Conversations on political economy of Sanditon

Abstract

Introduction:
During the war years Great Britain was alive with conversations about political economy. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was a forbidding tome, but it was succeeded by interventions that had an immediate bearing on lived experience and stirred up fierce controversy. Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, warning of scarcity on an apocalyptic scale if the working-class could not be persuaded to reduce their numbers (a fifth revised edition was published in 1817). David Ricardo’s fame as an economist began in 1809, when he entered the ongoing debate about the government’s suspension of the promise to convert banknotes into gold, arguing that the depreciation of paper money would lead to the rapid downfall of the nation. There were other figures celebrated in their day but forgotten now, like William Spence, who declared that Britain could stand defiant even if all its overseas commerce was swept away by Napoleon, or Captain Pasley, who argued with an eloquence admired by Jane Austen that on the contrary the expansion of empire was a vital necessity...

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