History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 506510

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

History of European Ideas

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

Review essay

Historical reections upon commerce, political economy and revolution in the

eighteenth-century Atlantic World
Manuela Albertone
University of Turin, Italy

The reduction of interest in the French Revolution in recent

years is at one with the crisis of political history and more generally
of political inquiry. In such circumstances, the recovery of the
centrality of French perspectives on eighteenth-century Atlantic
history and its consequences for the French Revolution is the rst
great strength of Paul Cheneys Revolutionary Commerce. Globalization and the French Monarchy.1
In the last few decades the most important contributions to the
New Atlantic History have centred on the history of the British
Atlantic Empire.2 Even taking into account histories of the Atlanticbased empires of Spain, Portugal and France, continental Europe
has remained very much on the sidelines.3 From the point of view
of intellectual history, historical studies of the Atlantic world of the
eighteenth century have been rather anglocentric. This is because
the success of the Atlantic Republican tradition has led to the idea
of the unity of Anglo-American political thought in the modern
age4; consequently scant regard has been paid to the contributions
made in this eld by other European countries.
Cheneys approach is innovative as his outlook on the Atlantic
world is set in France. At the same time his attention to the link
between commerce and the French Revolution owes much to the
Atlantic history perspective and its attention to economic
elements. This has led him to a new reading of the French
Revolution, and one which overcomes the opposition between
Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations.5
The process of globalization in the eighteenth-century and its
revolutionary effects are the core of the volume. Contemporary
observers called it progre`s du commerce and its outcomes
were discussed by philosophes, statesmen and merchants. The

E-mail address: manuela.albertone@unito.it.

Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce. Globalization and the French Monarchy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
2
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); The British Atlantic World, 15001800, ed. David
Armitage, M. G. Braddick (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2002).
3
Anthony Pagden, Lords of the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France c. 1500c. 1800 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995); J. H.
Elliott, Empires of Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America 14921830 (New
Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2006).
4
John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
5
See Alan Potofsky, The One and the Many: the Two revolution Question and the
Consumer-Commercial Atlantic, 1789, in: Rethinking the Atlantic World. Europe
and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, ed. Manuela Albertone, Antonio De
Francesco (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009) 1745.
1

0191-6599/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2011.07.011

book tackles the interplay between political, institutional and

economical factors, all of which were highly important for the
eighteenth-century democratic revolutions. By the variety of his
sources Cheney aims to go beyond traditional intellectual
history. He is particularly concerned to distance himself from
the so-called Cambridge school contextualism and its philological investigation, which he holds responsible for criticising the
materialist approach to history as reductive.6 The purpose of
the book is to describe economic ideas about globalization in the
eighteenth-century France, a period when transnational economic forces eluded the control of individual states. His
interpretation focuses on two main points: rstly, that the
premises of the science of commerce, namely how to create a
commercial monarchy, were false, since moderate reforms were
impossible; secondly, that there is a strong link between the
commercial revolution and the French Revolution.
Revolutionary Commerce emphasises the emergence of the
science of commerce in the eighteenth-century. This raises
immediately an important question: what does the author mean
by science of commerce? Cheney maintains that political economy
and science of commerce were pervasive though not precisely
synonymous terms.7 Nevertheless, he does not specify the
differences between them and the reader is left with a sense of
ambiguity. We can sometimes assume that the science of
commerce corresponds to the expression of mercantile interests,
as Cheney claims that commerce deserves more attention than
political economy, being more related to the reality established by
intellectual, political and economic forces. One of his interesting
conclusions is that at the end of the eighteenth-century science of
commerce and political economy presented rival conceptions of
the future of France.8
Eighteenth-century understanding of the terms commerce
and science of commerce is still in need of a thorough
investigation. It is worth emphasising the point that Du Pont de
Nemours denition of political economy is still valuable: Elle est
la science du droit naturel applique, comme il doit letre, aux
societes civilisees. Elle est la sciences des constitutions.9 Cheney

Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 11.

Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 7.
Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 8.
9
Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours to Jean-Baptiste Say, 22 April 1814, in:
Collection des principaux economistes, Physiocrates, ed. E. Daire, t. II, Paris
(Guillaumin, 1846), 397.
7
8

M. Albertone / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 506510

prefers the less determined term science of commerce. This is

more devoted to practice, and his analysis aims at using different
concepts to which, in his view, intellectual history does not pay
sufcient attention: competitive pressures, imperial politics,
models of governance. He deals with administrators, diplomats
and merchants. He aims at treating commerce not as a concept, but
as a series of practices and institutions. Through his pages we nd
eighteenth-century economical culture displayed in its entirely;
one of the valuable aspects of his book is to place the relationship
between economics and politics at the heart of the Atlantic history,
a perspective hitherto poorly investigated.
Despite his criticisms, the author draws from the Cambridge
school a stress on context, as he highlights the inuence of the
international context on economic thought, namely the problem of
the governance of the Atlantic world, and seeks to portray the
political economy of French imperial space. From a methodological
perspective Cheney intends to provide an innovative and richer
intellectual history, by considering the study of economic thought
as a synthesis of social phenomena and a valuable approach to the
study of the French eighteenth-century. The resulting intellectual
history is rightly intrinsically interdisciplinary.
The investigation of the relationship between early modern
state formation and commercial capitalism, ideas and social
change is held here as the way to overcome the dichotomy
between social and political interpretations of the French
Revolution. Nevertheless, we cannot help failing to mention that
one of the best historians of the French revolution, Georges
Lefebvre, could combine social and political history. By his
approach Cheney aligns himself with the new economic reading
of the French Revolution. In this respect he openly rejects the
revisionist interpretations envisaging the Revolution as a pure
political affair without material origin.
Among the recent studies on the link between economics and
politics and the emergence in the eighteenth-century of political
economy, as the modern political language,10 this volume amounts
to a stimulating contribution, by considering that the question of
sovereignty was not a fact of the Old Regime politics, but an issue of
political economy, posed by the primitive fact of globalization.
Cheney gives consideration to Istvan Honts perspective in
conceiving the economy in political terms. He aims to answer
Jealousy of trades strong question: can we assume a plurality of
political visions suitable to the integration of politics and market
society, or just that the modern representative republic has afnity
with markets?11 Nevertheless, Cheneys approach is far from
Honts repudiation of the economic determination of politics, even
if he takes account of Honts important lesson to highlight the
political insights in the eighteenth-century theories of international economic rivalry.
The rst three chapters of Revolutionary commerce illustrate the
progressive emergence in the French economic writers of the
awareness of the link between economics and geopolitics,
constitution and commercial prosperity and of the importance
of overseas trade as the central context for the consideration of
economic thought. Discussions of Great Britain and the United
Provinces provided case studies for French writers, who were
economic reformers and not revolutionaries as Cheney outlines
attentive to the links between the English constitution and its
commercial prosperity, and keen to point out how nances were
representative of the defects of the state. The Abbe de Saint Pierre,
Melon, Silhouette: all concentrated on the nature of the French

constitution and agreed with the idea that in France government

and social structure ought to be considered from an international
economic perspective, in which states oriented toward territorial
conquest were loosing ground to commercial states. The idea that
moeurs more than natural resources inuenced French economic
life was a well received opinion in 1748, when the Esprit des lois
was published.
A new and rich reading of Montesquieu is a key element of
Cheneys interpretation. Montesquieu is considered aside from the
dichotomy of laissez-faire/mercantilism. He was considered a
central gure of the Old Regime illusion concerning the possibility
of transforming France into a commercial monarchy. He sought to
accommodate new classes to old political forms and encouraged
commerce in a modernized absolute monarchy, by reaching a
compromise between the traditional order and the new geopolitical context. Cheney employs the term feudal to refer to eighteenthcentury France. This is in fact not suitable to the French social
structure of the last part of the Old regime.12 Montesquieu showed
that the rise of commerce set limits to despotism and to the size of
empires and that commercial expansion helps liberty to emerge,
because markets implied a different distribution of power. The way
in which Montesquieu represents a synthesis between old and new
is testied by the histories of commerce here analyzed, far from
Raynals philosophical approach. Two signicant examples are
chosen, the Chevalier dArcq and Butel Dumont. Both were
methodologically inuenced by Montesquieu as both paid attention to commerce in European polities and the central role of
foreign commerce, but their analyses diverged. Chevalier dArcq
rejected manufacture and trade and singled out agriculture as the
primary economic activity; on the opposite side, Butel Dumont
shared the opinion that freedom from arbitrary government was
the cause of the prosperity of Britains colonies.
Cheney very correctly highlights the distinction between
natural and articial wealth as a characteristic of the French
economic writers; chapters 4 and 5 are accordingly devoted to
physiocracy, the economic theory based on the natural order,
which was at odds with Montesquieus empire of climate, and
expressed by the idea of a pre-existing constitution.
In the last decades important new readings of physiocracy have
been jointly offered by historians and economists. These readings
have changed the interpretation of the rst scientic economic
theory.13 They put new stress on the political meaning of
physiocratic discourse and have emphasised the progressive
implications of the physiocratic economic approach. Cheney
singles out the key role played by the physiocratic writers: they
attacked the European colonial-mercantile system and the practice
of slavery and advocated free trade and free markets, economic
liberalism and the abolition of the society of orders that was at
odds with the natural economic order as they saw it. Nevertheless,
Cheney underestimates the innovative political implications of
physiocracy. On the issue of sovereignty he is not persuasive in
claiming that the Physiocrats drew upon the theories of Jean Bodin,
on the grounds that each advocated the unity of legislative and
executive powers.14
The theorists of the ordre naturel et essentiel des societes
politiques were actually far removed from the theorist of French
absolutism. It is true that they rejected the separation of legislative
and executive powers. Indeed, according to them, law was not
12

Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 54.

Catherine Larre`re, Linvention de leconomie au XVIIIe sie`cle. Du droit naturel a` la
physiocratie (Paris: PUF, 1992); Philippe Steiner, La science nouvelle de leconomie
politique (Paris: PUF, 1998); Victor Riquetti de Mirabeau, Francois Quesnay, Traite de
la monarchie, edite et presente par Gino Longhitano (Paris, LHarmattan, 1999);
Fisiocrazia e proprieta` terriera, introduzione e cura di Manuela Albertone, Studi
Settecenteschi, numero monograco, 24 (2004).
14
Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 14849.
13

10
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International competition and the Nation-state in
Historical Perspective (Cambridge, London: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2005); John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland, Naples, 1680
1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 4.

507

508

M. Albertone / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 506510

made by men, as it already existed in the natural order and could

be revealed by the principle of evidence. This rationalist approach
implied that the sovereign does not act as a legislator, but only
makes law understandable. For this reason the sovereign needs the
means to implement law made by nature: Ils nont point dit
LEGISFAITEUR - Du Pont de Nemours wrote - ce qui auroit indique
le pouvoir de faire arbitrairement des loix; ils ont dit LEGISLATEUR,
porteur de loi, ce qui determine que celui qui est charge de cette
fonction respectable, na dautre droit que de prendre la loi dans le
depot immense de la nature.15 This entailed strong limits to
absolutism and had liberal implications, as is testied by the
independence and political key role the physiocrats assigned to the
judiciary.16 From this perspective physiocratic political rationalism cannot be assimilated to enlightened despotism, as Cheney
suggests. The real meaning of despotisme legal, namely political
power submitted to the natural order, undermines absolutism and
renders groundless the existence of an opposition between politics
and nature in physiocratic theory.17
Cheneys reading of physiocracy is intended to reinforce his
whole interpretation, and he sees physiocracy as an attack on the
traditional order. In fact, he has relied too much on recent British
interpretations of physiocracy as far from modernity,18 and he
assumes that the Physiocrats natural science was incompatible
with their scheme of society.
Physiocrats did not envisage a commercial monarchy and their
new order was not applicable to the practices of Atlantic
commerce. According to them, the mercantile system reinforced
European scal governments.19 Cheney well depicts the originality
and the importance of this physiocratic perspective. In Cheneys
view, there is an inconsistency between their attack on commerce
and their attention to the history of commerce, testied to by
Roubauds Histoire generale de lAsie, de lAfrique et de lAmerique.
One can argue that physiocratic theory envisages an interdependence among all economic activities and that there is no opposition
between agriculture and commerce (they advocated a commercialized agriculture), but between agriculture and mercantile
interests. They opposed merchants, not commerce. It is worth
underlining that commerce and mercantile interests were not the
same. We can nd in Francois Quesnay the clear distinction
between commerce, corresponding to production and consumption, and the profession du negociant, qui ache`te pour
revendre.20
Cheneys book in its entirety rests on the idea that commerce
ultimately justied the republic, liberty and democracy. Nevertheless, facing the many-sided reality of the Old Regime we need to
15
John Stevens, Examen du gouvernement dAngleterre, compare aux constitutions
des Etats-Unis. Ou` lon refute quelques assertions contenues dans louvrage de m. Adams
intitule: Apologie des constitutions des Etats-Unis dAmerique et dans celui de m.
Delolme intitule: De la constitution dAngleterre, par un cultivateur de New-Jersey.
Ouvrage traduit de langlois et accompagne de notes, Londres (et se trouve a` Paris
chez Froulle), s.e. (1789), 17779, note XIX.
16
I have discussed the Physiocrats contribution to modern constitutionalism
related to the issue of the separation of powers in: Manuela Albertone, Que
lautorite souveraine soit unique. La separation des pouvoirs dans la pensee des
physiocrates et son legs: du despotisme legal a` la democratie representative de
Condorcet, in: Les usages de la separation des pouvoirs, The uses of the separation of
powers, Textes reunis pas Sandrine Baume et Biancamaria Fontana (Paris: Michel
Houdiard, 2008), 3868.
17
Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, 148.
18
Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual
Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Oxford, Princeton University Press,
2007).
19
Cheney discussed this aspect of physiocratic attacks to the mercantile system,
in: Paul B. Cheney, Les economistes francais et limage de lAmerique. Lessor du
commerce transatlantique et leffondrement du gouvernement feodal, Dix-huitie`me
sie`cle, XXXIII (2001), 23145.
20
Francois Quesnay, Lettre de M. Alpha sur le langage de la science economique,
in: Francois Quesnay, Oeuvres economiques comple`tes et autres textes, ed., Christine
There, Loc Charles, Jean-Claude Perrot, 2 vols. (Paris: INED., 2005), t. II, 1117.

distinguish between republican government and republican

discourse. The latter entailed reection on the public good,
political representation, and the foundations of sovereignty,
without reference to any particular form of government. Besides,
to investigate eighteenth-century republican ideas, we can then
enlarge our historical analysis and go beyond commercial
countries, such as the United Provinces, a republic, or Great
Britain, a commercial monarchy, and also appreciate republican
implications according to the eighteenth-century meaning of
the economic approach developed in the context of French
agricultural reality, represented by the physiocratic tradition:
M. Turgot disait souvent: Je nai jamais connu de constitution
vraiment republicaine, cest-a`-dire, de pays ou` tous les proprietaires
eussent un droit egal de concourir a` la formation des lois, de regler
la constitution des assemblees qui redigent et promulguent ces
lois.21 These arguments seem to give some grounds for saying that
constitutional freedom rather than the republic was related to
commerce in the eighteenth-century debates.
In the Old Regime corporate society, where different interests
prevailed, commerce was not always equivalent to freedom, as
Great Britains protectionism testied; it usually implied privilege
and in any case freedom was conceived differently from our
modern perspective. Besides, the dimension of an integrated
European and Atlantic market in the eighteenth-century, considered as a world system, has been recently challenged.22 S. R.
Epstein, a scholar in economic history, questioned some years ago
whether the driving force of pre-modern growth was the defence
and growth of individual and mercantile freedom against the
autocratic powers of states, and whether different kinds of political
regimes, absolutist or republican, gave rise to different economic
outcomes. In the traditional order, where what really mattered
were property rights to land, Epstein claims that monarchies
emerged that were more liberal and pluralistic than the republics,
since republican subjects economic and political freedom was
limited by the power concentrated in the hands of a ruling
oligarchy, as the United Provinces showed.23 Facing the complexity
of modern state formation as a slow and non-linear process of
expanding sovereignty, stimulating observations come from
Epsteins analysis of absolutism as a propagandistic device devoid
of practical substance.24 From a different perspective even Istvan
Hont emphasises the republican animosity to commerce and
explains how jealousy of trade the application of reason of state
to international trade follows from the imperative of protecting
the republic against external threats.25
Over many centuries the emerging of the world economy was
dominated by the long struggle between the Dutch republic,
France and Great Britain26; afterwards, in the last phase of the Old
Regime republics the emergence of commercial empire of two
monarchies as France and Great Britain changed the survival
strategies of the small republics.27 In such circumstances we do not
21
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de CONDORCET, Vie de Turgot (1786), in:
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Oeuvres, ed. A. Condorcet
OConnor, M.-F. Arago, 12 vol. Paris, F. Didot fre`res, 18471849, t. V, 20910.
22
S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth. The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300
1750 (London, New York, Routledge, 2000); Alan Potofsky, The One and the Many.
23
S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth, 1237.
24
S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth, 78.
25
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 13.
26
Ronald Findlay, Kevin ORourke, Power and Plenty. Trade, War, and the World
Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
27
In his narrative Cheney tends to assimilate the United Provinces and Great
Britain as commercial states. From a different perspective Koen Stapelbroek has
recently outlined how during the American revolution the Dutch republics foreign
policy moved from Great Britain to the United States, which strove for gaining credit
on the international scene as the champion of trade freedom against the
protectionist Great Britain (Koen Stapelbroek, Neutrality and Trade in the Dutch
Republic (17751783): Preludes to a Piecemeal Revolution, in: Rethinking the Atlantic
World, 100119).

