Sir James Steuart, 1713-1780.

Scottish Enlightenment economist, often regarded as the "last Mercantilist". 

A country gentleman, lawyer and Scottish nationalist, Sir James Denham Steuart of Coltness and Goodtrees (3rd Baronet) descended from a family of wealthy Edinburgh bankers and lawyers (the baronetcy title was purchased by his grandfather in 1695, notionally connected to Nova Scotia).  Steuart enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1724. Despite his father's death in 1727, Steuart carried on his law studies was admitted to the bar in 1734.  However, unlike his father and grandfather, who had been illustrious advocates, the young man had little appetite for a legal career - and did not get much of a chance to build one either, as he would end up spending half his life outside the country.  

Like many rich young gentlemen, Steuart promptly set out in 1735 on a grand tour of Continental Europe which would last until 1740, passing through Holland, France, Spain and Italy,.  While in Rome, Steuart met Charles Edward Stewart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"), the Young Pretender of the Stuart line to the British throne, and was promptly converted to the Jacobite cause.  He returned to Britain, got married in 1743, and awaited the call.  Finally, in 1745, Charles landed with his military force in Scotland, precipitating the "Forty-Five" Jacobite uprising. Upon Charlie's arrival in Edinburgh, Sir James Steuart was among the first to present himself to the prince and declare for him.  Steuart was promptly dispatched as an emissary to France on the prince's behalf, and charged with negotiating for a French invasion of England to support the rebellion. Steuart left in October and arrived in Versailles by early December.  Steuart was still in France when news arrived that the Jacobite army had been decisively defeated at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746.  Steuart was explicitly excluded from the 1747 oblivion act offering amnesty to the Jacobite rebels (20 George II c.52).  As a result, Steuart was unable to return to Britain and  would have to spend  the next couple of decades on the Continent.  

Steuart set up his main residence in Angoulême, but was not particularly satisfied there and often went for long sojourns elsewhere. When the Seven Years' War broke out in 1756, Steuart, as a British national, felt uncomfortable in France and moved to Brussels (Austrian Netherlands, a neutral territory).  In 1757, he moved to Tübingen (Duchy of Württemberg, also neutral), where his son went to attend university.  Finding the Swabian climate disagreeable to his health, Steuart spent several interludes in Venice and Padua.  The Enlightenment was then bubbling up in France, and Steuart was soon engaged with the "republic of letters".  Steuart's first work, published in 1757,  was a defense of Newton's 1728 chronology from recent attacks by French clerical critics.  Steuart began researching economics at this time - publishing, as a side-effect, a small treatise on the coinage of the German principalities in 1761. 

The change of regime that followed the death of George II and the ascension of George III in 1760 afforded Steuart the opportunity to try to find a way back home.  Steuart's son, also called James, went first, obtaining a position in the British dragoons.  Awaiting his own chance, Steuart moved north to Antwerp, and opened communications with the new British government. His strange activities alarmed the French authorities, who suspected he might be passing military intelligence to the British government, and he was briefly arrested and his home ransacked. After peace was made in 1763,  Steuart was finally allowed to return to Scotland, so long as he remained quietly on his estates (Steuart would receive a full pardon only in 1771). .

It was at Coltness that Sir James Steuart completed his great economics treatise, Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.  It had a long gestation.  Steuart had actually planned this work back in 1749 while at Angoulême, and began writing it in 1756.  The bulk of it was written in 1758-59 while in Tübingen.  When he arrived in Scotland in 1763, his Book IV (on credit) was still being researched.  The manuscript was finally completed by 1766, and published in 1767.  Along the way, in 1758-59, Steuart wrote his paper on the grain trade (published posthumously in 1783).   

Sir James Steuart's 1767 Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy is perhaps the first, fully-fledged economics treatise. Although often regarded as part of the Scottish Enlightenment which produced David Hume and Adam Smith, Steuart's economics hark back to the earlier Mercantilist era.  More accurately, while on the Continent, Steuart had imbibed the sophisticated Enlightenment Mercantilism that was in the air -- particularly, German Neo-Cameralism -- which combined a legal-statist approach with a "natural" approach to economics.  Although a promoter of old fashioned export subsidies and import tariffs, Steuart added several elements that  tied this in with a more general theory of economic development.  Unlike the old Mercantilists, he recognized Cantillon's "population-subsistence" dynamics.  He also introduced the concept of diminishing returns to land.  Steuart juggled two interesting theories of price -- a long-run, quasi-Marxian labor theory of value and a short-run "demand-and-supply" theory.  Indeed, Steuart was among the first to introduce the term "equilibrium".  Thus, Steuart was an important forerunner of both the Classical and Neoclassical schools in many respects.  Steuart also provided one of the more able statements of the real bills doctrine of money. Steuart followed the Inquiry up with his 1769 Considerations on the county of Lanark (under pseudonym . "Robert Frame"), where he explains and uses the mechanics of a supply-and-demand mechanism in markets.

Adam Smith's (1776) attacks on Mercantilism were mainly directed against Steuart (even though the latter was not mentioned by name).  Steuart was translated into French in 1789-90, and used by the revolutionaries to argue for certain reforms.  However, Steuart's economics were lauded by Karl Marx and he became something of a darling to the German Historical School.  

Steuart's 1767 Inquiry was not a best-seller - but it was well-received by critics, and was part of the reason he was finally granted a full pardon on December 23, 1771 (curiously, sixty years earlier, another Scottish outlaw, John Law, had also attempted a "practical" economic treatise in the hopes of earning himself a pardon - albeit Law did not succeed).  In 1772, at the request of the British East India Company, Steuart undertook a study on the scarcity of coinage in EIC-owned Bengal.  In 1773, Steuart added to his wealth the inheritance of the substantial lands of Goodtrees from a defunct Denham branch of the family, and changed his name to Steuart Denham as a condition.

Steuart died on November 26, 1780, from a toe infection and was  buried in a family vault at Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire.  His fame, though tarnished by Smith, was still great enough for the dedication of a cenotaph memorial tablet to Steuart in Westminster Abbey (as far as I can tell, the only economist there).  His collected works were compiled by his son, Lt. James Stewart, in 1805.

Top

Top

Top

All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca