Histories of Trade: Civilisation and Political Economy in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Histoire Philosophique, Political Economy and the Theory of Civilisation "After having read the descriptions of three or four thousand battles, and the substance of some hundreds of treaties, I do not find myself one jot wiser than when I began; because from them I learn nothing but events." It was for this reason, Voltaire concluded in his Nouvelles Considérations sur l'histoire (1744), that "we neglect studies infinitely