Diseño de la fragmentación horizontal

Vaughan’s Dock project and the work of the Bowood Set on the Quays serve as a series of case studies in ‘enrolling’ people into a liberal consensus, in the sense that Latour and Callon use the word, to mean the erecting of sustainable networks that displaced mercantilist sociabilities. Each of the case studies that form the

subsequent chapters is considered through the lense of different networks. To an extent this has been driven by the availability of sources, though the extensive Vaughan family have left private papers in London and America and, like most of the characters explored here, were well connected men who lead lives within the

129 _{Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: The Domestication of the}

Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, J. Law ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (Routledge: London, 1986), pp.196-223. See more recently Juliette Bennett, Vibrant Matter, The Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 20-38.

confines of well documented institutions, like the Customs, insurance, colonial lobbies and chartered companies. Nevertheless, the aim in each case has been to explore how the things involved in the Docks campaign contributed to ‘embedding’ Smithian political economy in London or can help problematise historical

understandings of how markets were constructed and functioned during the eighteenth century. Consequently, chapter one explores the capacity of Vaughan’s Dock campaign to enrage Londoners in order to unpick the relationship between the enlightenment and local economies in light of the enlightened economy theses associated with Berg and Mokyr. The next chapter examines how Smith’s ideas took root in the Customs under Shelburne in an attempt to combat corruption on the Quays. Chapter three turns to the Bowood Set’s relationship with the insurance industry to question the role of routine utilities in promoting improvements in London. Finally, the fourth chapter examines the role of the West India Merchants lobby in establishing the Vaughan’s Docks as well as pirating his ideas wholesale in a rival scheme.

! Although this choice of topics may sound bewildering, Latour admits one of the difficulties in ‘using’ ‘ANT [actor network theory] is not to be intimidated by the type of figuration’ or language used to describe a network, which may be statistical, discursive, geographical or pictorial. Instead, he argues all registers are valid in that ‘ideo-, or techno- or bio-morphisms are all just “morphisms’’, or ways of representing interaction between networks.130 _{Let actors provide ‘their own metaphysics’ and} generate your own expertise as a researcher, he says. Whether this descriptive strategy creates value for historians relative to more critical and predetermined theories of modernisation is left for fuller discussion in my conclusion. However, within each body of evidence moments of acceleration, new connections between institutions and discourses have been inventoried to capture the dynamism of the economy and the radicalisation of specific elements under the Bowood Set. ! ! Chapter one situates the City within a spectrum of different of calculating agencies in London through insurance records, emphasising that this agency had an intellectual as well as economic dimension. Despite Vaughan’s enlightened credentials, the 1796 campaign for the Docks saw petitions flood Parliament from Thames-side parishes objecting to the scheme, although residents of Westminster were simply indifferent to them. These very different reactions to Vaughan’s

proposals speak of a capital where various interests were active and that the

130 _{Buno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.}

‘enlightened economy’ Joel Mokyr and Maxine Berg have heralded needs refining. In systematically sampling insurance records from the silk and iron trades, it is possible to read this theory through changes in the built environment and choices available to consumers. Using 1,400 policies it is possible to build up a crude but essentially static picture of a capital divided into several distinct economic zones from 1710 to 1814. The policies show that highly nuanced and geographically specific architectural forms underpinned the business strategies in each area, cutting across both trades. Whether it took the form of the West End classicism that was essential for mercers, or the City coaching inns used by wholesalers, the built environment profoundly shaped the flow of business information in and around the capital, and with it the calculative agency of the native populations. Parochialism abounded and changes in consumption patterns were slow and highly uneven, causing a pronounced east-west divide in the capital. This birds-eye view suggests that several enlightenments were possible in London, and that both the politics and economic aims merchants like Vaughan pursued should be examined through the information networks operating in the City, which were distinctive.

