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States and markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2010

RYAN WALTER
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Abstract

Use of the ‘states and markets’ pair to conceptualise the international is pervasive. This article narrates the intellectual genesis of this dyad in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political œconomy. Adam Smith's arguments in Wealth of Nations are central, for there the analysis of strength is uncoupled from the analysis of wealth, de-politicising the international and making the economic denunciation of war possible. In the process the international economy is elaborated as a new theoretical object.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 691 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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59 Idem.

60 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 368–71.

61 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 368–9.

62 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 372, 447.

63 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 372.

64 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 428.

65 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 429–51. Smith's description therefore does violence to the mode of analysis he disrupts, and his construction of mercantilism is one we still labour under.

66 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 453.

67 Idem.

68 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 456.

69 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 457.

70 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 463. Support of the Navigation Acts in the name of national defence is, on the surface, a continuation of old arguments. What has changed is that now the analysis must be interrupted, through the device of exceptions, to bring the question of national defence into the argument. Arguments in the analysis of wealth before Smith already geared towards defence, since strength and wealth are interintrusive; in WoN their analysis is separate and strength has become an add-on consideration, since the categories of capital and annual produce do not directly speak to it.

71 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 465.

72 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 468.

73 Idem.

74 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 469.

75 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 469–72.

76 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 489.

77 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 495.

78 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 496.

79 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 497.

80 Idem.

81 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 564.

82 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 564–5, 572.

83 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 591.

84 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 575–77.

85 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 595–7, 600–1, 604.

86 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 604–5. Smith is referring here to ‘the contest with America’. Fortunately for Britain, the ‘disorder’ caused by American independence and the resulting loss of that trade was mitigated by five unforeseen and compensating events, see pp. 606–7.

87 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 612.

88 Here is one of the several particular conditions required for Smith's ‘invisible hand’ to work to national advantage, namely, the right setting of the merchant's variable character.

89 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 609–10.

90 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 616–7.

91 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 624.

92 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 625–6.

93 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 626.

94 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 626–7.

95 The more well known typology is Smith's stages of society, and it more directly underwrites imperialism, as when, in Chapter I of book V, Smith argued that trade ‘with barbarous and uncivilized nations’ will often need to be facilitated by fortified outposts. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 731.

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