Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:39:40.497Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke's Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Lucas G. Pinheiro
Lucas G. Pinheiro*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Since the 1950s, interpreters of John Locke have debated whether his ideas about political economy figured among the intellectual sources of capitalist development. While some have labeled Locke a mercantile or agrarian “capitalist thinker,” others have insisted that, although a mercantilist, he was in no sense a theorist of capitalism. By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, foreign trade, and labor discipline throughout the 1690s as a reflection of the historical rise of export-oriented cycles of commodity manufacturing in the English countryside known as “proto-industrialization.” Moreover, I claim that, because proto-industrialization was tied to the expansion of England's colonial economy, this neglected context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I argue that Locke pursued proto-industrial economic reform by combining a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress with an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and exchange that favored metropolitan trade.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 1 - 28
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Fowkes, Ben (London, 1990; first published 1867), 126 n. 4Google Scholar. The other two citations are from Nicholas Barbon's reply to Locke's Some Considerations of the Lowering of Interest (125 nn. 2–3).

2 See Macpherson, C. B., “Locke on Capitalist Appropriation,” Western Political Quarterly 4/4 (1951), 550–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laslett, Peter, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698,” William and Mary Quarterly 14/3 (1957), 370–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hundert, E. J., “The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33/1 (1972), 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appleby, Joyce Oldham, “Locke, Liberalism and the Natural Law of Money,” Past & Present 71 (1976), 43–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On colonialism and empire see Arneil, Barbara, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Jack, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America,” Modern Intellectual History 8/2 (2011), 267–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armitage, David, “John Locke: Theorist of Empire?”, in Muthu, Sankar, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2012), 84–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On money and credit see Caffentzis, Constantine George, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Wennerlind, Carl, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, 2011), 123–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Casson, Douglas, “John Locke, Clipped Coins, and the Unstable Currency of Public Reason,” Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics 18/2 (2016), 153–80Google Scholar; Eich, Stefan, “John Locke and the Politics of Monetary Depoliticization,” Modern Intellectual History 12/1 (2020), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a recent exception to this claim see Ince, Onur Ulas, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford, 2018), chap. 2Google Scholar. For an overview of capitalism as a topic in intellectual history see Teichgraeber, Richard F. III, “Capitalism and Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 1/2 (2004), 267–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), 220–21Google Scholar.

6 Wood, Neal, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley, 1984), 13, 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 131–2, 181, 237, 249–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ashcraft, Richard, “The Radical Dimensions of Locke's Political Thought: A Dialogic Essay on Some Problems of Interpretation,” History of Political Thought 13/4 (1992), 703–72, at 722, 744Google Scholar.

8 Ashcraft, “Radical Dimensions,” 720.

9 Appleby, Joyce Oldham, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), 271, 269Google Scholar. For a comprehensive overview of the connection between mercantilism and capitalism see Wood, Ellen Meiksins, “Radicalism, Capitalism, and Historical Contexts: Not Only a Reply to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke,” History of Political Thought 15/3 (1994), 323–72, at 349–55, 358–60Google Scholar. See also Stern, Philip and Wennerlind, Carl, eds., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford, 2013), 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 88–9; Ashcraft, “Radical Dimensions,” 744–5. As Andrea Finkelstein notes, “Tully seems to have conflated the factory system with capitalism.” See Finkelstein, Andrea, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor, 2000), 164CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 On the general preference for “commercial society” over “capitalism” among historians of political thought see Hont, Istvan, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, ed. Kapossy, Béla and Sonenscher, Michael (Cambridge, MA and London, 2015; first published 2009), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “commercial market society” see Ashcraft, “Radical Dimensions,” 721–3, 742–5.

12 See Mendels, Franklin, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32/1 (1972), 241–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critical perspective see Coleman, D. C., “Proto-industrialization: A Concept Too Many,” Economic History Review 36/3 (1983), 435–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For a notable exception see Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored, 3rd edn (London, 1983; first published 1965), 187–93Google Scholar.

14 On traditional society see Clark, J. C. D., English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. On agrarian capitalism see McNally, David, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley, 1988)Google Scholar; Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Meiksins Wood, “Radicalism, Capitalism, and Historical Contexts,” 347–8; Wood, John Locke, 20. On industry and manufacturing see Pincus, Steven, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009), 49–84Google Scholar; Berg, Maxine, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London, 1994), 14–16, 24–5Google Scholar.

