Nature's Evil

EIGHT

Resource Projects

Empire was a social practice. Its political economy had many practitioners, and there were also critics; theoreticians were few. Political thinkers taught about valour and glory, war and peace; they didn’t discuss where the government would find the money for the upkeep of its army. Mercenaries were the crown’s main expense, and they did not forgive debts, so the crown had to borrow. Using banks to finance debt, rulers needed revenue from which they could repay their loans. Governments increased taxes on the peasants, but they had always lived on the breadline. Only ‘industry’, ‘commerce’ and ‘colonies’ could improve the state finances. Waged for the sake of colonies, wars created debts which were secured by future revenue from those colonies. All three elements of this system – colonial profits, bank credits and mercenary armies – depended on the expected resources in the newly conquered territories. But these profits fell disappointingly short, and vanguard theories developed on the ruins of failed practices.

Robinson Crusoe on the British Isles

Daniel Defoe was perhaps the first theoretician of the new system of imperial economy. A prolific writer and skilful spy, Defoe is remembered for his Robinson Crusoe , but he also wrote hundreds of analytical briefs for both the Whigs and the Tories. In one of his early texts, An Essay upon Projects (1697), Defoe compared fashionable world-shaking schemes – the new specialty of the educated elite – to the Tower of Babel, ‘too big to be manag’d, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing’. 1 Many such projects were connected to the new colonies. Some worked, others failed, and the only proof of the pudding was in the eating.

Together with his Scots friend William Paterson, Defoe worked on creating the Bank of England; a little less ambitious than the Tower of Babel, this project met with success. Incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1694, the new bank would finance the crown’s war efforts by selling its own shares at 8 per cent annual interest. It would cover this debt from taxes on the tonnage of ships, and also from duty on wine and beer. In this balanced way, the Bank of England brought the colonial and domestic influx of revenue to one place. In a pamphlet concerning standing armies (1698), Defoe wrote that wealth would win wars, while the idea of military valour was archaic, ‘Gothic’. A truly modern thinker, Defoe despised the Gothic past – the realm of brute force, subsistence farming and chivalric romances. What the country needed was a standing army that would be supported by Parliament and financed by regular taxes and tariffs.

A worldwide best-seller, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a refutation of Don Quixote , written a hundred years earlier. A seafarer, sugar planter and slave trader, Robinson embodied the image of early capitalism just as Don Quixote symbolised the vanished Middle Ages. After crossing two oceans, Robinson returns to England overland, through China and Russia, with a consignment of Russian fur – a strangely archaic product of his adventures. But in his work of 1728, A Plan of the English Commerce , Defoe called for the factory processing of English wool to supply Europe and the colonies with ready-made products. A nonconformist, Defoe admired Holland and despised Spain. An enthusiast of industry, he was a consistent mercantilist. In 1706, Defoe set off for Scotland to secure its merger with England; his partner was again William Paterson, the Scottish trader who had made a fortune in the West Indies. Defoe was then working for Robert Harley, who prepared the Union with Scotland Act (1706) and concluded the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). State finances were a perennial headache for this restless statesman. In 1711 he created the South Sea Company, whose task was to convert state debt into shares and secure them by future colonies. A royal charter granted this company a monopoly on trade with South America. By buying shares in the new company, Englishmen were investing in anticipated revenue from the silver mines, sugar plantations and fishing grounds which still belonged to the Spanish enemy. The alchemy of stock markets would solve the problems of financing wars much more effectively than a tax inspector.

Under the Peace Treaty of Utrecht, Spain was forced to open its American ports to British trade. There was no demand for English wool products in the tropics, but the South Sea Company delivered many thousands of African slaves to the Spanish plantations in exchange for silver and sugar. In this way, the company exchanged services for raw materials – a mission worthy of the empire. In 1718 a new war began, and Spain confiscated many English assets in the Southern Atlantic. The shares of the South Sea Company reached a peak in 1720 (in one year they rose tenfold) and then collapsed. Defoe also lost his fortune and spent time in a debtor’s prison. His most successful projects were his novels. Moll Flanders was full of scenes of vice and retribution. Moll crosses the Atlantic, going back and forth between tobacco plantations in the colonies and sex work in the mother country. Repenting of incest, bigamy and other sins, Moll thanks the hand of Providence: sentenced to hard labour, she flees to America, where she buys a plantation. Apparently, a benevolent Providence was a speciality of the colonies.

