 John Robertson, The Case jor the Enlightellffl8llt: Scot/ollil alld Naples, 1680- 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge niversity Press, 2005), 147- 200. Naturally, this account 1 av out many of t.h distinctions between Naples and Scotland that Roberston discusses.

28 JOlne lve ey, Civil Sdci~9' alld EmjJil~: Irallilld (md ((I//olld ill tlu Eightlflltlt-Cellfmy Atlantic Hfn'/d few Haven: Yal niversity Press, 2009). 79-013 (88 then 79 quoted) and 218 .

29 011 this debate, I wan Hont, ''The 'Rich ou ntry-Poor 'oHIltry D bale in Scottish Classical Political Economy," in VVealth alld Virtue: The Shaping qf Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment ( ambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 271- 315; and Istvan BOlIl, "Th 'Rich

OWlul'-Poor C untr ' Debate Revisited: The Irish Origins and VI' neil Reception or the Hume Paradox," in David Hllme's Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2007), 250- 61, 292-304.

30 Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origills qf the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), vii- ix; see also Habermas, StlUctllral Traniformatioll, 13-26.

31 Reinhart Koselleck, Critiqlle and o isis: Enlightenment alld the Pa/hogellesis qf lt10dem Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 159- 170; Daniel Gordon, Citizens Withollt Sovereignty: Equality alld Sociability ill French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

32 For a comparative discussion, T C. W. Blanning, The Culture qf Power and the Pown if Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660-17 89 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

33 For examples of the dialectic between publicity, publics and reform, see Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics qf Taxa/ion in Eighteen/h-CentulY Frallce: Liberti, Egaliti, Fiscalili (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Robin J. Ives, "Political Publicity and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century France," French History 17, no. I (2003): 1-18.

34 Paul Beik, A]udgment qf the Old Regime (New York: AMS Press, 1967);J.H. Elliott, Empires qf the Allall/ic World: Britain and Spaill ill AI/lelica, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), chaps. 10 and 11; Jean Tarrade, "L'administration coloniale en France it la fin de I' Ancien Regime: Projets de reforme," Revue Histolique 229 (1963): 103-22.

35 Elliott, Empires qf the Atlantic World, 292-310. 36 On conferences, seeJean Tarrade, Le COlllmerce colonial de la Frallce a lajill de l'ancien regime: l'evolutiol!

dll regime de '?'Exclusif" de 1763 a 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), esp. chaps. 8 and 12; on colonial chambers of commerce, Tarrade, 'Administration coloniale en France."

37 For this argument on the British side, see John Roberston, "An Argument over a British Enlightenment: Why It Matters" (Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago, 2005).

38 The authority on censorship in eighteenth-century France is Raymond Birn, Royal CellsolJhip if Books in Eighteenth-Century Fwnce (California: Stanford University Press, 2012).

I 86 THE ECONOMIC TURN

39 Compare the discussion of the Consuls of Caracas to Lhal o[ Lhe NJexlco it m 'l'Cilrul t : I de V. (Collsulado of Caracas), "Idea General del Comercio de las In lias Rcino de 1I

EspaI1a," in COlllro11elsia sobre la liberlad 1e ('Ol/l~r(,w 811 Nueva Espana. 1776-1818, ed. Enri: F.loresca.no and, Fernando CastIllo ~M~~lco, D.F.: Insrituto Mexicallo de ~;omer 'io Exterior), 1.23- 68, and ~ons~1 of MexIco ~Ity, InG nne del consulado de merClantes de Mexico al Rey, sobre la sltuaclOn del comerclO. y la eCOllornla dl~ nueva Espai\a," J :69--139. lowe lh e references and others to Stanley Stem ~nd "Barbara tein, Ajlog(~ rrf EIIIJlird: ?1(1i1l (lilt! J lW ;pain In Ihe Age qf Charles III, 1759- 1789 (BaltImore: Johns Hopkins Univer iry Pre ,2003).

40 For a discussion of economic periodicals including a list of rei 'vant arti I (j'0l1l tll C , orreo Mermnlil, Luis ~iguel Enciso-Recio, Prensa Ecol/omi~a de~ XT!!ll: Et Dm () NII!Tcollli tlr EsjJarla) SitS hlldas, Estuchos y Documentos Cuaderno d· E-lisrona 10derna a lladolid: Fa ultad I Filosofia y Letras de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1958). 011 earli 'I' reform writings 1n pa~le seeJ~sll: Astigarraga, ."Las 'Re~exiones ~obr eI ' t~do a ~ual cI I orner ' io de Espana' (17G I): de SImon de Aragorn: contemdo, estudlO de fu nIt y pnm ra in! -preta ion." DOftlllldfilo d Iiabajo, Asociacioll Esj)(1I70/a de Historia Ecollomica 110 (201 1). t

41 On Lh · creation r COli /lladas in the panish Empire, and on the ino'ease ill 'Olrllict in the nine! 'cmh c ntllry, Gabl'iel B. Paquette, ", tate- ivil Society Coop 'raLion and nBi l in the Spruli 11 Erupir': TIl lntellectllal anel Political Activities of the Ultramarine Consulados and Economic Societies, C. 1780-1810," ]olll'llal qf Latin Americall Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 263-298. On the role of Madrid' R 'al 0 i d~d Econ6mica in pushing for (j'eer trad in the ew Spain in rhe wake of the pdlicy or ClJlIlDrtio fibrel tein and Stein, Apogee q( Empire, 286- 288.

