Of the first four citations in Capital, three invoke John Locke, including Marx's earliest formulation of use-value as the fitness of a commodity to “supply the necessities, or to serve the conveniences of human life.”Footnote 1 Although Locke's contribution to the intellectual development of capitalism was evident to Marx in the 1860s, it would only make a meaningful impression on historians of political thought a century later.Footnote 2 More recently, some commentators have placed Locke at the center of incisive investigations of empire, while others have begun to reassess his writings on money against the backdrop of England's currency crisis in the 1690s.Footnote 3 But unlike his colonial and monetary thought, the import of Locke's economic ideas to the history of capitalism writ large has traditionally—and especially lately—received far less attention.Footnote 4 Notably, two classic treatments of Locke withstand this charge: C. B. Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962) and Neal Wood's John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (1984). In his polemic reading of Stuart political thought, Macpherson famously dubbed Locke a bourgeois theorist whose Second Treatise laid a moral foundation for capitalist appropriation.Footnote 5 Two decades later, Wood confirmed Locke's embroilment in capitalism as an “early agrarian” capitalist thinker.Footnote 6 By foregrounding Locke's repudiation of feudal attitudes toward farming and landed property, Wood reframed key ideas in the Second Treatise as central elements in a robust theory of agrarian capitalism predicated on the tenets of profit, frugality, and capitalist property relations.
Departing from the bourgeois–agrarian binary, James Tully and Richard Ashcraft have stressed the centrality of mercantilism to the English economy and to Locke's considerations about its development, while maintaining that neither Stuart England nor Locke were in any sense “capitalist.” On this telling, mercantilism accounted for Locke's positions on manufacturing, workhouses, foreign trade, and employment in a way that was, in Tully's words, “incompatible with capitalism.”Footnote 7 But if, as Ashcraft accurately notes, Locke spoke of merchants, tradesmen, and manufactures as chief contributors to “the expansion of trade, and hence to the accumulation of riches for England,” then in what economic system did this expansion and accumulation take place and to what social process did they contribute?Footnote 8 While it is entirely plausible that Stuart England was a mercantile state and Locke a mercantilist thinker, the position that mercantilism and capitalism are mutually exclusive is questionable. Not only do mercantilist ideas hold “important clues about the origins of capitalism,” as Joyce Appleby observes, but the position that mercantilism is an integral part of capitalism registers a broad consensus among historians of economic thought that casts doubt on interpretations of mercantilism as a siloed socioeconomic formation.Footnote 9 Tully's and Ashcraft's objections to the history of capitalism as a framework for understanding early modern political thought reflect the view that capitalism as such only rose to prominence around the turn of the nineteenth century, once wage labor became the norm of industrial work, workers became divorced from the means of production, and the labor process fell under the absolute control of an emerging capitalist class.Footnote 10 On this account, Europe's preindustrial societies are most accurately portrayed when preceded by such qualifiers as “commercial,” “market,” or “mercantilist.”Footnote 11
By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. While I accept that Stuart England was fundamentally shaped by mercantile and agrarian developments, I maintain that dominant characterizations of Locke—as bourgeois, agrarian, or mercantilist—cannot account for the direction in which he sought to veer the English economy throughout the 1690s. Specifically, I argue that this particular period in the history of English capitalism, which social and economic historians have called “proto-industrialization,” marked the rise of rural manufacturing occasioned by a series of social, demographic, and economic shocks that reverberated across England and its colonies, including a surge of surplus agrarian labor, the integration of agriculture into industry, a spurt in consumer demand for delectable goods, and the imperial acquisition of Atlantic markets.Footnote 12
As such, I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, overseas trade, and labor discipline as an expression of such key proto-industrial developments as the centralization of textile production in workhouses and the proletarianization of rural labor before the factory system. I contend that the most salient objectives of Locke's political economy—economic improvement and expansion—were anchored in a plan for accumulation and employment purveyed by the extraction of surplus value from a disciplined, waged, and precarious rural workforce. Moreover, I suggest that, because proto-industrialization was intimately caught up in the buildout of England's colonial economy, the proto-industrial context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I claim that Locke pursued proto-industrial reform in England by combining a fundamental premise of imperial ideology with its basic commercial commitment; that is, his economic doctrine was informed by a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress on the one hand and, on the other, an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and inequitable relations of exchange that favored metropolitan trade.
To be sure, the manufacturing sites of early modern England—rural cottages, manufactures, workhouses, and workshops—looked decidedly different from what we might understand as a factory today. By contrast with the giant and imposing sites of heavy machinery and assembly lines that would come to saturate English towns in the nineteenth century, Locke leaves us with an image of the factory in its rustic beginnings—one that, at once rural and remote, was in both senses of the term a factory afield.
Proto-industrial capitalism and imperial commerce in Stuart England
Conventionally, historians of early modern political thought have largely overlooked the sizeable role proto-industrialization played in English economic discourse and development.Footnote 13 Most accounts of Stuart England as a “traditional” or “agrarian” society understate both the significance and the magnitude of manufacturing and industry in Locke's time, the output of which had at least equaled that of agriculture by the turn of the eighteenth century.Footnote 14 In focusing almost exclusively on arable farming, proponents of “agrarian capitalism” have neglected the surge of pastoral agriculture in seventeenth-century England and its decisive contribution to proto-industrialization.Footnote 15 As the petty farmer in arable regions struggled to make ends meet, consumption, production, and capital multiplied in the pastoral–industrial country, which became home to an emerging mass of inexpensive, abundant, expandable, and exploitable proto-industrial wage labor.Footnote 16 By the 1650s, the high-value outputs of England's extensive livestock already lent indispensable support to “population growth, proto-industrialization, and extensive urbanization.”Footnote 17
Locke's tenure on the Board of Trade, from 1696 to 1700, coincided with the earliest phase of English proto-industrialization, marked by the rapid regional ascent of rural industries and the spatial reorganization of manufacturing in the countryside.Footnote 18 At this point, the most characteristic features of proto-industrialization were already afoot, including the expansion of manufacturing across rural parishes, the orientation of production toward foreign and colonial markets, and what we might call the hallmark of proto-industry: the symbiotic development of industry and agriculture.Footnote 19 While the agrarian sector propelled manufacturing with new pools of surplus labor, entrepreneurial skill, capital stock, and commercial markets, rural industries increased the input of labor and capital in farming.Footnote 20 Locke's support for welding agriculture to manufacturing as a suitable means to productively employ surplus labor echoes his other proto-industrial measures for economic improvement, including reallocating investments toward export-oriented manufacturing, naturalizing foreign artisans, establishing workhouses in the countryside, and expanding Ireland's linen trade. That Locke articulated a strategy for economic development centered on invigorating proto-industries is as significant to the progression of his thinking as to our assessment of its place in the history of English capitalism. Proto-industrialization was an instrumental phase of industrial expansion, colonial trade, and capital accumulation that fundamentally affected the course of early modern capitalism in England and its colonies. Moreover, the renewed sources of labor, capital, and innovations laid open by proto-industries were essential to the emergence of the factory system at the turn of the nineteenth century.Footnote 21
Early modern proto-industrialization was most evident in England's woolen industry—Locke's preferred sector for driving economic reform.Footnote 22 While a nationwide workhouse network such as the one Locke envisioned did not yet exist, he observed its potential in the emerging centralization of labor in textile production as early as 1691, remarking on the “numerous Body of Workmen” clothiers employed “out of their Warehouses.”Footnote 23 Locke's proposal for centralizing and rationalizing rural manufacturing amounted to a decisive encroachment on the liberties of autonomous producers, whose productive sphere would be enclosed and whose labor would be disciplined by the direct supervision and control of entrepreneurs, overseers, and merchants.Footnote 24 Historically, however, wool production was consolidated gradually, irregularly, and never entirely; the dissipated manufacturing of woolen goods across cottages, households, and workshops persisted well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 25 Yet even critics of proto-industrialization concede that, as capital slowly impinged on dispersed manufacturing, scores of independent artisans were recast as wage laborers throughout Stuart England's woolen districts.Footnote 26 By the eighteenth century, English proto-factories were organized along the lines of “workshop-manufactures” based on “elementary labor-intensive techniques” and the “disciplining of the labour force.”Footnote 27 Although not yet the norm during Locke's time, his economic doctrine in the 1690s aspired to this labor process. Contrary to the subordination of labor to capital in the putting-out system, which took form indirectly through credit relations rather than wages, Locke's workhouse scheme projected a scenario in which the organization and subordination of workers by merchants and parish authorities would be more comprehensive and immediate than in cottages or small workshops.Footnote 28
More recently, historians have questioned proto-industrialization's contribution to the development of European capitalism. Some critics have rightly noted that the literature on proto-industrial growth of the 1970s and 1980s neglected the great extent to which households reallocated productive resources toward market-oriented activities in the early modern period.Footnote 29 This reallocation, however, does not explain why so many seventeenth-century politicians, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and reformers deemed workhouses, discipline, and control, rather than the pecuniary aspirations of industrious households, as the most appropriate means to bring surplus labor into the market.Footnote 30 As England's dominant industry, woolen manufacturing significantly shaped how political economists and projectors reimagined Stuart society.Footnote 31 To many, export-oriented wool production and workhouses were England's surest hope to gainfully employ its poor and grow richer.Footnote 32 The regimes of coercive and sweated labor that belied such hopes for employment and wealth were a central, yet neglected, aspect of what Jan de Vries has called the “industrious revolution” insofar as they applied, in Paul Cheney's words, “the stick of workhouses, fines, and imprisonment where the carrot of new consumption possibilities proved insufficient encouragement for keeping up ceaseless, well-disciplined effort.”Footnote 33 Beyond providing a solution to unemployment, workhouses promised to address a key challenge faced by textile entrepreneurs: ensuring that their output was regularly produced, timely delivered, and of uniform quality.Footnote 34 Locke's workhouse proposals, for instance, included strategies for controlling, specializing, and dividing the labor process. By making the poor work for their subsistence within a designated space for a set number of hours, his scheme would render labor strictly dependent on employers, wages, training, and workhouses. More than fueling England's “industrious countryside,” such a policy promised to usher in an industrial countryside.
Other critics object that proto-industrialization cannot explain why similarly thriving rural industries across South and East Asia did not yield levels of economic growth and industrial development on a par with their Western European counterparts.Footnote 35 This divergence, as Kenneth Pomeranz discerns, was largely purveyed by the astronomical stock of colonial resources European empires exploited to overcome the ecological limits to industrialization.Footnote 36 Yet, at the same time as he convincingly questions the explanatory claims of proto-industrialization, Pomeranz concedes that the early modern escalation of rural industries made crucial contributions to the emergence of the factory system in the form of a prodigious and exploitable pool of rural wage labor in manufacturing.Footnote 37 So, while the English economy managed to wheel its way out of a proto-industrial cul-de-sac through New World resources, the slave trade, and plantation slavery, Atlantic colonies also allowed England to employ vast swaths of surplus workers in industrial production rather than relegating them to agriculture in the 1800s.Footnote 38 And to the extent that this pool of proto-industrial labor impelled the advent of factory production through the skills and knowledge necessary for further innovations, industrial capitalism was indeed the “growing up” of proto-industry.Footnote 39
Since a sizable portion of proto-industrial commodities in Locke's time was destined for foreign and colonial markets, England's proto-industries were indissociable from its sprawling commercial empire.Footnote 40 England's woolen sector, in particular, secured considerable gains from the imperial policies, logistical infrastructure, and capital investment tied to colonial ventures in the Atlantic.Footnote 41 Additionally, the exceptional surplus and mobility of rural labor that galvanized proto-industrialization was instrumental to the early modern upturn of England's Atlantic settlements and commerce, furnishing the colonies with multitudes of new settlers and consumer goods.Footnote 42 The significance of the Atlantic economy to English proto-industries is likewise evident in the terms of imperial trade established by the 1696 Navigation Act.Footnote 43 Finally, colonial resources ultimately advanced English industrialization by facilitating the transfer of underemployed agrarian and handicraft workers into the factory system. By laying bare the prominent ties between rural manufacturing and imperial commerce, as well as their contributions to economic growth, proto-industrialization elucidates the conditions, pressures, and reasoning that underpinned Locke's political economy in the 1690s.
Capital and industry
In his 1691 Some Considerations of the Lowering of Interest, Locke stressed a fundamental tenet of his economic theory, namely that as manufacturing develops, wealth becomes less dependent on land while labor adds increasingly more value to whatever it produces in incremental parcels—from the commodity's raw state to its transformation into a finished consumer good. Taking England's woolen industry to illustrate his claim, Locke contended that if a shortage of money were to decrease demand for textiles a general decline in prices would ensue, not only in woolen garments but also in unwrought wool, wages, and food.Footnote 44 As prices slumped across the commodity chain, Locke reasoned, so too would revenue decrease from the merchant to the manufacturer to the farmer, whose “Land bears the greatest part of the loss.”Footnote 45 Wool was indeed a fitting example of this logic given the intimate ties the industry sustained between commercial agriculture and rural manufacturing at the time. This interdependence implied that the more connected farming and industry became, falling revenues in manufacturing would occasion even greater losses to the landholder on whose property “Corn, Butter, Cheese, and Flesh ” were produced.Footnote 46
To reverse the landowner's deficit and the laborer's underemployment, Locke suggested wheeling investments away from agriculture since the problem at hand derived precisely from a deflation in the value of arable land and an upsurge in the supply of rural labor. Instead of turning to commercial agriculture, as proponents of “agrarian capitalism” insist, Locke's answer was to expand rural manufacturing so that, as employment and output were scaled, labor would bestow more value on a greater quantity of commodities. To this effect, he considered it “past question” that “all Encouragement should be given to Artificers” whose business he deemed a promising hope against “Brokers” and “Unworking Shopkeepers” who, in “keep[ing] so much of the Money of a Country constantly in their Hands” while “Eat[ing] up too great a share of the Gains of Trade” were actively “Starving the Labourer and impoverishing the Landholder.”Footnote 47 “Artificers” here refers to the independent producers “who make … Vend, and Retail out their own Commodities.” Alongside landless rural workers, “Artificers” comprised the bulk of proto-industrial labor in England: small, middling producers in the countryside.
Given Locke's significant distress over the ongoing agrarian downturn, his solution was to reallocate investments toward manufacturing. Indeed, Locke painted a dire picture of England's agrarian crisis, describing insolvent farmers paying laborers with deeply depreciated wheat, which the latter could not sell at a high enough price, or at all, to afford rent and food. “And ’tis no wonder to hear every day of Farmers breaking, and running away,” he remarked, like the “many Farmers in the West [who] are broke and [have] gone since Michaelmass last.”Footnote 48 This westbound pilgrimage indexes the exodus of underemployed arable labor bound for England's pastoral country—the regional nucleus of proto-industrialization.Footnote 49 Moreover, Locke deemed investment in the labor-intensive production of commodities over raw materials the surest path to accumulation and improvement in England. “How much Manufacture deserves to be incourag'd,” he wrote,
since that Part of Trade, though the most considerable, is driven with the least Money, especially if the Workmanship be more worth than the Materials. For to the Trade that is driven by Labour, and Handicrafts Men, One two and fifitieth part of the yearly Money paid them will be sufficient: But to a Trade of Commodities of our bare Native growth, much greater proportion of Money is requir'd.Footnote 50
Locke's qualification of domestic commodities with the adjective “bare” registers his objection to the production and export of raw materials, which are worth less than finished consumer wares because they forego the extra value added by labor during the manufacturing process.
While the word “capital” was not common parlance in the English language during Locke's time, early modern political economists often used concepts like “Fund” and “Stock” to define an economy's capital stock—here land and labor—that could be invested to yield a profit.Footnote 51 Locke employed “Fund” in this way to earmark resources that afforded the highest return on investment in a commercial economy. In order to overcome the limits of growing rich from a finite and increasingly scarce landmass, Locke believed that England should transfer its resources to labor-intensive trades such as navigation and manufacturing. In Some Considerations, for instance, he referred to “Fund” in this sense by comparing England, “whose great Fund is Land,” with the Dutch Republic, whose “great Fund … is Trade.”Footnote 52 Here “Fund” designates the sum total of national assets that can be exchanged, stored as value, and employed as factors of production.Footnote 53 Locke moreover distinguished unproductive natural endowments from assets that can be employed, accumulated, and exchanged, including farmland, manufactures, and carriage. So whereas America's mountains, fountains, and uncultivated land were sources of natural wealth, England's tilled fields and Holland's manufactures were sources of artificial wealth, which is to say, they were capital or “Fund.”Footnote 54
Additionally, Locke's admiration for the Dutch—whom he deemed “Skilful in all Arts of promoting Trade”—suggests that his comparison between England and Holland was, far from being inadvertent, a reflection of his preference for capital accumulation through trade instead of land.Footnote 55 He thus contrasted English and Dutch “Fund” as a way of demonstrating the superiority of export-oriented manufacturing over the cultivation of raw materials. On Locke's account, the Dutch approach to economic improvement, centered on its consumer industries, was one England should emulate. From 1691 onwards, manufacturing recurs with increasing frequency and detail across Locke's economic writings. At a time when chronic unemployment swept the agrarian sector, Locke cast his lot with industry, which attests to his understanding that the outcome of a rural recession would further depreciate the value of land since, in a plummeting agrarian economy, “Land bears the Burthen a heavier way.”Footnote 56 Locke was also convinced that “If we consume our own Product and Manufacture … our Stock [will] be so much encreast.”Footnote 57 Thus economic growth and capital accumulation must be sought in trade, which he defined as “Domestick manufactures” and “Cariage, i.e. Navigation and Merchandise.”Footnote 58 In other words, the “producing of Riches” would increase to the extent that manufacturing was assisted by the “Improvement of Navigation” and carried out by a population “bold and skillful at sea.”Footnote 59
England could therefore enlarge its “Fund” by allotting its productive resources to consumer industries and the logistical means of transporting goods to foreign markets.Footnote 60 Manufacturing and navigation were the basic means to Locke's goal of economic improvement through accumulation. He provided a glimpse of this logic in 1677 by noting that, despite their country being “large and fertile,” West Indians lived a “poor, uncomfortable [and] laborious life” because they lacked the skill to improve the state of their industry and arts.Footnote 61 In contrast to the “primitive” state of industry in the West Indies, Locke sanctioned a “developed” economy that applied its knowledge, labor power, and skill in the “use and advantage of men in this world,” to procure both “new inventions of dispatch to shorten or ease our labours” and “new and beneficial productions whereby our stock of riches (i.e. things useful for the conveniences of our life) may be increased.”Footnote 62 Put differently, capital accumulation through export-oriented manufacturing ensues from an industrial organization of production, the fruits of which are consumer articles of comfort and convenience. Manufacturing, Locke insisted, is conducive to increasing an economy's “stock of riches” as it creates “new,” “beneficial,” and “useful” things that render life less toilsome and more pleasant—an unattainable prospect for an agrarian capitalist economy whose “greatest Fund” is not trade but land.
