Early English Tracts on Commerce
Edited by John Ramsay McCulloch.
CL Press, 2024.
Paperback, 693 pages, $19.50.
Reviewed by Gregory M. Collins.
John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1864) doesn’t roll off the zealous tongues of free marketeers as smoothly as Adam Smith, but he was a prominent Ricardian political economist of the nineteenth century who edited the 1828 edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and disseminated the guiding tenets of classical liberalism throughout his intellectual life with force and effect. Originally published in 1856 under his watchful editorial eye, Early English Tracts on Commerce is a compilation of various tracts on the intersection of commerce and statecraft—many of which are snapshots of McCulloch’s own free-market beliefs—that serve as a compelling precursor of Smithian political economy. The book has been republished by CL Press, a new publishing house led by George Mason University’s Daniel Klein and Erik Matson, dedicated to the noble mission of advancing the principles of classical liberalism and conservative liberalism.
Early English Tracts is most appropriate for the scholar and the (very) interested layman struggling to sleep at night over whether English merchants’ exchange of bullion for Indian goods in 1664 weakened the honor and prestige of Stuart England. In all seriousness, perhaps the greatest quality of the book is its detailed presentation of recurrent terms of debate in the seventeenth century over the role of commerce in promoting the economic and political interests of the burgeoning British Empire prior to the appearance of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, concepts that gave shape and form to the nascent science of “political economy.” This framework also helped to mold the precepts of ragione di stato (reason of state) into a governing strategy for the modern nation-state. Additionally, McCulloch’s volume supplies empirical ammunition for Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis that the ascent of bourgeois values was ultimately powered by the diffusion of ideas, rather than by capital or institutions, that granted dignity and credibility to the commercial spirit.
Early English Tracts consists of six tracts on political economy published between 1621 and 1701 and written by political economists, merchants, and English East India Company (EIC) officials. They address a labyrinth of topics, including the qualities of a “perfect Merchant” (think more Andrew Carnegie than Sam Bankman-Fried), free trade, the balance of trade, vent for surplus, the enclosure movement, the English-Dutch commercial rivalry, the Navigation Acts, immigration to England, and the EIC. The general consensus that emerges throughout the tracts is one in accord with classical liberal principles and classical political economy: free trade is mutually beneficial, balance-of-trade doctrine slights the blessings of imported goods, money begets trade and vice versa, wealth is the offspring of human industry and invention, wealth is measured by goods and services and not by the accumulation of gold and silver, monopolies and privileges hamper commercial prosperity, immigration is a net positive, the debasement of currency does not enrich the nation, cheap labor reduces production costs, customs and duties clog the flow of traffic, and apprenticeship regulations raise unnecessary barriers to entry. In England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, however, Thomas Mun, director of the EIC and a prominent exponent of English mercantilism, delivers a thought-provoking defense of a positive balance of trade that cools the free trade enthusiasms of the other disquisitions.
Yet the most entertaining and pithiest tract in the entire volume was “England’s Great Happiness; or a Dialogue between Content and Complaint.” Written in the form of a dialogue, it is no Plato’s Republic, but the writing constructs an insightful dialectic between an optimistic diagnostician (“content”) and a doomsday naysayer (“complaint”) debating the condition of England’s economy under Charles II in Restoration England. The author persuasively combats arguments denouncing the exportation of money, the influx of foreigners, the enclosure movement, the high cost of living, and the proliferation of traders who sell cheap. Explaining that these developments stimulate industry and profit, he concludes by insisting that England’s wealth was greater than it had been before the Restoration.
Perhaps the tastiest exchange for contemporary readers is the interlocutors’ discussion of enclosure. This moment in the dialogue raises an intriguing challenge to Hayekian notions of spontaneous order that Karl Polanyi, among many, would spotlight in the twentieth century. In his criticism of enclosure, the complaining interlocutor asks whether it was “lawful to take away that we have enjoy’d time out of mind.” The complainant is invoking proto-Hayekian reasoning in defense of organic custom, of unwritten habit, as a bulwark against rational design—that is, against the systematic and legally sanctioned division of common lands into private property. A defense of spontaneous order in this context would seem to vindicate the immemorial practice of open-field agriculture prior to the rise of the enclosure movement. Yet enclosure, as the “content” interlocutor in the tract professed, quickened the pace of economic efficiency, which remains one of the principal arguments in support of the practice and of Hayekian conceptions of catallaxy. If the enclosure movement can in fact be interpreted as a portent of modern commercial society, the framing of the “content” interlocutor feeds the Polanyi-flecked judgment that the capitalist state, at least in part, was not the product of spontaneous order but of conscious government intervention.