The South Sea Company was one of the first stock market bubbles; many other ‘projects’ would follow. The old money of the Don Quixotes flew into the new pockets of the Robinson Crusoes. Robert Walpole became first lord of the Treasury, Harley was put in prison, and Defoe began working for Walpole. The new government’s strategy was to withdraw from colonial escapades; Walpole focused on local industry, and primarily on the processing of wool. Implementing the teachings of mercantilism, he banned the building of metal-making factories and big ships in America. The Navigation Acts controlled commerce on the seas: colonial commodities and British goods could be transported only on British ships. The sole task of the colonies was to produce raw materials and deliver them to England.

Darien

In the meantime, England had annexed its nearest and arguably most important colony – Scotland. As an undercover agent, Defoe had contributed to preparing the Union of 1707. He saw in Scotland a brave but poor nation – freedom and industry were all that she needed. However, Scotland had just as much freedom as England; what Scotland lacked was colonies. Everyone knew the role that sugar, tobacco and other commodities played in English prosperity. The Scots must create their own colonial project. Looking at the map, Defoe’s colleague Paterson chose the isthmus of Darien. Connecting South and North America, this is the place where the Panama Canal is now located. If a trading colony, New Caledonia, were to be established there, an overland porterage would provide a short cut between England and India, or Scotland and China. Paterson told stories about the gold that the indigenous people in Darien wore. Stocks of fish and game were untouched, the natives were friendly, the Spanish were far away, and the British fleet would provide armed support. In fact, Paterson had read about Darien in a book written by a former pirate. He had promised to marry the daughter of a local chief, and his maps turned out to be as unreliable as his marriage proposal.

Paterson formed the Darien Company, and the Scottish Parliament supported the project. The whole country bought its shares; it is estimated that a fifth of all the money then in circulation in Scotland was invested in the company. But the planned expedition rang alarm bells in London: the porterage in Darien would be in competition with the East India Company’s ships. In 1698 a fleet of five ships prepared to set sail to Darien. Led by Paterson, they were loaded with industrial goods – cauldrons, crockery, weapons – which would be exchanged for gold, spices and other treasures of the East. Paterson had reasons to fear a confrontation with the English Navy, and his ships cast off from Kirkcaldy, a harbour north of Edinburgh. For some reason this port and the neighbouring county of Fife became the cradle of economics. The economist and ‘projector’ John Law had been born in Fife a quarter of a century earlier. A quarter of a century later, Adam Smith would be born in Kirkcaldy.

The Scottish expedition arrived at the isthmus and built a fort, defended by fifty cannon. Difficulties soon ensued – the greatest problem was malaria. The colony didn’t last even a year; only a handful of colonists managed to flee to New York. Meanwhile the Scots had sent another thousand settlers to New Caledonia. Defoe wrote about the Darien disaster as a ‘contrivance’ – just another failed project. 2 But thousands of Scots perished, many families were on the verge of bankruptcy, and the local shilling was devalued. Broken by events, the Scottish elite agreed to the formation of the Union with England in 1707. Scholars working on David Hume detect the influence of the Darien trauma on his work. 3 Adam Smith grew up with the stories of his fellow countrymen who sailed to their deaths from the village where he was born. It was a national trauma, barely remembered today. *

The regent and coffee

Meanwhile, the French king Louis XIV broke all records with his seventy-two years on the throne. His rule was long and pleasant, but it turned out that he was mortal. A virtuoso of political evil, the king left France with a debt of 3 billion livres and a tax system that failed to collect even 5 per cent of this sum. The greater part of this debt was linked to France’s defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession – a global conflict about overseas and European colonies. England won the war, and Louis XIV lost Canada, with its beaver and fish, but kept a colony to the south. Named in 1682 in honour of the king, Louisiana was a godforsaken place. The French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle had begun his adventures much further north, at the Great Lakes, and expected to find friendly natives and fur-clad animals on the Mississippi as well. The French had no concept of the vastness of the new continent; Louis XIV ordered de La Salle to continue south to seize the silver mines of Peru. Five years later, in Texas, de La Salle perished at the hands of his own sailors. But as a result of his efforts the French territory extended from modern Louisiana to Minnesota, encompassing eight American states. Neither beavers nor metals were to be found in this vast territory. The climate was too cool for sugar cane. The white population of French America was negligible. The bloody War of the Spanish Succession had lasted thirteen years, and only one French expedition had sailed up the Mississippi. Meanwhile France itself was turning into a wild wetland like Louisiana.

