Calculated Values: The Politics and Epistemology of Economic Numbers in Britain, 1688--1738 (2012)
Deringer, William Peter (Author)
Princeton University
Colley, Linda J
Burnett, D. Graham
Pincus, Steven
Levy, Jonathan I.
Burnett, D. Graham
Pincus, Steven
Gordin, Michael
Levy, Jonathan I.
Edition Details: Advisor: Gordin, Michael, Colley, Linda J; Committee Members: Levy, Jonathan I., Burnett, D. Graham, Pincus, Steven.
Physical Details: 482 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation chronicles the emergence of economic calculation as an analytical, argumentative, and moral tool in British politics in the half-century after the 1688 Revolution. During Britain's "financial revolution," novel questions about the nation's "Trade & Revenue" were contested in the halls of Parliament and the pamphlet press. Accountants, government employees, journalists, and Parliamentary representatives built creative economic calculations to make sense of imperfect data, interrogate political secrets, and critique factional opponents. Through seemingly endless political fights over economic numbers, nourished by Britain's intensely partisan political culture, a novel practice of quantitative political economy coalesced. Those skilled in economic calculation found new opportunities for public advancement. Such practitioners forged inventive techniques of numerical estimation, modeling, and valuation, and pitched ambitious ideas about how numbers could make for better policy and a better nation. Consequently, epistemological questions about data sufficiency, probability, and prediction became problems of immediate political concern. While Britain's computational combatants came to few cohesive answers about the questions they confronted, their disagreements laid the groundwork for a more pervasive trust in numbers as a privileged medium of political knowledge. The first half of the dissertation traces the career of economic calculation through three major political transformations that shaped the modern British nation. Chapter 1 considers the problems of public accounting--the challenge of "finding the money"--that arose for MPs and political commentators in the aftermath of 1688. Chapter 2 looks at the calculation of the "Equivalent" and the debates over the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1706-1707. Chapter 3 recounts the heated debates over the Anglo-French "balance of trade" in 1713-1714, prompted by the Peace of Utrecht. The second half of the dissertation begins with the 1720 South Sea Bubble, which, perhaps more than any other event, demonstrated to contemporaries why accurate calculation was so necessary for a commercial polity. Chapter 4 recaptures the diversity of plausible methods Britons developed for computing the value of the South Sea stock before the 1720 crash. Chapter 5 explains how one particular method of valuation, that of the MP Archibald Hutcheson, gained special authority as a true representation of that stock's "intrinsick value," in large part because it proved so useful in establishing the ethical wrongdoings behind the Bubble. The final chapter examines how, just as financial calculations had become so valuable for proving the failures of the past after 1720, thereafter they also began to assume new powers for predicting and controlling the political future.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/04(E), Oct 2013. Proquest Document ID: 1238001647.
Similar Citations
Article
Deringer, William Peter;
(2013)
Finding the Money: Public Accounting, Political Arithmetic, and Probability in the 1690s
Chapter
Ashworth, William;
(2007)
The Intersection of Industry and the State in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Book
William J. Ashworth;
(2017)
The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade
Article
Ryan Walter;
(2019)
The Bullion Controversy and the History of Political Thought: Experience, Innovation and Theory
Article
Margócsy, Dániel;
(2013)
The Fuzzy Metrics of Money: The Finances of Travel and the Reception of Curiosities in Early Modern Europe
Article
Le Maux, Laurent;
(2012)
The Banking School and the Law of Reflux in General
Book
Zhao, Gang;
(2013)
The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684--1757
Article
Chris Meyns;
(2020)
‘Data’ in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, 1665–1886
Book
Maifreda, Germano;
(2012)
From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution
Book
Carey, Daniel;
Finlay, Christopher J.;
(2011)
The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in the British Atlantic World, 1688--1815
Book
Rosenfeld, Sophia A;
(2011)
Common Sense: A Political History
Article
Carey, Daniel;
(2013)
Locke's Species: Money and Philosophy in the 1690s
Book
Jeffrey Sklansky;
(2017)
Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America
Book
Rebecca L. Spang;
(2015)
Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution
Article
Bochove, Christiaan van;
(2014)
Seafarers and Shopkeepers: Credit in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
Article
Schabas, Margaret;
(2008)
Hume's Monetary Thought Experiments
Article
Fiskesjö, Magnus;
(2010)
Mining, History, and the Anti-State Wa: The Politics of Autonomy between Burma and China
Book
McCormick, Ted;
(2009)
William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic
Article
Steere-Williams, Jacob;
(2015)
Milking Science for its Worth: The Reform of the British Milk Trade in the Late Nineteenth Century
Book
Magee, Gary Bryan;
Thompson, Andrew S;
(2010)
Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850--1914
Be the first to comment!