Trade, consumption, and commodities
In support of his claim that Locke was an agrarian capitalist, Neal Wood argued that Locke condemned luxury as a detractor of “well-ordered trade,” “good husbandry,” “industry,” and “frugality,” which, alongside the debauchery and fashionable tastes of country gentlemen, deepened England's agrarian crisis.Footnote 63 On this telling, Locke's disdain of luxury was a plea for landholders to “mend their ways” by cutting spending, improving farming techniques, and increasing production to revitalize commercial agriculture.Footnote 64 While Locke did decry certain patterns of conspicuous spending, he never held that frugality and industry were irreconcilable with consumer desires; much less was his attack on luxury meant as a universal denunciation of splendor. Rather than a wholesale indictment, Locke's criticism of luxury was reserved to two instances: first, whenever it led to idleness, ostentation, fancy, and vanity, which in turn caused moral ruin and financial insolvency; and second, when it instilled in consumers a penchant for foreign over domestic commodities.Footnote 65 Beyond these two reservations, Locke actually supported increased spending in English consumer articles of all kinds, so much so that he identified “suitable manufactures to the markets whose commoditys we want” and “fashions suited to [our] owne manufacture” as vital “promoters of trade.”Footnote 66
Far from a plea for austerity, then, Locke's critique of luxury was intended to dissuade spending in foreign consumer goods and promote English manufacturing and exports in woolen textiles. Known as a “mixed industry,” English wool attended to consumer demand for coarse and fine commodities alike.Footnote 67 Much of England's commercial policy at the time actively promoted consumer industries in order to cope with the upswing in foreign and domestic demand for woolen garments.Footnote 68 Locke's attack on luxury is therefore neither a testament to his agrarian theory of capitalism nor an example of his alleged “blindness about consumer goods”; it was a call for English consumers to divert fashionable spending away from imports and toward national wares.Footnote 69 This is important because the surge in delectable consumption and increasing sophistication of consumer tastes at the time was a decisive primer in the ignition of English proto-industrialization.Footnote 70 Locke attested to this in 1691 when he took notice of the recent proliferation of “Magazines of all sorts of Wares.”Footnote 71 A similar conclusion can be drawn from his well-known view that, while “rich in Land,” America was “poor in all the Comforts of Life,” including—as he singles out—“rayment and delight.”Footnote 72 In the context of a developed, monetized economy, Locke held the conveniences and comforts of life in greater esteem and value than its bare necessities. “To provide these things,” he argued, “nature furnish[es] us only with the materials for the most part rough and unfitted to our uses,” such that the production of those “things useful for the conveniences of life” demand “yet a great deal more [of] labour, art, and thought” than things necessary for our material subsistence.Footnote 73
In 1693, Locke voiced his views on consumer exports and employment in a tract endorsing the naturalization of foreign workers in England. Following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French Huguenots expatriated to England by the thousands, sparking a nationwide debate on immigration.Footnote 74 Bills in support of general naturalization, which would confer English citizenship upon a whole group of foreigners, were rejected by Parliament in 1689 and 1690.Footnote 75 When another bill was under consideration in 1693, Locke came down on its side in an essay titled “For a General Naturalisation.” In virtue of its overwhelming appeal to pecuniary interest, Locke's defense of naturalization is a revealing fragment of his political economy.Footnote 76 In particular, three of his arguments reaffirm the proto-industrial outlook to which he had previously assented in Some Considerations: first, his claim that national wealth is a driving factor of productivity from labor rather than land; second, his support for export-oriented manufacturing; and third, his emphasis on consolidating agriculture and industry. In light of its eminent economic logic, this text is as much a defense of proto-industrial development as it is a moral vindication of religious freedom.
If naturalization is the “shortest and easiest way of increasing your people,” Locke reasoned, it should be endorsed on the grounds that “people are the strength of any … government” and “the riches of any country.”Footnote 77 Whereas land is a prized and valuable factor of production to an agrarian economy, a commercial society rooted in manufacturing and foreign trade derives its wealth from an abundant and skilled workforce. “The riches of the world,” he remarked, “do not lie now as formerly in having large tracts of good land [but] in trade, which brings money and with that all things.”Footnote 78 This predicament resonates with Locke's treatment of economic development in the Second Treatise, in which he noted that “different degrees of Industry” furnish “Possessions in different Proportions.”Footnote 79 Whereas an economy characterized by barter and agriculture may sufficiently attend to subsistence, only a commercial society can impart citizens with the “conveniences of Life,” which are sustained and improved by “new and beneficial productions,” “Invention,” and “Arts.”Footnote 80
In 1693 Locke defined trade as the means to produce and to transport consumer goods to foreign markets—additionally, a large workforce, or “Plenty of hands,” he discerned, “is what contributes most to both.”Footnote 81 That is, manufacturing and exporting commodities are labor-intensive processes that generate more value to the extent that they employ labor more efficiently and at a lower cost. The goal here is “to make as much as you can” and “vent as much abroad as you can.” Building on his view that “the greatest part of the value [in all manufactures] lies in labour,” Locke justified increasing England's proto-industrial workforce in light of the corresponding decrease in wages it would offset, making the final price of domestic commodities more competitive in the world market. In order to realize this vision, Locke suggested expanding England's woolen industry by supplementing its workforce through the general naturalization of French artisans. Since England already produced unwrought wool in abundance, all it required to manufacture low-cost and high-quality garments—relative to France—was a greater and cheaper workforce. According to Locke's logic, more value would be created from manufacturing and exporting finished goods as a result of the additional labor engaged in weaving, spinning, fulling, bleaching, dyeing, and cutting—all of which would be performed at a lower expense, for higher profits, and more efficiently by bringing large numbers of workers together in workhouses.Footnote 82 In producing and exporting cloth rather than raw wool, England would thus raise its “Fund” from trade.Footnote 83
Given England's soaring rural unemployment, Locke was firmly against naturalizing unskilled and agrarian workers.Footnote 84 Rather, his plan encouraged pulling in a large pool of foreign artisans and sailors with a proven ability to make “great advantage to themselves by employing so many hands in navigation and transporting the several commodities of the world.”Footnote 85 Locke also objected to the popular outcry against naturalization on the basis that immigrants would overburden the English economy by draining its resources, employment opportunities, and welfare allowances. Skilled foreigners, he retorted, would instead favor English trade by increasing the supply and lowering the price of labor in manufacturing while raising its overall quality. The economic promise of naturalization was thus to “bring down the unreasonable rates of [our] own people or force them to work better,” addressing in turn the problem of England's “Want of people,” which only “raises their price and makes them both dear and careless.”Footnote 86 After all, Locke reasoned, once naturalized, foreigners are “in interest as much our own people as any.” For him, the key benefit of naturalization was its potential to expand export-oriented manufacturing—the engine of English proto-industrialization.
Despite his well-worn conjectures about civil society and the state of nature in the Second Treatise, Locke was also keenly alive to the insoluble realities of economic development. Economic improvement, a product of trade and monetization, was to Locke necessarily at odds with an agrarian society dependent on land. England's next frontier of commercial progress lay less in commercial agriculture, as some interpreters suggest, than in assimilating farming to manufacturing as a means of expanding industry and trade. Similarly, Locke's call for a more centralized and cohesive production cycle in 1693 was not a defense of “agrarian capitalism” but part of his argument to combine the cultivation of raw materials with the manufacturing of consumer goods in the countryside. Historically, this makes sense. Locke promoted rural manufacturing at a moment when English textiles were becoming coveted commodities in foreign markets and England's key export was “no longer a raw material [but] a finished product.”Footnote 87 As such, Locke's naturalization plan aligns with the transformations that invigorated England's proto-industries in the 1690s.
Locke closes “For a General Naturalisation” by addressing the question of poverty. His rejoinder to the common objection that naturalization would aggravate England's key social problem was to reconsider what the general public understood by “the poor.” “If by poor,” he wrote, “are meant such as have nothing to maintain them but their hands, those [who] live by their labour are so far from being a burden that ’tis to them chiefly we owe our riches.”Footnote 88 However, he continued, “If by poor are meant [those] who are able to work and do not, ’tis a shame and a fault in our constitution.” In other words, because they are an asset, not a liability, working people have no part among “the poor.” For Locke, poverty was not the outcome of immigration, of foreigners taking English jobs; it was instead an internal, domestic disorder that “ought to be remedied” nationally through legislative and economic reform. He viewed idleness as a social death sentence for England, with or without immigrants: “whilst it is permitted we must ruin, whether we have many or few people.” At the same time, if idleness can be resolved, he concluded, then “the more [people] we have the better it is for us.”
Labor and workhouses
While in 1693 Locke sought to increase England's proto-industrial workforce with foreigners, in 1697 his focus was on unemployed English citizens. As commissioner to the Board of Trade, Locke compiled a series of amendments to the Elizabethan Poor Laws in which he reimagined national welfare through a state-sanctioned, mass-employment policy reform.Footnote 89 Judging the number of beggars roving the streets as “manifestly great,” Locke opened his “Essay on the Poor Law” with an inventory of disciplinary solutions to idleness directed at those who were able yet unwilling to work—from corporal punishment and forced labor to transportation and imprisonment.Footnote 90 For the remainder of the text, he addressed another segment of the idle poor: those who, though capable and willing, were unable to find work.
The “true and proper relief of the poor,” he argued, was not to prolong their idleness through allowances but to employ them according to their skill and industry, such as by setting them to work in the “woollen or other manufacture.”Footnote 91 If 100,000 of England's poor were employed in a workhouse at one penny per day, he reckoned, in eight years this “would make England above a million of pounds richer.”Footnote 92 In this sense, Locke's plan for mass employment aligned with his goal to enrich England by making trade its greatest “Fund.” But even if Locke's intentions were to improve the poor's living standards and promote social mobility, the long-term effect of such a large-scale employment venture based on constant work at subsistence pay would be to proletarianize rural laborers. Locke's scheme followed on the footsteps of analogous petitions for Corporations of the Poor that occasioned an “unprecedented explosion” in workhouse projects across England.Footnote 93 Founded in 1696, the Bristol Corporation—a model for its progenitors—followed John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England in Relation to its Trade, which advocated for the establishment of a “new corporate body providing compulsory employment, a vast new workhouse, and central control of parish relief.”Footnote 94
Given his familiarity with the state of commercial affairs at the time, Locke was cognizant of the regulations in production, apprenticeship, and employment enforced by urban guilds and corporations, in particular their restrictions on child and female employment, which his plan sought to circumvent.Footnote 95 This helps to explain Locke's thoroughness when considering the implementation of his policy in rural parishes, where restrictions were fewer and surplus labor greater than in towns. In fact, when Locke briefly turns to the enforcement of his proposal in towns, nearing the end of his text, he is less concerned with creating new jobs and establishing new workhouses than with ensuring that the poor will be effectively absorbed by the manufacturing infrastructure already in place.Footnote 96 This is not incidental—for the historical conditions that framed Locke's “Essay on the Poor Law” and energized proto-industrialization in the English countryside were one and the same.Footnote 97
The text also reveals Locke's support for integrating agriculture and industry, demanding that parishes farm their own stock of raw materials to supply manufacturing in adjacent workhouses. To achieve this, a segment of the working poor would be employed in husbandry as apprentices to yeomen or farmers, and whatever they produced “in wool or other materials” would be sold to a “storekeeper … skilled in the particular manufacture”; an overseer would then distribute these “materials for the employment of the poor in each parish.”Footnote 98 The wool, first wrought at home then finished in workhouses under the surveillance of artisans, would be finally sold in the market by the storekeeper for a profit.Footnote 99 In this way, Locke secures employment for the poor at every stage of production, from farming to manufacturing. Additionally, the proposal bars workers from directly participating in the market for raw and finished commodities, enabling merchants to sell these products as consumer goods at a profit. Much like in a factory, Locke's plan would allow for the creation of surplus value through centralized production, wage labor, and exchange. Although the initial investment for his workhouse scheme would be considerable, the venture promised to “quickly pay its own charges, with an overplus.”Footnote 100
Beyond turning out commodities and yielding profits, Locke's plan would in time lend shape to an inexpensive, consistent, and disciplined workforce. By keeping wages at subsistence levels and shutting workers out of consumer markets, the “Essay on the Poor Law” reflects the contribution of rural manufacturing to the proletarianization of landless workers. Having absorbed much of the underemployed labor in the countryside, England's early modern textile industries were composed of “an unorganized mass of sweated labour” kept “just alive” by “meagre wages” that in turn “nourished theft, sedition, and rebellion.”Footnote 101 By engaging a poor and cheap workforce in a largely unregulated labor market, a centralized workhouse system in the countryside could organize, discipline, and contain the rural poor no less effectively than factories were able to helm the urban proletariat in the nineteenth century.Footnote 102 Since Locke's aim was, as Tully rightly discerns, to “habituate the young to a life of industry and discipline,” the long-run promise of his imagined workhouse system was less to generate profit than to create a replenishable, disciplined, inexpensive, and productive working class.Footnote 103
Locke also voiced his support for rural manufacturing in a 1697 report titled “Encouragement of Irish Linen Manufacture.”Footnote 104 To prevent Ireland from undercutting England in the world textile market, Locke proposed replacing Irish wool production with linen.Footnote 105 The report is a bold program for rationalizing and standardizing the labor process in Ireland's linen industry so that it might become “the general trade of that country.”Footnote 106 Noting that spinners were the poorest of all Irish linen workers, Locke called for the establishment of “spinning schools” to which families earning less than forty shillings a year would be forced to send their children.Footnote 107 In order to maximize efficiency, he insisted that only the double-headed wheel be employed in spinning.Footnote 108 This particular labor-saving technology allowed multiple yarns to be spun at once and, being operated by foot pedals, left the worker's hands free to perform other tasks simultaneously.Footnote 109 The machine was invented in 1681 by Thomas Firmin, a friend of Locke's, an adviser to the board's Poor Law reform effort, and the author of workhouse proposals similar to those written by John Bellers, Cary, and Locke.Footnote 110
Steered by the twin principles of employment and improvement, Locke's report on Ireland is yet another example of his support for integrating agriculture and industry. On the report's recommendation, most raw materials used in linen production should be cultivated, transported, and given up for free by workers. Each woman, for instance, would contribute an annual total of 2,400 yards of unwrought linen while every man would bring in one pound of raw flax and hemp.Footnote 111 The intention was to ensure that farmers reaped and sowed these by-products for free in their own time, enforcing a stricter divide between unpaid work in the household and wage labor in the workhouse. And while Locke designated the state as the central investor and stakeholder in his scheme, he placed the management of the industry entirely in the hands of “directors” appointed by Parliament and given “full power and authority in all things whatsoever relating to the conduct and management of this whole affair.”Footnote 112 In order to run their business operations, directors would be allowed to “erect magazines, workhouses, and other public buildings”; “order the buying and selling of anything”; levy taxes; impose regulations; and—in collaboration with “justices of the peace and other officers”—police the market by enforcing these regulations as law and punishing transgressors.Footnote 113
But the relationship between labor and capital in the workplace is as much a question of managing time as of controlling space. Before the widespread use of clocks, the prevalent measure of labor time in early modern Europe was determined by the length of tasks. In such “task-oriented” regimes of time notation, as E. P. Thompson noted, the categories of “work” and “life,” of “labor” and “social intercourse,” were unbound.Footnote 114 Starting in the late seventeenth century, workers began to lose the freedom to preside over their schedules as “timed labor” replaced “task orientation.” Here, work time was measured by the value of the time—expressed in money—taken to complete a given task.Footnote 115 As much in his Poor Law essay as in his linen report, Locke prescribed a production cycle for textile workers that explicitly demarcated the working day through conventions of timed labor. Children in English spinning schools would be forced to work from “sun rising to sunset only allowing them an hour for dinner.”Footnote 116 Those in Ireland would be employed in spinning “ten hours in the day when the days are so long, or as long as it is light when they are shorter.”Footnote 117 Further, Locke continued, “all children who are thus obliged to come to these schools shall be paid for what they earn there in spinning, according to the ordinary rate paid to others, first deducting from each of them what they have spoilt in tow or flax in their beginning to learn.”Footnote 118 As the production process is taken out of the household and gradually brought to the workhouse, remuneration in the form of a wage becomes a factor of the time spent at work. The costs incurred in training would be paid for by workers, whose wages would be reduced according to the value of the materials they “spoilt” while learning the trade. In other words, time “is not passed but spent.”Footnote 119 When he famously wrote in the Second Treatise that “the Turfs my Servant has cut … become my Property,” Locke did not mean that he owned his servant, but his servant's labor time.Footnote 120
The creation of a proto-industrial infrastructure for female and underaged workers in the countryside was the linchpin of Locke's plan. By the late seventeenth century, apprenticeship in England's textile trades had not been enforced for many years and, contrary to the restrictions imposed by urban guilds, the rural industry remained open to women and children.Footnote 121 In order to employ the poor “to the advantage of this kingdom,” Locke proposed setting “all children at 5 years old or sooner” to labor in working schools specialized in “spinning or knitting, or some other part of the woolen manufacture.”Footnote 122 This measure served the dual purpose of putting both children and women to labor in manufacturing by freeing “wives of day labourers” from childcare.Footnote 123 In pressing this point, Locke airs an early expression of the widely held belief among eighteenth-century reformers that only enclosed manufacturing establishments could effectively assimilate the idle poor into the productive segments of the population. Indeed, the central advantage of rural manufacturing as a poor-relief scheme lay in its ability to employ women and children.Footnote 124 Although Locke's proposal never became a bill, it was used in Bristol and “served as a highly praised model for discipline of the labouring classes, organization of child labour, factory discipline, and reform schools right up to the [early twentieth century].”Footnote 125
In sum, Locke's workhouse plan reflected the extent to which women and children were “integral to the spread of manufacture from the early modern period.”Footnote 126 Labor-intensive textile industries increased their productivity through the division of labor in workhouses while cutting costs by extensively employing female and underaged workers in the countryside.Footnote 127 What rendered the rural poor so useful to proto-industries, besides the low price and abundance of their labor, was their social condition. The destitution, flexibility, and docility of landless workers—women and children in particular—made them uniquely susceptible to regimes of forced work, confinement, surveillance, discipline, and timed labor that defined the labor politics of Locke's proposals for wool and linen manufacturing.Footnote 128
Locke's imperial commerce
In Some Considerations, Locke suggested that for a country “not furnished with Mines,” such as England, there are “but two ways of growing Rich, either Conquest, or Commerce.”Footnote 129 To this he added that trade, “where it is managed with Skill and Industry” rather than force, is “a surer and shorter way to Riches.” If “reaping the Profits of the World with our Swords” is out of question, “Commerce therefore is the only way left.”Footnote 130 While Locke never subscribed to a hierarchical order of populations characteristic of modern imperial ideologies, he did adhere to a linear model of economic development that informed the twin principles of imperial commerce: an empire's right to favorably trade with its colonies and its duty to improve them. Given the diverse comparative advantages of England's Atlantic settlements, colonies played distinct roles in favoring metropolitan trade. And since reaping the profits of the world was the outcome of peaceful commerce, discerning what commercial activities favored both a colony's improvement and the metropole's balance of trade was key to an effective imperial policy.
Locke's political economy offers two insights about his theory of imperial commerce. First, it reveals his embrace of a stadial theory of progress whereby pre-monetary agrarian societies like America were construed as “primitive” forerunners of commercial states such as England. Second, it lays bare his view that, in order to obtain the greatest advantage from colonial trade, England should manage or “improve” its colonies. Unlike in an agrarian colony, the proper means of managing and improving a commercial settlement was to encourage its consumer industries and trade.Footnote 131 Locke's position on Ireland bears out this logic. Rather than limiting it to an agrarian colony, as his compeers insisted, Locke proposed developing Ireland's linen trade through a plan that, as I mention above, followed his previous proto-industrial prescriptions to combine the cultivation of raw materials with the expansion of manufacturing in rural workhouses.
But was Locke an imperial thinker? David Armitage is skeptical of such a label in part because, unlike later theorists of empire, Locke never espoused a Eurocentric hierarchy of civilizations determined by irreconcilable cultural differences among populations.Footnote 132 While this is correct, Locke's views on economic improvement betray an underlying “developmental, if not necessarily progressivist,” tendency in his international thought.Footnote 133 This tendency becomes more palpable once we attend to the fact that the subjects of Locke's stadial account of progress were not people or populations but economies, and its markings of development were commercial attributes as opposed to immutable cultural traits or natural capacities. In the Second Treatise, for instance, Locke contrasts England and America by plotting each within a matrix in which societies, as opposed to their inhabitants, are ordered according to their stage of economic development, from a state of nature and subsistence agriculture to a commercial society shored up by markets, consumer industries, foreign trade, property rights, skilled labor, manufacturing, and monetization.Footnote 134 Rather than being bequeathed to a group by nature, Locke's determinants of economic improvement are acquired, learned, and honed in civil society through the various industrial, financial, and market-based institutions of a commercial economy set in motion by capitalist production, exchange, and accumulation. For him, the quality, productivity, and application of labor, along with advancements in manufacturing and shipping, were indelible traits of commercial societies.Footnote 135
The marks of progress in Locke's stadial theory, then, are discernible and tangible imprints of economic improvement. To illustrate that the value of finished commodities derives almost entirely from “Humane Industry,” Locke traces the production of consumer goods in the Second Treatise “through their several progresses, before they come to our use.”Footnote 136 The progress of a commodity along its stages of production—from raising and breeding sheep in pastures to spinning animal fibers in cottages to weaving yarn in workhouses—is analogous to the progress of an economy across its stages of development, from agriculture and husbandry to manufacturing and foreign trade. In England's imperial context, a colony's level of economic development would inform what types of productive activity—arable, pastoral, or industrial—should be encouraged to stiffen its economy while favoring metropolitan trade. Under these conditions, the metropole and the colony enter into an association at once commercial and imperial, one defined by unequal terms of exchange and subservient relations of production.Footnote 137 In strengthening this relationship, the proto-industrial measures in Locke's economic doctrine were of a piece with his theory of imperial commerce.
