Introduction Commerce and Its Discontents
On the eve of the Seven Years War (1756–63), a self-proclaimed French philosophe published a series of “Poetic amusements.” Amid odes to “The Triumph of Poetry among all Peoples,” “Love of the Fatherland,” and “Idolatry,” we find six pages devoted to “Commerce, a poem.”1 Firmin Douin de Caen, the poet in question, has since disappeared from the historical record, yet at the time he was awarded a certificate of merit from the French Academy for these verses on the origins and progress of commerce in France. His poem ended on a promise: that commerce would render “the Empire of the Lilies even more flourishing, / The French happier and Louis more powerful.”2
Similarly triumphant declarations about the potential of commerce abounded during this period, though not always in poetic form. But Douin’s ode represented the discourse of commerce in eighteenth-century France in yet another way: Its “hymn to commerce” also struck darker notes.3 Midway through, Douin lamented the vile qualities of the slave trade, calling it a “commerce odieux.”4 This characterisation of the commerce in humans as “odious” was but one example of a tension prevalent in eighteenth-century French political and economic thought, a tension between a triumphalist discourse of commerce and a foreboding sense of its destructive potential. This book aims to explore how this tension was intelligible to eighteenth-century French public intellectuals and how it manifested itself in their thought and texts.
As we shall see, Douin’s ode to commerce anticipated an attitude that flourished in the aftermath of France’s devastating defeat by the British in the Seven Years War. This conflict, which Winston Churchill deemed the “first world war,” strained the kingdom’s finances, ballooned its debt, and drastically reduced its overseas possessions.5 It also generated a crisis of confidence among France’s public intellectuals centred on the humiliating decline in their nation’s power and glory, especially in comparison to victorious Britain’s perceived strength.6 This study follows the conceptual and ideological change the Seven Years War unleashed as it intersected with thinking about empire and what I will refer to here, in shorthand, as “Enlightenment critical practices.”7 At the time, the discourse of commerce in France was interwoven with different discourses, of politics, of empire, of justice, of equality, and of wealth. But its most common loci were histories of commerce.8 These histories offered a perspective on commerce that ran parallel to but remained interdependent with a burgeoning “science of political economy” – what many scholars from Franco Venturi to John Robertson have considered the “unifying discourse” of the Enlightenment.9
This “science” was first identified as such in France by a group of theorists and practitioners clustered around the court of Louis XV in the 1750s.10 In this period, as Voltaire famously quipped, “the nation” turned its attention away from “opera” and “theological disputes” in order to “reason about wheat,” as droughts and shortages focused public attention on the statutes regulating its supply.11 Led by the king’s physician, François Quesnay (1694–1774), this mix of theorists and practitioners comprised the first group of thinkers to call themselves économistes since their stated aim was to think analytically, arithmetically, mechanically, and graphically about the national “oeconomy.”12 Because they argued that agriculture ought to be the principal focus of attention in France, and thus that France should be ruled by (-cracy) nature (phusis), and not industry or international trade, they came to call themselves Physiocrats and their doctrine Physiocracy.13 Their detractors referred to them otherwise, however – as a “sect” and a group of “small-frys,” to name but a few of the taunts.14 Most accounts of the history of economic thought have construed this antagonism to the économistes as a consequence of the challenge Physiocracy posed to the long-standing principles of the système mercantile.15 Yet their accounts have borrowed, intentionally or not, the categorisation of “mercantilism” first conceived by its critics. For if ever “mercantilism” existed, it was more a political system than an economic one.16
The policies and institutions identified with mercantilism in France were developed by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), with the aim to counter Dutch global dominance. The operating premise of the Colbertist programme was that wealth was finite and measurable in bullion; the state should thus be the sole benefactor of trade and economic gain acquired mainly through resource extraction from the colonies.17 This ideology has long been portrayed as bellicose – and it certainly was, since the notion of finite wealth sparked a long list of wars over scarce resources.18 In contrast, the Physiocrats were and still are characterised as pacifists, but also as “liberals,” because of their second abiding principle, that goods should circulate freely within France – just as blood does in the body, according to the surgeon Quesnay’s famous analogy.19 This last principle did not originate with Quesnay, however. It was developed earlier by an influential intendant de commerce, Jacques-Claude-Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712–59), best remembered for allegedly coining the phrase still used to describe this ideology: “laissez faire, laissez passer.”20 Gournay had earlier formed a circle of followers, charging them with the publication of works promoting competitive markets, and, especially, the translation of writings about commerce emanating out of England, seen as a model for France to emulate.21
These ideas had been percolating since the 1720s, when a trend towards rethinking the relationship of commerce to colonialism emerged in France following the spectacular crash of the Système set up by charismatic Scottish financier (and gambler) John Law (1671–1729).22 Called in by the regent Philippe duc d’Orléans (1674–1723) to repair the kingdom’s finances, Law issued paper money to pay off the kingdom’s debts and sought to strengthen state-run monopoly companies founded on colonial trade (to which we will turn in Chapter 4) by issuing their stock on the market. When the bubble then burst, Law’s scheme crashed in a wash of panic and fortunes lost overnight. Yet it was followed in 1728 by the passing of a law in the same spirit – known as the Exclusif – which dictated that state companies had exclusive control over the colonial trade.23 Both Law’s Système and the contentious Exclusif spurred writings about the connection between the polity and the economy which have also been characterised as “liberal”24 – from Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en general (written in 1730 and published in 1755) to Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce (Reference Melon1734). Although scholars have recently sought to introduce new frameworks for understanding the origins of classical and neoclassical economics, the narrative which paints the easy transition from mercantilism to liberal and pacific economic theories has remained powerful.25 Yet eighteenth-century approaches to the economy and to its political basis were more varied than what this dualist model quiets in its simplicity.
This book seeks to broaden our perspective on these early pronouncements on the connection between politics and the economy beyond this oppositional view. By adding French voices to the pioneering literature on the Anglophone origins of political economy and economics as disciplines, it proposes that their sources were more confused and contingent than generally portrayed.26 Including works beyond the canon and not immediately identifiable as “political-economic” also encourages us to consider attitudes towards commerce as multiple.27 We have forgotten that there was a cacophony to eighteenth-century writings about commerce – the contests, the range of preoccupations, and, most important, the imperial experience.28 Building on the framework of Madeleine Dobie and other scholars, this study seeks to open further discussion with approaches that have generally remained distinct from each other: the history of political thought, the history of economic thought, the history of empire, and the study of the European Enlightenments. It would be anachronistic not to do so, for in the eighteenth century these now distinct academic disciplines were recognised as mutually constitutive domains of inquiry. My engagement with them joins a growing chorus of voices contending that French imperial history cannot be considered a supplement to French national history but is rather a foundational, dialectical, and constitutive element of that history.29
Doux commerce Reconsidered
One tenacious phrase in particular still lies at the centre of much writing about eighteenth-century political and economic thought: doux commerce, taken to mean “sweet commerce” or “gentle commerce.” For academic and other commentators, this phrase is often used to summarize the celebration of commerce in the eighteenth century. Yet the story of doux commerce in France emerges as more complex when we pay attention to its historical specifity.30
In French, commerce (without the “sweet” modifier) has always carried a broad range of meanings. Its roots are Latin: commercium meaning “with merx” or “mercis,” meaning merchandise or the object of trade.31 By the sixteenth century, the term had undergone a semantic shift to encompass social relationships.32 The Trésor de la langue française, still the authoritative historical and etymological dictionary of the French language, begins by defining commerce as a series of human transactions and communications ranging from the exchange of ideas to sexual intercourse.33 All major French lexicons and dictionaries of the eighteenth century began with this same definition.34
Since the nineteenth century, however, the phrase doux commerce has been bundled into causal narratives explaining the origins of political economy and classical economics. Perhaps the most iconic instance of this phenomenon can be traced to Karl Marx’s first volume of Capital in 1867. Marx drew on a cemented understanding of the term when he railed against the seventeenth-century Dutch colonial administration’s “system of stealing men in Celebes in order to get slaves for Java,” exclaiming famously, “Das ist der doux commerce!”35 Notwithstanding Marx’s synthetic and sarcastic deployment of the term doux commerce, the origins, meanings, and uses of the term remain relatively unexplored. Not until 1977 did Albert O. Hirschman use doux commerce to structure one of the most influential twentieth-century works in the history of political economy, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments before Its Triumph. Largely due to Hirschman’s influence, the term doux commerce often serves as a shorthand means of associating the origins of economic thought in the eighteenth century with a triumphalist belief in progress facilitated by free trade; indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Hirschman’s work has been the primary vehicle for the transmission and ubiquity of this notion in current eighteenth-century scholarship and beyond.36
Yet the term doux commerce is not readily traceable in the eighteenth-century French texts concerned with political economy. To be sure, the meanings ascribed to the term by Hirschman were certainly manifest in works of the period. Yet, the tendency to rely on the term to summarize the period’s ideology has obscured our understanding of the theory and experience of eighteenth-century commerce. By unsettling Hirschman’s oft-cited formula, this study attempts to uncover the acute tension between the sweet and the bitter, the gentle and the violent forms of commerce that existed and were represented in eighteenth-century France. I suggest that this tension indicated an ambivalence towards commerce: an awareness of its limits, a consciousness of its underbelly, and an acknowledgement of the ease with which its deviant forms manifested themselves while coexisting with gentler ones.
So where did the term doux commerce come from? One early usage appears in the sceptical philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (Bordeaux, 1588), in which he referred to the “sweet and gentle exchange” that comes of interaction with “beautiful and honest women”: “C’est aussi pour moy undoux commerceque celuy des belles et honnestes femmes.”37 In this essay, “Of three [types of] commerce,” Montaigne eventually reveals his disappointment with the “commerce” of women, as with the “commerce” of friends, which he deems “noble” but ultimately impossible. Only a third “commerce,” that with books, is dependable, Montaigne concludes.38 This early association of douceur and commerce to women and femininity has gone relatively unnoticed, as our conceptual sense of the term has been distanced from this gendered valence.39 Just as meanings of commerce changed considerably over time, doux and its substantive, douceur, descended from a variety of sources.40 Originating from the Latin dulcis, it implied sweet to the taste, soft to the touch, and gentle.41 This sense persisted into the eighteenth century, when the two terms were again combined to refer to the sweet and gentle exchange of ideas, le doux commerce d’idées.42 These multiple meanings are key to understanding commerce in eighteenth-century France, though the term is today more familiar to us in its original Latin sense, where its use is confined to the world of merchants.
In Hirschman’s account, “the first mention of this qualification of commerce” appeared in Jacques Savary’s Le parfait négociant (Paris, 1675).43 This immensely popular how-to book for merchants seeking “perfection” served as the basis for the Dictionnaire universel de commerce, the first dictionary of commerce written in France, first published in 1723 and later edited by Savary’s grandsons. Through meticulous explanations and examples of the mechanics and practices of commercial exchange, the Dictionnaire sought to teach readers not only how to trade but also how to speak commerce, that is, how to use the vocabulary of commerce.44 In other words, it offered merchants a guide to the very terms structuring the language of commerce and to the appropriate manner in which to use them.45 By all accounts, they used it often.46 One passage from Savary’s dictionary implies that trade was a result of divine Providence’s dispersal of its “gifts.” Not only did trade foster “ties of friendship” among men, but “this continuous exchange of all of the comforts of life constitutes commerce and this commerce makes for all of the douceur [sweetness, gentleness] of life.”47
The centrepiece of Hirschman’s doux commerce thesis was, however, a work of extraordinary influence on eighteenth-century Europe and America: The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748 by Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755).48 Part 4 of The Spirit of the Laws is devoted to a study of commerce, its “spirit,” and the laws, historical and contemporary, pertaining to it. “Commerce cures destructive prejudices,” Montesquieu argues, “and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores [moeurs douces], there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores.”49 Hirschman infers that Montesquieu’s use of douces applies to commerce, meaning at once sweet to the taste, soft to the touch, and gentle. Yet what is clearly sweet, soft, or gentle in this sentence are moeurs, which I render as mores though the term is probably best understood as “shared public morality.”50 Commerce itself is not gentle; rather, Montesquieu argues, when commerce is present, mores tend to be gentle, and vice versa.
In fact, there is not much that is doux about Montesquieu’s commerce in this passage. Here commerce is not an end in itself. Rather, it is an agent of change. But of greater interest is what follows. Montesquieu continues by observing, “Commerce corrupts pure mores,” though, as Plato complained, “it [also] polishes and softens uncivilised mores [moeurs barbares], as we see every day.”51 Thus Montesquieu’s essay also acknowledges the deleterious effects of commerce. Yet in omitting Montesquieu’s reference to the corrupting potential of commerce upon mores, Hirschman’s text seems to have limited interpretations of Montesquieu’s claim.52
So one might say that the discontents of doux commerce are double.53 On one hand, the term has been and continues to be employed to explain the ideology of commerce in the eighteenth century (and beyond), though it does not fully reflect the ideological realities of that time.54 On the other hand, the ideal type the term describes – the idea that commerce was a sweetening, pacifying, and moralising agent – itself clashed in theory and in practice with commerce’s bitterest manifestations in the eighteenth century.55
Turning to sources that stretch beyond Montesquieu’s much-studied text, this book brings to the fore the key role of ambivalence in eighteenth-century French thought about commerce.56 Ambivalence is a category that I draw loosely from psychoanalytic theory; it connotes the simultaneous love and hatred of the same object or phenomenon.57 It is a term quite different from but often confused with ambiguity, which implies, simply, vagueness. Ambivalence has certainly been employed as a category of analysis by scholars as various as Homi Bhabha and Daniel Gordon to describe eighteenth-century views of colonialism and commercial society, respectively.58 In what follows, I hope to show how prevalent this attitude was in a discourse that has, until now, been portrayed as unanimously triumphant. I do not attempt to resolve the ambivalence detected in the sources, but rather I consider their seemingly contradictory elements part of a single discourse: the discourse of commerce in eighteenth-century France.
The Histoire des deux Indes
These contradictory aspects of commerce were evident to a cast of characters that includes Denis Diderot, the abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713–96), and their anonymous – if hardly secret – collaborators on the bestselling Philosophical and political history of the commerce and settlements of the Europeans in the two Indies (Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des établissements des européens dans les deux Indes), known to scholars as the Histoire des deux Indes.59 In delving more deeply into Hirschman’s genealogy of the “doctrine of doux commerce,” we uncover the contested and contradictory ideas of commerce held by the expansive network of intellectuals and politicians involved in the composition and edition of the Histoire des deux Indes. In doing so, we open ourselves to the possibility of an alternative to the prevalent perspective that late-eighteenth-century economic and political thinking converged on a consensus about the emergence of liberalism.60
One site dominated the assembly and dispersal of ideas about the European imperial experience, the future of Europe, and the ideas of commerce in eighteenth-century France: the Histoire des deux Indes. This may seem like a hyperbolic claim, yet it is difficult to overemphasise the Histoire’s reach and influence. Born of a defeat, the Histoire des deux Indes is now widely recognised as an, if not the, influential cultural and political product of the Seven Years War. It serves, therefore, as the pivot for my analysis and arguments in this book.
