Political Economy and Imperial Governance in Eighteenth-Century Britain
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
Product details
- ISBN 9780367901424
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jun 2021
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This book examines the relationship between imperial governance and political economy in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly in Canada and Ireland. It is concerned with the way economic ideology and party politics were mutually constitutive; and with the way extra-parliamentary interests both facilitated, and were co-opted into, strategies of governance and commercial regulation. Rather than treat political economy as a pre-existing intellectual orthodoxy that shaped imperial policymaking, it focuses on the ways in which economic thought was generated in moments of imperial crisis – especially those where politicians, commercial interest groups, and pamphleteer economists were forced to wrestle with the tensions between economic growth, political authority, and social stability. By rooting economic discourse and debate in specific problems of imperial commerce and administration, and by highlighting the many different actors and negotiations that produced economic policy, it argues that the transition from mercantilism to liberalism – the shift from protectionism to free trade – is a flawed description of eighteenth-century developments in economic thought.
Heather Welland is an assistant professor in the History Department at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