More broadly, Early English Tracts gives flesh to the theme of ragione di stato in early modern political discourse, signifying the idea that national interest, glory, and stability, rather than adherence to legal or moral norms, were the prime objects of statecraft in the heated competition of global politics. “Jealousy of trade,” the economic addendum to ragione di stato, illustrated how commerce could be strategically utilized in the international arena to achieve these aims, manufactures wrapped inside Machiavellian realism and tinged with amour propre. Mun’s coda at the end of England’s Treasure by Forraigne Trade captures this idea:
Behold then the true form and worth of forraign Trade, which is, The great Revenue of the King, The honour of the Kingdom, the Noble profession of the Merchant, The School of our Arts, The supply of our wants, The employment of our poor, The improvement of our Lands, The Nurcery of our Mariners, The Walls of the Kingdoms, The means of our Treasure, The Sinnews of our wars, The terror of our enemies. For all which great and weighty reasons, do so many well governed States highly countenance the profession, and carefully cherish the action, not only with Policy to encrease it, but also with power to protect it from all forraign injuries: because they know it is a Principal in Reason of State to maintain and defend that which doth Support them and their estates.
Critics of English mercantilism rebuked Mun’s arguments in defense of a positive balance of trade. As the tracts amply show, however, it was exceedingly difficult to disentangle economic concerns from political ones in the birth of the modern nation-state. Every writer in Early English Tracts recognized the glaring truth that commerce was an instrument both to promote material prosperity and to augment national power in the international arena. Although the tracts don’t press the logic of these causal connections, they bring forth a clear implication: While free trade might calm some jealousies between traders, it could excite additional jealousies between rival nation-states, thereby threatening sacred premises of doux commerce. This curious effect also reinforces the proposition that classifying early modern economic thought as an existential contest between advocates of “mercantilism” and those of “free trade” loses sight of the overlapping goals of these economic perspectives. Indeed, much of Mun’s quotation above could be threaded into the works of Smith and David Hume, both of whom would not be confused with a Mun-ite mercantilist but were quite aware of how commerce juiced the power of fledgling nation-states.
Early English Tracts is nagged by repetitive arguments and could benefit from footnotes and an appendix furnishing historical context for the featured writings. The lay reader, and even the expert, might want to read a work on intellectual history or political economy in the early modern period, such as István Hont’s Jealousy of Trade, before plunging himself into McCulloch’s volume, which assumes a heightened level of familiarity with seventeenth-century debates over commerce and trade.
But: Even if the reader does not possess extensive knowledge of such historical complexities, he can still discern intriguing lines of reasoning about political economy, particularly in defense of market exchange, that flourished in the works of more famous thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and persists to this day. Not only does free trade spawn a synthesis of interest between buyer and seller (paging Adam Smith), but in Discourses upon Trade we learn that the “main spur to Trade” is the “exorbitant Appetites of Men,” including those of the glutton, the gamester, and the miser. In other words, man’s vices breed the conditions for industry and ingenuity, while man’s contentment with bare necessities renders the world impoverished. Bernard Mandeville, anyone? (The Icarian undoing of Bankman-Fried might demand modification of this framing today.)
Or perhaps this quip, from Henry Martyn’s Considerations on the East India Trade, sounds familiar: “…[T]he plenty of these things is so much greater here, that a King of India is not so well lodg’d, and fed, and cloath’d, as a Day-labourer of England.” Echoing Locke’s similar observation in Two Treatises of Government and foreshadowing Smith’s same point in the Wealth of Nations, the author draws attention to the high living standards of England as part of his argument that the East India trade, by triggering the increase in English manufactures, ultimately generates more employment opportunities for the multitudes.
The broader philosophical weakness of Early English Tracts is one that plagues many defenses of commercial activity, which reflects the tracts’ shared purpose of influencing government policy rather than penetrating the metaphysical essence of the meaning of freedom: The writings fuel the criticism that endorsements of boundless wealth ignore the deeper religious and ethical foundations of a free polity that make economic exchange sustainable over the long term. There is little substantive consideration of these foundations in the book. Britannia Languens comes the closest, suggesting that the consumptive trade corrupts the moral integrity of the people (including that of future $6-latte drinkers: The anonymous author of the tract warns readers that coffee, a novel import at the time, is the “most useless” of all foreign goods because it serves “neither for Nourishment nor Debauchery”).
But Britannia Languens candidly announces elsewhere that professions such as the clergy, law, and literature bring “no increase of National Riches” and that “Logick and Philosophy” do not “add two-pence a year to the Riches of the Nation.” Aristotelian and Thomistic notions of the teleological aims of political economy are largely out of sight, out of mind throughout Early English Tracts: The discourses are prescient allegories of the swelling commercial and consumptive state in modernity, emphasizing the dangers of limiting wealth through burdensome regulations but not the importance of moral limits themselves on the acquisition of lucre. They thus offer scant reflective insight into the role of commerce in the growth and preservation of civilization.
The writings in Early English Tracts should, accordingly, be interpreted first and foremost as ad hoc tracts with policy objectives, resembling think tank white papers more so than Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty. In this sense, one comes away from reading McCulloch’s volume with a deeper appreciation of Adam Smith. While Smith did not invent many important economic concepts decorating the pages of the Wealth of Nations, he elaborated systematically on these concepts that appeared in piecemeal forms in prior economic tracts, such as those featured in Early English Tracts, in unmatched depth for his time. John Ramsay McCulloch may not have achieved Smith’s level of fame, but, among his various professional achievements, he is at the very least responsible for collating inquiries into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations that served as the rich fertilizer for Smith’s defining economic text.
Gregory M. Collins is a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University and the author of Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. His current book manuscript on the idea of civil society in early black political thought is under review.
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