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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
All constitutions of government ... are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them.
--The Theory of Moral Sentiments
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
--The Wealth of Nations
IS CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, AS DEVELOPED AND EXPOUNDED BY Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, a mode of imperialism? Recent work by Katie Trumpener and others points us in just such a direction. Trumpener, for example, argues, with respect to the English colonization of the Celtic periphery of Britain, that imperial governance and movements for economic modernization went hand in hand in practice, and as matters of policy, and were reflected as such in the cultural debates surrounding a range of political positions in Scotland, Ireland, and England. (1) It is my contention, however, that an even stronger argument can be made: imperial governance and economic modernization go hand in hand on a more general level than the mere practicalities of imperial relations and the modes of national representation such as the survey or the tour that those practicalities give rise to; they go hand in hand in the very principles of Smithian economics as such--even, ultimately, in Smith's notion of exchange. Like other participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith subscribes to notions of social and cultural development; indeed, he frequently draws on what he considers to be the barbarism and relative underdevelopment of the Scottish highlands for examples of the social forms preceding modern English society. But what drives these larger social and cultural developments is, for Smith, the degree to which free commercial relations have been allowed to prevail over other, particularly feudal, forms. The expansion of the means of subsistence by way of the freedom of individuals to engage in voluntary acts of exchange is the very hallmark, for Smith, of modern society, and nations are to be found in hierarchical social and political relationships with each other above all because they are at different stages of a common development toward commercial liberty. (2)
Yet despite the considerable reach of Smith's theory of exchange, his importance to the political dimensions of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literature has not received the critical attention it deserves. (3) Literary critics, social historians, and political theorists have focused, naturally enough, on the cultural and social
implications of the great political texts of the late eighteenth century, especially the works of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin. (4) In the study of Jane Austen, for example, influential interpretations of the social meaning of her novels by Marilyn Butler and Claudia Johnson have concentrated on her relationship to Jacobin and anti-Jacobin tendencies in English literature after 1790. (5) Yet Smith's great economic text was at least as influential on cultural and social questions at the time, and perhaps more influential over time, than the explicitly political texts that followed it. Creative writers from William Wordsworth to Charles Dickens took clear positions on the premises of political economy as presented by Smith, his defenders, and his inheritors. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, for example, are both, broadly speaking, conservative thinkers, but whereas Austen resisted Smithian ideas, Edgeworth promoted them. (6) Conversely, many of those who vehemently disagreed over such political issues as the perfectibility of society or the morality of monarchy concurred on the need to surmount the inheritance of "Gothic custumary" and modernize the British economy along broadly Smithian lines. (7) These examples illustrate that, in Britain circa 1800, advocacy of economic modernization in no way entailed advocacy of political modernization, and adherents and opponents of Smith could be found among both progressives and conservatives. As a result, simple dichotomies of Painite versus Burkean or radical versus conservative fall well short of addressing the range of social positions actually engaged by the literature of the early nineteenth century. To do justice to this range, it is essential to foreground the political implications of Smith's economic ideas and to examine how they served as a distinct locus for the theorization of domestic politics and social relations by those writing after 1776.
For Irish writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, it was Smith's belief that commercial transactions between nations could ameliorate the social and material inequities of a colonial system that was key. Significantly, the benefits of international trade are defined by Smith from the perspective of commerce itself, and imply a convergence among trading nations towards the commercial stage of society. By the early nineteenth century such a view of international commerce had come under attack. Smith's ideas were seen, for example, as entailing a "cosmopolitical economy" (in Friedrich List's phrase) in which a regime of international free trade would lead to de facto British hegemony over any less-developed trading partners--a situation described by others in a later formulation as "free trade imperialism." (8) Edgeworth, in contrast, appears to have feared no such hegemony, agreeing with Smith rather than his critics that trade could be an instrument of equality between nations regardless of differences in material development In her fictions of Irish society and Irish-English national relations Edgeworth freely adapts the ideas of exchange and productivity from which Smith's cosmopolitical thought derives. It seems odd, then, that the full measure of Edgeworth's relationship to Smith's cosmopolitics has yet to be taken.
One reason for this neglect, of course, is the powerful example of Burke, who has stood as the pole star to considerations of Edgeworth's national ideas. In an important recent reading of Edgeworth in the tradition of Irish writing, Seamus Deane relates her Irish novels to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates about the reform of national character that flowed from Burke's analysis of the French and English national characters in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edgeworth participated in these debates, according to Deane, by presenting the exotic foreign terrain of Ireland as effectively (re)conquered by an Anglo-Irish Ascendency acting in the name of the pragmatic necessities of a national modernization. Deane adds, however, that
... the 'utilitarian' rationality that she sponsors has both a normalizing and a disenchanting effect. In its ambition to produce prosperity out of poverty, it might also produce uniformity out of difference; it might threaten tradition by erasing its irrational and unproductive practices--the very identifying features of Irish 'tradition.' (9)
This is a perceptive account of a key paradox in Edgeworth's work, one that clearly marks the tension in her writing between a needed reform of Irish economic life and the possible loss of Irish national characteristics. But this paradox is less original to Edgeworth or to others writing in the wake of Burke than it may at first seem. On the contrary: the equation of economic development and cultural homogeneity derives directly from The Wealth of Nations and Smith's codification of political economy.
It is true that the disenchantment mourned by Edgeworth was celebrated by the cosmopolitical Smith, who viewed it as a necessary and welcome, not merely possible, outcome of economic development, but the fact remains that the paradox enters Edgeworth's work through her appropriation of Smith. (10) Edgeworth finds in Smith an alternative view of the history of national cultures to the one offered by Burke, a view that anticipates the historical materialism of Karl Marx more than the historical romance of Walter Scott. Of course, the general relevance of Smithian ideas to Edgeworth has been broached before. Marilyn Butler in particular has persuasively argued that The Wealth of Nations provides a model for the literary treatment of colonial psychology by writers such as Edgeworth via its analysis of the dependency relations between unproductive aristocrats and their retainers. (11) More recently, Butler has traced the provenance of Edgeworth's ideas on education to Scottish thinkers such as Smith. (12) My concern in this paper, however, is with how Smith's thought shapes the cosmopolitical--and not just psychological or social--vision of Edgeworth's novels. I will argue that the Smithian paradigm of value, which Edgeworth follows so religiously in her work, is fundamentally an imperial paradigm, one that legitimates a presumptive hierarchy of nations headed by Britain. To contextualize properly the colonial and imperial dimensions of Edgeworth's national tales, then, I will turn first to a description and analysis of the cosmopolitical dimensions of Adam Smith's economic doctrine.
African Kings and European Peasants: Smith on Exchange
The Wealth of Nations opens with the paradox that the hardest working societies are not necessarily the wealthiest ones. (13) Smith argues that [a]mong "the savage nations of hunters and fishers," where everyone who is able to do so must work and work hard, people are "miserably poor," whereas in "civilized and thriving nations," in which many of those who are able to work do not do so and instead live luxuriously at the expense of others, "a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order ... may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire." (14) From the very outset of his study, Smith emphasizes this triangulation between degrees of wealth, modes of labor, and forms of society. The notion that differential labor outcomes are associated with different forms of society helps Smith to support several claims, including the hypothesis that the members of the poorest classes in modern societies may be materially better off than the wealthiest individual in a "savage" or hunter-gatherer society. Because it leads to general opulence, among other advantages, the historical development from hunter-gatherer to commercial society is for Smith a positive good, both for a society as a whole and for its poorest members. There is of course an ethnocentric dimension to Smith's wealth-based measure of the differences between societies, given that his idea of national opulence is inspired by European examples; but the measure also has a universal aspect, since Smith assumes that all societies may eventually come to enjoy the benefits of commerce--not, it should be said, for the gratification of Europeans, but because "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable" (78). (15) We will need to interpret this notion of universal economic progress carefully, of course: Smith's point is not that the well-to-do within a society are likely to be morally concerned if the nation-at-large is poor (although perhaps they should be); rather, they too will be materially less well off when laborers are poor. The Wealth of Nations thus presents the material happiness of the lower orders of a society, in the form of high wages, as a necessary precondition for the material happiness of that society as a whole. But the paradox remains: how is it possible for less labor to produce more wealth?
According to Smith, the explanation of this paradox lies first of all in the familiar principle of "the division of labour," a process which, by multiplying "the productions of all the different arts ... occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people" (18). Smith uses the example of pin-making: where one person can make up to...
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