British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Lineages of Empire

Convened by Dr Duncan Kelly, University of Sheffield

Thursday 24 August 2006 to Friday 25 August 2006

ABSTRACT

Global commerce and empire in Enlightenment political thought
Prof. Sankar Muthu, Princeton University

What is the relationship between the discourses of global commerce and empire in Enlightenment political thought?  According to Enlightenment political thinkers, does global commerce promote peace among nations or does it instigate violent and corrupting imperial exploits?  Do Enlightenment thinkers believe that global commerce is an antidote to empire—that it might fuel future anti-imperial efforts and a transformation of power relations that will ultimately destroy an unjust European hegemony—or do they view global commerce as a substitute for empire—as a way to engage in a just European-led civilizing mission without the expence and the risks of conquest and military intervention?  I investigate these questions by focusing primarily upon two of the most important and influential theorists of global commerce and empire in the Enlightenment period, Denis Diderot and Adam Smith.  I argue that they both held some version of the 'doux commerce' thesis, but that they also believed that modern commerce had fuelled both wars among nations and the seizure of lands, goods, and peoples in the non-European world.  A deep ambivalence about global commerce, however, did not dissuade these thinkers from theorizing the potential of transcontinental commerce and communication to help produce a more equitable and less violent world.  Unlike Condorcet, who viewed global commerce as a peaceful, non-imperial manner of spreading European civilization abroad, both Diderot and Smith argued that greater trade, travel, and communication among peoples throughout the globe would ultimately make non-European nations stronger.  Their hope was that this shift in geopolitical power would thereby enable non-European peoples to establish their independence, to resist European efforts at interfering with their societies, and to forge a new global order in which European states and their commercial proxies (such as the international trading companies) would no longer have the power to dominate and to shape the rest of the world.  Until that distant future, however, they argued that, tragically, Europeans would be unlikely to engage in humanitarian, anti-imperialist reforms of their commercial institutions and practices—even though it would be in their genuine long-term self-interest to do so—for the deeply unjust system of global commerce that they commanded had too thoroughly corrupted European minds and societies for any chance of enlightened self-reform.  For Diderot and Smith, global commerce might, in the long run, produce some semblance of global justice not because it would allow Europe to export its values abroad, but because it would empower the non-European world and weaken Europe; only with this equity of power could the injustices of the global commercial order be successfully challenged.

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