ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Economic Crises of 1825-6: Retrospections

• In Event: Science, Politics, and the Nation

English Abstract

The crises of 1825-1826 started as a financial crisis in Spanish America and England then spread to become what many commentators have termed the first global economic crisis. The anniversaries have prompted reexaminations of the crises across multiple disciplines. This paper explores contemporary commentary on the crises and shifts in current scholarship on their multidimensional sources and consequences. It focuses on the imbrication of two contemporaneous developments: the emergence of British political economy as a discipline in the early nineteenth century, and stirrings in the prehistory of social scientific observations. Thus, Smith’s political economy, Malthus’s population principle and stadial theory all combined to offer guidelines on what to observe; this dovetailed with debates about the credibility of observations in accounts by travelers and residents in post-revolutionary Spanish America. While British political economists typically attempted to establish a clear distinction between domestic and political economy, Malthus’s population principle effectively erased the boundary between the two. These considerations were reflected in the accounts of the events of 1825-1826 as well as the processes involved in the transformation of diaries and journals into publications and their circulation, complicating questions about who could credibly observe, represent, identify causes, and assign blame for the crises. These questions speak to epistemological concerns about the boundaries of social scientific analyses, then and now.

Author

• Brian P Cooper