Aims of the lecture

• 1. To outline the early history of economic argument and its emergence as a language of “counsel and advice” for the courts and administrations of seventeenth-century Europe.

• 2. To highlight the way in which the arguments advanced identified varying sources of wealth and power: population, commerce, manufacture, agriculture, mines.

• 3. To show that well into the eighteenth century comparative assessments of the strength of a nation relied upon empirical, rather than analytical, arguments.

Bibliography

There is no reliable modern survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European economic argument that brings together developments in Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe in an even-handed manner, although there are a few older sources that provide a useful perspective on some aspects of the early development of political oeconomy. Terence Hutchison’s Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) is the most generally useful older work; while it does have the usual Anglo-French bias, it is unusual in the space it gives to German-language and Italian writings. It also offers clear and helpful indexes for both authors and subjects, a chronology (pp. 441–55) and a section “References and Literature” (pp. 419–41) that is divided up by chapter, separately listing within each chapter original writing and commentary upon that writing.

Istvan Hont, “Jealousy of Trade: An Introduction”, in his Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 1–156, provides the best modern overview of European political economy through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ryan Walter, A Critical History of the Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), provides a brief synthetic overview of the development of economic thinking in Britain from the later-seventeenth to the early-nineteenth century, making use of insights drawn from the history of political thought, where both historiography and range of analysis are far more sophisticated than usually encountered in the history of economic thought.

Jacob Viner, “Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, World Politics 1:1 (1948), 1–29. Viner was very knowledgeable about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commercial writing and in this article he identifies the relationship between wealth and the political power of states that characterizes the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century literature.