Here is a fact that seems to surprise many deeply learned scholars. The term “dismal science” was applied to British political economy as the 1840s ended because of its role bringing about the emancipation of West Indian slaves in the 1830s. This paper addresses the consequences that follow from our ignorance of the role of classical economic theory in the anti-racial slavery coalition of Biblical literalists and utilitarians.

In 1690, John Locke proclaimed, “Whatsoever [anyone]; removes out of the State that Nature hath provided … hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.” Ever since this dictum was pronounced philosophers, economists, and, especially, capital theorists have been embarrassed by the virtually universal disregard of it in practice. At the very inception of economic theorizing, Ricardo declared that explaining the division of the national income into wages, rents, and interest was “the principal problem in Political Economy.” He proposed an ingenious explanation, but was far from settling the matter. Some fifty years later, Marx, building on Ricardo's concept of value, brought the debate to a sharp focus; after him, it became largely an argument between Marxists and everyone else. Put starkly, Marx defined the value of any good or service to be the amount of labor required to produce it. Since a worker and his family can be supported for a year by the product of a good deal less than a full year's labor, this definition implies a gap between the value of a year's labor and the value of its products. Owners of land and capital are only too glad to close the gap by claiming the “surplus value.” Marx's diagnosis of the nature and origin of surplus value became the focus of discussions of the distribution of income for most of the following century.

Notwithstanding considerable efforts by at least two generations of economic theorists, the state of art of general equilibrium theory in the Arrow-Debreu framework is still extremely unsatisfactory, especially with respect to the treatment of the time dimension. Indeed, it is now taken for granted even among general equilibrium theorists that, to play a significant role, equilibrium analysis must account for individual agents' expectations about the uncertain future, and that the Arrow-Debreu procedure of collapsing the entire decision process at an initial date is to be interpreted, at most, as a counterfactual argument, the main message of the Arrow-Debreu approach being that “one cannot argue that markets co-ordinate activity if there are many of them missing” (Hahn 1995, p. 12).

The manuscripts dealing with commercial practices in Europe from the thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries have been the subject of numerous studies by those interested in the history of mathematics and sociology of knowledge. Indeed, these manuscripts shed a great deal of light on how modern mathematics, as well as mechanistic naturalism of the Enlightenment, can be traced to commercial arithmetic of the medieval and Renaissance periods. As such, the recent interest in these early manuscripts is well understood. But there is another aspect of these writings that has received far less attention: the economic contents of these manuscripts and their implications. for economic theory. In what follows, I will attempt to remedy this shortcoming by looking at the monetary lessons of these manuscripts concerning barter.