From its first printing in 1770,61 this first “philosophical and political” history of Europe’s colonial experience immediately became one of eighteenth-century France’s bestsellers.62 The Histoire des deux Indeswent through at least forty-eight editions between 1770 and 1795; it sold more copies than Adam Smith’s influential Wealth of Nations eight times over.63 Yet its popularity was not confined to France. Within a decade of its first printing, it was translated into English, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, and Polish.64 The Histoire’s outstanding international publishing success is all the more remarkable given its length: At its most complete, the work comprised ten volumes, in octavo, and was divided into nineteen discrete “books” – more than twenty-five hundred pages of text!
Vast in scope and dense with details, the work set out to offer a comprehensive comparative historical explanation of the European imperial projects, especially the European settlements and trade in what it specified as the two Indies, East and West. Beginning with the travels and conquests of the Portuguese in East India and ending with the formation of the British colonies in America, the Histoire des deux Indes also offered readers accounts of the worlds and civilisations beyond Europe, and, crucially, an assessment of the Europeans’ impact upon them. Though it sought to make its arguments by way of a historical idiom, the work was nevertheless encyclopaedic in nature; indeed, its authors deliberately sought to produce a sister volume to the Encyclopédie which drew attention to the connections between Europe, the East, and the West.65 This was the first time that any work of history had privileged this relationship, and for this reason, one is tempted to call the Histoire des deux Indes the first history of globalisation.
The work was not an endorsement of French or European imperial expansion, however. Quite the contrary: The Histoire des deux Indes more often than not recounted the failings of empires – information that threatened the French ancien régime. As a result, the Royal Council suppressed it in 1772; it was placed on the Index in 1774, and next formally condemned by the Parlement of Paris to be “whipped and burned in the Palace Square.”66 Adding to its notoriety, the Histoire was censored again by the theology faculty of the University of Paris in 1781.67 Finally, on 25 May 1781, the Parlement of Paris decreed that the declared “author,” the abbé Raynal, be “bodily apprehended” and his “goods be seized and sequestered.”68 If these bans had any impact on the reading public it was to increase the Histoire’s notoriety and interest. A joke running through Paris held that Raynal must have orchestrated them, since they served to increase the already strong demand for the work.69
Much of the initial scholarly attention to the Histoire des deux Indes focused on its reception as well as on the work’s authorship, demonstrating that most of the Histoire des deux Indes was not actually penned by Raynal.70 A renegade Jesuit and former journalist, and later a royal correspondent and notoriously assiduous philosophe of the Parisian salons, Raynal spent twenty years of his life working on the Histoire in a capacity that would today be called editorial.71 Although he contributed some writing to the enterprise and told readers, “I devoted my life to it,” the finished product actually consisted of a collage of contributions by several of Raynal’s contemporaries.72 Complete sections were also borrowed from travel writings, official government correspondence and documents, and other published works.73
The list of contributors – all of them anonymous – reads like a catalogue of eighteenth-century France’s most famous philosophes: Alexandre Deleyre, Jean-Joseph Pechméja, Paul-Henry Thiry baron d’Holbach, Jean-FranÇois de Saint-Lambert, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and, most famous, Denis Diderot, one of the principal authors of the Histoire’s third and most complete version, published in 1780.74 Remembered as a dramatist, novelist, and art critic, and accepted by some as a philosopher, Diderot is perhaps most renowned as the co-editor of the work commonly referred to as the Enlightenment’s magnum opus, the Encyclopédie.75 Less known is that Diderot was also an impassioned political and economic theorist. The oversight is not surprising. The acknowledged polysemy, dissonance, multiplicity, and ambiguity of his writings have often led to his dismissal by historians of political and economic thought.76 But Diderot’s contradictions were not confusions; they were thoughtful elements of his particular epistemology and a central feature of his political project.77
One effect of the collage of contributions which made up the Histoire’s sometimes patchy narrative is that the reader encounters varying points of view throughout the work. In the light of this effect, historian Michèle Duchet called the Histoire “polyphonous,” and one is tempted to agree that the work is more a “tissue of statements” than a unitary and coherent text.78 Yet, as the following chapters elucidate, the endeavour did cohere in at least one important way: Amid the multiple positions it articulated, the Histoire mobilised powerful rhetorical strategies to project agency upon its readers and to awaken them to action. As Sylvana Tomaselli has shown, the work sought to “transform the transformers,” comprising a distinctly French historical project.79 In this way, the work clearly inscribed itself into the multidimensional mission of those who often referred to themselves as members of the “Republic of Letters,” but who are now understood as protagonists in the Enlightenment.80 Considering the Histoire as more than an eighteenth-century history but as a work belonging to the “enlightenment disposition,” we can underline how filled with debates and contradictions that period and process were.81 Attention to the causes and effects of the Histoire’s polyphony has, however, meant that, until recently, scholarly commentaries have underemphasised this latent theory of historical agency, as well as one of the Histoire’s central preoccupations: Let us not forget that, despite its innovative approach, the Histoire was, above all, a history of commerce.
The Histoire’s Commerce
“[C]louds will be dispelled in all parts; a serene sky will shine over the face of the whole globe … then, or never, will that universal peace arise … [and] the general happiness of men will be established upon a more solid basis.”82 This giddy “hymn to commerce” from the Histoire’s book 19 trumpets commerce as the agent of a potentially formidable change leading to universal happiness, peace, and sunshine.83 At first glance, it appears that the authors of the Histoire cast sweet and gentle commerce as an antidote to the ills of colonialism and empire. But if we read past this and other such “hymns” in the work, we find equally impassioned narratives of the terrible potential and actual odiousness of commerce, little different from Douin’s ode, woven alongside the triumphalist thread. These instances of odiousness, also qualified on occasion as “vile,” pointed to the limits and the obstacles to good commerce. In particular, the text of the Histoire suggested three foci for understanding the underbelly of commerce: slavery, piracy, and monopoly. Commerce and Its Discontents is structured around this triad of limits and obstacles. And although the Histoire informed my choice of these points of deviation, I analyse and refract its messages through a wide range of sources, including poems, pamphlets, memoranda written for the Colonial Office, juridical treatises, and dictionaries.
The Politics of Definition
Dictionaries are an important source for this book, not only because they were such an epi-phenomenon in eighteenth-century France that the renowned editor of the Correspondance littéraire joked about their proliferation: “the furore for dictionaries is so great among us that a Dictionary of dictionaries has just been printed.”84 But at a time when the “enlightenment disposition” prevailed upon a new mode of thinking about the relationship between a set of freshly-constituted categories, such as “the people” and “society,” the proliferation of dictionaries also points to a politics of definition at work. First and foremost were the contestations over the very power to define key terms and the legitimacy of other definitional projects. Indeed, most ideological power struggles in the period translated into struggles over definition. To focus on definition differs subtly from a focus on meaning. It emphasises the actors or agents engaged in defining terms over those who receive or interpret them. The eighteenth-century struggles over the definitions of terms were also inextricably linked to the project of Enlightenment. In this era when traditional norms and practices were hotly debated, there also emerged an impulse to conceive the individual and the collective human space as independent from previous Leviathans, or absolute powers, be they religious or secular, the church or the monarchy. So too, older categories were subject to re-evaluation and re-definition. Commerce was one such category. The revival of definitions of, and connections between, the political space and the “oeconomy” was, as we shall see, a central stage upon which the politics of definition played out.
I open the discussion of eighteenth-century commerce by considering the animated conversation about luxury in eighteenth-century France, the so-called querelle du luxe, for luxury was both a cause and a symptom of a growing awareness of the ubiquity and permanence of commerce. Indeed, the way people spoke and wrote about luxury tended to mirror the way they understood commerce. So the quarrel about luxury provided a conceptual training ground for the ways in which commerce was and would be represented. As a first step, writers tussled over the term’s definition, ushering in the list of notions related to commerce that would become subject to the politics of definition. Through the passages in the Histoire dealing with luxury and Diderot’s essays on the topic, we are introduced to the possibility that the discourse of commerce was ambivalent, that it was possible and intelligible to both love and hate luxury and, concomitantly, commerce and still remain within a coherent discourse. Attitudes towards luxury provide a means of understanding the shape, character, and stakes of representations of commerce; at the same time, they introduce the dialectic between the doux and odieux effects of commerce.
We begin our exploration of the collapse of the triumphalist doctrine espousing the sweet effects of commerce in Chapter 2 by focusing on the form of commerce that the Histoire des deux Indes famously publicized as intolerable: the “commerce of man.” This analysis uncovers how the Histoire’s iconoclastic critique of the slave trade drew on a discourse of political slavery that implored the French to reject despotism and recognise the trade in African slaves as a species of odious commerce. In a gesture worthy of current calls for more material histories, the Histoireconfronted the discursive and abstract uses of slavery with the practice of selling humans for profit. Here, as we shall see, rhetoric was put to an innovative and devastating challenge by experience.
Chapter 3 examines how piracy and its agents also represented a form of transgressive and odious commerce. The epithet odieux, in contrast with doux, emerged directly from the eighteenth-century vocabularies contending with piracy. The Histoire’s critique of the hypocrisy inherent in the supporters of the imperial system emerges here. Specifically, the imperial powers are accused of intentionally renaming their actions to avoid the sanction they enforce on others. The tendency to obfuscate definitions of piracy as a means of controlling the international trading system was, in effect, a further tactic in the politics of definition.
Another feature of critiques of both the slave trade and piracy as modes of commerce was their explicit antagonism to what are referred to as “monopolistic agents,” be they the companies fuelling the slave trade or those punishing pirates while themselves engaging in piracy. The fourth and final chapter of this volume examines the explicit link different sources drew between domestic and international monopoly. But the problems with this odious form of commerce were not solely related to international trade: They were also understood to pervert the internal governance of France. The stakes and boundaries of the sweetness or odiousness of commerce lay in their power to promote or to pollute French national identity and success.
It was through the public conversation about luxury that these stakes first came to the fore, as the following chapter aims to explain.
1 Firmin de Caen Douin, “Le Commerce, poëme. Qui a eu l’Accessit à l’Académie Françoise, en 1754,” in Amusemens poëtiques d’un philosophe, ou Poëmes académiques sur différens sujets, dont plusieurs ont été couronnés, et autres piéces fugitives (Paris: Chez Cailleau, Reference Douin1763). The author is identified in the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s catalogue. All translations are my own unless I have specified otherwise.
2 “Rends l’Empire des Lys encor [sic] plus florissant, / Les François plus heureux & LOUIS plus puissant.” Ibid., 49.
3 For the term “hymn to commerce,” see Yves Benot, “Diderot, Pechméja, Raynal et l’anticolonialisme,” Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle 41 (Jan.–Feb. Reference Benot1963): 147.
4 “Disgraceful objects of an odious Commerce, / hapless Negroes, what have you done to the Gods?” (“Déplorables objets d’un Commerce odieux, / Nègres infortunés, qu’avez-vous fait aux Dieux? ”). In Douin, “Le Commerce, poëme,” 47, my emphasis. I have previously referred to this kind of commerce, the commerce odieux, as “commerce amer,” an antonym to doux which means, essentially, bitter or sour. But further research has confirmed that the term odieux, like the term vil, which also qualified commerce in eighteenth-century France, emanates directly from eighteenth-century texts, whereas amer does not.
5 France lost more than three-quarters of its imperial holdings in North America and West Africa, and the French debt doubled, from 1,360 million to 2,350 million livres, between 1753 and 1764 as a result of the decision to finance the war with credit and not taxes. What is more, all of this loss occurred on the tails of the already devastating French losses in the preceding War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), of which the Seven Years’ War was in many ways an extension and an expansion. James C. Riley has argued against the grain of a general historiographical consensus about the war’s devastating repercussions for France, stating that France’s economic loss from the war has been grossly exaggerated by historians (using “dramatic language”), although he concedes that France did suffer a fiscal and political catastrophe. See James C. Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Reference Riley1986), 191, 225. Gail Bossenga highlights that the British debt at the end of the war was greater than that of France; however with the French monarchy’s mired fiscal institutions, the cost of servicing that debt was much greater for France due to its high debt servicing charges. See , “Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in and , From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 37–66. Significant for our purposes here is the sense among public intellectuals in France during this period that the war had further crippled France’s financial situation. The authoritative account of that mindset is Michael Sonenscher’s “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic,” Political Studies 42 (Reference Sonenscher1994): 166–231, and, most recently, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). For Churchill’s oft-quoted assessment of the Seven Years War, see Winston S. Churchill, The Age of Revolution (New York: Dodd and Mead, Reference Churchill1957), 148–49.
6 The term “crisis of confidence” comes from Riley, Seven Years War, 192. See David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reference Bell2001), especially chapter 3, “English Barbarians, French Martyrs,” for the ways in which the French defined themselves against the English in this period.
7 This clumsy phrase aims to synthesize the plethora of critical gestures, in texts and beyond them, that self-identified agents of the Enlightenment in France deployed to advance their political and moral projects to counter and transcend despotism, including promoting agency among their readership. Reinert Koselleck offered one of the most powerful accounts of the process of “critical ferment” in sway in the eighteenth century, though he famously drew disastrous conclusions from it. See Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1955) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 10. Dena Goodman’s Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Reference Goodman1989) offers another influential account of the practices of social and political critique I consider. Jay Smith’s “Between Discourse and Experience: Agency and Ideas in the French Pre-Revolution,” History and Theory 40 (Reference Smith2001): 116–42 provides an alternative approach to agency which moves beyond discourse analysis to encompass experience. Because language and texts are the tools we use to convey our understandings of our biography, our politics, and our society, I am here interested in uncovering the way people related ideas to one another and what choices of words they made to do so, with the hope of arriving at a better understanding of the foundations of ideologies governing political and economic theory and practice today.
8 Paul B. Cheney demonstrated this early on in “History and Science of Commerce,” 226, and later in chapter 3, “Philosophical History,” in his Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reference Cheney2010).
9 For the ways in which John Robertson and Franco Venturi cohere Enlightenment thought about political economy in Scotland and Italy, see , Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 42.
10 Whereas Adam Smith later defined political economy as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.Reference Smith, Campbell and Skinner1776. 2 vols. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, Reference Smith, Campbell and Skinner1976], book 4, chapter 1), it was in France that this scientific status was first attributed to political economy. See , La ‘science nouvelle’ de l’économie politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). Cf. Liana Vardi’s recent argument that in fact Physiocracy’s “epistemological underpinnings … tied it to the realm of imagination from which it sought to escape.” Liana Vardi, “Physiocratic Visions,” in Dan Edelstein, ed., The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know too Much (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Reference Vardi and Edelstein2010), 97.
11 Voltaire, “Blé ou Bled,” Dictionnaire philosophique in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Chez Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1819), 241. In the eighteenth century, blé was translated into English as “corn, or grain for bread.” Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary, Abridged, In Two Parts: I. French and English, II. English and French. Ninth edition. (London: n.p., 1755). I have opted for wheat, however, as it more accurately renders the sense of the term blé used by Voltaire into contemporary English, since blé is a subset of the broader term grain, also employed in eighteenth-century French. Voltaire’s sarcasm in this quote is best heard when the passage is read in its entirety: “Around the year 1750, the nation, satiated with verses, tragedies, comedies, opera, novels, dreamy stories, even dreamier moral reflections, and theological disputes about grace and convulsions, finally turned to reason about wheat. We even forgot about vines in order to talk but of wheat and rye. We wrote many useful things about agriculture: everyone read them, except the farmers.”
12 Quesnay’s Tableau oeconomique (Versailles, 1758) offered the first graphic conceptualisation of the forces, both “destructive” (by which he meant consumption) and “regenerative” (by which he meant reproduction), circulating within and defining the national economy. Karl Marx described the Tableau as “an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible.” Theories of Surplus Value, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, Reference Marx1969–71), vol. 1, 344.
13 (1739–1817), Quesnay’s promoter (and renowned co-founder of the still trading Dupont Company), coined the term physiocratie in his compilation of writings entitled Physiocratie, ou Consitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain (Leiden, 1768). As the editors of the recent edition of Quesnay’s works note, the “Doctor” never publicly acknowledged his texts. Du Pont’s collection of Quesnay’s writings lists the group of Quesnay’s followers as “the marquis de Mirabeau, Abeille, the abbé Baudeau, and Le Mercier de la Rivière,” but Quesnay is never mentioned by name. See , , and , “Introduction des éditeurs,” in François Quesnay: Oeuvres économiques complètes et autres textes (Paris: INED, 2005), xii. Quesnay’s first expressions of the thesis that agriculture was the most productive economic activity were published in his articles for the Encyclopédie: “Fermiers,” “Grains,” and “Impôt.” On the ultimate failure of the “practice” of Physiocracy in France see , “Performing Physiocracy,” Journal of Cultural Economy3, no. 2 (2010): 225–42.
14 The terms secte and fretin are Frederick Melchior Grimm’s, the co-editor of the influential Correspondance Littéraire. See his report dated 1 January 1770: “There has arisen since some time, in the heart of this capital, a sect as humble as the dust where it was formed, as poor as its doctrine, as obscure as its style, but soon imperious and arrogant: those who make it up have taken the title ‘Philosophes économistes.’” And later: “I defy you to draw a single drop of genius from all of the apocalypses of the Quesnays, the Mirabeaus, the de La Rivières, and all of the fastidious commentaries of the Baudeaus, Roubauds, Dupont de Nemours and other economic small-frys.” Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot, depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1790 (Paris: Chez Furne, Reference Grimm1829), 322–23. Further jabs at the “sect” by the future contrôleur-général of France, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and by Scottish moral philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith are discussed by , Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 35–36. Possibly their greatest critic was Véron de Forbonnais, author of the Encyclopédie’s article, “Commerce.” See Peter Groenewegen, Eighteenth-Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries. (London: Routledge, Reference Groenewegen2002), 255.
15 As Céline Spector has shown, the term système mercantile can be first traced to Quesnay’s first convert, the marquis de Mirabeau, and his Philosohie rurale (1763), 329. Spector aptly locates the “birth certificate” of mercantilism as a concept in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, however: In book 4, Smith inveighs against the “popular” principle that money creates wealth, and that wealth consists of the abundance of gold and silver. See Céline Spector, “Le concept de mercantilisme,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale no. 3 (Reference Spector2003): 290.
16 The influential reconceptualisation of mercantilism as a political theory (rather than simply an economic one) whose contestation structured the first critiques of the absolute monarchy was Lionel Rothkrug’s Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reference Rothkrug1965), 38.
17 On the Colbertist strategies, see Pierre H. Boulle, “French Mercantilism, Commercial Companies and Colonial Profitability” in Blussé and Gastra, eds., Companies and Trade:Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime (The Hague: Martinus Hijhoff, Reference Boulle, Léonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra1981), 106.
18 To wit Colbert’s own statement of its bellicose nature, in a 1666 letter to his cousin, the intendant of Rochefort: “Le commerce est la source de la finance, et la finance est le nerf de la guerre.” Quoted in Céline Spector, “Le concept de mercantilisme,” 294. For one of the earliest such assessments, see Edmond Silberner’s still influential La guerre dans la pensée économique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1939), 263. With Terence Hutchison, I suggest that it is “inadequate and misleading” to “try to force” particular thinkers into “either one compartment or the other of a mercantilist–laissez-fairedichotomy.” Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Reference Hutchison1988), 3.
19 Contesting this characterisation early on, Samuel Hollander has argued that the Physiocrats were in fact “as much interventionist as the mercantilists.” See his “Malthus as Physiocrat: Surplus versus Scarcity,” in The Literature of Political Economy: Collected Essays II (London: Routledge, Reference Hollander1998), 51.
20 Despite its currency today, this phrase belongs to the curious history of alleged attributions. Gournay never published the phrase, but its earliest printed attribution to him is most likely by one of Quesnay’s eminent followers, the marquis de Mirabeau (“the elder”), in an essay entitled “Sur la cherté des grains” published in 1768 in the newly founded Physiocratic journal, Éphémérides du citoyen, ou Bibliothèque raisonnée des sciences morales et politiques. Here Gournay’s phrase is referred to as a “maxim” of great use to those interested in the “science of good legislation relative to commerce,” a phrase anticipating Adam Smith’s definition of political economy. See Éphémérides du citoyen (Tome 7, 1768): 157.
21 Gournay and his school, which originally included key figures in the history of commerce in France such as the abbé André Morellet and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, are still often identified as precursors to the Physiocrats though his project differed substantially from theirs. On Gournay’s aims and strategies see Sophus A. Reinert, The Virtue of Emulation: International Competition and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reference Reinert2011), especially 199–204; Antonella Alimento, “Entre animosité nationale et rivalité d’émulation: La position de Véron de Forbonnais face à la compétition anglaise,” GIM (Reference Alimento2009): 125–48; , La Balance et l’horloge: La genèse de la pensée libérale en France au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1989); and a forthcoming volume by , , , and , Commerce, société et population autour de Vincent de Gournay (forthcoming, 2012).
22 The most comprehensive recent account of Law’s life and theories is Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-maker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Reference Murphy1997).
23 The still authoritative account of the Exclusif is Jean Tarrade’s two-volume Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’Évolution du régime de “l’Exclusif” de 1763 à 1789 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, Reference Tarrade1972). Cf. Paul Cheney’s important reinterpretation of the debates over the Exclusif in Revolutionary Commerce.
24 On Cantillon, see Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Reference Murphy1987).
25 As Peter Groenewegen has noted, the view that Physiocracy was a “landmark in the beginnings of the science of economics” is widely held by “authorities as diverse as McCulloch, Marx, Marshall, and Schumpeter.” Eighteenth Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries (London and New York: Routledge, Reference Groenewegen2002), 56. For alternative accounts, see Richard Whatmore, who has offered a compelling account of how the sense of decline that followed the Seven Years’ War structured what would eventually become a republican discourse of political economy. See Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Reference Whatmore2000), especially chap. 2. Other approaches tending towards a more complex view of the origins of economics include Reflections on the Classical Canon in Economics: Essays in Honor of Samuel Hollander (Routledge, 2002), especially Samuel Hollander’s own “‘Classical economics’: A reification wrapped in an anachronism?” 7–26.
26 This study, and all studies of eighteenth-century ideas of commerce, is necessarily indebted to J. G. A. Pocock’s influential arguments first developed in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reference Pocock1975), and articulated more fully in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reference Pocock1985). Developing this approach further, with special attention to the Scottish Enlightenment, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, along with Nicholas Philipson, Knud Haakonssen, and John Robertson, to name but a few, related the ideal of commercial humanism to the prevalent theories of natural law and classical republicanism. While the circulation of ideas across the Channel was continuous, some distinctions, or “exceptions,” do become apparent in the French engagement with commerce in the eighteenth century. Both Catherine Larrère and John Shovlin have, in turn, pointed to the overemphasis of the historiography of eighteenth-century France on the Physiocrats. Shovlin has also called for greater notice to be given to the “din of public debate on economic questions in eighteenth-century France.” See , L’Invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle: Du droit naturel à la physiocratie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), and John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Reference Shovlin2006), 3. The authoritative accounts of early Physiocracy are still Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Reference Fox-Genovese1976) and Steven L. Kaplan’s Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); for its legacy in the Revolution, see James Livesey, “Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the French Revolution,” Past & Present 157 (Reference Livesey1997): 94–121.
27 Mary L. Bellhouse offers such a model in her study of Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire and Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide, “Femininity & Commerce in the Eighteenth Century: Rousseau’s Criticism of a Literary Ruse by Montesquieu,” Polity 13, no. 2 (Reference Bellhouse1980): 285–99. Erik Thomson offers another example with his approach to uncovering economic thinking in seventeenth-century France. See especially, “Commerce, Law, and Erudite Culture: The Mechanics of Théodore Godefroy’s Service to Cardinal Richelieu,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 68, no. 3 (2007): 409.
28 Madeleine Dobie has recently provided a compelling way of understanding these varied models and ideologies as a comprehensive discourse of “colonial political economy.” , Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 206. This book only touches on the many insights provided by Dobie’s work. Her model is essential to this study in many ways because of its historical emphasis on and integration of the crucial roles of slavery and imperialism. Yet we can also note that a parallel track has been opened by international political economists with the call for a new “cultural political economy” which necessarily links politics, economics, and culture in its analyses. See the pioneering work in this field by Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson, eds., Cultural Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, Reference Best and Matthew2010).
29 I build on Jeremy Adelman’s argument that histories of empire are “necessarily entwined” with histories of nationhood and thus offer a methodological and narrative prelude to Wilder’s account of the interwar French imperial nation-state. See , “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review113, no. 2 (2008): 339, and Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Reference Wilder2005), 20. With most recent works in the imperial history of France, Wilder begins by affirming the current (albeit slowly crumbling) refusal in French historiography and political discourse to recognise the living and constitutive character of France’s imperial system. Ann Stoler has referred to France’s “colonial aphasia” in reference to this phenomenon in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14–15. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has accentuated the “silencing of the past” in the historiography of Haiti in particular; most recently, Madeleine Dobie has delved more deeply into the problem by uncovering the absence of representations of the colonial fact in eighteenth-century France. See , Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and Dobie, Trading Places, respectively. Moving beyond the imperial focus, this inquiry also shares in Sophus Reinert’s project to extricate a clearer image of eighteenth-century understandings of commerce from the still calcified assumptions about Enlightenment commitments to free trade. See Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (Reference Reinert2010): 1395–425.
30 To be sure, Laurence Dickey has offered the most comprehensive analysis of the doux commerce thesis and its various mobilisations in Hirschman and Pocock, yet the theorists to whom he refers are never specified beyond the canonical list of Smith, Hume, Constant, and Defoe. See Laurence Dickey, “Doux-Commerce and Humanitarian Values: Free Trade, Sociability and Universal Benevolence in Eighteenth-Century Thinking,” Grotiana22–23: 272–83.
31 Eminent linguist Émile Benveniste has shown that only in Latin did a fixed and stable expression exist to convey commerce distinct from notions of buying or selling. The origins of this vocabulary are difficult to trace, but Benveniste suggests an origin in the Greek askholía (“occupations”) and prâgma (“thing”). The Romans adapted and transformed these terms to suit their adaptations and transformations of the institutions associated with them, leading to negotium, and, eventually, commercium. The roots of commerce are, thus, properly Roman since, for every other Indo-European language, commerce was a “trade without a name.” See chapter 11, “Un métier sans nom: le commerce,” in Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1969), 140–46.
32 and , Dictionnaire étymologique (Paris: PUF, 2008), 144.
33 Trésor de la langue française: Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960) (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1977–80), 1118–19.
34 Cf. the articles “commerce” in the Encyclopédie (written by Véron de Forbonnais); in Furetière’s Dictionnaire de Furetière (1690); in Académie française, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694); in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1743); and in Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1723, 1765).
35 , Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867). Vol. 1. Ben Fowkes, trans. (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 916. Ben Fowkes renders this phrase as “That is peaceful commerce!” The passage in question is drawn from pt. 8, chap. 31.
36 Hirschman’s formulation has had a wide reach and strong influence, as the reissuing of a 1997 twentieth anniversary edition attests. According to Seth Ditchik, senior editor at Princeton University Press, “several tens of thousands” of copies of The Passions and the Interests have been sold, and the new 1997 edition of Hirschman’s work has “sold over 10,000 copies and still sells pretty steadily.” Seth Ditchik, e-mail message to author, 20 October 2010. Commonly assigned in undergraduate history, politics, and economics survey courses in the United States, see, among others, the reliance upon it is evident in works such as Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reference Taylor1989), 214. Recent works by reputable historians of economic thought have also absorbed the formula. To wit, Dierdre McCloskey’s assertion that “Commerce, the French said, was a sweetener: le doux commerce.” See The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 30.
37 “C’est aussi pour moy un doux commerce que celuy des belles et honnestes femmes.” “De trois commerces,” book 3, chap. 3 in , Essais (1588), Pierre Villey, ed. (Paris: Quadrige/Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 824. Villey drew on Montaigne’s second edition (Bordeaux, 1588).
38 In referring to “commerce noble,” Montaigne may have been jesting, since the nobility had been forbidden to trade since the Middle Ages. On the shifting meanings of commerce in Montaigne’s work, see Philippe Desan, Les Commerces de Montaigne: le discours économique des Essais (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, Reference Desan1992).
39 The gendered aspect of the doux commerce thesis warrants further analysis and interpretation, and I encourage much-needed attention to the workings of this connection between femininity and exchange. To be sure, first drew attention to the gendered dimension of discourses of commerce in his Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), 99, 253, but researchers have not yet taken up the charge. I hope to join others in doing so in a future project.
40 On the various uses of douceur in the eighteenth century, see , Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially 67, 116, 123–26. As Gordon shows, the baron d’Holbach, famous for both his salon and his atheistic writings, went so far as to re-define douceur as “a flexibility that is conducive to making us liked.” That a “gentleman” could and should exhibit “douceur” in the period was indicative of a host of gender categories in transition. Helena Rosenblatt has argued that Rousseau “pushed” the concept of douceur “onto the political arena” in his Second Discourse (1755) by associating the term with “political virtues and economic independence,” and thereby “reaffirm[ing] a classical republican paradigm against an emerging commercial ethos.” Rousseau and Geneva: From the ‘First Discourse’ to the ‘Social Contract’, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997), 85.
41 Bloch and von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique, 203. Dulcis is itself connected to the Greek glukus, glukeros, meaning sweet (cf. glucose), and thus connotes those things agreeable to the taste, not bitter, and, figuratively, suave or agreeable. See et al. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1998), 1: 629.
42 For example, in Jean-François Marmontel’s account of the debates and discussions in d’Holbach’s salon, which he called the “côterie holbachique.” “The côterie holbachique,” wrote Marmontel, “found in itself the sweetest pleasures that liberty of thought and the commerce of minds (doux commerce d’esprits) can procure.” Quoted in Alan Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Reference Kors1976), 97.
43 A common eighteenth-century edition was Le Parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1713). See Jean-Claude Perrot, “Les dictionnaires de commerce au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine, 28 (Reference Perrot1981): 36–39.
44 As William Reddy notes, Savary was a pioneer in the “heroic effort” to systematize practical information in the eighteenth century, one factor in the “emergence of a public sphere Western Europe.” William Reddy, “The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking About Cloth in France Before and After the Revolution,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (New York: Cambridge University Press, Reference Reddy and Appadurai1986), 264–65.
