Jevons, Marshall and Late-Victorian Colonial Imaginaries of International Trade

• In Event: The Emergence and Continuity of Colonialisms: Agency and Domination

Abstract

W. Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), two of the late-Victorian intellectual forebears of today’s economists, imagine their project as establishing a science of economics on the model, perhaps, of physics (Mirowski 1984). But as this paper suggests, abstractions like utility, supply and demand curves, equilibrium, and notions of comparative advantage coexisted always in their work alongside more-or-less stylized histories – of stages of development, civilizational advance, and comparative national and racial character. Their principal discussions of international trade are interwoven with the issue of challenges to Great Britain’s domination in manufacturing trade and the resulting prospects for the preservation of the empire. Though they foresaw a greater dispersion of industry and commerce over time, the barriers of climate, culture, and race seemed likely to preserve the main contours of the colonial division of labor and English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, preeminence for some time. Their defenses of free trade policies are intimately interwoven with the fabric of theories of history, social evolution, and racial difference. I conclude by suggesting that a close reading of early neoclassical economists generally reveals (1) that the boundaries between economics and history/politics/culture, which they are supposed to have been instrumental in drawing, remained unclear from the beginning and impossible for Jevons and Marshall themselves to respect; and (2) that they offer a variant of liberal international theory currently ignored by scholars of the period.

Author

• David L. Blaney, Macalester College