Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850

Richard Adelman, Catherine Packham, Richard Adelman, Catherine Packham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138542136
• eBook ISBN: 9781351009508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy's relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its 'others', including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic.

Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

Part I

Representation and Political Economy

Section 1

Abstractions

1 “The Visionary Scene Was Lost in Air”¹

Conceptualizing Finance after the South Sea Bubble

Claire Wilkinson

Currunt scilicet Omnia
Sphærâ, non vitreâ quidem,
(Ut quondam siculus globus)
Sed vitro nitidâ magis,
Sed vitro fragili magis,
Et vitro vitreâ magis.

Obviously all things run in a
sphere, indeed not glassy
(as once the Sicilian globe)
but more shining than glass,
more brittle than glass, more
glassy than glass.²

Richard Crashaw’s “Bulla” was first published in 1646, appended to an edition of Daniel Heinsius’s Crepundia Siliana. The poem conducts a metaphysical examination of the empirical world, which is found to be as fleeting and unstable as a bubble, before conflating both life and poetry with the bubble’s ephemeral physical manifestation: “Vixit adhuc. Cur Vixit? Adhuc tu nempe legebas” (“Still it lived. Why did it live? Indeed [because] you read this far.”)³ The poem exists in being read, and then, like a bubble, it bursts—ends—and becomes nothing, its substance shown in retrospect to be sustained only by the reader’s attention. The bubble becomes a representation of the emptiness of language, but the poem is provocatively aware of its own paradoxical status: as spoken words, it is intangible, but in its inscribed form, it has a substantivity that exists beyond any singular instance of being read. It is this playfulness that makes it a particularly suitable postscript for Heinsius’s Crepundia, which was initially published in 1600 and argues that writing is an enduring form and is worthy of sustained critical attention.⁴ With its interest in the mutable substance of language, Crashaw’s poem at once endorses and unsettles this belief: the poem is something and nothing, and is itself implicated by the conceit that everything observable is transient.

Although “Bulla” was written nearly 50 years before the establishment of the Bank of England and the first issue of a bank note in 1694, the poem resonates with several of the key structural economic changes that would come to define the Financial Revolution in Great Britain.⁵ The Revolution of 1688 is distinctive for its introduction of public credit to the English economy. As P. G. M. Dickson describes in The Financial Revolution in England, when King William III faced the urgent question of increasing national wealth to enable developments in agriculture and commerce, and—critically—to finance war with France, he developed a system of long-term government borrowing. This system allowed funds to be raised without tax rates being increased, and it also set a precedent for a new type of investment in the state, whereby private individuals could receive a guaranteed income on money lent to the country.⁶ The new credit economy had reached a point of almost intractable crisis by 1720: The South Sea Company, which had been created in 1711 to reduce government debt, was facing disaster. Stock prices had steadily risen since the company’s inception, but the decision to issue more shares in 1720 to further alleviate the National Debt proved catastrophic.⁷ Public interest in the new stock was unprecedented, and prices rose rapidly before crashing in the late summer. Swift, who would later criticize the grounds for the Company’s operation, was supportive of the project in its early years and argued that it was “likely to prove the greatest Restoration and Establishment of the kingdom’s Credit” in 1711.⁸ The opposite proved to be true, and as the promises of new finance came crashing down, the task of analysing the Bubble’s social and political ramifications fell to the economic commentators, journalists, and literary writers of the day. There are many reasons why the South Sea Bubble offers a compelling moment in financial history to reflect upon the structural changes that the economy underwent after the accession of King William to the throne in 1688: the Bubble was the first stock market crisis in England, and in its aftermath, various assumptions that had kept South Sea shares afloat were exposed. As Christine Gerrard explains, “the South Sea crisis marked the culmination of the process begun with the creation of the National Debt under William.”⁹ In addition, the cultural accounts of the crisis that emerged in the wake of the Bubble are remarkable and span visual art, literary writing, journalism, private letters, and theatre. The crisis prompted a widespread process of reconceptualization, during which the implications of the new economic structure were reflected upon, debated, and finally integrated into an understanding of what the financial market might represent. The structural changes that were beginning to become manifest in the early 1720s provide the framework for how Britain’s economy functions to this day.

Crashaw’s “Bulla” predates the South Sea Bubble by almost a century; however, the poem’s interest in interconnection pre-empts one of the most significant imaginative shifts that took place during the Financial Revolution, a shift which began to be consolidated in the months and years following the South Sea Bubble. Crashaw writes “Currunt scilicet Omnia / Sphærâ” (“Obviously all things run in a / sphere”) and, earlier in the poem, “Orbes orbibus obvii” (“the spheres meet the spheres”). He is interested in interconnection, in how these connections are intrinsic but nevertheless fragile, and in how observing these networks in some way changes, or obscures, their substance. The appearance of the Bubble in 1720 was a symptom of the increasing connection and interdependence of all sorts of economic market players. As J. G. A. Pocock observes, by selling state debt to private investors, the government created a class of investors with a specific financial interest in the country’s economic success.¹⁰ One of the prevailing interests of authors writing about the Bubble after its rupture is the speciousness of value represented by South Sea Company shares. A letter written to the Weekly Journal or Saturdays-Post in March 1721 asked “how could it be […] that such Numbers of people should lay out substantial Fortunes for a Thing which has no Being but in Imagination?”¹¹ The theme is alighted upon too in poetry by Swift, Gay, and Pope. In “The Bubble” (1720), Swift writes about the folly of investors:

While some build Castles in the Air,
Directors build ’em in the Seas;
Subscribers plainly see ‘um there,
For Fools will see as Wise men please.¹²

Gay is equally acerbic in 1721’s A Pangerical Epistle to Mr. Thomas Snow, lamenting the loss of “Millions of imaginary Gold.”¹³ Pope’s most substantial comment on the crisis did not follow until 1733, when he wrote in the Epistle to Bathurst:¹⁴

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!
That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!
Gold imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,
Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings.¹⁵

The preoccupation of each poem is the role of the imaginary in the crisis, and how value had become ascribed to entirely fictitious tokens. The authors question the significance of perspective, with Swift’s watery South Sea offering a strange refraction of a directors’ promise, and Pope’s contracted “imp’d” at once signifying “implied,” “enlarged,” and “stolen.”¹⁶ It becomes clear that the substantivity of South Sea value is a matter of projection, and that the illusions of wealth are subject to modulations, depending upon who is looking, and how. It is the subscribers to the shares who see phantom castles and gold, whilst the Company’s directors experience the materialization of these objects in reality, as they reap the profits of widespread investment. Crashaw’s poem comments upon how objects in the empirical world exist when observed, but vanish as the subject’s attention turns away. This fragility of substance is transmuted to metaphor in the South Sea Bubble work: the wealth is always an illusion, and the Bubble serves to show that the financial innovation represented by early eighteenth-century credit instruments has the potential to unsettle all established modes of representation.

In Genres of the Credit Economy, Mary Poovey explores how “the credit economy in which we still live came to be naturalized and understood,” and it is the formative stage of this process of naturalization that I take as my topic in this paper.¹⁷ Public credit was new in the early eighteenth century, and it reshaped not only how the economy could function, but also demanded that existing ideas about economic structure and operation were reconceptualized. The South Sea Bubble represented both the zenith and the nadir of this new potential, and the crisis exposed the connections between the imaginative and actual systems that underpin economic function. If we take the dominant historical argument, which is set out by Pocock and P.G.M. Dickson before it is taken up by a later generation of critics, that the South Sea Bubble provided space—in intellectual thought and market function—for a consolidation of the terms of the post-1688 credit economy, then what actually happens during this period of consolidation is of fundamental importance to understanding today’s economy, precisely because it is formative.¹⁸ The highs and lows of 1720 show enthusiasm for the inflationary properties of credit being tempered by the reality of absolute loss, triggering a phase in which cultural concepts of the economy were redefined. Speaking about this process in broad terms has a certain allure, not least because there is something intriguing about the idea of a formative reconceptualization that is evidenced in cultural output without being overtly aspired to, but it is the contention of this chapter that the language of a small group of literary writers working in the post-Bubble years demonstrates the integration of the rhetoric of credit in popular culture. I want to make a series of small and interconnected arguments relating to this process. The first is that Swift and Gay—to differing extents—attempt to understand the new economic world by way of the vocabulary of the old. The second is that this mode of representation eventually fails, and it is in failing that it is, perhaps paradoxically, most successful. The final turn of my argument is that the language employed by these three writers in a series of poems performs a variety of microtransaction, which more fully exposes the extent of establishment of the new system that was shaped around credit at the turn of the eighteenth century. Central to this point is the idea that the economic metaphors used in a set of poetic examples of South Sea Bubble writing are encoded at a systemic level, and thereby do not belong to the author, but are a distinctive facet of a system which is being integrated by the very writing in which it is observed.

Before I come to rely upon the word “system,” some explanation is needed about my use of the term. In System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge, Clifford Siskin argues that “system is a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to know it,” and he aims to “illuminate system’s role in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge.”¹⁹ “System” is a form of organizing practice, in which interacting processes complement one another in operation, and provide a framework within which activities and actions both happen and can be understood. Siskin describes literature as a “cultural form,” itself involved in systemic practice, but simultaneously a medium through which the shape of other contemporaneous systems is made manifest.²⁰ System-related words begin to be used more frequently during the eighteenth century, and Siskin comments:

What these variations of system at the century’s end — systematise, systematising, systemization — signal is not just the presence or increasing number of things called “system,” but the spread of a social practice: of using system’s scalability to provide order within and across more things. As those things were put into the form of system — their parts reordered into new wholes — those wholes became pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Formation of Political Economy as a Knowledge Practice
• PART I Representation and Political Economy
• PART II Political Economy and Its Others
• PART III Modelling Political Economy Today
• Bibliography
• Index