Nature's Evil

Law and Cantillon’s experiment in Paris was a lesson for the teachers of the Enlightenment. The young Voltaire triumphantly observed the collapse of the Mississippi Company; a financial counterpart of the Lisbon earthquake, it probably played a role in his mockery of optimism. Montesquieu met Law and had in-depth discussions with him when the latter was already in disgrace; this experience must have fed into Montesquieu’s ideas about trade and power. The Abbé Prévost wrote about this era in a popular novel, The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut (1731). In this world of rich idlers and savage inequality, government favours can be bought as easily as sexual services. After a chance encounter, a man gives a woman a house, a carriage, a maid, three lackeys and a cook. The Chevalier des Grieux lives with Manon, but she is deported to Louisiana as a prostitute. Things do not go as well for Manon Lescaut in Louisiana as they went for Moll Flanders in Virginia. Astonished by the poverty of New Orleans, des Grieux buries Manon after she dies in the wilderness. Right up until the publication of Candide in 1759, the novel remained the favourite reading of the Enlightenment public. Voltaire and his enlightened friends willingly, although at a price, gave advice to the Russian empress, recommending that she widen her empire and acquire new territories. Nevertheless they believed that colonies were bad for France. For continental Europe, and later for independent America, the task was to find a new post-colonial model of political economy to oppose the ‘British system’.

Note

Notes

1   Defoe, An Essay upon Projects , p. 20; Hamilton and Parker, Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England

. 2   McKim, ‘War of words’. 3   Armitage, ‘The Scottish vision of empire’; Prebble, The Darien Disaster ; Roger Emerson, ‘The Scottish contexts’. 4   Pushkin, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , in his Complete Prose Fiction , p. 11. 5   Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

, p. 157. 6   Voltaire, Candide , p. 44. 7   Pushkin, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , p. 11. 8   Murphy, John Law ; Rist, History of Monetary and Credit Theory

. 9   Troitskiy, ‘“Sistema” Dzhona Lo’; Anisimov, Petr I ; Kurukin, Persidskiy pokhod Petra Velikogo , pp. 41–2. 10 Markova, ‘Novyye materialy’. 11 Murphy, Richard Cantillon . 12  Cantillon, An Essay on Economic Theory

; Jevons, ‘Richard Cantillon and the nationality of political economy’; Spengler, ‘Richard Cantillon’; Brewer, ‘Cantillon and Mercantilism’, in Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory ; Thornton, ‘Was Richard Cantillon a mercantilist?’; Ananyin, ‘“Quorum pars magna fui”’.

NINE

Labour and the Mercantile Pump

Mercantilists believed that the main goal of trade was the accumulation of gold in the state coffers. The population was of secondary importance. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, England seemed to be overpopulated, and the politicians were pleased by the emigration of the surplus population to America. Conducted by private individuals, trade always needed the backing of the state. British trade on the oceans would have been impossible without the Royal Navy protecting merchant ships from enemies and pirates. But the Royal Navy was equally dependent on the merchant fleet: commercial vessels were the training ground for sailors. The strength of the state lay in the wealth of the Treasury, which depended on the strength of the state.

The benefit of colonies