The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World

This volume recasts our understanding of the practical and theoretical foundations and dynamic experiences of early modern imperialism. The imperial encounter with political economy was neither uniform across political, economic, cultural, and religious constellations nor static across time. The contributions collected in this volume address, with undeniable pertinence for the struggles of later periods, the moral and military ambiguity of profits and power, as well as the often jealous interactions between different solutions to the problem of empire. The book presents a powerful mosaic of imperial theories and practices contributing to the creation of the modern world and to the most pressing concerns of our time.

Sophus A. Reinert is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy unit at Harvard Business School, USA. He has published widely on the history of political economy and is the author of Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (2011).

 
Pernille Røge is Assistant Professor in French and French Imperial History at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She was a Research Fellow and College Lecturer in History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 2009 to 2012. She has published widely on eighteenth-century French political economy and empire.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Foreword: Of Empire and Political Economy; Richard Drayton
Introduction: The Political Economy of Empire; Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge
PART I: THEORISING THE EARLY MODERN EMPIRE
1. An Empire of Trade Commercial Reason of State in Seventeenth-Century Holland; Jan Hartman and Arthur Weststeijn
2. A Natural Order of Empire: The Physiocratic Vision of Colonial France after the Seven Years War; Pernille Røge
3. Adam Smith on American Economic Development and the Future of the European Atlantic Empires; Thomas Hopkins
4. Views from the South: Images of Britain and its Empire in Portuguese and Spanish Political Economic Discourse, c. 1740-1810; Gabriel Paquette
5. The Empire of Emulation: A Quantitative Analysis of Economic Translations in the European World, 1500-1849; Sophus Reinert
PART II: IMPERIAL EXPERIENCES
6. War, Peace, and the Rise of the London Stock Market; Giles Parkinson
7. The Impact of Gifts and Trade: Georgia Colonists and Yamacraw Indians in the Colonial American Southeast; Claire Levenson
8. Retrenchment, Reform and the Practice of Military-Fiscalism in the Early East India Company State; James Lees
9. How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic: Mercantilism and the Crisis of Food Provisioning in the Franco-Caribbean during the 17th and 18th Centuries; Bertie Mandelblatt
Bibliography
Index