Provincializing economics: Jevons, Marshall and the colonial imaginaries of free trade

Contemporary economics speaks about trade in the familiar abstractions of comparative advantage, tracing the modern formulation of the case for free trade made in terms of welfare maximization to late-Victorian economists like W. Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. Though Jevons and Marshall did formalize theories that treat countries as if they are abstract individuals, a closer reading suggests that their thinking on trade was informed by colonial imaginaries of civilization and race. The economics invented by Jevons and Marshall manages claims about human sameness and difference in a particularly colonial fashion. They both slide readily and uncertainly between the idea that parts of humanity are permanently lesser races and explaining lesser humans as simply developmentally backward. The latter might achieve full physiological and moral humanity over time through the improvements (and attendant but necessary suffering) administered by Empire via market competition. They sometimes point to a common set of desires and calculating capacities, but never so decisively as contemporary economics. Jevons takes these commonalities as the basis of a quantitative science of economics, but doubts their empirical universality. Marshall sees these traits as distinctively modern and achieved only via the rise of modern institutions. By contrast, contemporary economics insists on the universality of these traits, claiming for economics a distinctive “analytical egalitarianism.” But difference is only defined away by fiat in contemporary textbooks and where difference arises, as in the problem of uneven development, the colonial impulse of economics remains. The connection to Jevons’ and Marshall’s own colonial management of difference becomes sharply visible. To return to Jevons and Marshall allows us to provincialize economics.