42 J I'emy Adelmau, SOU61:oigll!y and R b'OllltiO/I ill tile Iberian Allalltic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 4.

43 The following discussion summarizes Paul Cheney, "L'Histoil'e du commerce: genre litteraire I:t me~od~ ell Ie lI1om.i· politique, 'in -u Cerclede Vi7lCfllt de GOl/TII!!)': SIlL'oil'S k Ollomiques tI pratiqlles admlJllStrafwr- ell Fralll:e nu milim rill .\1Iiii liede, ed. Loye Charles, Frccieri Lefebvre, and Lristine Th6n~ (paris: EclitiollS INE , 20 I I), 295- 299.

44 This prescription came later, see Fran<;ois Veron de Forbonnais, Piillripes et ObservatiOlls teollollliqlles (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1767).

45 Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes, ReJlexiolies sobre el romercio espmlol a hldias (1762), ed. Vicente Llombrut Ro a (Madrid: InsutUlo de E tudlos Fiscalcs: DLqtribllYe, entro de Publicaciones Mini. rel'io d Ecollomi,a y Ha.ci nda, 1988) 233-47 . or ' late mercantilism' in amp manes: se' ibid., dltol' s i rlU'oducti n, xxii- x;w, Llombart discu es Campomllnes's tu rn to Brili&b and Fr nell examples and 'ow' , elllpha ·iz.ing Lhat the on ensus among progressive enlightened figures in pain was nciLher trictly 'm rcanril lst" or " liberal."

46 R de V (Consulado of Caracas), "Idea General del Comercio de las Indias Reino de Nueva Espana"; Campomanes, ReJlexiolies sobre el comercio espmlol a Indias (1762), 241-243. On the terminological shift to "colonia": Pagden, Lords qf All the vHn'/d, 124.

47 "Barcelona: Informe subre el comercio de America pOI' el Consulado de este Ciudad," Espirilu de los ml!iores diarios lilemrios aue se publican en Europa, no. 173 (1789): 1013- 1034.

48 L'AlIIi des hommes was published before Mirabeau's cOllversion to the secle, but the latter's analysis dominatedlarcl' Phy 'ocratic: wl'iting- 0 the subject. Mirabeau and Quesnay developed this Cl-iticism further in their PldlDsophie mfalr, ou ecollomie genemle et politiqlle de l'agricliliure, rMlIile a l'ordre ill/lllunbkJ des loix /Ill) iqlles & I/Iom{es (Amsterdam: Libraires associes, 1763). This line of analysis wa also the subject of numerous articles in the Eptzemerides dll Cito)'en. See Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the Frenrh lvIol/archy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 5 for further discussion and references.

49 Mirabeau gleaned many of his notions about slavery from his younger brothel' Jean-Antoine, who served as Colonial governor of Guadeloupe in 1754-55; early plans for abolition can be glimpsed in their correspondence. See LOlc Charles and Paul Cheney, "The Colonial :Macrulle Dismantled: Knowledge and Empire in the French Atlantic," Past & Present 219 (2013): 127-163.

THE POLITICAL ECONOIVIY OF COLONIZATION 87

50 }\ oll _Robert-Jacques Turgot, "Foin's," in EI/~ydoptfdie, 011 Diciiolillaire Raisolllte (Paris, 1751),

3( --42. 51 "Q!.restions mOl'ales et politiques, envoyees de la Foire Saint-Germain," EJ)/thllbides du CiIO)'eII,

nO. 2 (1766): 268- 2 9. 52 On fis ali m: l'abbe " j alas Baucieau, "Avis au Pellple sur son premicl-besoin, ou p lits Traites

economiqucs, sur Ie bled, la farine & I p, in,' Ephemerides dll CiIO)ICII, no. 4 (17 8): 102. On canals, Paulmier de la Tour, "Discours prononce it la cinquieme assemble de la Societe des Amis Agricoles, it Crest en Dauphine," Ep/zemirides du Citqyen, no. 2 (1772): 25.

53 On slaves: l'abbe Nicolas Baudeau, "Avis au Peuple sur son premier besoin, au petits Traites economiques, sur Ie bled, la farine & Ie pain," Ephhnhides dll Citoyen , no. I (1768): 176. On "true monarchy": Vauvillier, "Suite de l'analyse du livre intitule L'interet general de I'tat," Ephimhides

du Ciloyen 1770, no. 5 (1770): 204. 54 Cited in Paul Cheney, "Les Economistes fran"ais et I'image de l'Ameriqlle: I'essor du commerce

transatlantique et l'effondrement du 'gouvernement feodal,'" Dix-huitifine siide 33 (2001): 244;

see also Pagden, Lords qf All the World, chaps. 5 and 7. 55 The British East India company ruled as a sovereign in India until 1858. See Philip J. Stern,

The Company-State: COlpolate Sovere(gll!Y and the Early Modelll Foundation qf the Britislt Empire in I11dia (New York: Oxford University Press, 20 II).

56 Franc;ois Quesnay, "Lettre sur l'opinion de l'Auteur de l'ESPRIT DES LOIX concernant les colonies [1766]," in Oeuvres Ecollollliqlles Comj)/etes et Autres Textes, ed. C. There, L. Charles, and J.-C. Perrot (Paris: INED, 2005),869-79; Cheney, RevolutiollaJ) Commerce, 182-191.

The Political Economy of Colonization: from Composite Monarchy to Nation

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