Edmund Burke's literary executors French Laurence and Walker King issued "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" in 1800, three years after Burke's death in 1797. The document-reproduced in entirety here though without their informative Preface 2 -comes principally from a memorial Burke wrote to Prime Minister William Pitt in 1795, but almost half comes from other draft material, intended for the public but to be framed as letters addressed to Burke's friend Arthur Young. 3 The material began as a timely warning against interventionist measures in the face of dearth, including a locally administered minimum-wage scheme (referred to as a "tax" by Burke, because employers pay more for labor). But the interpolations from the letters are more of the nature of general political economy. The final document, "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity," then, is an admixture-"Details," the more specific facts from the memorial, including testimony of Burke the farmer, which work as illustration of the "Thoughts," formulated especially in the material that the executors had drawn from the subsequent draft letters.We have made a few very minor corrections to Burke's text, and we include most of the footnotes added by Francis Canavan for the Liberty Fund edition (Burke 1999), which relate the text to affairs of the moment. We thank Liberty Fund for their kind permission to reproduce Canavan's notes.Why do we draw attention to "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity"? Adam Smith's "liberal plan" or "liberal system" (WN, 664, 538-539) is cen-
Is the history of the modern world the history of Europe writ large? Or is it possible to situate the history of modernity as a world historical process apart from its origins in Western Europe? In this posthumous collection of essays, Marshall G. S. Hodgson challenges adherents of both Eurocentrism and multiculturalism to rethink the place of Europe in world history. He argues that the line that connects Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to modern times is an optical illusion, and that a global and Asia-centred history can better locate the European experience in the shared histories of humanity. Hodgson then shifts the historical focus and in a parallel move seeks to locate the history of Islamic civilisation in a world historical framework. In so doing he concludes that there is but one history - global history - and that all partial or privileged accounts must necessarily be resituated in a world historical context. The book also includes an introduction by the editor, Edmund Burke, contextualising Hodgson's work in world history and Islamic history.
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