Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical ‘commercial incivility’ of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism

The Caribbean Vice Admiralty Courts, 1763-1815; Indispensable Agents of an Imperial System

This thesis examines the nature and development of the British Vice Admiralty Courts in the West Indies, Bahamas and Bermuda between the end of the Seven Years' War and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the heyday of "the First British Empire". After a general introduction and a chapter describing the origins of the Courts down to 1763, there are sections on personnel and procedures , appointments and patronage , the law applied by the Courts in their various functions, and relationships, metropolitan and colonial. A chronological treatment follows, of the American War of Independence, the interwar period 1783-93, and the period of greatest prosperity, sophistication and reform during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, when the Courts were strongly influenced by Sir William Scott, the great Judge of the High Court of Admiralty. The thesis is rounded off by a short summary of conclusions.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD