Description
Economic Historians and Historians of Political Economy have struggled to define the theory and practice of the First British Empire “at once bonded and free decentralized and opportunistic”.[1] A vast literature attempts to capture the institutional consequences of the Glorious, Financial and Commercial Revolutions for the English/British Empire, and consequently for modern capitalism. In this paper I want explore a different strategy that suggests that at least some of the intellectual and institutional plurality of the First British Empire derived from alternative political economies elaborated in the regions and provinces of Empire. My primary case is Ireland, but I will refer to a wide variety of cases.
The dominant tradition turns on the concept of “jealousy of trade”. Jealousy of trade refers to the economic imperative to capture resource in order to sustain national sovereignty in a world of geo-strategic competition. This paper establishes the existence in Ireland of a different vision of commerce disentangled from empire and military competition. The paper establishes both the intellectual genealogy of that thinking and its consequences for practice. The role played by indigenous, Irish-language sources for an idea of a trading, thriving, but non-sovereign nation is emphasised.
The paper concludes with an argument that this Irish tradition of political economy is not a curiosity, but is paralleled in many cases around the eighteenth century Atlantic. The issue of plurality, or multiple equilibria is amplified in the history and historiography of empire past 1750 and definitely after the Seven Years War. Plurality in political economy, even in the second half of the eighteenth century when imperial competition between France and Britain had escalated, is not hard to find, Dutch, Danes and Swedes used Caribbean Free Ports and neutrality to avoid being co-opted by the combatants.[2]
Fredrik Jonsson argues that in the aftermath of the American secession Scottish improvers exploited Linnean economic botany to elaborate an alternative to the risky, and expensive, commitment to developing Britain through foreign trade. James Anderson from Monkshill near Aberdeen laid out an entire programme of infrastructural investment, social transformation and agricultural change, primarily through the introduction of merino sheep. The paper concludes with some early observations placing this vision of political economy in the British crisis of the 1780s.
[1] David Hancock, “A World of Business to Do”: William Freeman and the Foundations of England’s Commercial Empire, 1645-1707”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, Vol. 57, No 1 (June 2000), 34.
[2] Pernille Roge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire, (Cambridge: CUP 2019), 5.
About the Speaker
Jim Livesey is Established Professor of History and currently on sabbatical following his role as Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Galway. He is currently Visiting Scholar at NYU and concurrently Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrew.
Jim works on historical instances of collective action problems in the early modern period. His forthcoming comparative history of transitions in history as a contribution to our understanding of the just transition is entitled Transitions in Global History: Social and Political Transformation in the Climate Crisis and will appear with Bloomsbury in 2026 . His monographs on the origins of social democracy, on civil society and on adaptation to technological change in rural France have been published by Yale and Harvard University Presses. He is currently PI on the Atlantic Futures project, a capacity-building project in the social sciences in the West of Ireland funded by the Higher Education Authority and is Co-I on PACESETTERS, a Horizon Europe project on the contribution of the creative economy to the climate transition.
About the British Studies Seminar Series
The British Studies Seminar brings together scholars to discuss work that addresses the history of Britain and the British Empire from the early modern period to present day. The seminar is co-sponsored by the Graduate Cluster in British Studies at Northwestern, Northwestern History, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.
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