Philippe, duke of Orléans, became regent – he was married to his first cousin, a daughter of the late king. Voltaire later spread rumours that Philippe was having an affair with his own daughter, the duchess of Berry, and had fathered her child. For this impertinence, Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote his first play, Oedipus . Unabashed, the regent and his daughter attended the opening performance. Ancient Egypt was just becoming fashionable, and these French royals saw themselves more like pharaohs than emperors, whose powers were a little too limited. But the duke of Orléans was an enlightened ruler. In the recent war he had been a successful military leader; as head of state he became a peacemaker. But there was no money for reconstruction. The great building projects of the previous reign – Versailles and others – were a cause of financial outlay. Paris had no banks, although Genoa and Amsterdam had successfully run banks for years, and even London had one. But the elite, who had been longing for peace, gave themselves up to pleasure. As the Russian romantic writer Alexander Pushkin wrote in his historical novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , ‘The Duke of Orléans, combining many brilliant qualities with vices of every sort, unfortunately possessed not the slightest degree of hypocrisy. The orgies which took place at the Palais Royal were no secret to Paris; the example was contagious.’ 4

It wasn’t just the orgies that were contagious. One after another, fashionable coffeehouses opened around the Palais Royal. Louis XIV had his first taste of coffee with the Ottoman ambassador and received a coffee bush as a gift. According to legend, seedlings from this bush started the coffee plantations in Martinique. By the middle of the eighteenth century, millions of these bushes were growing in the French Atlantic colonies. ‘The whole of Paris turned into one big café,’ wrote the historian Jules Michelet about the regency. Indeed, the French Revolution began in the coffeehouses near the Palais Royal. Discussing human and civil rights, the revolutionaries drank coffee, stirred sugar into it and smoked tobacco, which were all produced by black slave labour. In Radishchev’s Journey (see chapter 4 ), two white men chat over coffee in far-away Russia: ‘“Remember”, my friend once said, “that the coffee in your cup and the sugar dissolved in it, have deprived a man like yourself of his rest, that they have been the cause … of tears, groans, blows and abuse …” – my hand trembled and I spilled the coffee.’ 5 In Voltaire’s Candide , it is the mutilated black slave who speaks. ‘If we catch a finger in the sugar mill where we work, they cut off our hand; if we try to run away, they cut off our leg. I have undergone both these experiences.’ 6

John Law

In the first year of his regency, the duke of Orléans was persuaded by the Scottish economist John Law to launch a very unusual project. Law, the son of a jeweller, was known in London for his luck in games of chance. But he had killed someone in a duel and somehow escaped from prison. After an unsuccessful attempt to start a national bank in Scotland, he moved to Paris. There he got to know the regent, also a gambler and libertine. The Scottish economist explained to the French regent that a country needs money like a body needs blood; that there would be no income from taxes until the circulation of money was re-established; and that gold wasn’t essential to achieve it – there were other means. The last point was of particular interest to the regent. As Pushkin wrote, ‘It was at this time that Law appeared. Greed for money was united to a thirst for enjoyment and dissipation. Estates vanished; morals went by the board; Frenchmen laughed and calculated, and the state fell to pieces to the skittish music of the satirical vaudevilles.’ 7

Paper money was John Law’s pet subject. In England it had been introduced to finance the war effort; Sweden and even far-off Massachusetts had also experimented with bank notes. At first these pieces of paper functioned as credit notes, and they guaranteed precise sums of gold or silver. The probability that all the bank’s clients would simultaneously want to cash in their bank notes didn’t seem very likely, and the banks issued more notes than they could redeem. The supply of money grew while the metal was locked in the bank’s safes. Now the banks could give credit to merchants, princes and generals without running out of money. Law wrote that, if England were to convert her circulating paper notes back into silver, the volume of its trade would be halved. 8

Then it turned out that probability theory, which was also developing then, was not entirely applicable to banking. Economic agents are mutually dependent and inclined to run into difficulties simultaneously. Granted, different clients took credit for different reasons and would lose their fortunes at different moments. But they all went to the bank to change their bank notes for gold every time they felt that a crisis was looming; moreover, this feeling arose in different people simultaneously. The first newspapers in Europe appeared at about the same time as paper money. Every day they published the value of shares and currencies, as well as reports from battlefields, geographical discoveries and high society rumours. Various investors all read the same newspapers.

John Law knew that, in England and the Netherlands, paper money was backed by gold. France had no such reserves. Her national wealth consisted of land, and Law proposed to create a land bank which would release money guaranteed by land. Every unit equalled a specific portion of land; on demand, the bank would have to distribute land from its reserves in exchange for the assignat. The amount of the bank’s land would grow as a result of colonial conquests, and the quantity of money would also increase accordingly. If there was enough money in circulation, wrote John Law, French land would be just as well cultivated as Dutch.

In May 1716, the regent approved John Law’s project. The new Banque Générale was privately owned, and everyone could buy shares. Soon the regent ordered his agents in the provinces to collect taxes exclusively in this bank’s notes. Law could barely print them quickly enough to meet the demand. The regent also founded a new joint stock company, to which he handed over the management of all the French colonies. Merged with Law’s bank, this company changed its name several times; the Company of the West, the Company of the Indies and, finally, the Mississippi Company. French bank notes were now guaranteed by the vast territory of Louisiana. The city of New Orleans, named in honour of the regent, was founded in the malarial swamps in 1718. John Law sent 6,000 white and 3,000 ‘coloured’ settlers to Louisiana.

The crown was paying the interest on its huge wartime debt to numerous rentiers – wealthy citizens who owned bonds issued by the government. Now the regent transferred the whole French national debt to the Mississippi Company: it would be covered by the income from the Louisiana swamps. The young regent won plaudits in Paris; he had found a way of monetising the ‘civilising mission’, in which the French were losing faith. This was how things should be: the empire’s outgoings would be offset by income from the colonies.

The business grew – John Law added French colonies in Africa to his company. Within three years its share value went from 140 to more than 10,000 livres . On the black market, shares were even traded at 18,000; people who couldn’t obtain shares bought options and futures, which were another invention of the time. At the beginning of 1720 John Law was made general controller of finances. Renamed as the Banque Royale, his bank became the first central bank in French history. The rentiers became richer than ever before. The most fortunate became millionaires – this was when the term ‘millionaire’ was first used in French. The biggest shareholders of the company obtained the rights of ownership on large plots of land on the banks of the Mississippi. The newspapers published articles about silver deposits found west of the Mississippi – the rock there was apparently richer in silver than the Peruvian mines. Misleading articles, images and maps buoyed up the rise in share prices. This was the dawn of PR.

In fact, the Parisian millionaires could place their hopes only in three sorts of raw matter from Louisiana: tobacco, sugar and felt. Tobacco required a mass influx of African slaves, and they had to be fed. Sugar cane from Saint-Domingue was planted right in the middle of today’s New Orleans; but, even in good years, the sugar was of low quality, and in cold years it didn’t grow at all. After they lost Canada, the French kept on hoping that they would find beaver and establish trading posts in Louisiana. They didn’t know that there were no beavers south of the Hudson. The stock market bubble fed on nostalgia for the lost colonies. Unprofitable Louisiana was passed from hand to hand over the course of many years. Half a century after John Law, as a result of the Seven Years’ War, Louisiana passed to the Spanish Empire. Then Napoleon got it back, only to sell it to the United States. These lands would become commercially successful much later, when slaves drained the swamps, built canals and developed cotton plantations.

The profits reaped by the regent and some shareholders in Paris derived not from overseas colonies but from French subjects. But John Law did fulfil some of his promises. He almost eliminated the national debt. His currency was convertible – shares could be exchanged for bank notes and bank notes for silver. The aristocracy experienced the pleasures of money, but they hardly understood the reason for the ebbs and flows in their accounts. The financial system assembled by Law was very complex; the Parisian public lacked the financial know-how to keep up with his creation. Thanks to the inexperience of the shareholders the crash was a long time coming, but then everything unravelled very fast. In the spring of 1720, the value of shares collapsed and Law stopped their conversion to gold. The price of bread in Paris rose instantly by 50 per cent. Angry Parisians occupied the financial quarter, which was situated near the regent’s palace. John Law fled from Paris.

In March 1721, Peter the Great of Russia ordered his College of Mines to offer John Law a princely title, the rank of active privy councillor, the order of St Andrew, and estates with 2,000 households and 6,000 serfs. Law would also have the right to build towns, invite foreign manufactories and create trading companies. In return, Law was expected to put Russian trade with Persia on a new footing and fill the state coffers with a million roubles in silver. Having conquered the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, Peter wanted to found a Persian trading company, giving to it extensive rights along the lines of the Mississippi Company. The east was still seen as full of treasures; Peter’s idea was that a new Silk Road would run through Russian territory, providing the crown with tariffs. 9 A new city at the estuary of the River Kura, where it drained into the Caspian Sea, would give the empire the industry which the city at the estuary of the Neva had long failed to provide. To achieve all this, Peter needed John Law, who was at that moment a bankrupt and a refugee. But Law didn’t accept Peter the Great’s invitation. Perhaps he knew how difficult it would be to get a million roubles in silver from the shores of the Caspian Sea, devastated by war.

At the peak of the market boom Law was believed to be the richest person of his time apart from kings, but he hung on to his shares right up until the crash. After fleeing Paris in a borrowed carriage, he succeeded in saving a few of his assets. When he died eight years later in Venice he left a big art collection – eighty-one crates of paintings, including canvases by Leonardo and Titian. The collection was to be shipped to Amsterdam, but the ship ran into a storm and the canvases got drenched. Out of all that wealth, only a few paintings survived.

In 1828 another talented schemer, Alexander Griboyedov, the Russian ambassador to Persia, presented the government with the idea of a Transcaucasian company. The idea – to capitalise on Persian trade and the fertile lands of the Caucasus – was the same one that Peter had proposed to Law. Griboyedov modelled his ‘project’ on the British East India Company. He asked the government to give his company land, the right to resettle serfs from central Russia, and to be free from all taxes, duties and conscription for fifty years. According to Griboyedov’s calculations, Russian merchants were spending huge sums, more than 10 million roubles a year, on purchasing colonial materials – cloth, sugar, dyes, dried fruits – from the British East India Company; the new Transcaucasian company would substitute its own products for these imports. 10 The plan was rejected, and Griboyedov was killed in a massacre in Tehran. Like Defoe, he was more successful as a writer than as a ‘projecter’ – he is remembered today for his comedy Woe from Wit .

Cantillon

In pioneering the banking business in France, the Scot John Law was joined by another unlikely hero, the Irishman Richard Cantillon. Like many in the social sciences, Cantillon was a political refugee. His parents were Irish Catholics, and their estate was confiscated by the English. Cantillon moved to France and began working in the new bank founded by Law, first as an employee and then as a junior partner. Having made money with the Mississippi Company, by 1719 he decided that the boom had reached its peak, and sold his shares. He was too hasty; the shares he sold tripled in value before they became worthless. This sale of securities brought him into conflict with Law, and he left for Italy. Later, in 1734, Cantillon was burnt to death in his own home in the centre of London. His cook was suspected of having started the fire – he disappeared with documents and jewels. Later a certain Chevalier de Louvigny was discovered in distant Surinam. Allegedly, he possessed papers and other things which belonged to Cantillon. Antoin E. Murphy from Trinity College Dublin, who has written Cantillon’s biography, believes that this chevalier was actually Cantillon, who had himself started the fire in London and fled to Surinam. 11 If he had lived in Surinam for another twenty years he might well have met Candide and his accidental friend, the mutilated slave. I think Cantillon would have loved to talk to them.

All that has come down to us is Cantillon’s treatise An Essay on Economic Theory . Written in 1730 and published in French in 1755 as Essai sur la nature du commerce en général , this book was largely ignored, though Adam Smith duly referred to it. Much later, William S. Jevons, who ‘rediscovered’ the book and translated it into English, wrote that it was, ‘more emphatically than any other single work, the cradle of political economy’. Labour without land is worthless, as is land without labour. As long as land is freely available, ‘men multiply like mice in a barn,’ wrote Cantillon. The general measure that expresses value is not gold, but land. John Law had also built his ‘system’ on this theory, but Cantillon’s examples showed more clearly how it worked. The humblest life can subsist on one and a half acres per head. The price of a finished product could be calculated in units of land. An acre will graze enough sheep to provide sufficient wool for a suit, but a suit made of fine wool would need ten times more land to feed spinners and tailors. Wine in Paris costs more than wine in Burgundy because of delivery costs, which could also be calculated in the units of land that horses and coachmen need for subsistence.

Labour could increase the value of a natural product many times over. For Cantillon, this is a miracle which needs investigating. He was surprised to learn that, in the steel spring inside an English watch, the relation of the cost of the material to the cost of the work was one to a million. His method celebrated the superiority of labour over land. If one country exchanges its labour for the raw materials of another country, then the first country will have the advantage in this trade, since it maintains its people at the expense of that other country. As an example, Cantillon puts forward the trade between Paris and Brussels: lace is exchanged for champagne for the sum of 100,000 ounces of silver per year. He calculates that the harvest of a single acre of Flemish flax, with value added by the Brussels lace-makers, is equal in value to the wine from 16,000 acres of French vines. Thanks to this exchange, many people could live on every acre of Flemish land, doing other things – shipbuilding, military service or scholarly work – and buying food from Burgundy or elsewhere. The more productive the labour, the less land it needs for creating wealth. Thousands of acres of French land went to Brabant along with the barrels of wine every year, just as if France had temporarily lost this land in a war. From Brussels, Cantillon went on to examine the problems of Eastern Europe. If a Polish landowner is also fond of Brussels lace, it will cost him a sixth of the income that he receives from selling the grain grown on his estate; if he is fond of wines from Burgundy, he will pay another sixth of his income for them. In exchange for the product of 1 acre of land in Brabant and 1,500 acres of land in Burgundy, the Polish landowner will give grain harvested on hundreds of thousands of acres of his own land. In this way Holland and Flanders maintain half of their population, exchanging the fruits of their labours for products from a foreign land. For any single product, the higher the value of human labour and the lower that of raw material, the better it is for the economy that trades in this product. 12

Cantillon looked at energy and mines as well. England prospers thanks to its deposits of coal, he wrote. He calculates that English coal saved several millions of acres which would otherwise be needed to grow timber – those very same acres which 300 years later would be called ‘ghost acres’. Some mines create wealth, wrote Cantillon, others lose money. The more gold or silver the Spanish mines extract, the more meat the Spaniards will eat and the more luxuries they will buy. The higher the value of land in a particular country, the higher the prices of all other goods. Moreover, explains Cantillon, wages don’t rise in line with prices, because they had been fixed by contract. While the entrepreneurs and landowners are counting their profits, it will become clear to the workers that their wages buy fewer and fewer goods. Some of them will tighten their belts, others will emigrate. Exacerbating inequality, the wealth of the mines has a ruinous effect on farms and factories. A part of the new money will be spent on importing foreign goods, and the country’s own industry will go into decline. Poverty and neglect will be evident everywhere. Cantillon is describing the mechanism of the ‘Dutch disease’ hundreds of years before it was identified.

Law and Cantillon’s experiment in Paris was a lesson for the teachers of the Enlightenment. The young Voltaire triumphantly observed the collapse of the Mississippi Company; a financial counterpart of the Lisbon earthquake, it probably played a role in his mockery of optimism. Montesquieu met Law and had in-depth discussions with him when the latter was already in disgrace; this experience must have fed into Montesquieu’s ideas about trade and power. The Abbé Prévost wrote about this era in a popular novel, The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut (1731). In this world of rich idlers and savage inequality, government favours can be bought as easily as sexual services. After a chance encounter, a man gives a woman a house, a carriage, a maid, three lackeys and a cook. The Chevalier des Grieux lives with Manon, but she is deported to Louisiana as a prostitute. Things do not go as well for Manon Lescaut in Louisiana as they went for Moll Flanders in Virginia. Astonished by the poverty of New Orleans, des Grieux buries Manon after she dies in the wilderness. Right up until the publication of Candide in 1759, the novel remained the favourite reading of the Enlightenment public. Voltaire and his enlightened friends willingly, although at a price, gave advice to the Russian empress, recommending that she widen her empire and acquire new territories. Nevertheless they believed that colonies were bad for France. For continental Europe, and later for independent America, the task was to find a new post-colonial model of political economy to oppose the ‘British system’.

Note

Notes

1 Defoe, An Essay upon Projects , p. 20; Hamilton and Parker, Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England . 2 McKim, ‘War of words’. 3 Armitage, ‘The Scottish vision of empire’; Prebble, The Darien Disaster ; Roger Emerson, ‘The Scottish contexts’. 4 Pushkin, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , in his Complete Prose Fiction , p. 11. 5 Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow , p. 157. 6 Voltaire, Candide , p. 44. 7 Pushkin, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great , p. 11. 8 Murphy, John Law ; Rist, History of Monetary and Credit Theory . 9 Troitskiy, ‘“Sistema” Dzhona Lo’; Anisimov, Petr I ; Kurukin, Persidskiy pokhod Petra Velikogo , pp. 41–2. 10 Markova, ‘Novyye materialy’. 11 Murphy, Richard Cantillon . 12 Cantillon, An Essay on Economic Theory ; Jevons, ‘Richard Cantillon and the nationality of political economy’; Spengler, ‘Richard Cantillon’; Brewer, ‘Cantillon and Mercantilism’, in Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory ; Thornton, ‘Was Richard Cantillon a mercantilist?’; Ananyin, ‘“Quorum pars magna fui”’.