Moral Discourses of the Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This book presents a comprehensive picture of eighteenth-century British authors’ engagement with a society increasingly driven by commercial interests. The books and pamphlets constituting the “discourses” on economic topics overstep the boundaries separating the domains of economics, religion (William Warburton, John Wesley), law (William Blackstone, Lord Mansfield), history (William Robertson, Edward Gibbon), physiology (Richard Morton, Goerge Cheyne) and politics (Edmund Burke, the Abolitionists). An impartial and inclusive history of the “discourses” is what the book purports to construct. The luminaries of the British (and Scottish) Enlightenment (Adam Smith, David Hume), are given due respects, but a great number of less well-known and even anonymous authors also feature in the book. Giving as much scope as possible to the sources themselves, the book pays attention to both the rhetorical and the thematic layers of the quotations, while keeping generalization and theorizations to the minimum. The “eighteenth-century” in the title begins in the 1680s, when some of the important authors such as Nicholas Barbon published their thoughts, and ends in the 1790s, with the contrastive pair of Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham.