Book ID: CBB744069935

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (2020)

unapi

Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB744069935/

Similar Citations

Book Wennerlind, Carl; (2011)
Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620--1720 (/isis/citation/CBB001221113/)

Article Gibson, Sarah Katherine; (2011)
The Science of Territorial Domination in General Haldimand's Defence of Quebec, 1778--1783 (/isis/citation/CBB001211536/)

Article Nina Bandelj; Gary Richardson; James Owen Weatherall; Julia Elyachar; (2016)
Comprehending and Regulating Financial Crises: An Interdisciplinary Approach (/isis/citation/CBB070425116/)

Book MacKenzie, Donald; (2008)
An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (/isis/citation/CBB001020376/)

Book Paula Stephan; (2015)
How Economics Shapes Science (/isis/citation/CBB774325733/)

Book Kean Birch; Fabian Muniesa; (2020)
Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (/isis/citation/CBB729464018/)

Article Martin Giraudeau; (2018)
Proving Future Profit: Business Plans as Demonstration Devices (/isis/citation/CBB381356467/)

Book Sklansky, Jeffrey; (2002)
The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB000302281/)

Article Emina Veletanlić; Creso Sá; (2020)
Implementing the Innovation Agenda: A Study of Change at a Research Funding Agency (/isis/citation/CBB690561994/)

Article Birch, Kean; (2013)
The Political Economy of Technoscience: An Emerging Research Agenda (/isis/citation/CBB001320493/)

Article Debra J. Lindsay; (2020)
The limits of imperial influence: John James Audubon in British North America (/isis/citation/CBB716257904/)

Authors & Contributors
Birch, Kean
James Owen Weatherall
de Pee, Christian
Nina Bandelj
Van Dyk, Garritt
Giraudeau, Martin
Concepts
Economics
Funding and finance
Science and society
Business and commerce
Science and economics
Sociology
Time Periods
18th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
Early modern
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Québec (Canada)
Atlantic world
Atlantic Ocean
England
London (England)
Institutions
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment