Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

68 Roshan Allpress
ligious associational contexts. It is ahistoriographical commonplace to note that
participation in globalizing networks of credit and trade during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries by groups like merchants in the City of London
expanded moral geographies, leading to philanthropic and humanitarian activism,
such as that on behalf of enslaved Africans or colonized indigenous peoples.
5 Only aminority of those in these networks became philanthropists or reformers,
and it is the particularities of their circumstances that shed light on
how their distinctive formation occurred. Of the nearly fourteen hundred mercantile
houses operating in the City of London in the early 1760s, fewer than
3percent were members of the Russia Company, which oversaw much of Britain’s
trade with northern Europe. 6 Yet more than half of the active committee
members of London’s philanthropic societies during the 1760s came from that
small subset of merchant firms, and Russia Company members were the most
prolific set of donors to new philanthropic societies in that decade.
Ageneration later, during the upswell of reform societies in Britain in the
aftermath of the American Revolution, asimilarly disproportionate number of
the leaders of new philanthropic organizations, such as the Abolition Society,
had—like Henry Thornton—spent their childhoods and early careers in families
and networks that were closely associated with the Russia Company. Unlike
their counterparts, these young men participated in adense culture ofsociability,
commercial habitus, and intellectual life—increasingly interlaced with the
religious innovations of evangelicalism. The distinctive formation that they received
shaped their philanthropy—and their characters.
The intent of this chapter is to explore how formation actually occurred in
these specific historical contexts—with attention to institutional, associational,
intellectual, and cultural particularities 7 and aview to identifying potentials for
the formation of character and vocation in the late modern context.
The Russia Company oversaw British trade throughout the Baltic and North
Seas—the third-largest British trading sphere after the trans-Atlantic and East
India trades, accounting for roughly eight hundred thousand pounds’ worth of
imports ayear duringthe 1760s, and comparableinscale to East India Company
5
6
7
Alan J. Kidd, “Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm,’” Social history 21, no. 2
(1996): 180–92; and Hugh Cunningham, The Reputation of Philanthropy Since 1750:
Britain and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
Thomas Mortimer, The Universal Director (London: Mortimer, 1763), 7–78.
See aparallel argument around specificity and causality by Christopher Bayly, “The
British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760–1860: Power, Perception and Identity,” in Empire
and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton
and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 22.