A science of concord: the politics of commercial knowledge in mid-eighteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT

This article recovers mid-century proposals for sciences of concord and contextualizes them as part of a broader politics of commercial knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain. It begins by showing how merchants gained authority as formulators of commercial policy during the Commerce Treaty debates of 1713–1714. This authority held fast during the Walpolean oligarchy, but collapsed by the 1740s, when lobbying and patronage were increasingly maligned as corrupt by a ferment of popular republicanism. The article then explores how the Anglican cleric Josiah Tucker and country pamphleteer Joseph Massie made use of this vacuum in authority to formulate a novel basis for the production of commercial knowledge. In pamphlets written between 1749 and 1760, they argued that the competing interests comprising the nation’s increasingly complex commercial system could only be reconciled and geared to the national interest through the establishment of a science which harnessed an impartial and systematizing epistemology, developing highly idealized accounts of the abstract market as a realm of concord which operated according to regular, rationally deducible principles. The conclusion suggests that their arguments introduced the foundational conceptual bases for later sciences of political economy and legitimated a new form of expertise in statecraft.

KEYWORDS:

• Adam Smith
• commerce
• Joseph Massie
• Josiah Tucker
• political economy
• science

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful for the helpful comments from Professors Simon Schaffer, Jessica Riskin, Keith Baker, and Priya Satia on previous drafts of this paper, and would very much also like to express my appreciation to the Charles Schmitt Prize Committee. Thank you.

Notes

1 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 22.

2 Ibid., 38–9. See Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics; Rothschild, Economic Sentiments; and Tribe, “‘Das Adam Smith Problem’ and the origins of modern Smith scholarship”.

3 For a helpful overview, see Teichgraeber, “The Reception of the Wealth of Nations”.

4 Monthly Review, January 1776, 300; Critical Review, March 1776, 193.

5 Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings”, 124–5.

6 See Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 423–78.

7 For an analysis of the effect of social change on Augustan politics, see Speck, Stability and Strife.

8 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 434.

9 Brewer, Sinews of Power.

10 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 428.

11 Davenant, An Essay upon the probable methods, 154–5.

12 This discussion draws on Dudley, “Party Politics, Political Economy, and Economic Development”; Gauci, The Politics of Trade; Deringer, “British Merchants and Mercantile Epistemology”.

13 Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, 12; Davenant, An essay on the East India Trade, 25.

14 Anon., Torism and Trade, 29; Deringer, “British Merchants and Mercantile Epistemology”, 187–8.

15 Boyer, History of the Life & Reign of Queen Anne, 633–4.

16 King, The British Merchant, xxxvii–xxxviii.

17 Gee, Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, preface. Hume would later recall in 1752 how “the writings of Mr. Gee struck the nation with an universal panic” about trade balances. See Deringer, “British Merchants and Mercantile Epistemology”, 194.

18 See Hoppit, “Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups”; and Olson, Making the Empire Work.

19 On the sugar lobby, see Penson, “The London West India Interest”; O’Shaughnessy, “The Formation of a Commercial Lobby”; Gauci, “Learning the Ropes of Sand”.

20 Anon., The Present State of the British Sugar Colonies Consider’d, 5–20.

21 Boyer, The Political State of Great Britain, 639–43; Anon., The Case of the British Northern Colonies, 1; Gentleman’s Magazine 36 (1766), 230.

22 The Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, 10 August 1734.

23 Anon., Letter to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole; Bennett, Two Letters and Several Calculations on the Sugar Colonies and Trade, iii.

24 Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 722; Kammen, Empire and Interest, esp. 74–80.

25 Smith, Chronicon Rusticum-Commerciale, iii–v.

26 Pownell, Principles of Polity, 5.

27 Brown, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 104, 111–19.

28 Butler, Fifteen Sermons and Butler, Analogy of Religion. See Shelton, Dean Tucker; and Oslington, “Anglican Social Thought and the Shaping of Political Economy”.

29 The final pages of Tucker, Reflections on the Expediency, hint at some of the allies Tucker might have found in Bristol for his fight against monopolies.

30 Semmel, “The Hume-Tucker Debate”; Elmslie, “Retrospectives: The Convergence Debate between David Hume and Josiah Tucker”; Hont, “The Rich Country-Poor Country Debate”.

31 Shaw, Bibliography, presents most of the known details about Massie’s life.

32 Massie’s employment by Pitt is revealed by his mentioning of arrears of “near Two Thousand Pounds”, causing him to publish at his “own Expence [ … ] for near Six years” in 1762, and, in an autographical memorandum, his identification the Earl of Chatham (i.e. Pitt) as the man who failed to pay £1,568 to him. See Massie, Historical Account of the Naval Power of France, 19; Shaw, Bibliography, i–viii.

33 Historians have repurposed his works of political arithmetic to model the social structure of eighteenth-century Britain. See Mathias, “The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century”; and Lindert and Williamson, “Revising England’s Social Tables 1688-1812”.

34 On Massie’s collection, see Hoppit, “The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature”.

35 Tucker, A Brief Essay, iv–vi.

36 Massie, Representation, dedication, 3–6.

37 Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle”. See also Stewart, The Rise of Public Science.

38 Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, dedication.

39 Davies, A succinct description, 26–9.

40 Rolt, New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 1.

41 Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, xiv–xvi.

42 Quoted in Wahrman and Sheehan, Invisible Hands, 104.

43 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 32. Here, Chambers’ “View of Knowledge” categorized “COMMERCE” as “Artificial and Technical” rather than “Natural and Scientifical”.

44 See Larrère, “In Search of the Newton of the Moral World”.

45 Wahr and Sheehan, Invisible Hands, 236–40.

46 Price, “Liberty, Poverty and Charity in the Political Economy of Josiah Tucker and Joseph Butler”, 9, 13–16, 25. See also Viner, Role of Providence in the Social Order; and Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.

47 Price, “Liberty, Poverty, and Charity”, 11–17; Tucker, Elements of Commerce, 55–8.

48 Tucker, Elements of Commerce, 60. Also see Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 187–8.

49 It was his first work since 1756 not dedicated to Pitt (whose failure to pay arrears was by then pressing), but instead to the Pelhams: the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and his nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, both closely associated with the Treasury. See Massie, Representation, dedication, vii.

50 See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 75.

51 Massie, Representation, dedication, 14.

52 Watts, Improvement of the Mind, 316.

53 Massie, Representation, 2–4, 10–11.

54 Massie, Representation, 12–18.

55 Tucker, A Brief Essay, 39–41, 47–8. Tucker made similar criticisms of the Levant Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company; see Tucker, Reflections on the Expediency.

56 Tucker, Elements of Commerce, 65, 180–1; Tucker, A Brief Essay, 50–2.

57 Massie, State of the British Sugar Colony Trade, title page, 12–13, 48, 66–7; Massie, Brief Observations Concerning the Management of the War, 9–11.

58 See Shapin, A Social History of Truth.

59 Tucker, A Brief Essay, ix–x.

60 Massie, Representation, 7, 15.

61 Claeys, “Virtuous Commerce and Free Theology”.

62 Priestley, Course of a Liberal Education, 3, 12–13.

63 Massie, Representation, 7.

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Jon Cooper

Jon Cooper is a PhD Student in the Department of History at Stanford University, USA.