At ease with the canonical division of labor, historians of economic thought do not characteristically toil to articulate ideas with social and political actuality: ideas have their logic, their genealogy, and their inherent prestige, without requiring some sort of reality check. To the extent that social historians in particular have frequently reduced texts (and the modes of cultural production) to mere illustrations or reflections of a deeper, structuring phenomenology, it may have seemed not merely convenient, but vital, for intellectual historians to take refuge in an idealist citadel, where ideas could be appreciated for their intrinsic interest. This general historiographical and epistemological question concerning the linkages between representation and lived experience, as well as their respective legitimacy and accessibility, sometimes cast into hyperbolic relief, if not outright caricature, during the post modern moment and the linguistic turn, takes on a particularly knotty complexity in the great debates over the grain question that roiled France, and other countries, during the long eighteenth century.

For while numerous participants, as Voltaire puckishly suggested, could not tell wheat apart from the “lesser” grains, and tilled the soil arduously in their elegant cabinets, others actually speculated in the grain trade even as they wrote about it. The list includes the international shipper, slave trader and businessman Jean-Gabriel Montaudouin de la Touche, from Gournay's circle; Guillaume François Le Trosne, magistrate on the présidial court of Orléans, from Quesnay's chapel; Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin, while he was attached to the bureau of the General Farm in Saint-Quentin, an early and virulent critic of Physiocracy; Jacques Necker, the Genevan banker, who started his career in a firm that had a long involvement in grain importing and speculating. Some of these figures and others interceded on another plane, making difficult and grave decisions concerning the subsistence and survival of the consumer-people even as they wrote—analytically, albeit also speculatively—about grain: like Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, lieutenant of the bailliage of Rouen, who dealt with the “horrors” of the “famine” of 1693–94;

Dugald Stewart, the successor of Adam Fergusons's chair in moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and an admirer of Adam Smith, was ready to admit that Smith's views especially on the freedom of trade and enterprise coincided remarkably with the French économistes (in which he most presumably included both Mirabeau and the Physiocratic school). However, at the same time he strongly pointed out that Smith was much less dogmatic in his views. Above all Smith differed very much with the Physiocrats regarding method. He admitted the importance of general principles, Stewart argued, but believed very little in their accuracy or practical application: ‘… in what manner the execution of the theory should be conducted in particular instances, is a question of a very different nature, and to which the answer must vary, in different countries, according to the different circumstances of the case’.

However in what should turn out to become the standard ‘great tradition’, or canon, of doctrinal history of economics this hesitance on behalf of someone who was very well placed to identify Smith's general views and methodological mores was very soon forgotten. Hence at least from the middle of the nineteenth century Smith was not only depicted as a doctrinaire free trader, a believer in general principles and – on this occasion the most important – someone who had been deeply influenced by the Physiocratic school, directly or indirectly through Turgot. Certainly the differences between Smith and the Physiocrats concerning agriculture or industry as a source of economic growth was noted. However, Smith's insistence upon a free trade (for example in corn), and the existence of sterile classes in society (servants, priests, etc.), has often been regarded as a consequence of the influence which Francois Quesnay and others bestowed upon Smith when he in the 1760s visited Paris. Ronald Meek and other scholars have also—most accurately so—drawn attention to the similarities between Turgot and the Scottish enlightenment concerning the so-called ‘four stages theory’ of economic and social development.

However, when such similarities are used in order to construct a historical sequence of doctrinal development emphasizing how the ‘old’ mercantile system was systematically criticised first by the Physiocrats and then by Adam Smith leading on to Ricardo and Classical political economy to – eventually – becoming part of the modern ‘neoclassical synthesis’, this is by large a false invention of tradition.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in France and then in Europe, Jean-Baptiste Say progressively became a central figure in political economy. Situating himself in the tradition of Adam Smith, he came to oppose the Physiocratic school of political economy on essential points. For this reason he has his own place in the current of opponents of Physiocracy.

This opposition is, however, of a different nature from the one that had prevailed in the decades when Physiocracy was at the center of the debates. The fact that Say claimed an affiliation with Smith did not prevent him from sharing a conception of political economy similar to that of the Physiocrats: like them, he based this new science on a sensualist theory of knowledge, a utilitarian theory of action and a theory of government—which we have proposed to call economic philosophy. His opposition to the Physiocrats bears more on the content of certain elements of economic philosophy than on its existence and structure. The works that Say published and the courses he professed show that his intellectual strategy was not frontal criticism of Physiocracy, but rather an attempt to integrate what he found true in their writings in order to achieve a complete exposition of the science—this is moreover the strategy he follows with respect to Smith. If he shows himself to be critical of some of their theses (fiscal and value theory), he is nonetheless not hard on Physiocracy and makes little use of eighteenth-century Antiphysiocratic writings.