15 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 77–80.

16 Ibid., 66; Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), 174–5Google Scholar.

17 O'Brien, Patrick, “Deconstructing the British Industrial Revolution as a Conjuncture and Paradigm for Global Economic History,” in Horn, Jeff, Rosenband, Leonard, and Smith, Meritt, eds., Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 21–46, at 25–6Google Scholar.

18 Mendels, “Proto-industrialization,” 241.

19 Mendels, Franklin, “Protoindustrialization: Theory and Reality,” in Mendels, Franklin and Deyon, Pierre, eds., Eighth International Economic History Congress: General Report (Budapest, 1982), 68–107, at 77–9Google Scholar; Kriedte, Peter, “The Origins, the Agrarian Context, and the Conditions in the World Market,” in Kriedte, Peter, Medick, Hans, and Schlumbohm, Jürgen, Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, trans. Schempp, Beate (Cambridge, 1981), 12–37, at 24Google Scholar. For critiques of proto-industrialization that confirm its importance to Stuart England's textile industry see Ogilvie, Sheilagh and Cerman, Markus, eds., European Proto-industrialization (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

20 Kriedte, “The Origins,” 28, 31–2.

21 Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), 287–9, 296CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 67–8.

22 Pat Hudson, “Proto-industrialization in England,” in Ogilvie and Cerman, European Proto-industrialization, 49–66, at 49; Mager, Wolfgang, “Proto-industrialization and Proto-industry: The Uses and Drawbacks of Two Concepts,” Continuity and Change 8/2 (1993), 181–215, at 194–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Locke, John, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (1691), in Locke, Locke on Money, vol. 1, ed. Kelly, Patrick (Oxford, 1991), 203–342, at 237Google Scholar.

24 Kriedte, “The Origins,” 107–11.

25 See Vries, Jan de, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Hudson, Pat, “Proto-industrialisation,” in Digby, Anne and Feinstein, Charles, eds., New Directions in Economic and Social History, vol. 2 (Houndmills, 1992), 11–22, at 17Google Scholar.

27 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 74–5.

28 Locke, John, “An Essay on the Poor Law (1697),” in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Goldie, Mark (Cambridge, 1997), 182–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture” (1697), in Bourne, H. R. Fox, ed., The Life of John Locke, vol. 2 (London, 1876), 363–72Google Scholar. I thank William Sewell for helping me to clarify this point.

29 See de Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 10, 122, 211; Pfister, Ulrich, “The Protoindustrial Household Economy: Toward a Formal Analysis,” Journal of Family History 17/2 (1992), 201–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 71, 97–103.

31 Defoe, Daniel, A Plan of the English Commerce (New York, 1967; first published 1728), 179Google Scholar; Child, Sir Josiah, A New Discourse on Trade (London, 1775; first published 1690)Google Scholar; Haynes, John, Great Britain's Glory: Or, An Account of the Great Numbers of Poor Employ'd in the Woollen and Silk Manufacturies, to the Increase of Trade, the Enlargement of the Revenues of the Crown, and Augmenting our Navigation (London, 1715)Google Scholar

32 See Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), 219–22Google Scholar; Valenze, Deborah, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge, 2006), 119–44Google Scholar; Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, 23–5.

33 Cheney, Paul, “Review of The Industrious Revolution by Jan de Vries,” Business History Review 83/3 (2009), 654–7, at 657Google Scholar.

34 Hudson, Pat, “Industrial Organisation and Structure,” in Floud, Roderick and Johnson, Paul, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain: Industrialisation, 1700–1860, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2004), 28–56, at 40Google Scholar.

35 Duplessis, Robert, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 244–9Google Scholar; O'Brien, “Deconstructing the British Industrial Revolution.”

36 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 241, 286–96.

37 Ibid., 21–2, 93–4, 255–6, 285–6.

38 Ibid., 287, 289.

39 Ibid., 286, 296; Mokyr, Joel, “Growing-up and the Industrial Revolution in Europe,” Explorations in Economic History 13/4 (1976), 371–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Pincus, 1688, 81–7; Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, and Robinson, James, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95/3 (2005), 546–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997), 518–27Google Scholar; Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London, 2010), 179–218Google Scholar.

41 Allen, Robert C., The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009), 109, 117, 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the logistical infrastructure connecting rural proto-industries to towns and overseas markets see Vries, Jan de, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1984), 238–40Google Scholar. On Stuart England's world market for textiles see Kerridge, Eric, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1985), 218–19Google Scholar. On English textile exports to America see de Lacy Mann, Julia, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford, 1971), 45, 152, 166–73, 216–18Google Scholar.

42 Blackburn, New World Slavery, 228–9; Games, Alison, “Migration,” in Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2009), 33–52, at 38–45Google Scholar.

43 Wellenreuther, Herman, “Britain's Political and Economic Response to Emerging Colonial Economic Independence,” in Carey, Daniel and Finlay, Christopher J., eds., The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in the British World, 1688–1815 (Dublin, 2011), 121–40Google Scholar.

44 Locke, Some Considerations, 293–5.

45 Ibid., 294.

46 Ibid., 293. All italicization, unless otherwise noted, is original.

47 Ibid., 241. “Unworking Shopkeepers” is likely a reference to private merchants who stored and sold goods produced by independent laborers.

48 Ibid., 237.

49 Thirsk, Joan, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640–1750 (Cambridge, 1985), 386–7Google Scholar.

50 Locke, Some Considerations, 242; emphasis mine.

51 Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 2, trans. Reynolds, Siân (New York, 1983), 232Google Scholar; Hicks, John, “Capital Controversies: Ancient and Modern,” American Economic Review 64/2 (1974), 307–16Google Scholar; Hodgson, Geoffrey, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago, 2015), 174–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, Jonathan, “Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism,” Business History Review 93/3 (2017), 483–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Locke, Some Considerations, 278, 287; Wood, John Locke, 40.

53 See Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, 2014), 45–50CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. As I note below, Locke defined trade as manufacture and navigation, both of which could be expressed as capital insofar as they were stocks of value, factors of production, and exchangeable assets that could be owned, accumulated, employed, and exchanged. I thank Jon Levy, Jennifer Pitts, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this question.

54 While the water one draws from a fountain is rightfully his property, the “Water running in the Fountain [is] every ones.” See Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, 1988; first published 1689), 288–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Locke, Some Considerations, 285. From 1683 to 1688 Locke was exiled in the Dutch Republic.

56 Ibid., 275.

57 Ibid., 225.

58 Locke, John, Locke on Money, vol. 2, ed. Kelly, Patrick (Oxford, 1991), 485, 488Google Scholar.

59 Locke, Some Considerations, 223–4.

60 Ibid., 232.

61 John Locke, “Understanding (1677),” in Locke: Political Essays, 260–65, at 261.

62 Ibid., emphasis mine.

63 Wood, John Locke, 46.

64 Ibid., 46–8, 111.

65 Locke, Locke on Money, 1: 231, 2: 493–5; 1: 276–7, 2: 436.

66 Ibid., 2: 486. On Locke's investment in the silk trade see Haley, Kenneth Harold Dobson, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), 228Google Scholar; Peck, Linda Levy, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2005), 109Google Scholar. In Some Considerations, Locke's condemnation of luxury with respect to consumer spending was reserved to foreign articles such as those imported to England from Japan and China. See Locke, John, The Works of John Locke, 12th edn, vol. 4 (London, 1824), 54–9, 72–3, 163–4Google Scholar. See also Vaughn, Karen, John Locke, Economist and Social Scientist (Chicago, 1980), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Hudson, “Proto-Industrialization in England,” 53–7.

68 Peck, Consuming Splendor, 19.

69 On Locke's alleged “blindness about consumer goods” see Harris, Ian, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in Its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994), 357 n. 17, 129Google Scholar. Much like Locke, Nicholas Barbon placed his hopes for “the infinite expansion of the economy” on fashionable clothing and trade. See Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, 119–18. See also Slack, Paul, “The Politics of Consumption and England's Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century,” English Historical Review 122/497 (2007), 609–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Hudson, “Proto-industrialization in England,” 53–4.

71 Locke, Some Considerations, 237.

72 Locke, Two Treatises, 296–7.

73 Locke, “Understanding,” 261.

74 John Locke, “For a General Naturalisation (1693),” in Locke: Political Essays, 322–6.

75 See Mark Goldie's introduction to Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 321.

76 For an exception to this see Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2004), 165–6Google Scholar.

77 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 322.

78 Ibid., 323; emphasis mine.

79 Locke, Two Treatises, 301.

80 Ibid., 299; Locke, “Understanding,” 261.

81 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 323.

82 On the division of labor in early modern textile production see Safley, Thomas and Rosenband, Leonard, eds., The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500–1800 (Ithaca, 1993), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 42.

83 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 323–4. On the problem Locke sought to address see Ramsay, G. D., The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1943), 104Google Scholar.

84 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 324.

85 Ibid., 325. On skilled Huguenots seeking asylum in England after 1685 see Hintermaier, John M., “The First Modern Refugees? Charity, Entitlement, and Persuasion in the Huguenot Immigration of the 1680s,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 32/3 (2000), 429–49, at 434CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On foreign skilled workers in England's textile industry see Peck, Consuming Splendor, 20, 108, 110. See also Smith, Brian, “Hands, Not Lands: John Locke, Immigration, and ‘the Great Art of Government’,” History of Political Thought 39/3 (2018), 465–90Google Scholar.

86 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 325.

87 Kriedte, “The Origins,” 34. From 1699 to 1701, 81.2 percent of England's total exports were manufactured goods. Ibid., 36.

88 Locke, “For a General Naturalisation,” 326.

89 In 1696, Poor Law reform became the focus of the newly founded Board of Trade. See Macfarlane, Stephen, “Social Policy and the Poor in the Later Seventeenth Century,” in Beier, A. L. and Finlay, Roger, eds., London, 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London, 1986), 252–77, at 261Google Scholar.

90 Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 185–90.

91 Ibid., 189–90. A common argument for such schemes was that they would defray costs of poor relief and yield profits. See Slack, Paul, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1986), 199–200Google Scholar.

92 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 169.

93 Slack, Poverty and Policy, 195. As Mark Goldie notes, “fifteen cities secured Acts of Parliament to establish corporations of the poor between 1696 and 1715.” See Goldie in Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 183. Between 1678 and 1695, workhouse schemes for employing the poor had been proposed by Thomas Firmin, Matthew Hale, Josiah Child, John Bellers, and John Cary. See Valenze, The Social Life of Money, 119–33; Coats, A. W., “Economic Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 13/1 (1960), 39–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On corporations of the poor see Timothy V. Hitchcock, “The English Workhouse: A Study in Institutional Poor Relief in Selected Counties, 1696–1750” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985), chap. 2.

94 Slack, Poverty and Policy, 196. Cary was a personal acquaintance of Locke's and, along with Thomas Firmin (also known to Locke), an adviser to the Board of Trade during its inquiry into the Poor Laws.

95 On the hostility of English towns to early capitalism see Dyer, Christopher, “Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century England?”, in Kermode, Jennifer, ed., Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England (Wolfeboro, 1991), 1–23, at 11Google Scholar.

96 Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 195–8. While Locke gives urban corporations more autonomy in executing his policy (195–6), he is stricter regarding the trades and skills that should be promoted in the countryside, including roughing, spinning, and weaving wool (192–3).

97 As Stephen Macfarlane notes, the board's final report to the Lords Justices “made no mention of the City or the suburbs.” See Macfarlane, “Social Policy and the Poor,” 261.

98 Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 193.

99 Ibid., 194, 192.

100 Ibid., 192. Costs such as the salaries of teachers, guardians, and overseers would be deducted from funds raised by the poor relief tax.

101 Wadsworth, Alfred P. and de Lacy Mann, Julia, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester, 1931), 90Google Scholar; Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry, 128–9.

102 On the regularity and discipline of labor in seventeenth-century woolen manufacturing as a solution not only to unemployment but to drunkenness, debauchery, and petty violence among the English poor see Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, 23–4.

103 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 65.

104 According to H. R. Bourne, the report was “substantially altogether Locke's work.” See Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture,” 363.

105 Locke learned much about Ireland's linen trade by corresponding with his Irish friend William Molyneux. See de Beer, E. S., ed., The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), 5: 701–5; 6: 219–22, 229–31Google Scholar.

106 Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture,” 365.

107 Ibid., 366.

108 Ibid., 366–7.

109 Endrei, Walter and Maines, Rachel, “On Two-Handed Spinning,” in Hafter, Daryl M., ed., European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Bloomington, 1995), 31–41, at 37Google Scholar.

110 Mason, M. G., “John Locke's Proposals on Workhouse Schools,” Durham Research Review 3/11 (1960), 8–16Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan and Cooper, J. P., eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), 302Google Scholar.

111 Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture,” 369.

112 Ibid., 370.

113 Ibid., 370–71.

114 Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967), 56–97, at 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Ibid., 61.

116 Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 192, 192 n. 8.

117 Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture,” 366.

118 Ibid., 366, emphasis mine.

119 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 61.

120 Locke, Two Treatises, 289.

121 Mann, The Cloth Industry, 98. By the late 1600s, the increase in supply of finished and colored fabric in England demanded greater quantities of skilled labor. See Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry, 130; Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization, 95; Hudson, “Proto-industrialization in England,” 54.

122 Locke, “Essay on the Poor Law,” 192.

123 Ibid., 189–90.

124 Cunningham, Hugh, “The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680–1851,” Past & Present 126 (1990), 115–50, at 128–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 65.

126 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 31.

127 Rahikainen, Marjatta, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2004), 32–7Google Scholar.

128 See Peck, Consuming Splendor, 108.

129 Locke, Some Considerations, 222. I thank the anonymous reviewers, Duncan Kelly, and Adom Getachew for their helpful comments regarding Ireland's place in Locke's theory of imperial commerce.

130 Ibid., 223. For Locke, conquerors have no right over the property, goods, money, and estate of the conquered. See Locke, Two Treatises, 390.

131 While Locke proposed establishing manufactures in Virginia in 1697, this was a strategy to increase the colony's wealth by attracting skilled English emigrants rather than a comprehensive scheme for industrial development. See Ashcraft, Richard, “Political Theory and Political Reform: John Locke's Essay on Virginia,” Western Political Quarterly 22/4 (1969), 742–58, at 747CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In suggesting that manufactures were also important to the colonies, Locke's ideas about imperial policy were uncommon at the time. See Reinert, Sophus, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, 2011), 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

132 Armitage, “John Locke,” 86, 97–8.

133 Armitage, David, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013) 79Google Scholar.

134 Locke, Two Treatises, 301. On Locke's influence on Enlightenment models of moral progress see Tully, James, “Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground,” in Armitage, David, ed., Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot, 1998), 345–72, at 357–61Google Scholar.

135 Locke, Two Treatises, 297–9. For an instructive account of money in Locke's colonial thought see Ince, Colonial Capitalism, 47–69.

136 Locke, Two Treatises, 297.

137 Bell, Duncan, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, 2016), 91Google Scholar; Tully, James, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” in Kelly, Duncan, ed., Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought (Oxford, 2009), 3–29, at 5–6, 14, 28Google Scholar.

138 See John Locke, “Notes on Trade in Sweden, Denmark and New England” (1696), Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 30, folio 38, quoted in Arneil, Barbara, “Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55/4 (1994), 591–609, at 603CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139 Pincus, Steve, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69/1 (2012), 3–34, at 22–3, 27Google Scholar. See also Burnard, Trevor, “Making a Whig Empire Work: Transatlantic Politics and the Imperial Economy in Britain and British America,” William and Mary Quarterly 69/1 (2012), 51–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That many of Locke's political allies opposed the creation of land banks, whose advocates deemed land to be a superior security than precious metals, casts further doubt on the “agrarian capitalism” thesis. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this point to my attention. On the intellectual debates surrounding the establishment of the Bank of England and the failure of the Land Bank United in the 1690s see Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, 108–22.

140 On Locke's proposal to establish ports, shipyards, cities, and merchant privileges in Virginia as a means to bolster the colony's trade with England see Ashcraft, “Locke's Essay on Virginia,” 747.

