Making money from plantations meant engaging in the circuit of West India trade regulated through a mercantilist system that protected the interests of the ‘mother country’. Long needed to demonstrate to his metropolitan readership that Jamaica brought great wealth to Britain and that the production of sugar depended on slavery. The circuit of the West India trade connected England, West Africa and the Caribbean through a complex set of relations, at the heart of which sat the merchant house. Long’s Uncle Beeston headed the West India house of Drake and Long in the City of London and Long was well aware of the centrality of merchants and the use of bills of exchange to facilitate the sugar and slavery business. Given the increasing criticism of the conditions of the slave trade by the early 1770s, he attempted to sanitize it. The merchants used legers, accounting and numeracy to distance themselves from the realities of slavery. They controlled the system of credit and debt on which this mercantile capitalist formation depended.

This chapter covers: historical theorizing about what role the state ought to play in an economy; from the mercantilist to the market role; historical fear of a Leviathan government role; government role in France and the origin of the term “laissez faire”; Adam Smith’s alternative view of the “wealth of nations”; the role of the “invisible hand”; Weber’s view of mercantilism and of its role in the growth of the capitalist system; advent of the Industrial Revolution and its need for energy, and also for better use of time; Adam Smith’s view of the role of the state in regulations and also in some redistribution; and the importance of empathy in communities.

This essay challenges the historiographical myth of salutary neglect on many levels, beginning by exploring how it came to its current, dominant interpretive status. I argue that it grows out of a desire to see the colonies as relatively democratic and independent, but that such a perception is deeply problematic. The levers of imperial control were powerful throughout the colonial period; colonial political systems did not develop “in a state of nature”; the tendrils of legal control were invidious and far-reaching; and force–the power of empire–was never far away. British navies, in particular, supplemented by occasional armies and colonial militias under the command of the Governor, along with all the mechanisms of legal control–sheriffs and executions, heads on stakes at the public crossroads–lurked always on the horizon, ready to intervene if necessary, sometimes only in the public imagination, but often in fact. This chapter is a call to think deeply about the power of empire during the colonial period. Doing so will lead to a richer understanding of what broke down between 1763 and 1776, but also of what came before. Salutary neglect it was not.

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

The French gained and lost a vast empire in the New World from the sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Mercantilism, a set of economic and political practices based on the assumption of limited wealth, underpinned that empire. French explorers founded colonies in North America based on trade in furs and fish. Few French ever to wanted move to the empire throughout its history. The French lost almost all their North American empire by 1763, mostly to Britain. But its colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean exploited slave mercantilism as effectively as any in the world. Terror made possible rule by a small white population. The edifice supporting that rule cracked with the French Revolution, beginning in 1789. By 1791, the enslaved population risen, overthrown the slave system, and begun a bloody war of independence that produced the first anticolonial hero, Toussaint Loverture. In the end, the enslaved would win their war, and establish independent Haiti in 1804. Napoleon would find his schemes for a rejuvenated empire based in the Caribbean and the Louisiana territories thwarted. As the nineteenth century dawned, the French empire would need not just new lands, but new ideological foundations.

Understanding economics is critical to understanding the history of humanity, from hunter-gatherers to today. Economics is the study of decision-making and how humans make decisions. Without understanding economics we cannot understand the trajectory of history over the last 10,000 years. This chapter reviews basic economic principles, and how economies have evolved through time. It discusses the economic principles of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the differences between a market economy and a command economy, and the political and historical implications of the clash between those two models.

A Financial History of Western Europe is Kindleberger’s self-identified masterwork, an attempt to derive robust theories from centuries of accumulated fact, and then to use those theories as a framework for making sense of the momentous events of Kindleberger’s own life. It is a story of financial development in support of economic development at a global scale, both development processes advancing together in Darwinian evolutionary fashion by means of boom and bust.

The genesis of Chinese political economy can be traced to the Warring States era (453–221 bce), which was marked on one hand by rapid economic progress (the spread of iron metallurgy, advances in agricultural productivity, the invention of coinage, and the emergence of a private merchant class) and on the other hand by the rise of autocratic states (accompanied by the centralization of political power and mass mobilization for war). The economic principles and policies that later shaped the formation of the first unified empires – what I will designate the militarist–physiocratic state – were enunciated by leading ministers of the most successful autocratic states, such as Li Kui in Wei and Shang Yang in Qin, and set down in works such as The Book of Lord Shang and Han Fei Zi.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

Concerns about international competitiveness and the associated global institutions and processes of trade are at the heart of resistance to ambitious climate policy. There is tension between the need to be competitive and the significant costs of decarbonisation in the transition to low-carbon economies. The World Trade Organisation and related agreements simultaneously promote contradictory goals: the removal of 'barriers to trade' including 'behind the border' environmental regulation and the need to support 'sustainable development'. A particular example of the problems for action on climate change are Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions whereby corporations have been able to sue governments for damages allegedly incurred through the operation of government environmental regulations. Five actions are suggested: raising awareness of the benefits of decarbonisation, developing 'green finance', pursuing standardisation of low carbon technologies, reforming trade law to encourage low-carbon goods and services and ensuring copherence across international frameworks.

Part I outlines the international law applicable to economic activity both for the war and in the war zone. It begins by briefly outlining the difference between premodern and modern international law norms governing the acquisition of labour and property in war. The two sets of norms were radically different. As systems of warfare in Europe changed from premodern plunder-based warfare to modern industrial-based warfare, international law overturned and replaced norms regulating plunder and the taking of slaves, with norms that sought to protect labour and property from appropriation and exploitation in war.