In the late 1820s, Say's intellectual strategy undergoes a change with the arrival of a new adversary, David Ricardo. While the French economist aims at a “historicization” (mise en histoire) of Physiocracy insofar as it is no longer a live intellectual force in industrial society, he finds himself obliged to return to Quesnay's methodological mistakes so as to combat those he sees coming to the fore in the writings of the British economist.

Two overlapping generations of economists

Born in 1767, Jean-Baptiste Say was still in his childhood when François Quesnay died in 1774 at the age of 80.

The physiocrats considered that François Quesnay had created a ‘new science’, political economy. They set themselves the task of celebrating this event by writing its history. It is to this end that, in 1768, Pierre Samuel Du Pont wrote De l'origine et des progrès et d'une science nouvelle. In the first pages of his essay, Du Pont attributed the foundation of the science of political economy to ‘three equally worthy friends of the inventor of the Tableau Économique: de Gournay, M. le Marquis de Mirabeau and M. le Mercier de la Riviere’. The latter two, Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau (1715–1789) and Paul-Pierre Lemercier de la Rivière (1719–1801), were the doctor's principal collaborators, but Jacques Vincent de Gournay died early, in June 1759, before physiocracy as a concept had emerged. As intendant of commerce, Gournay (1712–1759) was at the centre of a circle of writers and administrators in France in the 1750s. These men, all closely associated with commerce, were charged with translating and disseminating what they called the ‘science of commerce’. Gournay's circle shared some key elements with the physiocrats. For example, both groups considered competition to be the principal driving force for the creation and circulation of wealth. They were also both very critical of the guilds and favoured freedom in the grain trade. However, either from a theoretical or a political point of view, Gournay's circle was less homogeneous than the physiocratic movement. The science of commerce cannot be summarized as a body of doctrines because it was really the product of group discussions. In addition, most of the authors in Gournay's circle did not see ‘freedom’ and ‘property’ as being governed by the immutable laws of a transcendent ‘natural order’. In contrast to the ahistorical truths of the physiocratic order, which local and regional history and circumstances had to yield to, the science of commerce was characterized by an ongoing focus on realities, contingencies and local practices. This epistemological stance was the source of future debates between the followers of the two. For example, Gournay was aware of the need to reinforce the French monarchy's naval capacity, and he therefore defended the instigation of a Navigation Act and the colonial Exclusif.

In 1767 Forbonnais published the Principes et observations oeconomiques with the declared intent of challenging the scientific validity of the Tableau économique, despite the fact that in 1759 ‘he had been one of its keenest readers, just as Quesnay had been of his Recherches et considérations sur les finances de France depuis l'année 1595 jusqu’à l'année 1721’. Indeed, the relationship between Quesnay, the court physician who had given himself to the study of the economy, and Forbonnais, the inspecteur général des monnaies de France (from 1756) and economic advisor to the contrôleur général Étienne de Silhouette, was strong, as the letters that the former sent to the latter during 1758 attest. In one dated 14 September, Quesnay had expressed his appreciation for Forbonnais's ideas ‘on circulation’, saying these were ‘the only way to conceive of it in reality and truth’. Quesnay praised him for having avoided the trap of tracing the origins of the wealth of a nation by taking into account only the circulation of money. However, in the same letter he invited Forbonnais to follow a new path to analyse that circulation: in carrying out his research and ‘assessment’ Forbonnais needed to bear in mind

Quesnay also stated that it was necessary to distinguish between

In essence, despite continuing to maintain that foreign trade could lead to a net profit, in this letter to Forbonnais, Quesnay had anticipated the key arguments of his Tableau in which, significantly, the possibility that foreign trade could produce a net profit disappeared.

The main interpretations of what is called either ‘Physiocracy’, ‘the Physiocratic school’, ‘the Physiocrats’, ‘the philosophes-économistes’ (as they like to call themselves), or less often ‘the Physiocratic movement’ can be classified in two broad categories. Historians of economics have concentrated almost exclusively on the theoretical contribution of the Physiocrats and presented it as a precursor to either classical economics or modern economics. Secondly, early modern historians have developed political interpretations of Physiocracy. In this regard, the most influential work is that of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Recent examples of Physiocratic discussions Physiocracy in the context of eighteenthcentury French political and philosophical debate include Catherine Larrère, Gino Longhitano, Henry C. Clark and Michael Sonenscher.

