Practicing oeconomy during the second half of the long eighteenth century: an introduction

Roberts, Lissa L.

doi:10.1080/07341512.2014.988423

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…32 Historians of eigtheenth-century science have already begun exploring new spaces of natural history beyond the familiar cabinet and garden, including spheres of practical activity like ships and quarries. 33 The spatial-labor approach 29 On natural history's various practical relationships to cameralism, mercantilism, oeconomy, and physiocracy, see : Koerner 2001;Cook 2007;Cowie 2011;Roberts 2014;Güttler 2015. 30 Alexander von Humboldt to Paul Usteri, 27 June 1790, in Jahn and Lange 1973, on 97-98.…”

Section: Approaches: Workcapes Of Natural Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700–1830”**

Anthony

2021

Ber Wissenschaftsgesch

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This special issue seeks to understand natural history from the perspective of those for whom making knowledge was part of making a living, and to highlight the labor regimes -free and forced, from households to plantationsthat sustained natural knowledge economies in Europe and its colonies through the long eighteenth century. Natural history was a broad but increasingly systematic field of study pursued variously out of medicinal, leisurely, and imperial interests, which involved the collection, classification, and commercialization of natural objects. It is sometimes assumed, then, that natural history was practiced exclusively by European and settler elites in this period. But this is itself an image that naturalists of the educated classes carefully cultivated, and which historians have significantly revised in recent years. 2 Drawing upon some of the most energetic currents in the history of science, this issue proposes that the study of labor -encompassing a range of mental and manual activities -offers a useful, comparative framework for understanding how actors of diverse social strata participated in the collective enterprise of natural history. Wary of the limitations of what has been called "salvage biography," which risks overrepresenting the agency of subaltern actors who contributed to European scientific enterprises, a focus on the workscapes of natural history instead points to the rules as well as the exceptions: histories not only of naturalists' engagement with non-elite knowledge, but also of the larger systems of slave labor, peasant farming, family inheritance, workshop

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Section: Approaches: Workcapes Of Natural Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700–1830”**

Anthony

2021

Ber Wissenschaftsgesch

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“…When sixteenth-century English writers used the terms “common wealth” or “common weale”—German sources used the linguistic equivalent der gemeine Nutzen or das gemeine Wohl —they had in mind a functional, thriving, and harmonious society at large. Economics and the market economy were only one subfield within a larger field, representing a more holistic conception that combined individual with societal welfare maximization (Roberts 2014, pp. 135–138).…”

Section: “Laissez-faire With the Nonsense Taken Out”: Silver Deflatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Monetary Theory and Cameralist Economic Management, C. 1500–1900 A.D.

Roessner

2018

J Hist Econ Thought

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More than England and other states, the German principalities were, in the pre-industrial period, hampered by silver outflow and persistent pressures on the balance of payments, which led to idiosyncratic models and strategies of economic development usually but not entirely helpfully called “Cameralism.” It is less well understood how Cameralism, as a policy of order and development, and monetary theory went together. The present paper will sketch these working mechanisms as well as provide a few angles for new perspectives and future research. A first section after the brief introduction studies general issues of development in relation to balance-of-payment constraints (II), followed by the discourses on whether the domestic currency ought to remain stable in terms of intrinsic (silver) value (III), or whether it may be debased so as to raise domestic exports and competitiveness (IV). Both options were considered, at times and by varying actors, as valid strategies of promoting economic development, especially export-led growth, although most contemporaries viewed coin debasement as harmful to the economy. A fifth section discusses an alternative to the aforementioned strategies, that of raising effective monetary mass through increasing velocity. Since the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century, the German economic tradition had a clear understanding of how velocity could be managed and the common weal stimulated by an increase in “vivacity” of circulation (V). In hindsight, it appears that we find here a powerful program towards promoting economic development and Europe’s rise towards capitalism. A conclusion will offer some thoughts for further research (VI).

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“…Like Phillips, Dominik Huenniger's contribution participates in efforts to reshape our understanding of relations between oeconomic and natural knowledge in the period by studying late Enlightenment university reform efforts and debates through the lens of Professor Johann Christian Fabricius (1745-1808). 20 Universities were always connected to state-building and scholars' expectations of their own usefulness in light of these processes, Huenniger argues. Plans for improving the futures of universities-and society-through reform contained a synthesis of often competing ideas about what it meant to make a case that these institutions were useful and necessary to the future expansion of the states that sponsored their growth.…”

Section: Larry Stewart and Kelly J Whitmermentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectations and utility in eighteenth-century knowledge economies Notes and Records special issue introduction

Stewart

Whitmer

2018

Notes Rec.

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Creating a sketch, a plan or a model for the future is often closely related to endeavouring to predict what it may yield. It is also a process that stabilizes contemporary portrayals of social realities, including those aspects understood as problems, or in need of improvement. As Sang-Hyun Kim and Sheila Jasanoff have shown in their work on 'sociotechnical imaginaries', frequently plans and 'visions of scientific and technological progress' act as vehicles for communicating ideas, implicitly and explicitly, about 'public purposes, collective futures and the common good' in a particular historical moment. 1 Plans and sketchy visions for the future are worthy of study in their own right, even if they are never realized, because of the efforts to organize expectations and to assimilate ideas about what is (and is not) in the 'public interest' that they purport to represent. 2 Attending to the origins and expectations inducing projects of envisioning the future, that is, attending to 'dreamscapes' that may or may not have been realized in the long eighteenth century, is a major task of this special issue. All of the essays take as their starting point that the imagined futures of this period reveal a distinct constellation of agendas, moral imperatives and politics. Indeed, the eighteenth century was full of dreamscapes. Their makers routinely devised particular categories and practices to both articulate and, in some cases, to actually build the imagined futures they desired-or claimed to desire. In this period's 'knowledge economy', a term now generally associated with the work of economic historian Joel Mokyr, makers of dreamscapes and professional analysts of the future were often called 'projectors' or 'project makers'. 3 This particular cadre of 'dreamscapers' tended to anchor their visions in sketches, schemes or plans for improvement(s). Mokyr focused on the British context during the dramatic expansion of its commercial, imperial and military interests abroad; here, it is clear that projecting as an enterprise took on a particular tone and set of qualities. 4 On the continent, and in the German context that is a main focus of our special issue, projectors often operated within authoritarian regimes and were adept at playing to the 'biopolitical' contours of the absolutist state. 5 Those who were able to make new visions for improvement(s) accessible to the public in the period often articulated them as a set of expectations, to be apprehended through

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Practicing oeconomy during the second half of the long eighteenth century: an introduction

Cited by 14 publications

References 34 publications

Introduction to “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700–1830”**

Introduction to “Working at the Margins: Labor and the Politics of Participation in Natural History, 1700–1830”**

Monetary Theory and Cameralist Economic Management, C. 1500–1900 A.D.

Expectations and utility in eighteenth-century knowledge economies Notes and Records special issue introduction

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