From Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy

Abstract

With the elaboration of the concept “commercial society,” political economy identified the social as an object of analysis proper to its inquiry. But the development of a discourse of political economy in the seventeenth century centered on the role of extraterritorial, maritime, and interstate commerce in underwriting the funding of state power and in augmenting the collective wealth of the polity. While political economy emerged in response to accelerating processes of early modern commercialization, it was slower than contemporary discourses of natural law and moral skepticism to formulate a conception of “commercial society.” When in the later seventeenth century an inchoate conception of commercial society did emerge in political economy, this was achieved through the internalization of models of maritime commerce as the basis for reimagining domestic society as radically commercial and for understanding this fact as a new, endogenous basis for the expansion of the aggregate wealth of the polity.