Ben Dew - Commerce, finance and statecraft: Histories of England, 1600-1780

Commerce, finance and statecraft

Commerce, finance and statecraft

Histories of England, 16001780

BEN DEW

Manchester University Press

Copyright Ben Dew 2018

The right of Ben Dew to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 1 7849 9296 5 hardback

First published 2018

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For Claire

J.U.S.N

I have received a good deal of help and support while completing this study. Jessica Dyson and Bronwen Price kindly and selflessly covered my teaching duties in the spring of 2016, thereby giving me a muchneeded unofficial sabbatical. Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger read through the bulk of the manuscript and provided detailed, perceptive and exceptionally helpful feedback. The two readers engaged by Manchester University Press offered both enthusiasm and excellent advice. The bulk of the research was completed at Senate House Library, the Bodleian Library and the British Library; I would like to thank the staff at all of these institutions.

I am also very grateful for the intellectual guidance and encouragement I have received over the years. At the University of East Anglia, I was inspired by Marina Mackay and Judy Hayden. At Queen Mary, University of London, I benefited greatly from working with Richard Bourke, Markman Ellis, Andrew Lincoln and Christopher Reid. I am also appreciative of the support I have received from Gregory Claeys, Emma Clery, Noelle Gallagher, Mark Salber Phillips and Nicholas Phillipson.

For their good cheer and enormous generosity I would like to thank Sin and Paul Brock, Vera and Francis Connolly, and Ann Brock. I am also very appreciative of the assistance I received from Patricia and Ivor Dew, and Marie Brodie. My parents Kathy and Chris have provided invaluable help, warm hospitality and excellent company.

My greatest debt is to Claire Brock who has been a willing and able discussant on all aspects of the project, a super editor, and an even better companion. Her love and friendship have made everything worthwhile.

1. Economic statecraft

This book explores the accounts of commerce and finance developed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians of England. Writers of the period, I argue, were engaged in a series of long-running and politically charged debates concerning a range of economic issues: the impact of popular and arbitrary forms of government on trade; the political and economic consequences of taxation; the development and value of Englands trading companies and commercial empire; the relationship between war and commerce; and, more generally, the meaning of national prosperity and its significance for Englands security, greatness and happiness. In discussing such questions, historians sought to present kings and queens as managers of the nations monetary and trading interests, and economic issues themselves as aspects of statecraft. As a consequence, commerce and finance came to be considered alongside political and military affairs as matters in which monarchs could demonstrate their skill, virtue and even heroism. This historiographical approach, which I label the economic statecraft tradition, shaped the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society conceived of politics, wealth and the meaning and function of the past, and helped to generate an important, but largely unexplored, variety of economic history.

Three characteristics of this mode of writing should be emphasised. First, its conceptions of commerce and finance were, in a sense, political. Writers did not view the economy as an autonomous or semi-autonomous system shaped by the forces of supply and demand. Instead, commercial and financial material was presented as a series of actions performed by government primarily the instigation of laws, commercial regulations and taxes which either helped or hindered Englands interests. Economic statecrafts key concern, therefore, was with what can best be described as the history of economic policy. Second, and largely as a consequence of this, none of the writers who discussed economic statecraft conceived of it as an independent field of study. Rather, the achievements of particular statesmen in commerce and finance were shown to be connected to their political, religious and military roles. This meant that economic statecraft formed part of a wider study of statesmanship, and understanding it involves tracing its shifting relationship with other aspects of this subject. Third, the accounts developed by historians were premised on the idea that the past provided a series of good and bad examples of economic management. Englands greatest monarchs, it was argued, through their skills in this area, had brought wealth, power and happiness to the nation. Its less successful rulers had allowed nationally beneficial forms of trade to decline and introduced morally and financially corrosive types of luxury. Consequently, their actions had weakened England in relation to its international rivals and had inaugurated periods of poverty and misery. Studying these examples was valuable as they could provide practical lessons for modern statesmen. Economic statecraft was, as a consequence, a self-consciously didactic form of writing.

The narrative that follows examines the emergence of economic statecraft in Jacobean historical writing (

In contrast to such approaches, this analysis treats historical writing about England as a subject worthy of attention in its own right and aims to show that the writers of the period developed a sophisticated form of politico-economic history. Two clarifications need to be added to such a claim. First, I am not arguing that the works under consideration were doing economic history in the modern sense of the term. There is, of course, a huge methodological gap between the approaches taken by William Camden and David Hume, and those of, say, J. H. Clapham, Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole. I want to show that a number of these economic questions, while not perennial, have substantial histories of their own, and have been answered using the conceptual vocabulary of neoclassical narrative history, as well as the modern terminology of aggregates and forces.

Second, while the organisation of this account is broadly chronological, it does not treat the texts it discusses as a series of incremental steps through which historians gradually acquired the techniques of

2. Public and private realms

This book also contributes to wider discussions concerning historical and economic culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by developing a critique of what might be labelled neo-Aristotelian analyses of commercial modernity. Such ideas received their classic exposition in Hannah Arendts work of 1958, Vita Activa.

Arendts thesis has been highly influential. In