By promoting commercial agriculture in America, England benefited from new markets for its commodities, which in turn encouraged its manufacturing and shipping industries.Footnote 138 The notion that Atlantic colonies were most valuable to England as emerging markets for domestic manufactures was a cornerstone of Whig imperial policy following the deposition of James II. Not only did Whigs endorse new taxation schemes that, as Steve Pincus points out, “would favor the manufacturing as opposed to the agrarian sector,” they also pushed for the creation of the Bank of England, which would “simultaneously support manufacturers and provide liquidity to the government.”Footnote 139 The central economic advantage of overseas settlements derived less from their promise to enlarge England's landmass than from their potential to pry open new markets for English consumer industries.Footnote 140 England's political and economic transformations of the 1690s were largely spawned by a shift in imperial commerce crystalized by the Board of Trade and financialization.Footnote 141 Composed predominantly of reforming Whigs, the board was a driving engine in the overhaul of England's imperial economy in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. And although Locke's leadership in the board is well known, scholars have overlooked how his proto-industrial prescriptions for economic improvement in England related to his views on imperial policy.
Recently, the debate around Locke's embroilment in empire has largely turned on his theory of property and the context of colonial dispossession in the Second Treatise.Footnote 142 Locke's views on land and property were indeed integral to his intellectual and political investments in the colonies, yet his ideas regarding trade and proto-industrial development played a specific role in his vision of empire, especially in cases where commerce took precedence over territorial expansion and the cultivation of land.Footnote 143 Assessing the contribution of trade and industry to Locke's outlook on imperial commerce requires shifting the discussion from his theory of property to his treatment of colonial trade. Locke's writings and correspondences on the Irish economy offer an illuminating perspective on his understanding of imperial commerce not in the least because manufacturing and trade in Ireland were more pressing concerns than settlement and agrarian improvement in the 1690s.Footnote 144 Ireland occupied a liminal position on Locke's scale of progress; although its economy was less advanced than England's, its commercial agriculture and consumer industries were more developed than those of the American colonies. Ireland's considerable clandestine Atlantic trade in provisions and textiles, for instance, attested to its competitive advantage in world markets for consumer goods.Footnote 145 Moreover, Irish self-government was a heatedly contested topic in England. Ireland's ambiguous status as both kingdom and colony generated “the most pointed discussions of nation, state and empire in British political thought of the late seventeenth century.”Footnote 146 For all these reasons, Locke's contributions to the Irish question unveil connections between his theories of commerce and empire that his views on America alone cannot explain.Footnote 147
One of the pressing problems animating political and economic discourse around Ireland at the time was its threat to England's woolen industry.Footnote 148 “Of all the Plantations setled by the English,” John Cary wrote in 1695, Ireland “hath proved most injurious to the Trade of this Kingdom, and so far from answering the ends of a Colony, that it doth wholly violate them.”Footnote 149 Cary's preferred measure against Ireland was to “limit their Trade” by reducing it “to the State of our other Plantations, confining the Exportation of their Product only hither, and that also unmanufactured.”Footnote 150 Although Cary entertained the possibility—albeit only in passing—of encouraging Ireland's linen industry, his preferred, optimal solution was to encourage the colony's pastoral agriculture as a cheap supply of food for England's demographic and economic growth.Footnote 151 Charles Davenant echoed Cary's alarm, arguing that if Ireland were allowed to trade freely with the rest of Europe, the low price of its textiles would quickly defray England's market share, or, in his words, “cut the Turf from under our Feet.”Footnote 152 Much like Cary, Davenant's solution was to enforce Ireland's status as an agrarian colony by suppressing its textile trade wholesale and, “in keeping with their backwardness,” limit Irish foreign commerce to furnishing England with livestock.Footnote 153 Unlike America, whose colonists had more to gain from “Rearing Cattle” and “Tilling the Earth” than the “setting up of Manufactures,” Ireland posed an imminent threat to England's consumer industries.Footnote 154 For Cary and Davenant alike, this problem demanded an imperial policy set on forcefully dismantling Ireland's linen trade and curbing its economy to a pastoral plantation in the service of English proto-industrialization.
Locke's plan for Ireland was decidedly different. The Board of Trade had been debating the Irish question since 1696 and, following a series of exchanges on Ireland's linen industry with William Molyneux, Locke drafted his solution in 1697.Footnote 155 Instead of retrenching Irish manufacturing and circumscribing its economic function to an agrarian colony, he argued strongly in favor of prodding Ireland's linen industry through an ambitious scheme that would combine the cultivation of flax and hemp with the production of linen cloths in a network of public workhouses across the countryside.Footnote 156 Locke suggested employing the latest manufacturing technologies alongside innovative measures to enhance productivity, increase output, and standardize quality through an intricate system of rewards and punishments, from apprenticeships for unskilled workers and performance-based bonuses for managers to the enforcement of disciplinary action and punitive sanctions leveled against detractors.Footnote 157 The proposal would also ensure that Ireland remained one of the peripheral economies managed by and subservient to England. Although he certainly thought of Ireland as a colony at the metropole's disposal, Locke did not think it should serve the same function as England's agrarian settlements in the Atlantic.Footnote 158
The imperial thrust of Locke's perspective on commerce was indissociable from his understanding of English economic development as an equally domestic and international project, one that was tied to closely managing the colonies with a view to their improvement. Rather than promoting England's woolen trade by constraining Ireland's textile industry, as per competing doctrines, Locke sought to balance the demands of English imperial authority and economic interests with those of Irish industrial expansion.Footnote 159 To be sure, Locke's international thought was neither as geographically wide-ranging nor as anthropologically hierarchical as those of later imperial ideologues.Footnote 160 Yet his view of global commerce was nevertheless imperial insofar as it did, like subsequent ideologies of empire, subscribe to both a hierarchical, stadial scale of progress and a managed system of commercial governance aimed at moving the colonies through the successive stages of economic development in his model. And although a hierarchical ordering of populations based on racially marked capacities and culturally specific aptitudes was central to modern theories of empire, it was not a necessary condition of imperial ideology. According to Duncan Bell, for instance, imperialism, in its broadest definition, speaks to an attitude or disposition invested in creating, maintaining, or intensifying “relations of inequality between political communities.”Footnote 161 Indeed, modern ideologies of empire encompassed a plurality of strategies of exclusion, exploitation, and governance that ran the gamut from direct forms of settler colonialism and formal practices of subordination to indirect and informal means of political and economic rule.Footnote 162 Early modern imperial policies were therefore “not only destructive, in that they checked and constrained industrial activity, but also creative, as they channeled manufacturing work along certain lines.”Footnote 163
In addition to claiming a commercial right (ius imperium) to expropriate colonial resources, empires have historically imputed to their governments a particular duty to “improve the conditions of the imperialised country.”Footnote 164 Contrary to Cary and Davenant, whose commercial policies were unconstrained by a developmental duty to improve Ireland's textile trade, Locke's call to expand Irish linen production conveys England's imperial right to trade with and duty to improve Ireland in its capacity as a colony—and not just agriculturally. Indeed, Locke's scheme was meant to propel Ireland's advancement in linen manufacturing and lift it from an agrarian to a proto-industrial colony that could serve as a complement to rather than a substitute for England's woolen trade.
