Finance, Communication and Co-‐ordination in Eighteenth-‐Century
Empires
The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?
The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.
The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged. Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.
Paper-‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-‐registration is essential as space is limited.
Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk)
A workshop sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee,
July 5-‐6, River Rooms, Ninth Floor, Tower Building, Nethergate.
The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?
The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.
The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged. Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.
Paper-‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-‐registration is essential as space is limited.
Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk)
