Commerce, Finance and Statecraft by Ben Dew

Author:Ben Dew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

Part III

8

Economic statecraft and economic progress: William Guthrie’s General History

The middle years of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a new, enlightened approach to history. Underpinning this mode of writing was the assumption that the level of progress achieved in modern-day Europe distinguished it from any previous historical period.1 To an extent, the novel qualities of the present were conceived of in political terms. With regard to England in particular, there was support for the Tory/Court Whig argument that the nation’s much-celebrated liberty had its origins not in Saxon or pre-Saxon history, but rather in the constitutional and cultural shifts produced by the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. Equally, there was a growing belief that a range of intellectual and cultural fields – among them technology, manufacture, the arts and sciences, and, perhaps most importantly, manners – had been transformed over the past hundred years and that, in some sense, these developments were interconnected.2 Incorporating such diverse subject matter into a conventional narrative posed considerable challenges, and some writers, most famously the Scottish conjectural historians, dispensed with the chronological approach altogether.3 Neoclassical conceptions, however, as Philip Hicks’s account of the subject has shown, continued to shape the ways in which British writers and readers viewed history.4 Consequently, there was a desire to provide an account that conformed to the conventional understanding of history as ‘a continued Narration of things True, Great and Publick’, but that was able to explain and narrate the recent shifts which had transformed Europe’s nation states.5 Such ideas served to alter the emphasis of English narrative history in two important ways. On the one hand, they expanded the genre’s thematic range. And although politics remained the primary subject, England’s political history was shown to have shaped and been shaped by a range of non-political developments. On the other hand, history’s narrative focus tightened. The desire of post-Civil War party-political histories to show the benefits of government of a particular ideological hue led them to present the character and conduct of the monarch as the key force determining the character of a particular era. As a result, English history was conceived of as the site of a series of abrupt transformations in the nation’s fortunes, as good and bad monarchs succeeded one another in rapid succession. While later writers did not necessarily ignore the character of individual statesmen, the impact of character was shown to be restricted by a wider set of institutional and ideological considerations. Attention, meanwhile, came to be focused around a single epoch-defining shift: the decay of a medieval, feudal society and the emergence of a modern, commercial one.

These ideas ensured that commerce acquired a unique degree of importance within historical narratives as both a significant agent in bringing about the demise of feudalism and the defining characteristic of the system that replaced it. An enlightened society, it was assumed, was necessarily a commercial one and it became a key task for historians to trace the causes and trajectory of England’s economic progress.

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