Atlantic Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Anglo-American theories of Trade and Empire in the 1780s

Andrew Hamilton 

This paper seeks to resolve some of the problems in traditional intellectual history's tendency to historicize economic attitudes toward "mercantilism" and "liberal political economy" into distinct historical periods. Rather, it is my contention that a better approach is to see the different attitudes toward international trade in the early modern period as distinct strands or discourses which, aggregated together, make up the language of free trade. After tracing the two main strands--the vocabulary of laissez-faire and the strand that we might label reason of state--I want to suggest that various economic theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may best be understood in light of these aggregated strands of discourse, and especially in regard to what has become known as the rich country-poor country problem. It is my working hypothesis that when this model is applied to the writings of Benjamin Vaughan and John Adams in the 1780s, it will reveal why Vaughan remains unflinching in his cosmopolitan vision, while Adams retreats from a similar stance to a position of defensive nationalism.

[WP # 99027]