De-Centering Eighteenth-Century Political Economy: Rethinking Growth, Wealth and Welfare in the Swedish Empire (DEPE)

Work package 1 traces the disciplinisation of economics at the Swedish, German and Italian universities in its relationship to natural law, natural history and natural philosophy with a special focus on the Swedish case study. Traditionally, the disciplinary history of eighteenth-century political economy has been treated as a shift from mercantilism to early liberalism. This is also very much true of the Swedish case. The common narrative goes from Anders Berch (1711–1774), the leading ‘mercantilist’ and first professor of ‘economics’, to Anders Chydenius (1729–1803), an early ‘liberal’. However, this project proposes that we need to rethink this narrative.

Preliminary findings suggest that we should instead regard both Berch and Chydenius as ‘improvement thinkers’, whose focus was on bettering the organization of the state and the living conditions of the people. To reassess the disciplinary narrative WP1 engages with encounters between the Kameralwissenchaften, natural law and ‘political economy’ in the intellectual context of eighteenth-century Europe, with an eye towards broader political debates and economic writings. Eighteenth-century discussions of improvement, wealth, growth and welfare were part of a broader concern, across Europe, with the foundations and characteristics of commercial society.

Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that several Swedish writers developed their economic and political thought in interaction with Göttingen and other German centres of Continental political economy. It is known that the course textbook of Anders Berch, the first holder of ‘the chair in economics’, was inspired by German textbooks. On the other hand, Berch’s own textbook was translated into German and was a success in German universities. Here is an example of the tangled history, with a Swedish thinker in conversation with foreign authors exercising influence on discourse elsewhere in Europe. This gives an opportunity to study the creativity of individual agents together with local institutional contexts and conventions, as well as the broader transnational circulation of political economy.

Textbooks are an important source because they gained new prominence in the eighteenth-century university since they were central to new teaching duties. The practice of writing a dissertation, for example, developed in a way that was closely tied to the textbook culture at the centre of academic life in the eighteenth century. And the dissertation was important insofar as it was supposed to cover new areas, questions and educational needs that would later be taught. These new teaching duties also gave rise to new professional and technical media such as professional journals.

A fascinating paradox seems to have developed over the course of the eighteenth century, the era in which the idea of creating a university discipline based upon political economy was pursued. Over the course of the century, the greater the push for the disciplinisation of political economy, the more internally divergent political economy became, as academics drew upon differing resources, ranging from natural law to critical histories of European colonialism. The hypothesis of WP1 is that the overarching concept of improvement overcame this emerging divergence with disciplinisation.

Work package 2 studies the relationship between political freedom and improvement. The fact that Sweden had ‘parliamentary rule’ in the Age of Liberty (1719–1772) gives the WP2 a path linking parliamentary economic legislation to the emergent literature of political economy, improvement in particular. To study this link the second part of the project analyses the parliamentary speeches of the Swedish Diet, in particular the ways in which the members of the parliament discussed measures and practices of improvement. The majority of the topics discussed dealt with economic matters, broadly defined. In these discussions political economy played a crucial role in shaping and implementing improvement proposals across Europe. Often, these suggestions of improvement aimed at the better integration of national markets. One important aspect was the call for more civic freedom. This would encourage industriousness and result in greater wealth, welfare and growth.

The ideas of freedom were coupled with state-centred policies. They were not mutually exclusive in a framework aiming at the simultaneous strengthening of state and market. The demand for more freedom was coupled with the politicisation of the society. In promoting the rise of a new civic consciousness and new ways of conceiving state and society, this politicisation process extended beyond the realm of ideas to affect practical conduct towards the world and environment.

The politicisation of society created a movement for improvement that encompassed all spheres of life. Reconsidering political economy’s relation to the process of politicisation – conceptualized in terms of improvement – helps us to address the question of whether the transformation of state administration in the eighteenth century really occurred in, and together, with the age of Enlightenment. A more encompassing approach to the politics of economic thought opens new perspectives regarding the historical process of politicisation during the eighteenth century: in terms of the emergence of a public political debate, political participation, the rise of economy and politics as topics of analysis and even, in rare cases, the fundamental questioning of the foundations of the existing political regime.

Rather than analysing economic texts within a clearly bounded field of politico-economic discourse, this WP situates them in their broader cultural, political and intellectual settings. The hypothesis of WP2 is that the emergence of political economy had a direct link to the parliamentary politics, vibrant civic life and ultimate politicisation of the Swedish political and economic culture.

Work package 3 studies the switchboard through which the plans for improvement were elaborated in the eighteenth century: the concept of Polizei/police/policy. In the eighteenth-century sense, good police meant good management of the resources of the state (gute Policey, god politie) with the aim of common welfare. The majority of police ordinances dealt with economic matters and professions. Police ordinances are therefore a valuable source in the search for knowledge of changing concepts of improvement, wealth, welfare and growth. Hence WP3 analyses Swedish police ordinances, their relationship to economic thought and the implementation of the principles concerning improvement, wealth, growth and welfare.

It is essential to pay attention to the importance of shifting communication practices in the construction and development of normative languages in the eighteenth century. Through their personal mobility and activities within and beyond the fiscal chamber, specialists in state administration played an important role in shaping the normative language of governance. After all, very many of these Swedish and German writers were civil servants. This was not simply the communication of a normative language of the state to a pre-existing public; rather, the production of normative political language during the Enlightenment coincided with the formation of a contemporary public.

The hypothesis of WP3 is that from the institutionalisation of political economy a concept of improvement inflected by natural law emerged as a normative concept of rule that simultaneously served to legitimise governmental power and to define its limits.

Work package 4 examines journals as a form and strategy of mediation, dissemination, negotiation, and socialization of knowledge about improvement. The study of political economy in the eighteenth-century context must take into account the fact that the development of the new discipline occurred in a changing media environment. The process of the disciplinisation of political economy accompanied the broader intellectual phenomenon of the European Enlightenment, and involved diverse and highly mobile actors. This recognition requires a fourth WP to examine the ideas developed by political and economic thinkers, as well as to study their engagement with contemporaneous forms of communication, such as patriotic societies and especially journals. Journals offer a specific form of access to eighteenth-century political economy. The study of academic journals helps us to understand strategies for the popularization of knowledge characteristic of scholarship and science during the Enlightenment.

WP4 explores the amount and content of the texts discussing practices of improvement. Here, the role of the public needs to be addressed as well. Did the editors of journals select and arrange knowledge in accordance with public demand? WP4 will concentrate on journals that were of transnational character. One example is the foremost literary journal in Sweden, Swänska mercurius. The editor of Swänska mercurius, Carl Christoffer Gjörwell (1731–1811), was responsible for introducing leading foreign authors to Swedish intellectual circles. The second journal of interest is August Ludwig Schlözer’s (1735–1809) Neueste Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit in Schweden, which introduced the most recent Swedish scholarship to the German audience. While editing this journal Schlözer, a household name as a historian, was based in Stockholm and in Uppsala. WP4 places the studied journals in the context of Swedish and Northern European journals more broadly.

The hypothesis of WP4 is that journals enabled transnational encounters, not only disseminating ideas but having an impact on how the concept of improvement was understood in different vernaculars.

Recent scholarship has suggested that the ideology of improvement aided the British imperial expansion abroad. Inspired by New Imperial History, work package 5 explores the relationship of Swedish improvement culture to Sweden’s imperial aspirations. New Imperial History has rejected the idea of Europe as a self-limited entity, and argued that Europe as it exists today as a cultural, economic and conceptual unit was created as a result of the process of colonialization. However, this perspective results from the nineteenth-century focus of New Imperial History, exaggerating the size and strength of the British empire and the role it played in the formation of Europe.

A focus on eighteenth-century Sweden sheds new light on the construction of political and economic knowledge in the colonial context. WP5 examines eighteenth-century Swedish political economy in relation to the contemporary measures and policies of improvement and betterment as envisioned and practised in the Swedish colony of St. Barthélemy. Sweden’s hope to recover the status of a great power remained strong. Colonies seemed to offer a solution to the economic weakness of the former great state, solving the problems of growth, wealth and welfare.

Political economy and colonialism went hand in hand with creating profit. This raises the question: what contribution does this global colonial perspective offer to our conceptualisation of political economy as a prospect of human betterment and as the most significant contribution of the Enlightenment to Western thought? WP5 thus examines this darker side of eighteenth-century political economy investigating concepts of welfare, improvement and wealth as found in the colonial archives. It explores the relationship of Swedish improvement culture to Sweden's slave trade. The hypothesis of WP5 is that the practical projects of improvement planned for the colonies were inspired by contemporary continental political economic writers, and they were informed by scholarly activities at European universities.