Conclusion: the great art of government
My reading of Locke's political economy as an expression of proto-industrial capitalism is grounded as much on his conceptual apprehensions and insights about economic improvement as on the historical subtext underlying them. Locke is in this sense a proto-industrial thinker not because he acknowledged the limits that land imposed on economic improvement, but because he sought to overcome this obstacle by employing labor in rural manufacturing through a more intensive, efficient, productive, and profitable arrangement of commodity production. Given England's significant advances in commercial agriculture by the late seventeenth century, Locke's solution to the restrictions on growth, accumulation, and employment enacted by arable land and farming was—contrary to the “agrarian capitalism” thesis—to engage surplus labor and resources in manufacturing and trade. The financial and employment crises of the 1690s pressed Locke to fine-tune his economic ideas; it animated his quest for alternative models of economic improvement unbound by the constraints of an overheated agrarian sector.
The historical import of this interpretation lies in the contributions England's textile proto-industries made to the long-run development of the factory system through the reallocation of surplus agrarian labor and capital toward manufacturing.Footnote 165 While the English word “factory” only came to define a mechanized workplace of mass production in the nineteenth century, depictions of the factory as a paragon of machine technology and a synecdoche for urban industrialization are inadequate models for understanding its place within the broader history of capitalism.Footnote 166 The context and content of Locke's late writings confirm that the economic logic and social conditions that spearheaded the industrial factory in the 1800s had been fomenting in the English countryside since the seventeenth century. Early modern workhouses were a nationwide political solution to England's agrarian crisis that, much like Locke's prescriptions to refit the English economy in the 1690s, turned to rural manufacturing as a means to absorb surplus labor. Moreover, in seeing Ireland's linen industry as a complement to English proto-industrialization, Locke's theory of imperial commerce squared the demands of metropolitan and colonial economic development. His view on Ireland alludes to an imperial understanding of commerce by ensuring that colonies remained subordinate to as well as dependent on the metropole in two respects. First, the means, direction, and fate of the Irish economy would remain England's prerogative; second, Ireland's prospects of reaping the material rewards of improvement would be strictly dependent on its ability to favor English trade. In recasting the Irish linen industry as a medium for England's competitive advantage, Locke was able to negotiate the otherwise antagonistic interests of two competing textile proto-industries as unequal yet mutually beneficial parts of England's sprawling commercial empire.
Finally, Locke's political economy is an essential element of his theory of government. Throughout his economic writings, Locke figures the state not as a passive guarantor of monetary institutions or a facilitator of commercial transactions but as an active agent of production, a “captain of industry” charged with managing, increasing, and employing its subjects by directly intervening in systems of production and networks of exchange—by setting people to work in workhouses, managing colonial industries, and prying open new overseas markets for raw materials and finished consumer goods. As he put it in the Second Treatise,
So little, that even amongst us, Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasture, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, wast; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing. This shews, how much numbers of men are to be preferd to largenesse of dominions, and that the increase of lands [hands?] and the right imploying of them is the great art of government.Footnote 167
Locke's “great art of government” expresses the central tenet of his political economy, namely that trade, industry, and employment are a state's surest sources of wealth and power.Footnote 168 Starting from the assumption that a large population is more beneficial to economic improvement than abundance in land, Locke ends by equating the “great art of government” to a state's competence in rightly employing its laboring population. A government that secures, protects, and encourages production while employing its citizens is “great” insofar as it improves trade and increases its “Fund” by setting its subjects to produce and export consumer goods. Political and economic strength ensue from a prodigious and skilled population of artisans and sailors able to carry out both necessary components of trade: manufacturing commodities and transporting them to foreign markets.
Locke's strides toward reorganizing the ongoing arrangements of production and exchange across England's commercial empire illustrate the salient ties between his theory of government on the one hand, and the proto-industrial and imperial aspects of his political economy on the other. His prescriptions for economic expansion, capital accumulation, and employment treat commercial agriculture mostly as a by-product of proto-industrial manufacturing and foreign trade; that is, as a factor of production rather than its end. Indeed, most of Locke's references to agrarian societies are meant to illustrate the lowest stage in his scale of progress—a model to avoid rather than to pursue. Economic improvement inheres instead in the productive employment of labor as opposed to land, in the comforts and conveniences of life more than in its necessities, in the manufacturing of finished commodities over the cultivation of raw materials, and in commercial exchange and foreign trade rather than subsistence.
In the end, Locke leaves us with an image of a proto-industrial countryside that, in being the site of manufacturing and workhouses, departs from earlier, Edenic accounts of agrarian England, such as the one John Milton idealized in 1667 as “a happy rural seat of various view.”Footnote 169 Locke's political economy, in contrast, portends the “Other” to Milton's courtly paradise: the impending workplaces that William Blake, bearing witness to the realities of nineteenth-century industrial labor, dubbed “dark Satanic Mills.”Footnote 170
Acknowledgments
For helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts, I thank Ingrid Becker, Paul Cheney, Chiara Cordelli, Stefan Eich, Adom Getachew, Onur Ulas Ince, Steven Kelts, Jonathan Levy, Patchen Markell, Benjamin McKean, Laura Merchant, Sankar Muthu, William Sewell, and participants in the Western and American Political Science Association annual meetings as well as the Political Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Pitts for her insightful comments on each iteration of this essay since its inception. For their instructive and generous feedback, I thank Duncan Kelly and the three anonymous reviewers.
