ABSTRACT
In several of his essays and in the History of England, David Hume
explored the relationship between the patterns of economic activity to be found in states from antiquity to the present, and the constitutions-or
regime types, in modern parlance-that characterized them. In this respect,
Hume did not differ from any number of eighteenth-century writers,
including Adam Ferguson, James Steuart, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
and Charles-Louis Montesquieu, all of whom used constitutional form as
an analytical grid for understanding issues of wealth and poverty. Hume’s
attempts to understand the relationship between constitutional forms and
economic prosperity were part of a broader Enlightenment movement that was transforming older historiographical practices. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, it was hardly original to use the Platonic (later Aristotelian and Poly-
bian) typology of state forms-monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic-
in order to trace patterns in the rise and decline of states. What was new,
however, was to apply this typology to the task of coming to terms with the
revolutionary consequences of the discovery of the New World and the
expansion of European commerce that followed from this event. Hume
himself argued that by dint of their regularity, impersonality, and sheer number, economic activities now enjoyed a privileged status in all scientific
‘‘political’’ inquiries: European history had become the history of com-
merce, and the study of this subject paved the way for the development of
political economy.1 From this point of view, Guillaume Raynal’s best-selling
Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Etablissements et du Commerce des
Europe´ens dans les deux Indes (1773-74) represents less a decisive shift in
eighteenth-century historical writing than a culmination of trends well
under way. Eighteenth-century writers transformed established historiographical
practice by integrating the economy into the very heart of a historical
method that generally privileged regime type, or the constitution, as a basis for
the analysis of the political and economic fortunes of ancient and modern
states.2 For the historian of commerce-a subtype of political economist
whose existence goes largely unnoticed in present-day accounts of eighteenth-
century political economy-constitutions and commerce existed in a dialec-
tical relationship that was expressed in Montesquieu’s dictum: ‘‘commerce
has a relation with the constitution’’ (1989, bk. 20, ch. 4).3 This relationship dictated first of all the relative power of European states within an increas-
ingly competitive world economy. Which sorts of states, in short, were poised
to take greatest advantage of the expansion of European commerce in all its
forms? More gravely, however, it seemed that the newly privileged place of
commerce in European society threatened those states whose constitutions
did not seem propitious to commerce.
