Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850

Literature Incorporated

Literature Incorporated

The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850

John O’Brien

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

JOHN O’BRIEN is associate professor and the NEH Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Harlequin Britain and the editor of Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29112-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29126-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291260.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Virginia toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Brien, John, 1962– author.

Literature incorporated : the cultural unconscious of the business corporation, 1650–1850 / John O’Brien.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-29112-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29126-0 (ebook) 1. Corporations in literature. 2. Businesspeople in literature. 3. Business literature—Great Britain. 4. Corporations—Great Britain—History. 5. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 6. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 7. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR149.C667O37 2016

820.9'3553—dc23

2015017769

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: The Corporation as Metaphor

1. John Locke, Desire, and the Incorporation of Money

2. Wonderful Event: The South Sea Bubble and the Crisis of Property

3. Insurance and the Problem of Sentimental Representation

4. Bodies of Men: Abolitionist Writing and the Question of Interest

5. Held in Reserve: Banks, Serial Crises, and the Ekphrastic Turn

Coda: The Entrepreneur as Corporate Hero

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

The Corporation as Metaphor

Literature, political economy, and law: these are the touchstones of this book, which focuses on the figure of the corporation from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century in the English-speaking world. I consider the corporation as a historical entity, a creature of law and a vehicle for commerce, and also as an imaginative construct. The corporation is a fiction that not only informs other fictions but also has gained autonomy and power on its own right in the world. Figuratively extending the human body, the corpus, into the sphere of social life, the corporation has become one of modern culture’s most prominent means for mediating between the public and the private, the collective and the individual. Literature Incorporated is not a history of the business corporation, though such a thing—a massive undertaking!—would be valuable, if it were possible.¹ Nor is this book by and large a history of literary works that are explicitly about corporations. Very few such animals exist in this period. Rather, I explore points of intersection between literary texts and other kinds of writing—economic, political, polemical, legal—that respond to the emergence of the business corporation in Anglo-American culture in this period. This was an era when joint-stock companies were organized for colonial trade, when the institutions of finance capitalism such as insurance and banking reorganized commerce, and when Adam Smith began the systematic study into the sources of national wealth that became the foundation of the discipline now known as economics.² This was also the period when John Locke offered the first codification of empiricist philosophy; when Joseph Addison’s Cato, often credited as the last great tragedy in English, was first performed and gave oppositional politics a potent and enduring figure of resistance; when narrative fiction reorganized itself as the novel by embracing a new understanding of probability; when abolitionist writers conducted an intense media campaign to interest readers in the cause of people whom they could not see, and when literature as such was emerging as a category of knowledge, study, and aspiration for writers and readers. I pursue the trope of incorporation as it appears in texts written across many separate domains that attempt to imagine the relationship between human bodies—as readers, as protagonists, as property—and larger social systems like the nation and the domain of finance, trade, people, and things that was not yet called the economy.³

The concept of incorporation as applied to social entities like a business venture is a figure of speech; more specifically, it is an instance of a rhetorical trope known as catachresis. Derived from the Greek for abuse or misuse, catachresis results when language fails to offer an obvious word choice to describe something. Henry Peachum, in his rhetorical handbook The Garden of Eloquence (1593), calls catachresis an abuse by means of which we give names to many things which lack names, as when we say, the water run, which is improper, for to run, is proper to those creatures which have feete, and not water which hath none.⁴ The modern critic Lynn Festa eloquently observes that catachresis is distinctive among all rhetorical figures because whereas other tropes involve the substitution of figurative for literal meaning, the exchange of one word for another (part for whole, like for like), in catachresis the substitution of figural for literal meaning—exchange itself—breaks down.⁵ That is to say that the oddness of the figure of the corporation inheres in the fact that businesses, cities, colleges, and other entities that are said to be incorporated do not actually have bodies and therefore are obviously not persons. Does some of our discomfort with what corporations do inhere in the language that has for centuries been used to conceptualize them? As the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s story Peter Pendulum (1840) put it, banks are not individuals, but corporations; and corporations, it is very well known, have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned.⁶ For Poe’s narrator, whose own body has been battered in the course of the story as he tries out the various forms of business undertaking that seem available to individuals in a society dominated by companies, the unaccountability of banks and other corporations renders their difference from human beings suspect and scandalous. That scandal has not abated. It reemerges sometimes when, for example, jurists do what they have done since at least the seventeenth century, when Sir Edmund Coke in the Sutton Hospital case (1612), describing the corporation as a fiction . . . which resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law, saw the corporation as a convenient way to enable courts to describe the rights and responsibilities of collective groups. But when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the First Amendment right of free speech to corporations and other kinds of associated bodies in the Citizens United case in 2010, critics often followed Poe in picking up on another section of Coke’s decision in Sutton Hospital, where he remarked that corporations have no soul, and saw that as the point at which the figure breaks down and should in effect be ruled inadmissible. Legal scholar Joel Bakan, in his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, gives a kind of ironic homage to the power of the figure when he describes the corporation as a pathological agent, an "institution" that destructively acts out its deepest internal contradictions like a crazed person, with destructive consequences to everyone and everything around it.⁷

Both the utility of and the discomfort with the figure of the corporation have been recurrent themes in its history. In Britain from the Middle Ages onward, towns, guilds, charitable organizations, universities, and the church were all understood to be incorporated institutions, bodies politic that transcended the limits of individual human bodies and persisted beyond single human life spans. The historian Ernst Kantorowicz traced how the thirteenth-century church began to make a distinction between the physical body of Jesus as made present in the Eucharist and the imaginary, metaphorical body of Christ’s church: "Now . . . The Church, which had been the mystical body of Christ, became a mystical body in its own right . . . a mystical corporation. The monarchy was reconceptualized by this logic to create what Kantorowicz memorably described as the king’s two bodies," the one fleshly and mortal, the other imaginary and immortal, occupied by a real person in the present tense but representing a collective interest (that of the state and its people) and aspiring always to transcend the here-and-now and reach toward eternity.⁸ From there, the monarch was able to authorize corporations that acted as extensions of his or her own sovereignty and that enabled collective institutions to be represented in courts of law, to collect taxes, to extend the monarch’s interests at home and abroad: universities, charities, municipalities, and, starting in the late sixteenth century, commercial and trading entities.⁹ In Of Corporations (1659), probably the first legal treatise in the English language on the form, William Sheppard offered this definition: A Corporation, or an Incorporation (which is all one) is a Body, in fiction of law; or, a Body Politick that indureth in perpetual succession.¹⁰

But the peculiar doubleness of the concept often prompted complaint in the early modern period, as it has ever since, and particularly so as the business corporation gained increasing autonomy and power. A genius in his own right at formulating compelling figures of speech, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) called corporations lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrayls of a naturall man.¹¹ Hobbes presciently understood how such entities could become rivals to the state, attaining a kind of sovereignty of their own that would be hard to dislodge. And Henry Polloxfen, arguing against the British East India Company in the 1690s, addressed his complaints to "the invisible East-India Merchant. . . . Dealing with you is a kind of dealing with Spirits, an Invisible Body subsisting only in intelligentia legis."¹² From its origins, the corporation has been a kind of offense to representation, a legal fiction whose abstraction seems to mystify as much as it defines the relationship between individuals and larger social entities.

Near the outset of his Grundrisse, the enormous series of notebooks that he compiled in order to systematize his study of political economy, Karl Marx ponders the utility of abstract concepts in political-economic thought. Concepts like population, exchange value, production, and labor (among others) seem necessary if the theorist aims to say anything specific at all. Hence Marx admires how Adam Smith took an immense step forward in isolating and objectifying labour as such as an abstract universality that enabled economists to imagine national wealth in terms more useful than those offered by the physiocrats, with their focus on the productivity of land, or by the adherents to the Mercantile System, with its focus on money in the form of bullion.¹³ But economists evoke such abstractions, Marx also immediately reminds himself, at the cost of obscuring the ways in which labor, say, is a very different thing at different moments in time, because labor is always embedded in a complex, historically specific network of social relationships and material determinants. So, for example, Marx observes that "one of the latest forms of bourgeois society, joint-stock companies, also existed at the start of the bourgeois era in the shape of the great, privileged monopoly trading companies, entities that occupied what Marx describes as a very different position" in relation to the rest of the economic system than they did at the time of his writing.¹⁴

Just when he was beginning to fill the notebooks that are now known as the Grundrisse, Marx had every reason to be freshly aware of the centrality of companies to the transatlantic economic system. The Panic of 1857, a financial crisis that Marx welcomed as the spark that might lead to a revolution, was frequently seen at that time to have been set off by the failure of the New York City office of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company in August of that year. The first historian of the Panic, J. S. Gibbons, observed in 1858 that the failure of Ohio Life struck on the public mind like a cannon shot.¹⁵ For his part, Marx was gratified to see that the Panic had begun just as he had in 1850 predicted it would, with a financial crisis starting in New York, but he was also the first to observe that such an explanation oversimplifies the vastly more complex chain of causality that leads to any such event. To the (very considerable) extent that the Panic prompted Marx to draft the Grundrisse, begun in August 1857 within days after Ohio Life’s failure, we could plausibly say that his allusion to the joint-stock form here at the book’s outset is an oblique reference to the prominence that such entities as Ohio Life had attained as central actors in the bourgeois economic system that Marx was so eager to see supplanted.¹⁶ And to the (again, considerable) extent that the Grundrisse formed, as it was designed to, the foundation for Capital (1867), we can also observe that the abstraction Marxism owes some debt to a corporation’s failure.

What is striking, then, is how little Marx has to say about corporations in either text. It is as if, avidly reading and in turn contributing to the newspaper accounts in 1857 about the failures of insurance companies, banks, and other corporate institutions, Marx was determined to rise above the fray of the moment and conceptualize political economy in terms that were equally abstract but in his thinking more foundational: money, capital, labor. Corporations as such have very little place in Marx’s classic descriptions of the economic system. The passing reference to them that we have seen in the Grundrisse, where he talks about modern joint-stock companies, suggests that Marx did not, at least at that point, understand the corporation very well. By 1857 the term joint-stock, which dates to the late seventeenth century, was an anachronism, as the corporations of the mid-nineteenth century well outstripped the joint-stocks of the past in sophistication, capitalization, reach, and independence from the authority and supervision of nation-states. And (to go out on a limb here) it is perhaps one of Marxism’s shortcomings as a practical political program that its foundational thinker underconceptualized the business corporation in his own works. (A key exception would be central banks such as the Bank of England and the Crédit Mobilier, about which Marx writes in great detail in his essays for the New York Tribune in these years.) A possible result is that his program has not always had the tools it needed to anticipate or reckon with the corporation’s growing puissance since the middle of the nineteenth century. Thomas Piketty, whose desire to follow and transcend Marx is expressed in the very title of his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, underplays the role of multinational corporations, even though, as he says (surprisingly compounding Marx’s anachronism) most private economic activity today is organized around corporations, or, more generally, joint-stock companies.¹⁷ Even one of Piketty’s few explicit references to modern multinationals is framed as an issue of national affect: "In the series Mad Men, which is set in the early 1960s, the New York advertising agency Sterling Cooper is bought out by distinguished British stockholders, which does not fail to cause a culture shock in the small world of Madison Avenue advertising: it is never easy to be owned by foreigners."¹⁸ If part of the pleasure in reading Piketty’s work comes from his willingness to use the feeling states evoked by a television series as evidence, part of the weakness of his analysis may be his underarticulation of the corporations that, since Marx’s time, have played an increasingly large role in the economic system.

Where Marx, at least, is surely correct is in his recognition that we must use any such abstract term as corporation with great care, recognizing that the concept bears the traces of complicated social, political, and material change. The corporation as it exists today is an abstraction that gathers up a long history of institutions and practices as varied as city governance, guild organization, state-sponsored colonial exploration, money lending, insurance, slave trading, and university founding. This book explores several of these practices and institutions as they were imagined at different moments in the two centuries before the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company provided Marx with his occasion.

My primary point of orientation will be the business corporation as it has been described in the English language and articulated in literature since the late seventeenth century. To undertake such a study is necessarily to engage with what has become known as the New Economic Criticism, an object that is difficult to pin down. Voltaire famously quipped that the entity that called itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, and I am tempted to joke that much the same could be said of this somewhat nebulous but consistently interesting body of work. It is at least worth accepting at this point that the movement is no longer new, since it traces its beginnings at least as far back as Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature (1978). The movement got its name in the early 1990s, first as the subject of a panel at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 1991 and then as the subject of a full-scale conference in its own right at the Society for Critical Exchange in 1994; expanded versions of papers given at that conference were published in a volume entitled The New Economic Criticism in 1999.¹⁹ That collection is wide-ranging, its topics as varied as Montaigne’s essays, the marketing of Tennyson’s poetry, the theme of debt in The Great Gatsby, and the theoretical relationship between money and other systems of signs. But the studies there and those that have followed in their wake most typically defined their object of study as the relationship between imaginative literature and the economic conditions under which it is produced: the financial situation of the author, the points of overlap and exchange between the language deployed by a poet and that deployed by an economist, the homologies between registers of symbolization in the rhetoric of fiction and the rhetoric of finance capitalism. Most important, such studies assume that texts written in the register of the literary encode within them ways of describing our shared life that can be understood by thinking in the way that economists do and that also might have something to say to economists that they would not think of on their own. Notable monographs in the field that have been inspirations to this book include, in addition to Shell, Kurt Heinzelman’s The Economics of the Imagination (1980), Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1986), James Thomson’s Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996), Ian Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005), Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2008), and Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008). The evidence of these works proves, I think, that at least the third term in New Economic Criticism is safe: these are consistently excellent works of criticism, offering new insight on writings that we thought we knew well.

Now for the hardest question: to what extent does this mode of criticism merit the term economic? None of the critics mentioned above have advanced training in modern economics as an academic discipline. Professional economists would probably see this as a significant and even a crippling problem, and there are surely moments in many works by literary critics (and in the present volume) that would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of modern economic theory. But I would argue rather that the distance from the discipline of economics has proved to be more enabling than disabling, that it has permitted writers whose disciplinary training is in literary studies to gain leverage on economic logic by treating it as a kind of imaginative form in its own right. What literary critics have emphasized is the extent to which the medium through which economics and other social sciences describe the world is inevitably metaphorical, that such writers are using a language that was developed for no discipline in particular to give figural form to an aspect of the world. This is even the case when economic and other social scientists turn to mathematics. Over the past few decades in particular, economists have gained tremendous authority by describing their discipline as a science, increasingly turning to mathematical models that give their work the appearance of incontestable fact. But however much numbers offer the hope of escape from the bonds of language, such models still often remain framed by linguistic choices. Jonathan Schlefer, for example, has recently made the case that the figure of the invisible hand, used by Adam Smith to describe how individuals work for the greater good while unconsciously pursuing their own self-interest, has proven to be extraordinarily powerful, a metaphor that underlay the misguided thinking that helped to cause the 2008 financial crisis.²⁰ The metaphor has been absorbed to become an unconscious assumption that the market operates to maximize social good when it is allowed to be most free. The assumption persists, Schlefer observes, in the absence of any model that could prove that this is the case or, for that matter, evidence that any such thing as a completely free market exists. Like the invisible hand, the market is a figure of speech, an abstraction derived from what was once and sometimes still is a physical location. There is nothing necessarily sinister about economists’ use of figural language; it is simply true that all of the ways of producing knowledge about the world have to share a language that was invented for none of them in particular, and each must reach for analogies in domains of language that have developed historically strong associations elsewhere. The value of literary studies, and perhaps, to invoke an economic term, its comparative advantage among the disciplines, is its self-consciousness about that fact, its awareness of the historicity and contingency of its medium.

To use the tools of literary analysis to understand issues studied by economists is not simply or even primarily a matter of being interdisciplinary, no matter how much that mode of scholarship remains a professed desiderata, particularly in the lives of academic institutions, which these days love few things so much as the ability to advertise their interdisciplinary initiatives.²¹ Rather, in fact, this book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on. Literary studies thus has a kind of leverage over economic writing that suggests that the prefix for disciplinary we should use is less inter- than supra-, that attention to language, rhetoric, and figuration can provide us a point above or outside the economic from which we might critique it. To be sure, such a critique has been mounted from within the discipline of economics itself, most famously by Deirdre McCloskey. McCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics (first published in 1986, with a revised edition issued in 1998) argues that the modern discipline of economics has gone into denial about the fact that, at its core, it is describing social reality by means of metaphor, argument, and storytelling. In such denial, economists are going against the grain of the history of their own discipline. For there is an almost novelistic degree of coincidence in the fact that the founder of modern economic writing, Adam Smith, was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, for whom the extension of habits of thought formed to understand what he, like most eighteenth-century intellectuals, called belles lettres to economic subjects was so natural that it required no defense. McCloskey has described the turn to mathematical evidence as the standard of proof within the discipline as a mistake that threatens to unmoor economics from reality, producing unscientific rubbish that is worthless as science, producing little that might be described as actual inquiry into the world.²² Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the first instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here.

The use of economic logic on the part of literary critics probably speaks, too, to the desire to give their work the authority of a discipline that in our time has vastly more public stature and influence than their own, its claim to the status of objective science buttressed by its frequent recourse to the hard evidence of numbers. Eighteenth-century studies have the potential to intervene here in a particularly powerful way, not only because the origins of the discipline of economics are generally traced to this period, but also because so many important eighteenth-century writers were also significant political figures with direct or indirect influence over the nation’s finances. John Locke (the subject of chapter 1 of this book) wrote important essays on the subjects of interest and coinage; Joseph Addison (a central figure in chapter 2) served as secretary of state; Jonathan Swift served as a key adviser to Robert Harley, the chief finance minister of a Tory government in the 1710s and then, in Ireland in the 1720s, organized a campaign in the print media—the Drapier’s Letters—to repel an attempt by the London government of the day to foist what he saw as an illegitimate form of currency on Ireland; Daniel Defoe (who shows up in several chapters) wrote tirelessly on trade and finance, often at the bidding of political paymasters, and so on in an itinerary that includes Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, and Adam Smith as well. Before economics emerged as a discipline in its own right, it was a branch of statecraft, one that many writers whom we now think of as philosophers, essayists, and even poets understood to be under their purview.

But economic theory has found itself reaching, almost in spite of itself, for models of the form that we now class as literary. Consider, for example, the origin story that Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz tell at the outset of their book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, first published in 1963. This book, perhaps more than any other work of economic history, helped establish the ascendency of monetarist economics in the discipline in the United States, certainly as a mode of explanation for historical crises such as the Great Depression; by the end of the 1960s, Friedman himself had become the public face of monetarism and to no small extent of the field of economics tout court. Monetarism is by necessity quantitative, and A Monetary History of the United States is accordingly filled with charts, graphs, and tables in which the authors record the quantity and flow of money through the period of their study, a period defined by the fact that at the time of their writing, the most reliable data about money was available only for the period beginning just after the U.S. Civil War. Yet numbers alone turn out not to be enough to make their case, and Friedman and Schwartz explain at the outset that the need for such a book, a history, arises from the fact that statistics are insufficient to prove their point about the centrality of money to understanding economic crises. An analytical narrative, they realized, was needed to add a much needed dimension to the numerical evidence.²³ It is as if narrative represents a fall from an Edenic state where numbers alone could tell the story, that Friedman and Schwartz are writing sentences and paragraphs against their better judgment, as a concession to readers who, alas, still need them. This might be considered an example of the rhetorical figure known as ekphrasis, or the speaking picture; the numbers form a picture of the economic system, but one that requires the supplement of language to be fully understood; we will have more examples of what I will call an ekphrastic turn in writing about economics in chapter 5. In A Monetary History of the United States, money is cast as a kind of hero, the central agent of history. That is to say that money is not, as Friedman and Schwartz put it, a passive factor which chiefly reflects the effects of other forces; rather, the supply of money is an independent factor which exerted a powerful influence on the course of events.²⁴ One important effect of their analysis is that their narrative greatly downplays the importance of political actors like, say, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and raises the importance of banks as institutions that have decisive historical impact. But an important if unacknowledged premise of their study is that money has itself become the great man of history, which they conceptualize from the start as a narrative genre, and that very fact is a testimony to the power of story. This turn to narrative history and the construction of money as an agent within it is an unconscious, rather than a conscious feature of monetarist economics, a feature of the subdiscipline that it has never articulated to itself. And, too, the turn to money as a way of explicating a shared logic of symbolization in literary texts, which was undertaken by critics like Marc Shell at roughly the same time as monetarism’s ascendancy in economics, suggests that the two disciplines shared an unconscious affinity in this period.

To speak of disciplines or the culture as a whole as having an unconscious is to engage in the practice of catachresis oneself, projecting a figure of speech used to conceptualize the individual psyche in directions that its great popularizer Sigmund Freud never imagined. And, given that figure’s origins in the world of nineteenth-century German philosophy, using it to describe English writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would seem to be particularly anachronistic. But such a conception of a collective unconscious has proved to be an extremely useful and durable one in the hands of critics such as Fredric Jameson, Eric Lott, and Bill Brown, who have written of political, racial, and material unconsciousness, respectively, deploying the figure of the unconscious to describe the ways in which cultures construct domains of ideas and feeling that reach articulation only in displaced and oblique forms, and in places where social scientists do not often look, such as poems, novels, songs, and paintings. And it is precisely this degree of obliquity that renders such works particularly important, because they help identify a culture’s taboos, fears, blind spots, and conceptual impasses. So, for example, even though there is almost no literary work in this period that is explicitly about the corporation as such, the questions that the corporations of this period raise—about the relationship between the state and commerce, about cause and effect, about the individual and the collective—address important ideas that appear as well in works of poetry, fiction, philosophy, and drama. Or, perhaps more in keeping with the spirit of a study that begins, as I do here with John Locke, the goal is to bring this period’s unconscious political-economic ideology into the realm of the idea, what Locke calls ‘the object of the Understanding when a man thinks," in order to render it available for critique.²⁵

Even more importantly, I follow these critics in insisting on the centrality of history, on returning to what we might call the very long eighteenth century to investigate the interbraided relationship between economics and imaginative writing in a period when both were being refitted for modern uses.²⁶ This insistence on the importance of the history of economics distinguishes literary studies from the direction that economics has taken over the past few decades, when economic history has seen its place in the larger discipline of economics steadily diminished. Mary Poovey has observed that it is very typical for economists to repudiate their predecessors, with the result that if they do not explicitly deny that the discipline of economics has a history, they deny that its history matters.²⁷ The discipline is intensely presentist, only infrequently admitting historical evidence, and the status of economic history has correspondingly declined. The economic historian Peter Temin, using the case of MIT’s Economics Department, where he taught for decades, has recently lamented the decline of economic history from its equal place as one of three legs underpinning a stool that constituted the subject as it was taught at MIT for decades after World War II (the others being economic theory and econometrics) to neglect, to, now, virtual banishment. MIT graduate students are no longer required to take any courses in economic history, a fact that Temin deplores, in part because, he argues (as a longtime student of the Great Depression of the 1930s), studying history would help economists and the policymakers they influence to avoid making mistakes that have already been proved to be such in the past.²⁸ Pierre Bourdieu suggested in the mid-2000s that the excesses of economic writers like Gary Becker and Jon Elster, who advanced rational-actor theory against the best established findings of the historical sciences of human practices, would result in a reaction that could eventually restore economics to its true vocation as a historical science.²⁹ This book might perhaps be part of such a reaction, one that takes advantage of the continuing importance of historical evidence to literary studies. That importance has stayed constant even while the study of literature has integrated theory and even, in the past two decades, quantitative methods.

If economics is the major theme of this volume, a minor but important theme is the law. Corporations are legal fictions; each act of incorporation requires an act of law, and legal historians and theorists have been intrigued by the relationship between them virtually since the start of the discipline of legal studies itself. We have already seen how Sir Edward Coke was prompted by the Sutton Hospital case (1612) to assert that a Corporation aggregate of many is invisible, immortal & resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law.³⁰ All of the categories that Coke invokes—visibility, temporality, intention—have continued to resonate with writers both inside and outside the field of legal studies who grapple with the questions raised by the kinds of agency that corporations have in the world. It is when corporations are challenged—by the claims of individuals, by the state, by the need to adapt to new circumstances, by the forces of history itself—that new cases emerge where the relationship of corporations to other aspects of the culture come into articulation. I have made use of some of those cases and the ways they have been analyzed at various points in this book, such as in my discussion of the eighteenth-century understanding of insurance in chapter 3 and, in chapter 4, of what constitutes a man in the face of the challenges to the trade in human persons made by the first abolitionist movement in the 1770s and 1780s. Perhaps most importantly, legal studies has a much greater place for history than does economics, because so much of it is attempting to understand how the precedents of the past can help us manage the complexities of the present. And, like literary studies, it attends closely to language, to