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THE ENLIGHTENMENT ABOVE NATIONAL CONTEXT: POLITICAL ECONOMY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCOTLAND AND NAPLES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1997

JOHN ROBERTSON
Affiliation:
St Hugh's College, Oxford

Abstract

It is now common to study the Enlightenment ‘in national context’, and in few cases has the approach been more fertile than in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The danger of this approach, however, is that it deflects attention from the international connections of the Enlightenment, fragmenting the movement as a whole. It is argued here that the Enlightenment is better understood as an intellectual movement which was both cosmopolitan and patriotic, and that this is particularly evident in its commitment to political economy, as the key to improving the human condition in this world. The argument is developed through a comparison of Scottish and Neapolitan political economy from the mid- to the later eighteenth century. Though set apart by very different economic circumstances, the Scots and the Neapolitans had a common point of reference in French economic writings, and through these Hume's ideas in particular were transmitted to Naples. It was from within this common intellectual framework that the Scots and the Neapolitans elaborated their distinctive positions on the scope for free trade between nations. If Hume and Smith believed that poor countries such as Scotland would prosper through greater free trade, while Genovesi and Galiani argued that only by measures of protection could the abundant natural resources of the kingdom of Naples be harnessed to its benefit, their differences derived from shared premises, and a comparable fear of the inclination of the leading mercantile powers, Britain and France, to control trade to their sole advantage.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article was originally prepared for the Cross-cultural Enlightenment Conference at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in April 1993: I am grateful to participants on that occasion and subsequently at seminars in Reading, Oxford and Chicago for helpful comments, and more particularly to Maxine Berg, Istvan Hont and Donald Winch. I also acknowledge the help of a British Academy grant to attend the Victoria Conference.