45 See, for example, the practical advice in Savary, Dictionnaire universel de commerce, s.v. “Interest,” 431.
46 William Reddy has also noted how, following its first publication in 1723, the work was “hawked about Europe, not just France,” having been “reissued, pirated and translated at least six more times between 1741 and 1784,” indicating that “it was used by real merchants in their day-to-day dealings.” Ibid., 264. The Dictionnaire serves as an invaluable source for this book. Yet, to be sure, my subject is not merchants, but rather the political languages and discourses that framed their and others’ understanding and very experience of commerce. The pioneering study of merchant culture in eighteenth-century France is Daniel Roche, “Négoce et culture dans la France au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 25 (Reference Roche1978): 375–95.
47 Savary, Le Parfait négociant, cited in , The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. 1977. 20th anniversary edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 59–60.
48 , Passions and Interests (1997), 61. The first English translation of De l’Esprit des lois (Geneva: Barillot, 1748), by , rendered the work’s title as The Spirit of Laws (London: Nourse, 1750), without the second definite article.
49 “Le commerce guérit des préjugés destructeurs: et c’est presque une règle générale que, partout où il y a des mœurs douces, il y a du commerce; et que, partout où il y a du commerce, il y a des mœurs douces.” “Du commerce,” pt. 4, chap. 1 in Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois.
50 As Victor Gourevitch notes, moeurs is “notoriously difficult to translate.” The term “manners” is unsatisfactory because it elides the moral content of the French moeurs. It can sometimes hold the connotation of “customs” or “ways,” in keeping with its Latin root, mores, but these terms were often distinguished by eighteenth-century writers. See Victor Gourevitch, “Note on the translations” in , The Discourses and other Early Political Writings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xlv. I opt for the English “mores,” with , , and , in their translation and edition of Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 338.
51 “Le commerce corrompt les mœurs pures (a); c’était le sujet des plaintes de Platon: il polit et adoucit les mœurs barbares, comme nous le voyons tous les jours.” Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, pt. 4, chap. 1.
52 Recent works have also drawn attention to this neglected aspect of Montesquieu’s idea of commerce. Daniel Gordon first commented on it in Citizens without Sovereignty, 131. See also Elena Russo’s “Virtuous Economies,” which uncovers the causes of Montesquieu’s fears about the destructive potential of commerce. Sophus Reinert also affirms that, despite continued historiographical contentions to the contrary, “The Spirit of the Laws was exceedingly clear. Unless guided by policies, commerce could lead to conquests,” Virtue of Emulation, 192. For Hirschman’s omission, see Passions and Interests (1997), 60.
53 My use of the term discontents intentionally evokes the term used in the English translations of Sigmund Freud’s influential essay, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930). In many ways, Freud’s essay can be read as a commentary on the discontents of commercial society, in addition to being a compelling analysis of the various effects of a “well-polished Society” upon individuals and consequently on the community. More recently, Joseph Stiglitz has also named an influential work on globalisation (eighteenth-century commerce’s most recent incarnation) along the same lines – Globalization and Its Discontents – though Stiglitz’s work focuses on the failings of the international institutions responsible for global economic policy and change to assist the poorest people and countries.
54 In an elegant article, John Shovlin has also shown how jarring it can be to read eighteenth-century French texts in the light of Hirschman’s conclusions. Shovlin’s reading of Siéyès reveals, for example, that “honor” and not interest was the driving desire of those engaged in economic activity. See his “Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (Reference Shovlin2003): 224.
55 In a later groundbreaking article, “Rival Interpretations,” Hirschman began to address this possibility. Looking backwards through a Marxist lens, he offered a diagram of the various interactions between what he termed the “DC,” or doux commerce, and the “SD,” or self-destruction, theses of capitalist theory, concluding that in some instances these two interpretations coexisted. Yet Hirschman here considered mainly nineteenth-century texts.
56 To be sure, and the contributors to the special issue, “Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment,” for Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques. (1999) 25, no. 2, 180, have highlighted that “the philosophes were the first to make such tensions the continuous theme of their work and the essays in this volume display a fascination with the topic of ambivalence.” Anthony Strugnell early on pointed to the ambivalence towards the theoretical and practical bases of commerce in eighteenth-century France. See “Matérialisme, histoire et commerce: Diderot entre le réel et l’idéal dans l’ Histoire des deux Indes,” in and , eds., Etre matérialiste à l’âge des Lumières: Hommage offert à Roland Desné. (Paris: PUF, 1999), 296–97.
57 The term was first introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) in 1910 to describe the dominant symptom of schizophrenia. It was later adopted by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1912–13). In both instances, the category implied the “simultaneous presence of conflicting feelings and tendencies with respect to an object.” Victor Souffir, “Ambivalence” in Alain de Mijolla, ed., International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Detroit: Thomson Gale, Reference Mijolla2005), 56.
58 Cf. , “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” October28 (1984): 125–33, and , ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2000), 68, 209.
59 I will henceforth refer to this work as the Histoire des deux Indes or the Histoire in the text, and the HDI in the notes.
60 See Dickey, “Doux-Commerce and the ‘Mediocrity of Money’ in the Ideological Context of the Wealth and Virtue Problem,” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, abridged with commentary by Laurence Dickey (Indianapolis: Hackett, Reference Dickey1993), 245.
61 The first version of the HDI (Amsterdam, 1770) appeared in 1772 and comprised seven volumes in-8o. The second version of 1774 was augmented slightly, but the greatest changes occurred to the third version, which increased to ten volumes in-8o by 1780. A fourth, posthumous edition appeared in 1821, collated and annotated by academician and journalist Antoine Jay (1770–1854) and journalist and administrator Jacques Peuchet (1758–1830). In its final form, the work was divided geographically into nineteen books – each subdivided into numerous chapters – and included an atlas and a comprehensive index. The 1780 version is considered the most complete and forms the basis of the Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle’s new critical edition. The first of this new critical edition’s five volumes, as well as a volume of maps and charts, appeared in 2010. I draw on this third version in what follows. In using the term version here I follow the principles of the first modern critical edition of the work, under the direction of Anthony Strugnell, which distinguishes between four main versions of the text, of which there were several editions. See et al., “Bibliographie sommaire des éditions de l’Histoire des deux Indes,” in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique du commerce et des établissements des européens dans les deux Indes (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2010), liii–lxxx.
62 Robert Darnton calculated early on that the Histoire ranked fifth among the “forbidden” bestselling works of eighteenth-century France. See The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 63.
63 This is not to mention the number of extracts and other abbreviated versions which appeared in pamphlets and various collections. On the work’s several editions see , “La bibliographie matérielle et l’Histoire des deux Indes,” L’Histoire des deux Indes: Réécriture et polygraphie, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz, eds. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 44–45. On the HDI’s numerous extracts and their significance, see Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “L’Histoire des deux Indes et ses Extraits: un mode de dispersion textuelle au XVIIIe siècle,” Littérature 69 (Reference Lüsebrink1988), 28–41. Smith’s Wealth of Nations was first published on 9 March 1776 and ran to six editions in 1791. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds., Introduction to The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Reference Campbell and Skinner1976), 61–64.
64 The greatest number of translations were in the English language, followed by German, Russian, and Italian. On these, and the circulation of the text in the United States and South America – especially Brasil, Mexico, and Venezuela – see , “Introduction générale,” Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2010), xlix.
65 For comparisons between the Histoire des deux Indes and the Encyclopédie, see , Diderot, De l’athéisme à l’anticolonialisme (Paris: François Maspéro, 1981); , “Trop(icaliz)ing the Enlightenment,” Diacritics23, no. 3 (1993): 51–52; and , “L’appel au lecteur dans l’Histoire des deux Indes,” in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Anthony Strugnell, eds., L’Histoire des deux Indes: Réécriture et polygraphie, (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 53–67.
66 The practice of whipping and burning (“lacérer et brûler”) books at the base of the grand staircase of the Parisian “Palace of Justice” was reserved for a select 19 of the more than 700 books condemned between 1770 and 1789. As Robert Darnton notes, authorities recognised (and feared) the publicity that this type of autodafé would create. Cf. Édition et sédition, 13.
67 The HDI was the book “most frequently confiscated in the Paris Customs” (at 45 confiscations, followed by Voltaire’s Oeuvres at 41, Rousseau’s Émile at 12, tied with the sexually explicit Thérèse philosophe at 12, and d’Holbach’s atheist Système de la nature at 8) from January 1711 to September 1789. See Robert Darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769–1789 (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, Reference Darnton1995), 258–59. The first censure placed on the HDI was by the King’s State Council, which issued the Arrest du Conseil d’état du roi, qui supprime un imprimé ayant pour titre: Histoire philosophique & politique des etablissemens & du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes [par G.T. Raynal]. Du 19 décembre 1772. Extrait des registres du Conseil d’État (Paris: Chez P.G. Simon, imprimeur du Parlement, 1773). The order for the HDI to be “lacéré et brûlé” is found in the Arrest de la Cour de Parlement, qui condamne un imprimé, en dix vol. in-8, ayant pour titre, Histoire philosophique … à être lacéré et brûlé par l’exécuteur de la Haute-Justice (Paris, 25 May 1781). Finally, the University of Paris singled out eighty-four heretical propositions in its Determinatio sacrae facultatis Parisiensis in librum cui titulus, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes par Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, A Geneve, chez Jean-Léonard Pellet, Imprimeur de la Ville & de l’Académie, 1780 (Paris, 1781). To place the academic censure of the HDI in perspective, we might here recall that nineteen propositions extracted from the 1750 edition of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois had also been censured by the Sorbonne in 1754. See Victor Goldschmidt, ed., De l’Esprit des Lois (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, Reference Goldschmidt1979), 8. It is also relevant to note that in the so-called liberal years of the Old Regime (1770–89), on average only four to five books were banned per year. See Robert Darnton, Édition et sédition: L’univers de la littérature clandestine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, Reference Darnton1991), 13.
68 Quoted in Kors, Holbach’s Coterie, 228–29. Raynal was in fact allowed to plan for a rather pleasant exile from France, where he was celebrated in cities across Europe. He was allowed to return in 1784, though he was forbidden entry into Paris. Ibid.
69 Certainly, demand for the new editions of the work (arriving clandestinely from abroad) soared immediately after the Parlement’s burning of the HDI. The bookseller “Esprit,” for example, sold 400 copies of the in-octavo edition in ten days, for the “crazy price” of seventy-five livres. See Darnton, Édition et sédition, 46. Denis Diderot famously kidded: “How often would the bookseller and author of a privileged work, if they had dared, have said to the magistrates: ‘Sirs, by grace, a little arrest to condemn me to be whipped and burned at the base of your grand staircase?’ When a book’s sentence is cried out, workers at the printer’s say: ‘Good, another edition!’” In Lettre adressée à un magistrat sur le commerce de la librarie, quoted in Darnton, Édition et sédition, 13.
70 See the papers in Lüsebrink and Tietz, Lectures de Raynal, and Lüsebrink and Strugnell, Histoire des deux Indes, which opened a new phase of scholarship on the HDI following the still fundamental quartet of studies by Anatole Feugère (Reference Feugère1922), Hans Wolpe (Reference Wolpe1956), Yves Benot (1970), and Michèle Duchet (Reference Duchet1971, Reference Duchet1978).
71 Raynal never called himself “éditeur,” however. We have a remarkably limited sense of Raynal’s persona and private life. For what is still the most comprehensive biography of Raynal, see Anatole Feugère, Un précurseur de la Révolution: L’Abbé Raynal (1713–1796) (Angoulême: Impr, ouvrière, Reference Feugère1922). Drawing on Feugère, Alan Kors brought Raynal and his world to life in D’Holbach’s Coterie, especially 21–22, 160–63, and 179–85. As both a servant of the absolute monarchy and a member of the Republic of Letters, the critical movement which opposed it, Raynal belonged to an influential demographic in eighteenth-century France, where these apparently contradictory roles were quite common. See Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 28–34. Cf. Norbert Elias’s, The Court Society (1969, and 1983 in English), where he famously argued that a “civilizing process” managed by the absolute monarchy in effect subordinated elite figures and French men of letters, while allowing them to see themselves as polished superiors. Daniel Gordon offered an important revision of this thesis when he established that French authors, like Raynal, in fact carved out a “unique ideological space that was neither absolutist nor democratic.” Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty, 4.
72 For Raynal’s claim, see HDI (1780), book 1, intro, 2.
73 See Anatole Feugère, “Raynal, Diderot et quelques autres historiens des deux Indes.” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 20 (Reference Feugère1913): 345.
74 See Feugère, Un précurseur de la Révolution, 177, and , Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: Bibliothèque de L’Évolution de l’Humanité, 1971. Reprint. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 126.
75 On Diderot’s status as a philosopher, then and now, see Michel Delon’s “Préface” to Denis Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), ix–xii.
76 Notable exceptions are the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, which published an edition of Diderot’s Political Writings in 1992, edited by John Hope Mason and the late Robert Wokler, followed by Anthony Pagden’s seminal European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, 1993). A decade later, political theorist Sankar Muthu engaged with Diderot’s work in his Enlightenment against Empire. I share in their aim to bring to light Diderot’s political and economic thought both within the Histoire and in texts written contemporaneously with it so as to restore Diderot’s place in our understanding of eighteenth-century imperialism and commerce. Equally central to this historiographical vein are the works of Srinivas Aravamudan and Sunil Agnani.
77 Wilda Anderson articulates this point in Diderot’s Dream. Indeed, Diderot’s contributions to the Histoire might be considered the paradigmatic example of what critics following Jean Starobinski have construed as his tendency to “transfer” his speech and arguments to others. See Jean Starobinski, “Diderot et la parole des autres,” Critique296 (Reference Starobinski1972): 10–11. On Diderot’s “astonishing usage of intertextuality,” and the “heteroclite treasure of the Diderotian spirit,” see Barbara de Negroni, “Diderot et le bien d’autrui,” in Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni, eds., Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, Reference Negroni, Delon and Negroni2010), xxvii.
78 Michèle Duchet, “L’Histoire des deux Indes: Sources et structure d’un texte polyphonique,” in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz, eds., Lectures de Raynal (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Reference Duchet1991), 9–15, and Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 170–73. Hans-Jurgen Lüsebrink and Anthony Strugnell note the work’s “kaleidoscope of registers” in their introduction to Histoire des deux Indes, 7. On the historian’s choice to consider a document a “tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning,” see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reference Pocock1985), 193.
79 , “On labelling Raynal’s Histoire: Reflections on its Genre and Subject,” (paper presented at “Raynal’s ‘Histoire des deux Indes’: Colonial Writing, Cultural Exchange and Social Networks in the Age of the Enlightenment,” Cambridge, 1–3 July 2010), forthcoming in conference proceedings. See also Gianluigi Goggi, “L’Histoire des deux Indes et l’éloquence politique,” SVEC 7 (Reference Goggi2003): 123–61.
80 Contemporaries referred to themselves as members of the “République des lettres.” For the history of the term, see Françoise Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres? Essai de sémantique historique,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 147 (Reference Waquet1989): 473–502.
81 The term and concept “enlightenment disposition” is Emma Rothschild’s. See Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16. This interpretation of the Enlightenment as a space of contest and not uniformity also aligns with Mark Hulliung’s The Autocritique of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Reference Hulliung1998), and David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reference Bates2002).
82 HDI (1780), book 19, 374.
83 Recall that the term is Yves Benot’s. See “Diderot, Pechméja, Raynal,” 147.
84 This was Friedrich Melchior Grimm writing in his Corresponance littéraire in 1758. Cited in , “Introduction” to Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 8.
