Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book presents the first in-depth examination of the relationship between the theories of British political economists and travel accounts. It employs tools from cultural historians to examine how political economists and others attempted to explain differences in progress and civilization, and racial, status, and gender differences between peoples during the period 1750-1850.
The book also draws on the histories of observation and objectivity to examine how British political economists pursued what T.R. Malthus called "authenticated facts" from overseas, as they struggled to reconcile their universal theories with the multitudinous observations made by travelers.
The first part of the book traces this theme of managing information overload during the transition from early modern travel by Europeans to the rise of scientific travel in the eighteenth century. The third chapter focuses on how political economists employed the principle of population to organize travel observations at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The next chapter explores accounts by British sent to evaluate speculative investments in former Spanish American colonies in the 1820s, and the following chapter looks at the travel writing of Harriet Martineau. The conclusion sketches the immediate post-1850 period, as concerns shifted from managing information to managing the British Empire.
The book casts new light on how British political economists dealt with the problem of turning facts into evidence during the Industrial Revolution. This book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the history of travel writing, the history of economics, and the history of science.
Synopsis
The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750-1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers' observations in their own analyses.
Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus's population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects, domestic woman and economic man.
The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau both observe, a role associated with women, and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, to men.