After the Ming dynasty prohibited private overseas trade in 1374, China’s once-flourishing maritime commerce languished until the 1520s, when a boom in Japanese silver mining impelled Chinese mariners to flock to Japan for the monetary metal in high demand in China. Dubbed “Japanese pirates” (Wokou) by the Ming government, these Chinese entrepreneurs developed multinational merchant coalitions and trade networks (including Japanese and Portuguese traders) across the East/Southeast Asian maritime world. The Wokou also became crucial allies of the daimyo of western Japan, embroiled in civil wars and eager to obtain both trade revenue and Portuguese gunpowder weapons. Ming military campaigns in 1548–1557 eliminated many Wokou leaders, but the smuggling trade proved intractable and the Ming lifted its maritime ban in 1567. The Wokou era also witnessed – albeit temporarily – the emergence of the “port polity” as an alternative to the Chinese imperial model of political economy within East Asia.

Colonial practices of jurisdictional accumulation consist, in the Iberian case, of the requerimiento, encomiendas, audiencias, and the various jurisdictional opportunities they provided leading to jurisdictional competition and subjectivities in colonial New Spain. Castile’s mercantilism is also discussed in relation to its governance and administrative structures and commercial–legal institutions. Relying on the jurisdictional incorporation of both settlers and Native American subjectivities, Castilian practices of imperial expansion transplanted Castilian authority and are primarily concerned with authority over people providing jurisdictional opportunities of contestation and subjugation. Different practices of jurisdictional accumulation are identified in the French, Dutch, and English/British empires. These mostly relate to trading and chartered companies and settlements primarily concerned with authority over land and resources, where inhabitants of the colonised land need to be excluded rather than jurisdictionally incorporated. The more commercial, indirect, and outsourced practices of these empires are discussed through the debates on mercantilism and the practices of corsairing, which produced conditions for jurisdictional accumulation as transports of authority (i.e. focused on the use of intermediaries and a jurisdictional distancing between the imperial centres and their colonies).

Chapter 2 discusses historical sociology as the framework adopted to develop a new approach to early modern jurisdictions. The project aims to enrich diplomatic history's institutional and cultural paradigm through a more productive engagement with new legal histories of extraterritoriality and historical materialist approaches. Debates regarding Eurocentrism and how to conceptualise imperial agency in historical sociology are discussed, and an outward methodological internalism is proposed as required by the research problem posed in Chapter 1, namely the problem of narrow and linear sources of the means of imperial expansions of authority such as ambassadorial immunities. To frame this methodology, the commodity form theory of law is discussed as a powerful but overly structural approach to processes of expansion that conflates mercantilism and capitalism. In response, the methodology is framed instead by Political Marxism, as a more agency-based and historicist approach to international history, that relies on the concept of social property relations.

This chapter depicts the failure of the English nation state to launch and sustain overseas enterprises in Asia in the early seventeenth century. It reveals that the East India Company was conceived as a mercantilist strategy of monopoly and force by the crown to acquire new markets and sources of wealth beyond the Cape of Good Hope. But a combination of fiscal–military weakness, unrealistic policies fostered on it by the state and a general economic and constitutional crises which engulfed England by the mid-century, all combined to undermine the Company’s attempt to establish itself at Bantam, Japan and on the Coromandel Coast in India. The result was the abandonment by Company servants on the spot in Asia of metropolitan policies in favour of realising their own local private interests of trade, power and transcultural immersion. As the Company teetered on the verge of collapse in England, it left a vacuum of authority and leadership within its factories in Asia, allowing Company servants to seize new opportunities to empower themselves and appropriate Company policies to suit their own interests. As investment, shipping and specie stopped flowing from Europe, Company servants insinuated themselves into pre-existing Asian networks of commerce and influence.

Chapter 8 offers comprehensive treatment of Burke’s thoughts on Anglo-Irish commercial relations. Burke was Parliament’s leading proponent of the Irish trade bills in the late 1770s, which were intended to relax commercial restrictions between Ireland and England. In Two Letters of the Trade of Ireland, he argued that free trade granted advantages to the trading nations and produced collective prosperity. Burke’s legislative activities in support of the Irish trade bills also illustrated his famous trustee theory of representation: he was willing to jeopardize his seat in Parliament in pursuit if Irish free trade, a policy goal that upset many Bristol merchants apprehensive about foreign competition. Furthermore, I discuss instances in which Burke did not argue for the maximum amount of free trade, such as his opposition to William Pitt’s commercial propositions and the Anglo-French Treaty of 1786. These cases reveal that Burke took into account other considerations of the British Empire, such as national security, when reflecting on matters of commercial policy. I also challenge the interpretation that Burke was originally a committed adherent of mercantilism. Rather than being a mercantilist or free trade absolutist, he sought to balance a defense of commercial liberty with the imperatives of empire.

Chapter 7 scrutinizes Burke’s economic insights in Observations on a Late State of the Nation, his speech defending the commercial policy of the Rockingham party, of which Burke was a prominent member in Parliament. The speech tends to be neglected in the study of Burke, but it contains many early clues about his emerging conception of political economy that I shed light on, such as his views that balance-of-trade theory is misguided; free trade promotes collective prosperity; and arbitrary systems of revenue undermine commercial progress. This section also supplies an examination of Burke’s remarks on commerce and the Navigation Acts in his two famous speeches on Anglo-American relations, Speech on American Taxation and Speech on Conciliation with America. The thrust of both speeches is that Britain should reestablish its theoretical imperial authority over the American colonies, but it should also allow American industry to flourish free from excessive government entanglements. Burke also provided a qualified defense of the Navigation Acts in the speeches, arguing that the Acts were partially responsible for the collective commercial enrichment of England and America in the eighteenth century.