Although a string of recent works have contributed substantially to restoring the French political economy in studies on the culture and society of the Enlightenment and Revolution, the Physiocrats are still portrayed as a rationalist and ultra-liberal set of authors, a very small economic clique who did not really connect with the Enlightenment spirit, which itself was based on sociability and humanistic values. This representation of Physiocracy as an early modern version of neo-liberalism goes beyond the limits of the historical discipline and attains a sort of canonical status in the late Michel Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France and, more recently, in the widely read essay, The Illusion of Free Markets, by the political scientist Bernard Harcourt.

The canonical version of Physiocracy that emerges from these interpretations and reinterpretations runs from Eugène Daire's and Karl Marx's writings in the middle of the nineteenth-century up to the present. The first feature that distinguishes Physiocrats from other political economists is their belief in the superiority of capitalistic agriculture over other economic activities in general and manufacturing in particular. More precisely, they held to a theory of exclusive productivity of agriculture, from which new wealth (produit net) could only be created through large-scale agricultural production. Hence, Physiocrats – particularly Quesnay their leader – were in favour of maximizing the net product, which they saw as the only way to augment the wealth of the French nation. Their policy advice was to favour a good price (bon prix) for agricultural products, and that such a price could only be realized when the government removed all internal and external trade impediments for agricultural products.

In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter does not hesitate to qualify the critique of Physiocracy deployed in Graslin's Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l'impôt (1767) as “the best ever proffered.” Yet the author of the work was unknown in the Republic of Letters: not having belonged to the circle of young men of letters gathered around the intendant of commerce Jacques Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759) in the 1750s, lacking avowed relations with other theoreticians of the time, away from the capital for more than 15 years, Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin (1727–1790) exercised the function of tax collector at the General Farm bureau in Nantes, an Atlantic city then at the height of its prosperity. Yet one would be mistaken to take him for a completely isolated novice. We know in fact that he frequented the same, highly prestigious collège, Dormans-Beauvais, in Paris, as the future famous economist, Gournay circle-fellow and Antiphysiocrat François Véron de Forbonnais (1722–1800), that they had common friends, in particular diplomat Pierre-Michel Hennin (1728–1807), common relatives, and that Forbonnais's father and Graslin were members of the same scholarly society, the Royal Agricultural Society of the Touraine généralité. This last element manifests a taste, if not for political economy, at least for agricultural questions and patriotic academies. Graslin admits, moreover, in the foreword to his work, that “long devoted to studying the elements of economic science, [he] had recognized all the falsity of the principles imagined by the writers who are regarded as the masters of that science.”

Judging that his ideas had sufficiently matured, Graslin was to take advantage of a contest proposed in 1766 by the Royal Agricultural Society of Limoges on indirect taxation both to refute the ideas of François Quesnay (1694–1774) and his disciples and to present his own reflections on the question. Not having won the contest (and for good reason: he inverted the assumptions of the program, which were of clearly Physiocratic inspiration), he nevertheless obtained an honorable mention, and decided to publish his memoir anonymously at the end of 1767 under the title: Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l'impôt. At the same time he entered another contest, one proposed by the Imperial Society of St. Petersburg, this time on serfdom.

The political economy of colonization was not always the full-throated criticism of Europe's colonial-mercantile enterprise that it became during the second half of the eighteenth century. And yet, while allowing for a large dose of contingency in the development of political economy from the sixteenth century onward, this social science seems to have been destined to accord a great deal of critical attention to the problem of colonization. From its origins in the early modern period, political economy resembled the critical analysis of the relationship between state and society that it became during the age of Enlightenment. Even when economic writers internalized a strictly statist logic, a relentless focus on social development as the source of state power could have unintentionally subversive effects. In the first part of the following essay, I argue that colonization was not a subject that economists simply turned to from time to time when economic or political conjuncture pointed overseas. Rather, the problems of sovereignty among the composite monarchies and empires of early modern Europe were such that the colonial question was present in political economy ab ovo. In the second, I discuss the critical, sometimes anti-imperial turn that colonial political economy took after Seven Years’ War, mainly in the French case. Comparison with Spain shows that the relative maturity of the enlightened public sphere, as well as its relationship to a reform-minded state, shaped the colonial political economy that developed in these places after the mideighteenth century.

What follows is necessarily a sketch rather than a fully realized tableau, with some details filled in here and there to suggest the plausibility of the broader outline. Further work on this subject should depart from the premise established below: the orienting concepts of—and historical problems confronted by—early modern political economy derived from the widespread and durable phenomenon of the composite monarchy. When the problem of sovereignty is placed at the center of analysis, the novelty of the post-Seven Years’ War period becomes clearer, as does the play of similarity and difference between anti-imperial and reformist colonial political economy.