Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The most important institution in the mercantile regime was customs – the direct source of governmental revenue connecting the Treasury with the colonies. It so happened that some of the leading intellectuals of the Enlightenment doubled as customs officials, and this service provided them with material for their critical theories. The father of English philosophy, John Locke, began his career in their majesties’ customs service, as secretary of the board of trade and plantations. Charles Davenant wrote his books on trade, war and colonies while employed over three decades as a senior excise officer. Adam Smith, a propagandist for free trade, served as a member of the Scottish Customs Commission. The father of Russian political thought, Alexander Radishchev, served as the head of customs in St Petersburg. Leaving us an apt summary of the complexity of the job, he wrote: ‘My satisfaction was transformed into indignation such as I feel when in summer time I walk down the customs pier and look at the ships that bring us the surplus of America and its precious products such as sugar, coffee, dyes and other things, not yet dry from the sweat, tears and blood that bathed them in their production.’ 3

Their colleague was Lemercier de La Rivière, the intendant in Martinique, the informal capital of the French West Indies. Fighting smuggling on the islands, de La Rivière relaxed the exclusive regime, permitting ships from neutral countries to unload at Martinique and exchange goods for sugar. Realising that free trade would destroy their monopoly, the planters got de La Rivière recalled to France. A free intellectual, de La Rivière then acted as a consultant to the governments of France, Russia and Poland – mostly without success. After his visit to St Petersburg in 1767, Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire, ‘De La Rivière thought that we crawled on all fours and took upon himself the great labour of leaving Martinique in order to teach us to walk upright.’ 4 But Voltaire too taught her to walk upright by encouraging her to partition the Ottoman Empire. She would get Constantinople (now Istanbul), resurrect Byzantium as a new colony of the Russian Empire, and leave it to her grandson Constantin. Launching war after war, Catherine captured Crimea but failed to restore Byzantium. The empress, an avid reader of French novels, might have remembered that years earlier Voltaire had also left Constantinople to his Candide. Published in the same year (1759) as François Quesnay’s Economic Table , Voltaire’s Candide ends with the protagonist urging his own little salon to cultivate a garden. But it is in Constantinople, of all places, that Candide, an orphan from Westphalia, makes his garden.

The collapse of the Mississippi Company, the defeat in the Seven Years’ War, the loss of Canada, the crisis in the West Indies, and the missed opportunities on the Bosphorus – all this led the French physiocrats to drink milk, to seek the secrets of life in wheat prices, and to concentrate on the internal workings of the national economy. The state debts were the consequence of colonial wars for the sugar islands, beaver dams, and hazy promises. Tariffs and excises, the poll tax and the salt gabelle led to the uprising in Haiti and the taking of the Bastille. But the anti-imperial ideas of the French physiocrats found fertile ground in another country that had also liberated itself from its imperial masters.

Post-colonial America

For its founding fathers, America was a land of farmers rather than merchants or manufacturers. In Paris, Thomas Jefferson had exchanged ideas with the physiocrats. Upon his return to America, he led the faction of landowners who defended freedom of trade. Political equality would be based on the access to land and general participation in the running of the republic. This new America would be different from old Europe – no exchequer, no aristocracy, no guilds. For Jefferson, the landowners – many of them slave-owners as well – were the nation, and he did not want to see factories and workers in America. The authors of the constitution enshrined this preference for agriculture over industry and farmland over towns. This romantic outlook still defines American electoral laws. Jefferson understood that towns needed builders and villages needed blacksmiths, but he wished to leave large manufactures to Europe. Let the Old World exchange its iron and textile goods for American tobacco, fish and flour. Trade must be free; duties, the symbol of British mercantilism, were the source of evil. Jefferson’s library in Monticello contained books by the physiocrats and Adam Smith. Believing that state debt was an attribute of the mercantile system, Jefferson opposed the creation of a federal bank. The state must not go into debt, burdening future generations. The constitution must be re-examined every nineteen years and arable land must be redistributed with every generation. Jefferson corresponded with Alexander I of Russia and possibly knew about the redistribution of land with every generation which the Russian peasants practised (many romantically inclined thinkers loved this narrative). Thomas Paine was similarly concerned about future generations. ‘Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.’ The abundance of land and unlimited immigration would create a middle class – a large group of well-to-do farmers, whose harvests and happiness depended solely on God. So wrote Benjamin Franklin, for whom the agrarian economy was linked with a puritan mistrust of luxury. 5