Part I
At the roots of economics imperialism
Classical and neoclassical economics and the issue of primitive societies
Part I is devoted to economistsâ explanatory models of primitive societies in the history of economic thought.
Chapter 1 deals with Smithâs classical model of the âearly and rude state of societyâ and Marxâs analysis of pre-capitalistic societies in his philosophical and economic works. Smith and Marx are shown to share the idea that primitive societies are affected, as Smith puts it, by the absence of division of labour, which is the engine of growth. The analyses of the two great classical economists are preceded by an excursus on the interpretations of savage peoples by philosophers from Montaigne to the Enlightenment, the purpose being to understand the intellectual context of the analysis of the economists.
Chapter 2 deals with the neoclassical-formalist model of rational choice applied to primitive man. The model was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by the anthropologists Raymond Firth and Melville Herskovitz; Robbinsâs and Knightâs neoclassical economics clearly influenced their approach. Firth and Herskovitz described the primitive economy as a locus wherein rational choice is limited by customs and institutions, compelling individuals to behave irrationally. Increasing attention paid to non-market institutions by neoclassical economists since the 1970s has produced new interpretative models of primitive societies based on transaction costs and information-theoretic approaches. Richard Posnerâs theory provides the most significant and ambitious model, which explains many distinctive primitive institutions as adaptations to the uncertainty of the environment or to the existence of high information costs. The influence of sociobiology in economics, essentially through the work of Jack Hirshleifer, and in anthropology with the birth of the behavioural ecology of hunter-gatherers, significantly strengthens Posnerâs thesis of a rational (maximizing in the economic sense) behaviour of primitives.
1 The distant origins of economics imperialism
Classical economists and primitive societies
1.1 Travellers, philosophers and the savages
1.1.1 The travel literature, a source for philosophersâ reflections
In the second part of the eighteenth century, when Smithâs foundation of political economy took shape, information on the âsavage nationsâ of North America, Asia, West Africa and the Pacific was rather extensive. At the end of the 1870s, âthe Great Map of Mankindâ (a phrase used by the English philosopher and political thinker Edmund Burke in a letter of 9 June 1777, to the Scottish historian William Robertson, on the occasion of the publication of Robertsonâs History of America) was considered well known: âthe Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once.â This was primarily all the result of the vast accumulation of travellersâ accounts over more than two centuries following the discovery of America, the great event that changed the perception of the world by Europeans and caused the encounter with âotherâ new peoples. There follows a survey of the most important and influential among them.
In the first part of the sixteenth century, Giovanni da Verazzanoâs and Jacques Cartierâs voyages of exploration in the service of the king of France to the Americas provided the first accounts of the native peoples of North America. Then published were Jean de LĂ©ryâs (1536â1613) Histoire dâun voyage faict en la terre du BrĂ©sil autrement dite AmĂ©rique (1578) and AndrĂ© Thevetâs (1516â92) SingularitĂ©s de la France antarctique (1557) â France antarctique was a French colony established in Guanabara Bay at Rio de Janeiro which existed between 1555 and 1567. These two were the texts at the basis of Montaigneâs essai on the cannibals. These works testify to Franceâs role in the sixteenth century as an important centre of interest in the non-European worlds, in particular North America. This role intensified in the seventeenth century with publication of some of the most important works from the ethnographic point of view, rich with information on the manners and customs of the Canadian Indians. The first were the Voyages de la Nouvelle France (1619 and 1632) by the French explorer Samuel Champlain (1574â1635), âthe father of New Franceâ, and the Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1619) by the author and poet Marc Lescarbot (1570â1641), based on his expedition to Acadia, a colony of New France in north-eastern North America. They were followed by the Grand Voyage au pays des Huron (1632) by the French Franciscan missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat (1590â1640). Together with the RĂ©lations des Jesuites de la Nouvelle-France â missionariesâ reports written in French and Latin, which appeared in print between 1632 and 1673 â these were the most important sources of knowledge on the Canadian Indians.