141 Brewer, Holly, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review 122/4 (2017), 1038–78, at 1059–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

142 See Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 137–76; Arneil, John Locke and America; Mehta, Uday, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), 46–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ince, Colonial Capitalism, chap. 2.

143 For a critique of this perspective see Hsueh, Vicki, “Unsettling Colonies: Locke, ‘Atlantis’ and New World Knowledges,” History of Political Thought 29/2 (2008), 295–319Google Scholar.

144 On English settlement in Ireland see Barnard, T. C., “New Opportunities for British Settlement: Ireland, 1650–1700,” in Canny, Nicholas, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1998), 309–27Google Scholar.

145 Daniel Carey, “An Empire of Credit: English, Scottish, Irish, and American Contexts,” in Carey and Finlay, The Empire of Credit, 1–16, at 9; Nash, R. C., “Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 42/3 (1985), 329–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

146 Armitage, David, “The Political Economy of Britain and Ireland after the Glorious Revolution,” in Ohlmeyer, Jane H., ed., Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000), 221–43, at 225Google Scholar.

147 On England's stake in the Irish economy see Livesey, James, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven, 2009), 77–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

148 See Kelly, Patrick, “The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act of 1699: Kearney Re-visited,” Irish Economic and Social History 7 (1980), 22–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a detailed reading of Cary and Locke on Ireland see Reinert, Translating Empire, 106–114.

149 Cary, John, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade (Bristol, 1695), 89Google Scholar.

150 Ibid., 98, emphasis mine.

151 Ibid., 101–10. Cary backed the revocation of the Cattle Acts banning Irish cattle exports to England.

152 Davenant, Charles, Ballance of Trade (London, 1699), 118Google Scholar.

153 Hont, Istvan, “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” in Dunn, John, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge, 1990), 41–120, quote at 89, see also 85–9Google Scholar. For Davenant's position see Davenant, Ballance of Trade, 129–31.

154 Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (London, 1698), 225–7.

155 Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture.” For Locke's correspondence with Molyneux on the Irish linen trade see de Beer, The Correspondence of John Locke, 5: 701–5; 6: 4–9, 189–93, 219–22, 229–32, 292–7. On Locke, England, and Irish linen see Hont, “Free Trade,” 79–90; Armitage, “The Political Economy of Britain and Ireland,” 239–41.

156 Locke, “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture,” 365–9.

157 Ibid., 367–72. On rewards and punishments in Locke's thinking about labor see Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 64–8.

158 Locke neither supported a union with Ireland nor considered it a kingdom (such as Scotland). See Armitage, “The Political Economy of Britain and Ireland,” 240–43; Armitage, Ideological Origins, 156–7.

159 Although Locke never endorsed Ireland's full economic independence, as Daniel Defoe, Thomas Prior, and Arthur Dobbs did, they all agreed that England's development of Irish consumer industries could benefit England and Ireland alike. See Livesey, Civil Society and Empire, 68–9.

160 Armitage, “John Locke,” 90–93.

161 Bell, Reordering the World, 91.

162 Tully, James, Public Philosophy in a New Key: Imperialism and Civic Freedom, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2008), 195–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Reordering the World, 107–10.

163 Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Trade and Industry in the Indian Subcontinent, 1750–1913,” in Horn, Rosenband, and Smith, Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution, 271–90, at 272.

164 Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” 10–11.

165 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 66, 74; Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization, 17.

166 See Freudenberger, Herman and Redlich, Fritz, “The Industrial Development of Europe: Reality, Symbols, Images,” Kyklos 17/3 (1964), 372–400, at 386–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tribe, Keith, Genealogies of Capitalism (London, 1981), 107–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berg, Maxine, Hudson, Pat, and Sonenscher, Michael, eds., Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge, 2002; first published 1983)Google Scholar; Freeman, Joshua, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

167 Locke, Two Treatises, 297–8.

168 For an insightful reading of this passage as evidence of Locke's espousal of increasing “hands” (working population) over “lands” (territory) see Smith, “Hands, Not Lands.”

169 Milton, John, Paradise Lost (Oxford, 2005; first published 1667), 112Google Scholar.

170 Blake, William, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, ed. Maclagan, E. D. and Russel, A. B. (London, 1907; first published 1804–10), xixGoogle Scholar.