Revenue,rent…profit? Early British imperialism1,political economy and the search for a differentia specifica ( inter se )

Abstract

This article argues that in the mid to late eighteenth century, political economy, through writers such as Francois Quesnay, David Hume and Adam Smith, saw a discussion of ‘despotism’, which stood for thinking through the political arrangement within which economic productivity was formulated; even as the distinction between the two was not always self-evident. This theoretical function of despotism disappears in the ‘mature’ phase of political economy (David Ricardo), precisely when it was taking shape—in institutional and conceptual-lexical terms—in the subcontinent through Britain’s conquest of India via the East India Company. We argue that the disappearance of despotism at the conceptual level in this phase in Britain is not only questionable from a theoretical standpoint but also played its historical role as a decoy in occluding attention toward imperialism in India wherein the distinction between the political and the economic was becoming more and more difficult to make. Through such an investigation we thus hope to examine the emergence of the economy (and by implication the state-political) as an independent analytic site as well as evaluate its categories and historical significance. We base our argument on a reading of the canonical texts of figures such as Adam Smith, William Blackstone and David Ricardo, Land Revenue Settlement sources in India and the hitherto neglected economic writings of W.H. Sleeman.