The Forgotten Book that Helped Shape the Modern Economy
A British merchant's long-forgotten seventeenth-century book may not only fuel a radical rethinking about how modern economies developed in Europe and America, but also add historical perspective on today's hot-button issue of the proper relationship between government and business.
Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political EconomyIn his new book, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy, Harvard Business School historian Sophus A. Reinert unearths John Cary's An Essay on the State of England. Writing in 1695, Cary laid out a powerful case for how England, through muscular government intervention in economic affairs, could create national wealth based on manufacturing. This production would be fueled by an imperialistic British Empire, which through its expansion would provide the needed raw materials.
The book proved extremely persuasive at home and also abroad after being translated into French, Italian, and German. Government leaders and policymakers in each of these countries were influenced by the Essay's key idea that government should be a dominant player in helping shape economic development.
Of particular interest to Reinert is that modern-day economists and historians seemed to have forgotten this fact. "Where the consensus today is that eighteenth-century economists believed that free trade would bring peace and prosperity to all, the mainstream of political economy at the time was actually preoccupied with how trade could be a form of conquest and how political communities could best nurture and encourage their industries against foreign competitors."
We asked Reinert to discuss his book and some of its central ideas.
Sean Silverthorne: How did you get the idea for this book? I'm especially interested in how you hit on the format to hang your work on John Cary's little-known Essay on the State of England?
Sophus Reinert: My book is essentially about how political economy first emerged as an "academic science" in the early modern period, and about the actual ideas and policies—the national strategies of the 1600s and 1700s, so to speak—that successfully led to economic development and were therefore emulated in other nations at the time. The idea for it probably came from my love of old books, which allowed me to see quite starkly the discrepancy between past and present fame in the discipline of economics. The most printed and most translated books were just not the ones other scholars were talking about. I wanted to read and write about those books.
I first had the idea of hanging the book's structure on Cary when I saw on my shelf a number of increasingly voluminous translations sitting next to what to me seemed a distressingly tiny original. Cary's 1695 Essay had indeed been cumulatively translated three times (into French in 1755, Italian in 1757-58, and German in 1788). The Italian and German translators never even returned to the original English edition, and the work gained hundreds and hundreds of pages along the way. This provided me with a unique opportunity, because all the changes that were made to the text survived as archaeological layers for me to excavate. The ever-expanding Essay became my way of making sense of the larger question I was facing—namely, how a rigorous history of political economy overturned the classical narrative of Western divergence in the eighteenth century.
Q: Why is the Essay and its various translations written for other countries important for our understanding of the development of the political economy in Europe and the New World?
A: Because they help us understand the actual ideas and policies that were influential as Europe first took off relative to the rest of the world. They also shed light on the historical interconnection of businesses and governments at the dawn of real globalization. The reigning idioms of political economy, its proposals, and their implementation in the long eighteenth century were very different from the ideas later celebrated by the economics profession.
"We need to completely rethink what economic ideas were actually influential in that period."