CONCLUSION: ‘Property, contract, trade and profits’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Lewis Namier once grandly observed that ‘every country and every age has dominant terms, which seem to obsess men's thoughts. Those of eighteenth-century England were property, contract, trade, and profits’. Someone unprepared to follow Namier in taking such an extensive view might say that he is running different things together. This person might be tempted to quote Edmund Burke's distinction between property as ‘sluggish, inert, and timid’ and ability as ‘a vigorous and active principle’. And he or she might then ask, what are ‘contract, trade, and profits’ if not the lawful struggles of ability against the interests of landed property? Namier would doubtless concede that estates were sluggish in eighteenth-century England and defend himself by pointing out that as the century wore on property became less a matter of land than of moveable wealth: banknotes, bills of credit, stock. This association of property and paper is the main reason why so many acts of parliament under the Hanoverians were passed concerning forgery, and why the punishments set for these crimes were so severe. There was no rigid distinction between ‘property’, on the one hand, and ‘contract, trade, and profits’, on the other. Appropriations and expropriations of ability and resources, both local and foreign, brought a teeming world of commerce into being, and from time to time this new wealth came to be invested in landed property.
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- Information
- Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property , pp. 180 - 183Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999