At the end of the seventeenth century, England already had an empire in the Caribbean and in North America, but it had mainly cross-border relationships with the North American natives. This popularized a superficial and misrepresented image of the Indians, and also a widespread hostility towards them.1 The first important English collections, Richard Hakluytâs Divers Voyages Concerning the Discovery of America (1582) and Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), consisted mostly of non-English sources; but the above-cited contemporaneous French literature was largely unknown in England at that time. Jesuit accounts were not translated into English and they became known only in the 1820s through the works of Charlevoix and Lafitau, the main sources for Adam Smith (and the Scottish philosophers of his time) in his discussion of the savage state of human history in his Glasgow Lectures.
The philosopher John Locke (1632â1704) played a crucial role in expanding knowledge about the American peoples in England. A great collector of travel books, Locke contributed to making the American savage the most interesting figure among the primitive peoples known in England at that time.2 His famous phrase in the Two Treatises of Government (1689) â âin the beginning all the world was Americaâ â meant that America was considered the beginning of civilization, a pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe: the state of nature, Locke maintained, was an historical human reality which existed in the America of his days. He was one of the promoters, together with the members of the Royal Society, of the printing of the four volumes of the famous collection of travels and voyages edited by Awnsham and John Churchill in 1704. The collection included many narratives printed in English for the first time, and which expanded and completed Richard Hakluytâs collection of 1589. It also included a preface (often attributed to Locke) entitled âThe Whole History of Navigation from its Original to This Timeâ. In the early eighteenth century, the Royal Society began to publish travel accounts in its Philosophical Transactions, thus enhancing knowledge of the New World and the recently discovered lands. The Churchill collection was reissued, being augmented from four to eight volumes in 1732 and 1747. Also the less original collection published by John Harris in 1705 was reissued in 1740. In 1745â47, Thomas Astley published the four-volume New General Collections of Voyages and Travels compiled by John Green and immediately translated into French by Antoine Francois PrĂ©vost, well known as AbbĂ© PrĂ©vost (Histoire gĂ©nĂ©ral des voyages, 1747â59), becoming the most comprehensive French source of world travel literature.
In the meantime, two fundamental works had been published in France: the above-mentioned books by Charlevoix and Lafitau â respectively the Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1722) and Moeurs des sauvages americains (1724). Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682â1761) and Joseph-Fracois Lafitau (1681â1746) were Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the two first decades of the 1700s. The book by Lafitau, who was in Canada from 1712 to 1717, is now considered the most important work produced by the French Jesuit community in the first half of the eighteenth century.3 Lafitau drew upon five years of âfieldworkâ, and he furnished a detailed description of Iroquois practices. He rejected the characterization of the American Indians as peoples without religion, laws and government, considered an error committed by the first missionaries. He challenged this stereotype by providing an accurate reconstruction of the forms of government, marriage customs, educational systems, types of dwelling, clothing, wartime and peacetime activities, trade, diseases, funeral rituals, and languages spoken among the Iroquois and Hurons. Lafitau examined all these aspects of social life for traces of ancient times and concluded that there was not even one aspect of the American customs did not have an equivalent in classical Antiquity.4
To complete the picture, mention should be made of some other books influential at that time. First of all, the History of the Five Indian Nations (1727â47) written by the Scottish-born scientist, and close friend of Benjamin Franklin, Cadwallader Colden; his history of the Iroquois tribes was the first documentary on native American culture written in English and was considered Americaâs first history book. Also important was the Histoire de la Lousiane (1751â53, translated into English in 1763) written by the French (or Dutch) historian and naturalist Antoine-Simon La Page du Pratz (1695?â1775) who spent many years in Louisiana under the colonization scheme organized by John Law and the Companies of the Indies, and who had familiarity with the Natchez people. A peculiar but important contribution was made by Louis Armand de Lom dâArce, Baron de Lahontan (1666â1715), a French imperial officer who lived in New France and studied the Huron, Algonquin and Iroquois peoples. In 1703 and 1704, he published three books, an amalgam of ethnographical analysis and radical social and political criticism which influenced many authors of the Enlightenment: Nouveaux voyages dans lâAmĂ©rique septentrionale, his memoirs of his sojourn in New France; the sequel, MĂ©moires de lâAmerique septentrionale, and the imaginary dialogue between the author and a Huron chief SupplĂ©ment aux voyages ou Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario. Lahontanâs emphasis on the natural lifestyle of savages, and their profound sense of liberty and egalitarianism, greatly influenced the tradition of social criticism of European institutions: in particular, indebted to his idealized representation of Amerindians, which incorporated many of the staple elements of the noble savage figure, was Rousseauâs Discours sur lâorigine de lâinĂ©galitĂ© (see Ellingson 2001 and Harvey 2010).5
The nineteenth-century knowledge of savage peoples was completed by the voyages of discovery of new lands in the Pacific Ocean, undertaken by James Cook, Louis Antoine de Bougainville (who published in 1771 the well-known Voyage autour du monde) and Jean-Francois de La PĂ©rouse, whose world circumnavigations greatly extended the hitherto scant information available on that part of the world. The two-volume work produced in 1756 by the French Ă©rudit Charles De Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, had contained what may be the first occurrence of the words âPolynĂ©sieâ and âAustralasieâ. It furnished information that was useful for Cookâs and Bougainvilleâs explorations â and drew a new map of the world.
These descriptions of the peoples of new worlds, became the empirical foundation for a general rewriting of human history crucial for the Enlightenment project of a world historical science of mankind (see RubiĂ©s (2002). These travel accounts influenced philosophical reflection from Montaigne to Rousseau, Diderot and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers â and we have already mentioned Locke. Travel accounts and this philosophical reflection upon them were Smithâs sources on primitive societies. As regards the former source, as far as we know, Adam Smith had extensive knowledge of this travel literature. His library contained the most important collections of voyages (see Bonar 1932): Hakluytâs, Churchillâs, Harrisâs; the Philosophical Transactions volumes, and other more- or less-known travellersâ accounts. He possessed Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoixâs Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1722) and Joseph-Francois Lafitauâs Histoire des dĂ©couvertes e des conquetes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde (1733). Lafitauâs Moeurs des sauvages americains (1724) was not included in Smithâs library; however, we know that he was familiar with that text because Lafitauâs Moeurs, together with Clarlevoixâs Histoire, are the sources mentioned in his discussion of the savage stage of human history in his Glasgow Lectures. In general, these works were the ones most used and appreciated by the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers.6 In regard to the latter source, to which Smith himself, as a philosopher, contributed, Montesquieuâs reflection was crucial in the organization of his theoretical position (as well as that of many others).
1.1.2 Montesquieuâs philosophy of history and savage nations
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment, was the author who, in the mid-nineteenth century, more than any other, contributed to defining the issue and the method of analysis of the societies different from those of the West. In his great work De lâĂ©sprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu laid the foundations for a philosophy of history.
Montesquieuâs starting point was the existence of a multiplicity of laws and customs, so that âthe whole seems to be an immense expanse, or a boundless oceanâ (Montesquieu 1750: 630), as many authors of the seventeenth century had observed. Unlike those authors, however, Montesquieu thought that he had been able to grasp the connecting âthreadâ running through history. When men legislate, Montesquieu maintained, they are not driven by the caprice of fancy: the order of laws is variable, but not artificial. In every law a thought is revealed: when it is uncovered, so too is its meaning, that is, its âspiritâ. Laws vary according to the circumstances: it is therefore not surprising that they are so different. To grasp its essence, a law must be considered in light of a combination of relationships, Montesquieu explains:
(Ibid.: 23)
When the relations composing the social organism are discovered, they must be gathered together and classified in order of importance. Montesquieuâs method consisted of showing the relationships between a certain particular expression of public and private life and the mentality of a nation as determined by its social necessities. Hence by reconstructing the social frame, understanding connections and concatenations, he sought to unravel the tangle of laws and to grasp its essence. As he writes in the preface of his book: