Table Of ContentRoutledge Studies in the History of Economics
THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF
WILLIAM PETTY
EXPLORING THE COLONIALIST ROOTS OF ECONOMICS
Hugh Goodacre
i
The Economic Thought of
William Petty
William Petty (1623–1 687), long recognised as a founding father of English
political economy, was actively involved in the military-c olonial administra-
tion of Ireland following its invasion by Oliver Cromwell, and to the end of his
days continued to devise schemes for securing England’s continued domination
of that country. It was in that context that he elaborated his economic ideas,
which consequently reflect the world of military- bureaucratic officialdom,
neo- feudalism and colonialism he served.
This book shows that much of the theory and methodology in use within
the economics discipline of today has its roots in the writings of Petty and his
contemporaries, rather than in the supposedly universalistic and enlightened
ideals of Adam Smith a century later. Many of the fundamental ideas of today’s
development economics, for example, are shown to have been deployed by
Petty explicitly for the purpose of furthering England’s colonialist objectives,
while his pioneering writings on fiscal issues and national accounting theory
were equally explicitly directed towards the raising of funds for England’s preda-
tory colonial and commercial wars.
This book argues that exploring the historical roots of economic ideas and
methods in this way is an essential aspect of assessing their appropriateness
and analytical power today, and that this is more relevant than ever. It will be
of interest to advanced students and researchers in the history of economic
thought, early modern economic history, development economics and eco-
nomic geography.
Hugh Goodacre is currently a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University
of Westminster, and a Teaching Fellow at University College London. He was
formerly a Senior Curator for Asia, Africa, Pacific Collections at the British
Library, where he worked from 1972 to 1996, specialising in Arabic. His
research project is to explore the influence of colonialist ideology on the eco-
nomics discipline.
ii
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For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ series/
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iii
The Economic Thought
of William Petty
Exploring the Colonialist Roots of
Economics
Hugh Goodacre
iv
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Hugh Goodacre
The right of Hugh Goodacre to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-0-815-34815-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-16760-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
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v
Contents
List of figures vii
List of tables viii
Preface: economic thought and the intellectual legacy of colonialism ix
Acknowledgements xii
1 William Petty: biographical and historical background 1
1.0 Introduction 1
1.1 Petty and the Cromwellian settlement in Ireland 2
1.2 Aftermath 7
1.3 Petty’s status in the history of economic thought 11
1.4 Conclusions: Petty, Smith and the roots of economics 14
2 Petty and the colonialist roots of development economics 26
2.0 Introduction 26
2.1 Petty, Smith and development economics: a literature review 27
2.2 Petty on labour in early modern Ireland 31
2.3 Petty, the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland and the
‘civilising mission’ 35
2.4 Petty on institutions and their transformation 37
2.5 Petty and the state: metropolitan and colonial 38
2.6 Conclusions 41
3 Petty’s economic thought and the fiscal- military state 46
3.0 Introduction: Petty and the historical roots of the
fiscal- military state 46
3.1 Petty’s fiscal theory and the history of economic thought 48
3.2 Petty, public finance and warfare 66
3.3 Conclusions: state, natural law and military- bureaucratic
officialdom 77
vi
vi Contents
4 The spatial economy from Petty to Krugman 95
4.0 Introduction 95
4.1 Petty’s spatial- economic analysis 96
4.2 From Petty to von Thünen 125
4.3 Krugman’s ‘new economic geography’ outlined 137
4.4 From Petty to neoclassical economics 151
4.5 Conclusions 160
5 William Petty and colonialism: a selective review
of some current debates 178
5.0 I ntroduction: an “alternative genealogy of the history of
political economy”? 178
5.1 Petty’s spatial- economic thought: a French– English zig zag 179
5.2 Petty’s natural philosophy in its colonial context 183
5.3 Petty, colonialism and historians of economic thought 184
5.4 Petty, Whig history and colonialism 186
5.5 Conclusions 188
Postscript: William Petty and the colonialist roots
of economics 191
Bibliography 194
Author citation index 222
General index 231
vii
Figures
4.1 Reduction in distance to navigable water 122
4.2 The five counties “next circumjacent” to London 134
4.3 Von Thünen’s original diagram 134
4.4 The diagram in the 1875 edition of von Thünen’s work 135
4.5 Launhardt’s diagram, plotting distance against rent 135
4.6 Lösch’s three-d imensional ‘demand cone’ diagram 136
4.7 Von Thünen’s theory in three dimensions 137
4.8 The ‘tomahawk’ diagram 142
4.9 Locational real wage and core– periphery equilibrium 144
4.10 Violation of the “No-B lack- Hole” condition 145
4.11 The emergence of flanking cities 147
4.12 The ‘double tomahawk’ 149
viii
Tables
3.1 England’s national accounts 58
3.2 Petty’s recommended scale of state revenue and expenditure 68
4.1 Dimensions of the agrarian economy 98
4.2 London: its size and the range of its economic influence 99
4.3 The spatial- economic logic of Petty’s final scheme 119
ix
Preface
Economic thought and the intellectual
legacy of colonialism
The economics discipline as it now exists in much of the academic world –
internationally as well as in the countries where it initially took its now familiar
form – has an intellectual ancestry which is inextricably interlinked with colo-
nialist currents of thought in the West. This book aims to cast light on this
interconnection in the case of a formative chapter in the emergence of modern
colonialist ideology – that which concerned England’s colonialism in Ireland,
“the colony par excellence” of early modern times1 – and specifically in the
case of the writings of one of its foremost ideologists, who has also long been
recognised to be a founding father of English political economy, William Petty
(1623– 1687).
The book argues that the role of the history of economic thought is essen-
tial if we are to assess the ideas and methods used by economists today; if we
lose a perspective on where those ideas and methods came from, and on their
performance in different historical periods and circumstances, then we lose an
essential aspect of assessing their appropriateness and analytical power in appli-
cation to economic issues in the world today. It is with that aim that this book
brings to the fore Petty’s close engagement – practical as well as ideological – in
the history of English colonialism in early modern Ireland, a chapter of his-
tory which has been described as having “presaged the future form of capitalist
imperialism”, and as having been consciously adopted by England as a “model
of empire”.2 Petty, who first “began to define colonial populations by looking
at Ireland”,3 directed all his considerable intellectual energy towards providing
ideological legitimation for this colonial relationship. His was a not incon-
siderable contribution to the construction of modern colonialist ideology at
this formative stage when England’s colonial rule in Ireland was the context
in which the very idea of the colonial system, in its modern form, was begin-
ning to be defined. Ireland was indeed providing the archetype of the colonial
relationship which was subsequently to be globalised – a relationship whose
legacy lives on in the situation of international inequality that exists today. Such
was the soil in which the roots of much modern economic thought were first
planted, and it is the aim of the present study to explore the continuing effects
on today’s economics discipline of this intellectual ancestry.
