Commerce, Finance and Statecraft: Histories of England, 16001780

(Hardback)

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Commerce, finance and statecraft charts the emergence of new approaches to England's economic history in the historical writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book explores the work of the period's most influential historians - among them Francis Bacon, William Camden, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and David Hume - and shows how these writers, and their contemporaries, were engaged in a series of hotly contested, politically-charged debates concerning the management of England's commercial and financial interests. This book will be essential reading for historians and literary critics working on Restoration and eighteenth-century historical writing, and historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers interested in historiographical theory. -- .

Reviews

'In this fine study, Ben Dew perceptively examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century-historians of Englands narratives and normative assessments of commerce and finance, as well as monarchical policies designed to shape the new economic conditions. [...] Commerce, Finance and Statecraft deserves a wide readership. Among its many strengths, Dews book provides scholars working within the field of History of Capitalism with a timely meditation on the politics of the historians choices in how they explain and assess the past to shape the future.'
Carl Wennerlind (Barnard College, Columbia University), in The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats (Autumn 2020).

Author Bio

Ben Dew is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth