Colonialism, displacement and cannibalism in early modern economic thought

The representation of political-economic issues in eighteenth-century literature cannot be adequately understood without an appreciation of what it was that writers of that period were concerned to put behind them — the unvarnished and crude discourse of the bureaucratic-military officialdom of the preceding century, exemplified, in the economic literature, by the ‘political arithmetic’ of William Petty.1 The most comprehensive — and for many the definitive — response to writers like Petty was provided by Adam Smith, who skilfully combined the lofty tones of moral philosophy with homely discussions of everyday economic affairs in a determined attempt to rescue the apparatus of economic analysis from its association with those who had forged it and refurbish it in such a way as to make it an acceptable element of a discourse which claimed the mantle of Enlightenment. Accordingly, far from acknowledging any debt to his unenlightened forebears, he breezily dismisses them with the declaration: ‘I have no great faith in political arithmetic’ (Wealth of Nations IV, v).