Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris
prosperous voyages I often made
To Epidamium, till my factor’s death
And the great care of goods at random left
Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse … (1.1.36–43)
Again, Egeon’s transnational business is redolent of early modern commercial practice: as a foreign merchant, he relies on a local “factor,” or agent, to broker his transactions in Epidamium.10 But the critique of foreign trade that can be heard in this speech is not a fiscal one. Indeed, Egeon insists that “our wealth increased” as a result of his “prosperous voyages.” Rather, he believes his international business to be at fault because of the damage it has done domestically, to his wife and to his marriage. Commerce in Egeon’s life story thus entails what he considers to be a fatal error. The verb Shakespeare chooses here is revealing: Egeon’s “great care of goods at random left”—that is, his mercantile appetite for neglected foreign goods—“Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse” (emphasis added). This is a term that Shakespeare often uses to suggest perversion of “kind,” that is, natural, courses of action: it has a similar valence in Adriana’s remark about “some love that drew” her husband from home.11 Moral rather than fiscal economy is brought into play here, in other words; the agent of immorality is Egeon’s appetite, which estranges him from his domestic as much as his national obligations.
In the Egeon story, then, Shakespeare articulates a highly ambivalent set of attitudes toward international commerce that serve to frame the details of the main plot. On the one hand, in the words of Solinus, commerce across national borders is a more or less innocent ensemble of “well-dealing” practices; on the other, it is viewed by the Duke of Syracuse as a potential threat to national health and by Egeon as a confirmed threat to domestic harmony. These negative assessments are informed by the ambivalences, in Adriana’s words, of a “love that drew him oft from home.” Is transnational commerce, as Egeon insists, a phenomenon born of the merchant’s potentially excessive appetite, perilous only to himself and his family? Or is it, as the Duke of Syracuse hints, an external force that potentially damages the nations with which it comes into contact? In other words, is commerce simply a matter of individual or domestic moral health that necessitates prudence on the part of the merchant alone? Or does it have a potentially pathological impact on the fiscal well-being of nations, and thus require the judicious intervention of sovereigns? Significantly, such questions resonate with those posed in English economic writing of the sixteenth century. If the age of English mercantilism proper is dominated by the “Four Ms”—Malynes, Milles, Misselden and Mun—the century of premercantilist English thought is represented by the “two Ss”—Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith.
Premercantilist Commercial Pathology: The “Two Ss”
It should be reiterated, of course, that the notion of “the” economy as a nationally bounded system engaged in transactions with global trading partners and adversaries is a twentieth-century, post-World War II innovation. What we might want to call economic writing prior to 1600 is rarely about the economy in the modern sense of the word: Tudor English writers, secular as much as ecclesiastical, tended to regard commercial activity as a subset of Christian ethics divorced from any national or global context, involving mostly individual transactions spiced with the sins of covetousness and usury.12
This focus on individual morality, however, was increasingly challenged in the sixteenth century by emerging practices of economic nationalism. Henry VII’s victory in the War of the Roses resulted in the consolidation of central royal power at the expense of the feudal lords; the Protestant Reformation and the seizure of monastic properties by the crown further fueled a new ideology of the English nation-state in which not only religious and political but also economic power was centralized in the king.13 This development was partly inspired by a financial crisis: throughout much of his reign, Henry VIII suffered from a drastic shortage of money. The necessity of full state coffers became even more pressing as England contemplated invasion by hostile Catholic powers. England’s new religious nationalism, inspired by the break with Rome, was therefore accompanied by a worried economic nationalism, and writers supportive of the king looked for new ways to generate revenue and treasure.14 This task was made all the more vexed by the economic crises created by rampant inflation in the 1540s and 1550s and devaluation of the nation’s coin.15
Other factors contributed to the growing English awareness of and interest in national economy. Under the Tudors, English merchants and institutions wrested control of foreign trade from stranger merchants such as the Italian Lombards and the Hanseatic merchants of northern Germany; after the fall of Antwerp to Spain in 1576, new English joint-stock companies such as the Levant Company (chartered in 1581) and the East India Company (chartered in 1601) took control of the lucrative spice and silk trades, which had previously been dominated by the Portuguese.16 English merchants’ growing sense of themselves as players on the stage of global commerce also helped foster new perspectives among Tudor economic writers. In the decades following the London Merchant Adventurers Company’s reincorporation in 1565 as the Merchant Adventurers of England, English economic writers—many of them merchants themselves17—likewise displayed a stronger sense of national as opposed to merely individual or familial wealth, together with an understanding of the systemic processes by which it might be accumulated or squandered.
Early Tudor protodiscourses of national economy are most legible, and were most sophisticatedly expounded, when they intersected with medicalized discourses of the body and disease. In the late 1530s, Henry VIII’s political adviser Thomas Starkey penned a treatise titled Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, in which he argued that the nation’s wealth was diminished by metaphorical diseases such as “consumption,” “palsy,” and “frenzy.”18 But in resorting to such analogies, Starkey found it hard to identify with any coherence the causes of England’s economic ills. On the one hand, the characters of his dialogue repeatedly excoriate the gluttonous appetites of English subjects in ways that reek more of the pulpit than of the mercantilist treatise. Pole, for example, attributes the nation’s economic woes at one point to “excess in diet … For this may be a common proverb: ‘Many idle gluttons make vittle dear’” (92). Similarly, he chalks up England’s problems to the sins of “idleness and sloth” (93). On the other hand, however, Starkey sometimes offers analyses that anticipate a more modern conception of economic pathology—that is, he permits his two characters to regard England’s ills as the product not of slipshod morality but of systemic problems that bedevil commerce with other nations.
The affliction of political “gout,” for example, is caused by excessive foreign trade: “if we had fewer things brought in from other parts, and less carried out, we should have more commodity and very true pleasure, much more than we have now; this is certain and sure” (96). Starkey’s suspicion of imports anticipates the mercantilist conviction that excessive consumption of foreign commodities depletes the nation’s treasure. Also like the mercantilists, he complains about the export of English raw materials such as “lead and tin,” which get converted into manufactures overseas, only to be retailed back to the English at higher prices (158). But Starkey does not share the mercantilists’ valorization of exports as a means of acquiring bullion; instead, as the above examples make clear, his economic goal is the self-sufficient commonwealth. And this ideal often leads Starkey to collapse his more systemic analysis into moral outrage about the English appetite for all things foreign: Pole attributes what he calls the body politic’s “palsy,” for example, to “all such marchands which carry out things necessary to the use of our people, and bring in such vain trifles and conceits, only for the foolish pastime and pleasure of man” (82).
Starkey’s conflicted paradigms of economic pathology delimit the conceptual horizons of subsequent sixteenth-century economic writing. On the one hand, his more medieval discourse of immoral appetite is replicated in the extensive body of Elizabethan literature bemoaning the unprecedented availability of sin-inducing foreign goods such as clothes, foodstuffs, spices, and drugs. In The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), for example, Philip Stubbes sought to locate the origins of economic pathology in the aberrant appetites of English subjects for such goods. Employing pointedly medical language, he offers