scholarly journals The Political Economy of Colonisation: Carl Bernhard Wadström’s Case for Abolition and Civilisation

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Ahlskog
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Alternative Reading

<p>This article is an analysis of the Swedish abolitionist and Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s (1746&ndash;1799) writings in the British anti-slavery debate in the years between 1788 and 1795. Previous historical scholarship has seen Wadstr&ouml;m primarily as a Swedenborgian visionary on a quest for religious fulfilment in Africa. An alternative perspective on Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings is offered in this article by highlighting his comparatively overlooked polemical publications and Parliamentary testimonies in the British anti-slavery debate. Instead of treating Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings and colonial plans as manifestations of his Swedenborgian dreams, they are reassessed as contributions to the contemporary anti-slavery debate. The focus is on how Wadstr&ouml;m participated and argued in this debate in order to show the ideological tenets underlying his views. Wadstr&ouml;m is linked to the Scottish Enlightenment discourse by showing how he uses the concepts of classical political economy in his argumentation for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Through this alternative reading of Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings, it is possible to gain another entry point into the complex and motley character of late eighteenth-century political thought in Northern Europe.</p>

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
For Profit

This chapter briefly discusses three insights into early modern British engagement with risk: the presence of a distinct conceptual refinement in late seventeenth-century sources; the tight relationship between risk and trust in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and the character of the political subject, which is worked out in the early modern engagement with risk. Beyond these three observations, the chapter also argues that early modern British engagement with risk offers two narratives—views of risk that persist in our own time and shape our orientation toward an unknown future. These include accounts of risk as a threat to security, as well as depictions of risk as an opportunity to be exploited for profit or gain.

The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port: the political economy of a trans-imperial hub

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Fabricio Prado
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Port City ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Global Connections

Abstract In the late eighteenth century, Montevideo evolved from a small colonial town dependent on Buenos Aires into the main Atlantic port in the region. Networks connecting Montevideo to Luso-Brazilian merchants turned Montevideo into a hub for trans-imperial trade. Between 1778 and 1810, thousands of Spanish and foreign ships entered the port of Montevideo. As a result, although economically dependent on Buenos Aires’ commercial community, Montevideo merchants and authorities managed to use their privileged port, newly created institutions and trans-imperial networks to advance the city's commercial and political role within the estuary. The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port city with global connections was not an isolated event, but a part of a broader process of growing global trade and political transformation.

JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT POLITICAL THOUGHT: FROM THE REFORM OF RUSSIA TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFBILDUNG

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
RETO SPECK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Political ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This essay revises customary interpretations of Johann Gottfried Herder that stress the non-political or anarchical nature of his philosophy and his opposition to Enlightenment thought. Approaching his politics through the idea ofBildung, it argues that Herder first elaborated on this seminal concept in a series of early texts concerned with the reform of Russia. It analyses Herder's writings on Russia in the context of wider Enlightenment debates about the reform of the empire, and shows thatBildungwas employed as a means to mediate between contrasting models of political action put forward by contemporaries such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot. An outline of the subsequent development ofBildungin his anthropological works reinforces the political intention behind the concept, and situates Herder's political thought firmly within late eighteenth-century controversies.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Borderlands of Identity and the Aesthetics of Disjuncture: An Introduction to Scottish Gothic

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Carol Margaret Davison ◽  
Monica Germanà
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
British History ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

The idea of a ‘Gothic Scotland’, however, did not prove difficult to conceptualise in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth when a Romanticised portrait of Scotland furnished the nation’s most prevalent cultural image. As Ian Duncan astutely observes in regard to the politics of literary history, it was ‘Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or commodity’ rather than a site of Romantic production (Duncan et al. 2004: 2). Such an objectification was ironic given the existence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and its rationally fuelled preoccupations. That objectification was also, notably, expressed in two forms – in both the lighter and darker, more Gothic, shades of Romanticism. Despite the differences in these two manifestations, the Highlands served in both as a synecdoche for a Scotland that exemplified two primary attitudes towards ‘British’ history and rapid modernisation.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-161
Author(s):  
Annika Mann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.

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