Values, classical political economy and the Portuguese empire

Abstract

The article explores early criticisms of Adam Smith, with particular reference to long-distance commerce, the Portuguese empire, and the writings of William Julius Mickle. The changing relationship between merchants and sovereigns, and between economic and political power, was of central importance, the article suggests, to disputes over Smith's ideas of self-interest.

Keywords:

• commerce
• empire
• state
• corporation
• interest

Notes

Revised version of a paper presented at the University of Coimbra in March 2011.

 1. See Godwin (1820), pp. 110, 112, 611, 620.

 2. See de Bonald (1802), vol. 2, pp. 89–90.

 3. On the early critics of political economy, see Rothschild (2011), pp. 149–153.

 4. See Smith (1976a), p. 9.

 5. Letter of early December 1773 from A.R.J. Turgot to M.R.A.N. Condorcet in Turgot (1883), pp. 143–44.

 6. See Smith (1976b), p. 549.

 7. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, available at http://wilson.library.emory.edu:9090/tast/assessment/estimates.faces.

 8. See letters of 9 May 1764, 21 November 1764 and 15 February 1765 from the Directors of the East India Company in London to the Company's Council in Calcutta, and letters of 30 September 1765 and 24 March 1766 from the Council in Calcutta to the Directors in London, in Indian Records Series: Fort William-India House Correspondence, gen. ed. T. Raychaudhuri, 21 vols. (Delhi, 1949–1985), vol. 4, pp. 39, 40, 60, 71, 357, 404.

 9. See Miller (1988).

10. Letter of 18 February 1761 from George Johnstone to William Johnstone, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, Papers of William Pulteney, PU 469 [453]. David Wedderburn, an acquaintance of Smith and the brother of another close friend, stopped in the Cape Verde Islands (‘in all my travels I never saw so very horrid a place’) on his way to Bombay in 1770. He provided ‘some bark, some Salt of Wormwood, & some Snuff’ to the very melancholy Portuguese governor (‘upon my asking him, how long he intended to remain here, he answered with a very deep sigh, probably as long as the Count D'Oyeras [the prime minister, Pombal] lived’), and was presented with ‘some hogs, fowls, goats & vegetables’; he also found 20 German soldiers, who had been shipwrecked on a Dutch East India Company ship, and whom he took with him to Bombay, into the service of the English Company. Letter of 8 May 1770 from David Wedderburn to Janet Erskine, National Archives of Scotland, Papers of the Sinclair family, Earls of Rosslyn, GD164/1698.

11. Letter of 14 October 1782 to John Sinclair of Ulbster in Smith (1987), p. 262.

12. See Smith (1776b), pp. 493, 549, 633, 635.

13. Quoted in ‘Anecdotes tending to throw light on the character and opinions of the late Adam Smith, LLD’ (1791), in Smith (1983), p. 230.

14. Letter of 26 October 1780 to Andreas Holt, in Smith (1987), p. 251.

15. There is a single extended study of Mickle's life and work: Sister Eustace Taylor (1937).

16. The translation, with its heroic evocation of mercantile, political and scholarly wisdom, and of the glories of the University of Coimbra (in which Camöes learned ‘an intimacy with the classics, equal to that of a Scaliger, but directed by the taste of a Milton or a Pope’), was widely considered to have introduced Portuguese history and literature to an English audience:

‘The rocks on every shore/

Resound the dashing of the merchant-oar./

Wise laws are form'd, and constitutions weigh'd./

And the deeprooted base of Empire laid…/

Coimbra shines Minerva's proud abode/

And… beholds another dear-loved Athens rise.’

Camöens (1776), pp. clxxxviii, 119.

17. Mickle (1776), pp. civ–cvi, cliii.

18. ‘Much, therefore, is due to the man, who, by wading through the Portuguese and Spanish writers, has shed true light on that wide political field, where a Reynal and other eminent philosophers have wandered astray and stumbled’. Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 46 (August 1776), 367–369, p. 368.

19. See Mickle (1779), p. 6; letter of 25 March 1776 from James Macpherson to John Macpherson, Macpherson Papers, British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection, Mss Eur F291/122.

20. Mickle (1778), pp. clxi, clxxv and Mickle (1779), pp. 17–18, 26.

21. Mickle (1778), pp. clxvii–ix, clxxi, clxxvii, clxxix.

22. Mickle (1778), pp. clxxi, clxxxiv, clxxxvi and see Smith (1776b), p. 638.

23. Mickle (1778), pp. clxii, clxxvi–vii and Mickle (1779), pp. [4], 10.

24. ‘On the Death of David Hume’, in Mickle (1808), p. 144, mispag. 162.

25. ‘Anecdotes of William Julius Mickle’, in Mickle (1794), pp. xxxvii–xxxix.

26. Mickle, who was the son of a Scottish clergyman with an unfortunate side venture in brewing, was close to destitution for much of the 1760s and 1770s. His great hope, as he explained to his brother, was to become a clerk in the West Indies, or the purser on an East India Company ship. A letter to the Chairman of the East India Company, dated 1 March 1776, and asking for a subscription to the Lusiad, was marked ‘never delivered’. Undated letter of [1765] from William Julius Mickle to Charles Mickle, letter of 1 March 1776 from George Johnstone to Mr Harrison, Osborn Mickle Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University; and see Sim (1806).

27. Mickle (1778), pp. xvii, liii, clxxiv, clxxxv, and Mickle (1779), p. 24.

28. Mickle (1779), p. 15.

29. See Bayly (Oxford, 2004), and, on early British views of Indians as ‘aerially predisposed to indolence’, Rothschild (1995).

30. ‘When Gama arrived in India, the Moors, great masters of the arts of traffic, were the lords of the eastern seas. They had settlements on every convenient station, from Sofala to China; and though under different governments, were in reality one great commonwealth’. Mickle (1778), pp. xl, li, clvii.

31. Mickle (1778), pp. xii-xiii; ‘Enquiry’ in Camöens (1778), p. 332; Mickle (1779), p. [4].

32. Mickle (1778), p. lxxxviii and Smith (1776b), p. 569.

33. Say (1803), p. i.

34. Pownall (1776), p. 48.

35. The two works were published at almost exactly the same time. There was an extended review of the Wealth of Nations in the Monthly Review (vols. 54 and 55, 299–308, 455–469, 16–26), in addition to shorter notices in the Scots Magazine (vol. 38, pp. 205–206) and the London Magazine (vol. 45, pp. 321–322). The Lusiad was reviewed in the London Review (vol. 3, pp. 19–25, 90–102), and again in 1778 (vol. 7, pp. 1–10, with comments on Mickle's criticism of Smith), the Monthly Review (vols. 54 and 55, pp. 249–260, 369–383, 5–16, and, in 1778, vol. 59, p. 311), the Critical Review (vol. 41, pp. 15–26 and in 1778, vol. 46, pp. 62–64), the Lady's Magazine (vol. 7, pp. 129–130) and the London Magazine (vol. 45, pp. 210–211), as well as the Gentleman's Magazine (vol. 46, pp. 367–369 and vol. 48, pp. 427–428), with comments both in 1776 and 1778 on Mickle's criticism of Smith.

36. Mickle's brother was a journeyman printer, associated with one of the conservative printers in Oxford, Daniel Price, and he was himself a proof-corrector for the Clarendon Press. A letter from his brother Charles conveys the precariousness of the family's circumstances: ‘I cannot bear the thoughts of your going abroad… I would have you tell them [his possible patrons] you shall come for some time to Oxford, and that they may put up a Ticket immediately. When you come my Sisters will make some Shirts; and as you will need a new suit of Cloaths, let Mr Grieg take your Measure before you leave Town, that if you again chuse Priest gray they may be sent here in a few weeks when it falls to its standard price’. Letter from Charles Mickle to William Julius Mickle, dated 9 November [1765?], Osborn Mickle Papers, Beinecke Library.

37. See Smith (1776b), pp. 405, 610, 722–723.

38. ‘It is not the little cunning finesse of embroiling the Indian princes among themselves; of cajoling one, and winning another; it is not the groveling arts of intrigue, often embarrassed, always shifting, which can give lasting security’. Mickle (1778), p. clxxxvi.

39. Mickle (1778), p. clxxxvi.

40. Smith (1776b), pp. 838, 934.

41. Smith (1776b), p. 638.

42. Smith (1776b), p. 471.

43. Bolts (1772–1775) vol. 1, pp. vi-vii, 85. Smith owned a copy of Bolts's book, and his arguments about the East India Company follow Bolts fairly closely.

44. The review in the August 1776 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine which praised Mickle's understanding of Indian commerce, and contrasted it to Smith's, was thus immediately preceded by the following three articles: ‘Qualifications of a Siberian hairdresser’ (pp. 360–361), ‘Declaration of American Independency’ (pp. 361–362) and ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ (pp. 365–367). Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 46 (August 1776).

45. Mickle (1779), p. 18.

46. Mickle (1778), p. ccxxv.

47. Letters of 10 January 1776 and 3 April 1776, from Robert Walpole in Lisbon, and letter of 13 February 1776 from Lord Weymouth in London to Robert Walpole, The National Archives, SP89/81, 16r–v, 41r, 199r–200v, 201r, 201v.