M. Albertone / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 506510

merely face an opposition between monarchies and republics, but

a complex interplay, as Richard Whatmore has recently outlined,
sketching the increasing tendency in Geneva to turn to Britain as
the only state capable of sustaining a peaceful commercial
empire.28
Physiocrats believed France should concentrate its wealth away
from the ocean and they rejected territorial conquest, even though,
as Philippe Steiner has shown, they were aware of the links
between power, wealth and the military and the navy on the
international scene, as marked by the economic and political
rivalry between France and Great Britain.29 Cheney pays attention
to the physiocrats original outlook on the European colonial
system, since Physiocrats complained about the anti-economic
effects of slavery and colonial exploitation and envisaged colonies
as incorporated into the nation, in a space dominated by freedom
of trade.30 In this perspective the role played by the physiocratic
international perspective in the debate on the Exclusive, the
trading regime established in 1717, is here well analyzed.
Cheneys sixth chapter on the Exclusive plugs an important gap
in historical discussion of the Atlantic word, by highlighting the
French contribution to the eighteenth-century economic and
political culture of the Atlantic, too often considered as British
centred. After the pioneering works by Jacques Godechot and
Pierre Chaunu,31 French historiography has been late in dealing
with the new Atlantic history, reducing it to history of empires, and
deeming it not compatible with French national history.32 For
French scholars the Atlantic is not a concept as it is for AngloAmerican historians. It is not a question of French backwardness;
indeed, we can even maintain that the Atlantic history began in
France in the eighteenth-century, when the Academy of Lyon
instituted in 1781 a prize on the effects on Europe of the discovery
of America, proposed by Raynal, who himself encouraged an
historical overview on Atlantic history through the success of his
Histoire des deux Indes. In comparison with Anglo-American
historiography, French scholars have adopted a different approach,
which is open to the Mediterranean, continental Europe and the
Oceanic spaces.33 By this perspective the compact analysis of
Revolutionary commerce represents a turning point in the American
28
Richard Whatmore, Neither Masters nor Slaves: Small States and Empire in
the Long Eighteenth Century, in: Lineages of Empire. The Historical Roots of British
Imperial Thought, Proceedings of the British Academy, 155 (2009), 5381. See also
r appui. The Small
Richard Whatmore, Lamitie de grands Etats est leur plus su
State Dilemma in Genevan Political Economy, 176217980 , Schweizerische Zeitschrift
fur Geschichte/Revue Suisse dHistoire/Rivista Storica Svizzera, vol. 50 (2000), 35371.
29
Philippe Steiner, Wealth and Power: Quesnays Political Economy of the
Agricultural Kingdom, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, XXIV, n. 1 (2002),
91109.
30
For two recent overviews on Physiocracy and slavery see: Marcel Dorigny, The
Question on Slavery in the Physiocratic Texts: A Rereading of an Old Debate, in:
Rethinking the Atlantic World, 147162; Pernille Rge, The Question of Slavery in
Physiocratic Political Economy, in: Governare il mondo. Leconomia come linguaggio
della politica nellEuropa del Settecento, a cura di Manuela Albertone (Milano,
Fondazione Feltrinelli, 2009), 14969.
31
Jacques Godechot, Histoire de lAltantique (Paris, Bordas, 1947); Huguette and
Pierre Chaunu Seville et lAtlantique, 15041650 (Paris, Colin, 1955); Paul Butel,
Histoire de lAtlantique de lAntiquite a` nos jours (Paris, Perrin, 1997).
32
Marcel Dorigny, LAtlantique: un etat de la question, in LAtlantique, Dixhuitie`me sie`cle, n. 33 (2001), 716, Dorigny argues there is a strong French
historiography on the Atlantic world; see also Marcel Dorigny, Bernard Gainot, Atlas
des esclavages : traites, societes coloniales, abolitions de lAntiquite a` nos jours (Paris,
Autrement, 2006); Cecile Vidal, The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic
History, Southern Quarterly, 43 (2006), 15389. A recent investigation of French
America, which pays attention non only to the overseas organization but also to the
metropolitan system, is offered by Trevor Burnard, Allan Potofsky, Introduction. The
Political Economy of the French Atlantic World and the Carribean before 1800, special
issue, French History, vol. 25, n. 1 (2011), 18.
33
A comparison between the French and Anglo-American historiography on the
Atlantic is offered by Silvia Marzagalli, Sur les origins de lAtlantic History:
paradigme interpretatif de lhistoire des espaces atlantiques a` lepoque moderne, in:
LAtlantique, 1731.

509

historiography, which gives new centrality to France in the Atlantic

world, by highlighting the unintended outcomes of the economic
discussions.
The center-pheriphery outlook allows Cheney to trace the
mutual exchange between metropolis and colonies. During the
eighteenth-century colonists mounted a resistance to the Exclusive, as the island economy increased. Merchants demanded
freedom of trade in terms of national interest, and later the
Physiocrats theorized this demand, emphasising that a monarchical empire was a more modern regime type than a commercial
republic. On the other side, the chambers defended the Exclusive
through the rhetoric of nationhood. There is here an original and
uninvestigated approach to the shaping of national character,
which offers a contribution to the discussions that are currently
taking place regarding national histories and global history.
Cheney encourages us to rethink the lines of interaction between
national histories and area studies, to follow how ideas and
economic and political movements spread and to practice a global
history which helps also to take into account the differences
between nations.34
The last part of the volume is the most innovative, as it places
the French revolution at the core of the Atlantic context and the
threats posed to France by primitive globalization. It is rooted in a
re-evaluation of the economic approach against the revisionist
historiography on the French revolution. Cheney rejected the
tendency to conne the interpretation of the revolution to its
political aspects and he carefully points out the economic
foundations of representative government. He envisages two
phases in the monarchys efforts to accommodate the traditional
order with the new commercial reality: (1) the bankruptcy of 1788
and the revolution of 1789, (2) the fall of the monarchy in 1792.
The nature of what was at stake was evident in the Affaire des
colonies, the controversy in the rst stages of the revolution about
the fate of French colonies. The moderate path of reformers, to
preserve slavery and make revolution, was not practicable and it is
here exemplied by the position of Barnave. An important and
neglected protagonist of the French revolution is then newly
evocated from an unusual standpoint.
During the revolution colonies were an economic and essential
interest and a compromise was required between the revolutionary universalism and the demands of commercial empire. The
liberal revolution at home was at odds with the ow of wealth from
the colonies and their illiberal structure. The singularity of the
French empire is outlined by comparison with the centrality of
empire to the British nationhood, as David Armitage has traced it.35
There did not exist in France a similar perception of empire; the
Physiocratic project to create a monarchical empire aimed in fact at
the abolition of the empire system.
It is Cheneys contention that the revolutionary effects of the
commercial revolution caused the 1789 revolution and that
Barnaves Introduction a` la revolution francaise highlighted the
interplay between constitutional monarchy and commercial
empire, since they collapsed together.
Two ideas of metropolis-colony relationship were at stake:
rstly, the enforcement of the revolutionary principles of
universality and equality, which could have led to the independence of colonies. Cheney contends that this solution was close to
the Physiocrats proposals. Secondly, the imperial solution, a sort of
American federalism similar to constitutional monarchy, the
illusion being that the revolution could be terminated by

34
Rethinking American history in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); Chistopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern
World 17801914 (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Thomas Bender, A Nation
among Nations: Americas Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
35
David Armitage, The Ideological origins of the British Empire.

510

M. Albertone / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 506510

preserving together monarchy, colonies and slavery. Barnave

represented this illusion, as he emphasised the link between the
monarchy and the colonial question, both of he intended to
preserve. For him the survival of the revolution depended on the
wealth of colonies, which he aimed to keep safe by a civilized
monarchy and an aristocracy of property.
Cheneys perspective leads to a new and innovative reading of
the positive effects of the Atlantic economy. He goes beyond the
New Atlantic history, and encourages an analysis of the dynamics,
complexity and diversity of empires, following the postcolonial
studies argument that there is not any evident distinction between
imperialisms. Revolutionary Commerce takes account of the wealth
of all the Anglo-American scholars contributions on the Atlantic
History.
It is true that Anthony Pagdens Lords on the Word provides a
comparative study among Spanish, French and British empires and
shows colonies political effects on the metropolitan powers, but
Pagdens book is focused on ideologies rather than on discourses.36
On the other hand Revolutionary Commerces variety of sources is
deeply anchored in historical reality and in economic and political
practices and suggests a dialogue among different protagonists.
Nevertheless, Cheney does not share Pagdens concern about the
denition of concepts, as his encouragements to annotate the
terms empire, imperialism and their meanings suggest, nor does he
share Armitages effort to avoid any conceptual ambiguity, when
he gives detailed denitions of ideology.
The French case adds new elements of the emergence of
different identities in the Atlantic world, it backs up the idea that
there is not a typical colonial venture, that the creation of this
identity was not self-conscious and that the Atlantic colonies
developed their identities over a period when the mothercountries were acquiring their identities as modern nations.37
Cheney does not share the view that empires can also be
positive forces in the world, a perspective which has been recently
denounced as being thinkable again.38 David Armitages The
Ideological origins of the British Empire is an avowed point of
reference for Cheneys reading of the French idea of empire,
different from the British case, which is inseparable from its
imperial history.39 He follows Armitages proposal to go beyond
nation-state history, which allows us to overcome the separation
between domestic and overseas history. Most of all he shares
Armitages optimistic assessment that trade depends on liberty

36

Anthony Pagden, Lords of the World.

Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 15001800, ed. Nicholas Canny, Anthony
Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
38
Anthony Pagden, From Empire to Federation, in: Imperialism. Historical and
Literary Investigations 15001900, ed. Balachandra Rajan, Elizabeth Sauer (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 25571.
39
David Armitage, The Ideological origins of the British Empire.
37

and he is affected by his opinion that the British Atlantic world

combined liberty and empire, which in Cheneys perspective
corresponds to commerce. Armitage maintains that liberty can be
the foundation of empire and emphasises that the success of a
trading nation, as Britain was, was related to the liberty of its
government. Nevertheless, we can not help failing to mention that
as Cheney well depicts the collapse of the Old Regime broke out
in France, and not in Great Britain, and that the French revolution
represented a turning point in the shaping of modern European
identity. In this respect the French case analyzed by Cheney, where
the link between colonies and absolutism nally moved to
revolution, is far from the British model. From this point of view
the author argues against the centrality of the British Empire as an
interpretative key applicable to the whole of the Atlantic world.40
Cheney is close to the global dimension of eighteenth-century
ideas offered by Armitages recent analysis of the American
Declaration of independence as a global phenomenon, suggesting
that it is possible to compare discrete phases of globalization.41
Post-colonial studies assume that empire, imperialism and
colonies were the same and that all people were subjected in the
same way. The Anglo-American new Atlantic history has explored
various early imperialisms and has dened them in different way.
For his part Anthony Pagden has highlighted an economic
deterministic paradigm, proceeding from Adam Smith and the
eighteenth-century economists, alleging that people benets in
the modern world were related to commercial societies, and
incompatible with conquest. Pagden emphasises that liberal
imperialism is a topic coming back, sometimes disguised as
international politics, in recent historiography.42
By considering French colonies in relation to an absolutistic
regime and an economically dynamic state, Cheneys approach is
signicant. In the last chapter of his book he outlines the limits of
the Barnaves effort to combine the colonial system with
constitutional monarchy and with the new revolutionary reality.
Nevertheless, his interpretation sometimes suffers from eighteenth-century writers excessive optimism. His reading of the
revolutionary effects of commerce sometimes overlooks, as other
Anglo-American investigations on the Atlantic world do, that the
positive outcomes of commerce had been preceded by conquest,
that commerce implied exploitation and that liberty and revolution in Europe were dependent upon the subjection of nonEuropean people.

40
Preface by Bernard Bailyn, in: The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David
Armitage, M. G. Braddick (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2002).
41
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence. A Global History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Stimulating observations come from
Armitages contention that the American Declaration arose from movements of
individuals and goods around the Atlantic world that linked Europe, Africa and
Americas into a single economic and cultural system, showing that the various
European sources for the Declaration encourage the rethinking of American history
in a global age and can help to show that globalization, as Cheney outlines, is not a
novel condition. See also, David Armitage, Is there a Pre-History of Globalization?, in:
Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen,
Maura OConnor (London, New York, Routledge, 2004), 16576.
42
Anthony Pagden, From Empire to Federation.