{"title":"Empire and Enlightenment after John Law: Merchant Capitalism and Political Economy in the French East India Company","authors":"Oliver Cussen","doi":"10.1086/726158","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article accounts for the expansion of French global commerce in the decades after the John Law system (1717–20) and explores the contradictory relationship between two consequences of that expansion: the consolidation of the Old Regime’s fragmented, unevenly developed, and elite-dominated global economy, on the one hand, and the emergence of an abstract and critical discourse of political economy, on the other. The argument is pursued through two figures who were intimately associated with the French East India Company: the financier François Castanier and the philosophe Jean-François Melon. The accumulation strategies of Castanier, a director of the company from the period of the Law system to his death in 1759, reveal the particular logics of merchant capital in Old Regime France. The development of Melon’s ideas, from memoranda written for the company in the 1720s to his influential Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), shows how those operations in turn generated a critical political economy of empire. Reading Melon alongside Castanier, the article recovers the productive but unstable relationship between empire and Enlightenment that emerged out of the French East India Company in the decades after the Law system. In facilitating the career of Castanier, the company offered a blueprint for growth in an economy of finite adaptability. But in provoking the critique of Melon, it revealed how French merchant capitalism generated expectations that the Old Regime was unable to meet.","PeriodicalId":46828,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Modern History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726158","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article accounts for the expansion of French global commerce in the decades after the John Law system (1717–20) and explores the contradictory relationship between two consequences of that expansion: the consolidation of the Old Regime’s fragmented, unevenly developed, and elite-dominated global economy, on the one hand, and the emergence of an abstract and critical discourse of political economy, on the other. The argument is pursued through two figures who were intimately associated with the French East India Company: the financier François Castanier and the philosophe Jean-François Melon. The accumulation strategies of Castanier, a director of the company from the period of the Law system to his death in 1759, reveal the particular logics of merchant capital in Old Regime France. The development of Melon’s ideas, from memoranda written for the company in the 1720s to his influential Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), shows how those operations in turn generated a critical political economy of empire. Reading Melon alongside Castanier, the article recovers the productive but unstable relationship between empire and Enlightenment that emerged out of the French East India Company in the decades after the Law system. In facilitating the career of Castanier, the company offered a blueprint for growth in an economy of finite adaptability. But in provoking the critique of Melon, it revealed how French merchant capitalism generated expectations that the Old Regime was unable to meet.
本文阐述了约翰法体系(1717-20)后几十年法国全球商业的扩张,并探讨了这种扩张的两个后果之间的矛盾关系:一方面,旧政权分散、发展不均衡、精英主导的全球经济的巩固,另一方面,出现了一种抽象的、批判性的政治经济学话语。这一争论是通过两位与法国东印度公司有密切关系的人物展开的:金融家弗朗索瓦·卡斯塔尼尔和哲学家让-弗朗索瓦·梅隆。该公司董事卡斯特尼尔从法统时期到1759年去世的积累策略,揭示了旧法国商业资本的特殊逻辑。从1720年代为该公司撰写的备忘录到他颇具影响力的Essai politique sur le commerce(1734),梅隆思想的发展表明,这些行动反过来又产生了帝国的关键政治经济。与卡斯特尼尔一起阅读《甜瓜》,这篇文章恢复了法国东印度公司在法律体系之后的几十年里出现的帝国与启蒙运动之间富有成效但不稳定的关系。为了促进卡斯特尼尔的职业生涯,该公司提供了在适应性有限的经济中增长的蓝图。但在引发对梅隆的批判时,它揭示了法国商人资本主义是如何产生旧政权无法满足的期望的。
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading American journal for the study of European intellectual, political, and cultural history. The Journal"s geographical and temporal scope-the history of Europe since the Renaissance-makes it unique: the JMH explores not only events and movements in specific countries, but also broader questions that span particular times and places.