Conclusion

This chapter turns to the twenty-first century to study the implications of narrative form to the representation of contemporary fiscal catastrophe. It argues that the legacy of the narrative dispute between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians can be seen in contemporary explanations of the Great Recession, including the 2011 report generated by the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis and two Hollywood films, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short. All three texts are shaped by both the imperative to represent the complexity of global finance and the impulse to offer a simple explanation.

The Slave as System

This chapter concentrates on the relationship between eighteenth-century political economic theory and chattel slavery in the Americas. It begins by explaining how British, French, and American economic theorists asserted the inefficiency of slave labor even as the institution was sustained within the global market. This orthodox belief in the incompatibility between the free market and the legalization of slavery was crucial both to abolitionism and economic liberalism, inoculating capitalism from the moral degradations of slaveholding and slave trading. A very different economic argument emerges in the narratives of Black Atlantic authors who construct their life stories as “it-narratives,” precisely designed to reveal the mutualism between the global capital economy and the slave trade. The chapter provides close readings of the narratives of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Venture Smith, and Boyrereau Brinch, emphasizing their work as economic treatises and not autobiography.

Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral Economies

This chapter argues that resistance to Hamiltonian finance was both an economic and literary critique. The familiar opposition between Hamiltonian finance and Jeffersonian agrarianism has put the stress on the rural setting—an emphasis that has led scholars to talk about economic policy with the literary term, “pastoralism.” This chapter argues that the importance of the pastoral to Jeffersonian writers is not found in agrarianism, but on the formal structure of simplification that is essential to pastoral poetics. This same imperative toward simplicity is also located in the eighteenth-century economic science that was crucial to the Jeffersonians: French physiocracy. The chapter explains the importance of physiocracy and pastoralism to the political-economic writing of Thomas Jefferson, George Logan, and John Taylor of Caroline.

Hamilton and the Complex Stories of Public Credit

This chapter argues for the importance of narrative form to Alexander Hamilton’s writing on behalf of public credit and the establishment of the Bank of the United States. Hamilton attempts to explain the emerging economy of the United States as a complex set of embedded dependencies, and his own narrative style is designed to reproduce mimetically the extensive relations and contingencies that make up financial and commercial markets. Hamilton establishes this approach from his reading of a new literary form, the eighteenth-century economic encyclopedia, especially that of Malachy Postlethwayt. The chapter also explains how Hamilton’s writing is subject to a stylistic critique by his political antagonists, which renders narrative complexity as financial malfeasance. It concludes with an extensive discussion of the two different theories of literary meaning that animate constitutional debates about the establishment of the Bank of the United States.

Stories without Plots

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

Introduction

This introductory chapter details the Jeffersonian bias in early United States literary history and makes a case for attending to Alexander Hamilton’s economic writing from the early 1790s. It argues that Hamilton’s writing provides a very different way to explain the complex mechanics of commerce and finance, albeit a method that has largely disappeared from literary history. The chapter also explains why we should approach economic writing through formal literary analysis.