Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

In less fortunate parts of the world, where the risks of hunger and shortages were perennial, a new problem arose – a lack of demand. Comparing the Dutch and English markets to the massive periphery of Europe, economic experts saw the main difference not in a shortage of goods or services but, on the contrary, in a lack of demand for them. Demand depended on the raising of the general level of education and culture: savages did not have a taste for luxury items, nor did peasants. It was fine that poor peasants did not have the goods that were routine for the bourgeoisie. The fact that they did not want them was a problem. Lack of taste and ambition made them lazy and poor, which did not help their ambition. Demand, taste and aspiration – they all had to be created among these unfortunates. Fashion and addiction became the magical means of taking the peasant economy out of sloth and idleness.

Bernard Mandeville, the author of the remarkable Fable of the Bees (1705), was the first to voice the idea that individual virtues have little effect on the common good, but that the free play of private vices creates it from scratch. Mandeville described a hive of bees that live just like people. Worker bees fed ‘half the world’ with their labour but remained poor. Their judges took bribes. Their priests were lustful, and even manure was fake. And yet life flourished as never before. ‘Thus every part was full of vice / yet the whole mass a paradise.’ But then, all those fancy things ‘which the Indies had been ransacked for’ vanished. It was the way back to misery. ‘The slight and fickle age is past; / and clothes, as well as fashions, last.’ Speaking in rhyme, Mandeville launched a war against the old ascetic morality.

In 1718, Nathaniel Torriano set off for China on the Augusta , an East India Company ship. In Canton, he sold the copper and iron ingots, watches and jewellery he had brought from England, and also calicos from India. In exchange he took on a cargo of tea, which became all the rage when he brought it back home. In London the value of his cargo was estimated at £50,000; this would have been enough to buy several English estates. The exchequer received less revenue from land taxes than from customs, which produced from half to three-quarters of its income. 10 Fashion led to a particularly rapid turnover of capital. Mandeville wrote: ‘fickleness / in diet, furniture and dress, / that strange ridiculous vice, was made / the very wheel that turned the trade.’

In his Essays (1777), David Hume organised these early ideas into a philosophical system. In the ancient world, almost everyone was a peasant, but now every peasant fed another person: it could be a soldier who made the state safer or an artisan who made life more pleasant. But what forced the peasants to produce more than they needed for themselves? There would be no surplus, wrote Hume, if peasants lived in their idle way, working only enough to take care of their own families’ needs. Indeed, a peasant works either under compulsion or of his own free will. Armed men could force peasants to work; but this slave-driving method is impractical, it enfeebles the state and diverts soldiers from their duties. The peasant would only work willingly to meet his own desires. There are certain things, products of nature or manufacturing, that create ‘temptations’ – goods that stimulate desires rather than satisfy them. These ‘temptations’ would motivate a peasant to work more effectively than force of arms. Temptations had first been delivered by foreign trade, which, Hume says, ‘in most nations has preceded any refinement in home manufactures.’ But then local artisans learnt to reproduce these tempting goods in ever larger volumes, using domestic resources. ‘And this perhaps is the chief advantage which arises from a commerce with strangers. It rouses men from their indolence; and presenting [them] with objects of luxury, which they never before dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed.’ Nobody is left behind, because those very merchants who had specialised in importing foreign goods eagerly reinvest in producing home-grown imitations. ‘Their own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and rubies of the Indies.’ 11