! Chapter two investigates officers of London’s Customs House in order to ascertain how City merchants interacted with the state, and how the projected Docks merged with fiscal policy. The Excise has been hailed by John Brewer and others as characterising a modern bureaucracy, but these traits arrived relatively late in the port of London, which was largely administered by the Customs.131 _A prosopographical analysis of all 230 landwaiters, the middle-ranking officers in daily contact with merchants on the Legal Quays, between 1738 and 1785, shows the Customs to have been a pasture for Treasury appointees and a classic instance of Georgian corruption. By 1776 the link between political patronage and fiscal inefficiency was clear to Customs Commissioner Sir William Musgrave, and attempts to discipline officers through wages and pensions were underway from 1783. This chapter nevertheless argues against any simple model of bureaucratic evolution, suggesting that political corruption only got worse in the period

immediately prior to the ‘age of reform’, as instigated by administrators like Musgrave and extra-parliamentary political campaigners. Not only was corruption political, it was biological, manifest in the aging bodies of the officers and causing a

131 _{Patrick O’Brien, ‘Political Economy of Taxation, 1660-1815’ Economic History Review,}

New Series, 41, 1 (1989), pp. 1-31; John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War Money and the English State, 1`688-1789 (London: Unwin Hymen, 1989); Ashworth, Customs and Excise Trade Production and Consumption, 1640-1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), part II; See also Ogborn, Spaces, pp. 158-201.

breakdown in the relationships with London’s merchants as they became

increasingly reliant on merchant fees to build up retirement funds. Although London merchants frequently bribed officers, their growing appreciation of a regularly remunerated Customs service suggests that close, reciprocal and corrupt relationships with them were becoming unworkable after the extreme mismanagement of the 1770s.

! Chapter three explores the limits of Musgrave’s methods by examining the insurance industry in the City, one of the ‘routine’ utilities applauded by Smith for its unflinching administration of money and things, as opposed to people. Vaughan himself was a director of the Royal Exchange Assurance, and the City’s insurance industry has been associated with many shifts in the calculative agency of

policyholders as a result of the future-orientated and predictive capabilities of actuarial science. However, Robin Pearson’s work suggests that while fire was a particular threat to the City’s mercantile warehouses, in no way did this translate into investment in fire-proof buildings in that sector or in the later Docks.132 _Examining the career of East India Company warehouse builder and insurance surveyor, Richard Jupp, it becomes clear that although the insurance companies collected a lot of data about their policy holders this knowledge was hard to process or

formalise. Jupp continued to use traditional, highly flammable material in his warehouses. Explaining this, a further investigation of the warehousing economy suggests that the sector was heavily dependent on high-levels of continuity and trust, which focused on investment into human capital rather than plant. It is argued that warehouses were themselves were well articulated calculative spaces that used the signs frequently carried by people, like badges, licenses and tickets, to assess the risk they posed to buildings

! Chapter four outlines the role of Legal Quays and Docks in creating

commercial writing. Drawing on ideas used by Miles Ogborn in Indian Ink, it suggest that the Quays were a crucial site in generating knowledge about trade, which contributed to the political, economic and cultural values deployed by merchants like Vaughan.133 _{Exploring several genres of writing about the Quays emanating from} the Customs, merchant lobbies and the 1796 Inquiry into the Port of London, the

132 _{Robin Pearson, ‘The Impact of Fire and Fire Insurance on Eighteenth-Century English}

Town Buildings and Their Populations’, Carol Shammas ed., Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment (London: Brill, 2012) pp. 67-93.

133_{Miles Ogborn: Script and Print in the Making of the East India Company (Chicago:}

chapter suggests that the volume and reach of commercial information grew

considerably over the eighteenth century. Each of these genres of writing described or formed networks aimed at making members of the commercial community more compliant, whilst also spreading that information more widely. Commercial

information made both new ideas about political economy and labour processes on the Quays more accessible as well as making commercial networks more

bureaucratic. It served, therefore, to reshape mercantilist sensibilities by reaching beyond merchants to politicians and other members of the commercial community. Further it is suggested that Vaughan’s Docks were another iteration of this process, creating better commercial information with which to press down on Quayside labour but also altering the calculative agency of City merchants. Combined with shares, these disrupted the colonial lobbies still further, and suggesting that the top- down analyses of the Docks by Linebaugh, following Marx, and Ashworth, following Foucault, are obscuring the interactions between knowledge, sociability and

property that made the Docks capable of forming elite sensibilities as opposed to only offending them.134

! Focusing on the port of London in depth, this dissertation shows that Vaughan and his associates not only tried to fight mercantilism but that they had some success in materially changing how it operated. In doing so they contributed to a shift towards more Smithian markets. However, the Bowood Set were by no means entirely successful, and their plans were both resisted and highjacked; saw many objectors bought-off rather than convinced; and gentlemanly standards

amongst themselves and at the upper echelons of the large bureaucracies that they courted, or ran, were never questioned. Enrolling people into a Smithian consensus took many ‘things’ but the networks got larger, more complicated, and more

regularly bureaucratic in most cases.