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1st Edition

Commerce versus Conquest The Political Economy of Jean-François Melon

Edited By John Shovlin, Koen Stapelbroek Copyright 2027

286 Pages

by Routledge

Description

Jean-François Melon (1675–1738) was the most widely read European political economist before Adam Smith. This book is the first collection dedicated to exploring the context, message, and reach of Melon’s work. The leitmotif of commerce versus conquest offers a key to Melon’s vision. He argued that a new kind of commercial state must displace the war-oriented regimes of the past. The vitality... Read more

Table of Contents

Melon and the Politics of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe
John Shovlin and Koen Stapelbroek

Part I: Melon’s French Contexts

1. Melon the Modern: Eastern Tales and Rococo Economics
Arnaud Orain

2. Tax Reform, the Single Duty Project, and Melon’s Dialogue with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre
Antonella Alimento

3. Melon, the Compagnie des Indes, and the Political Economy of Abundance
Oliver Cussen

4. The Essai politique as a Peace Plan: Melon’s Project to Stabilize the European States System
John Shovlin

Part II: Melon’s European and Atlantic Contexts

5. The Right to Trade: The Dutch Translation of Melon’s Essai politique
Koen Stapelbroek

6. David Bindon’s Edition of the Essai politique sur le commerce and Development Debates in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
James Livesey

7. Between Uztáriz and Melon: Argumosa’s Erudición Política (1743) and the Modernising of Spanish Economic Culture
Jesús Astigarraga

Part III: Translations

Introduction to Part III: Translations
John Shovlin and Koen Stapelbroek

Jean-François Melon, ‘Memorandum to Examine Who the Opponents of the India Company Are, Why They Demand Its Suppression, and of What Utility this Company is to the State’ (c. 1726)

Jean-François Melon, ‘Chapter XXII: Seashells’, Mahmoud the Ghaznavid, an Eastern Story: A Fragment Translated from the Arabic, with Notes (Rotterdam: Jean Hofhoudt, 1729), 117–21

Jean-François Melon, ‘Chapter X: On Exportation and Importation’, Political Essay on Commerce. New Edition, Augmented by Seven Chapters, and in which the Gaps in the Previous Editions are Filled (n.p., 1736), 130–50’

Jean-François Melon, ‘Chapter XI: Of the Liberty of Commerce’, Political Essay on Commerce. New Edition, Augmented by Seven Chapters, and in which the Gaps in the Previous Editions are Filled (n.p., 1736), 150–65

Jean-François Melon, ‘Chapter XXIV: Of Political Arithmetic’, Political Essay on Commerce. New Edition, Augmented by Seven Chapters, and in which the Gaps in the Previous Editions are Filled (n.p., 1736), 318–57

Editor(s)

Biography

John Shovlin is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (2021) and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (2006).

Koen Stapelbroek is Professor of Humanities at James Cook University, Australia. He is the author of Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (2008), and edited several collections, including The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century (2017) with Antonella Alimento.

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