Nature's Evil

1   Knorr, British Colonial Theories , pp. 26–59; see also Wakefield, England and America , pp. 244–65; Glamann, Dutch–Asiatic Trade ; Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire . 2   Quoted from Knorr, British Colonial Theories , p. 84. 3   Quoted ibid., p. 106. 4   Ibid., p. 103. 5   Ross, The Life of Adam Smith . 6   Pushkin, Eugene Onegin , stanzas 23–4 (chap. 1); Smith is mentioned in stanza 7. 7   Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , pp. 182, 192. 8   Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism , pp. 5–6. 9   Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11  Tocqueville, Democracy in America , p. 530. 12  Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , p. xxiv. 13  Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce , pp. 248–9, 254–6, 379. 14  Kulisher, Istoriya russkoy torgovli , p. 161. 15  Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation , p. 61. 16  Prinz, ‘New perspectives on Marx as a Jew’. 17  Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 31, 130, 52. 18  McNally, Monsters of the Market , pp. 113–47; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism , pp. 99–140. 19  De Vries, The Industrious Revolution ; Ogilvie and Cerman, European Proto-Industrialization . 20  Canny, The Upstart Earl ; Shapin and Shaffir, Leviathan and the Air-Pump ; Principe, The Aspiring Adept . 21  Knorr, British Colonial Theories , p. 210.

TEN

The Resources that Failed

Ideas are intertwined with emotions. Together, they turn intellectual history into a succession of stormy waves in which sublime aspirations collapse into disenchantments. Resource panic occurs when a particular sort of raw material is regarded as the be-all and end-all. When vital resources come to an end, wars and uprisings seem unavoidable. On the other hand, wars and revolutions can be explained with hindsight not by the greed or stupidity of rulers but by the exhaustion of the soil, oil or other vital supplies. In fact, this was the starting point for the social sciences. The rules of the genre are such that disenchantment in resource projects is usually connected with pivotal commodities – food, energy or even land. Resource panics have defined the modern period just as much as images of the end of the world defined the Middle Ages.

Anti-imperial France

Colonial adventures, financial pyramids and resource wars led to the formation of a post-catastrophic movement in political thought. Behind Cantillon’s work stood the bitter experience of the Irish colonial ‘plantations’. Smith’s work was his reply to England’s ‘project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers’, which impoverished Scotland. The teachings of the physiocrats responded to the shock that John Law’s projects had caused in France.

Opposed to the mercantile system and colonial speculations, the physiocrats rediscovered the traditional basis of the national economy – agriculture. In their opinion, only fertile land and peasant labour could generate capital. Everything else – industry, long-distance trade, luxury items and, ultimately, financial operations prey on the people who till the soil. Pioneering the mathematical modelling of economic exchange, François Quesnay’s Economic Table focused on wheat. A commodity unlike others, grain was central for the economy. Trade in grain ought to be free, but the physiocrats wanted to impose high duties on colonial trade and luxury items. Industry does not produce wealth – artisans and merchants belong to the ‘sterile’ class, and only agriculture is productive. Commerce should be limited to local markets which didn’t require custom posts and bureaucrats. An ‘economic sect’ centred in Versailles, the physiocrats laid some of the theoretical grounds for the French Revolution.