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 of commerce was the crowning achievement and natural outcome of well-conceived statecraft, not simply a means to other ends. His Essai politique sur le commerce (1734, rev. 1736), which circulated in ten French-language editions and was translated into eight other languages, was the first comprehensive outline of a political economy appropriate for the modern state, overturning many contemporary conventions. Commerce versus Conquest explores the settings in which Melon wrote and the debates his work generated both within the French context and in translation. It also offers the first English translations of several key works by Melon including three new chapters of the expanded 1736 edition of the Essai.
This volume is intended for scholars and students of the history of economic thought, the history of political thought, French intellectual history, Enlightenment studies, and the history of capitalism.
Table of Contents:
Melon and the Politics of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe Part I: Melon’s French Contexts 1. Melon the Modern: Eastern Tales and Rococo Economics 2. Tax Reform, the Single Duty Project, and Melon’s Dialogue with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre 3. Melon, the Compagnie des Indes, and the Political Economy of Abundance 4. The Essai politique as a Peace Plan: Melon’s Project to Stabilize the European States System Part II: Melon’s European and Atlantic Contexts 5. The Right to Trade: The Dutch Translation of Melon’s Essai politique 6. David Bindon’s Edition of the Essai politique sur le commerce and Development Debates in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 7. Between Uztáriz and Melon: Argumosa’s Erudición Política (1743) and the Modernising of Spanish Economic Culture Part III: Translations Introduction to Part III: Translations. 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
About the Author :
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.
