Conclusion: Rethinking Economic Culture

Summary

This book is intended to contribute to the process of reconfiguring the way we think about early modern economic relations. As I have shown, the most popular of our current methods are deeply flawed and the conclusions that they have produced are often unsustainable. Much of the existing historiography has failed to adequately acknowledge the importance of cultural norms. Specifically, profound problems have arisen from methodologies that assume the primacy of material concerns in economic relations and the tendency of previous scholars to reduce the history of this issue to a conflict between ‘the moral economy’ and ‘the market economy’. The preceding chapters have thus documented the ways in which this dualism elides the complexity and diversity of social and economic behaviour. Some previous historians have already remarked on these weaknesses, a few even offering potential alternatives – yet, this process of questioning, criticising, and superseding has rarely been sustained, especially in the historiography of the later Stuart period. I conclude, therefore, with an explanation of the implications of this historiographical argument and the evidence presented in the book as a whole, emphasising the fruitful possibilities it opens up for future research.

Any prospective synthesis must begin with an earnest recognition of the importance of morality in economic culture, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and more generally. This means abandoning methodologies that neglect moral norms or that reduce them to mere ‘tricks’ and ‘tactics’.