This chapter situates Montesquieu’s economic writing within broader political and economic developments that favored the emergence, in France and all over Europe, of political economy. For Montesquieu, the rise of international trade; the increasing dominance of mobile forms of wealth; and transformed expectations for material well-being in modern societies undermined traditional social structures and the forms of political authority that went with them. In this context, Montesquieu’s political thought can be read as a kind of political economy insofar as it employed a moral psychology of other-directedness and self-interest that was better adapted to an emerging commercial society than traditional models of duty and virtue. But Montesquieu, unlike the more straightforwardly economic writers of his time, did not organize his inquiry around questions of plenty so much as he sought, through his comparative method, to explore the diverse ways in which statecraft in the age of commerce could contribute to his ideal of moderate government.

The political economy of colonization was not always the full-throated criticism of Europe's colonial-mercantile enterprise that it became during the second half of the eighteenth century. And yet, while allowing for a large dose of contingency in the development of political economy from the sixteenth century onward, this social science seems to have been destined to accord a great deal of critical attention to the problem of colonization. From its origins in the early modern period, political economy resembled the critical analysis of the relationship between state and society that it became during the age of Enlightenment. Even when economic writers internalized a strictly statist logic, a relentless focus on social development as the source of state power could have unintentionally subversive effects. In the first part of the following essay, I argue that colonization was not a subject that economists simply turned to from time to time when economic or political conjuncture pointed overseas. Rather, the problems of sovereignty among the composite monarchies and empires of early modern Europe were such that the colonial question was present in political economy ab ovo. In the second, I discuss the critical, sometimes anti-imperial turn that colonial political economy took after Seven Years’ War, mainly in the French case. Comparison with Spain shows that the relative maturity of the enlightened public sphere, as well as its relationship to a reform-minded state, shaped the colonial political economy that developed in these places after the mideighteenth century.

What follows is necessarily a sketch rather than a fully realized tableau, with some details filled in here and there to suggest the plausibility of the broader outline. Further work on this subject should depart from the premise established below: the orienting concepts of—and historical problems confronted by—early modern political economy derived from the widespread and durable phenomenon of the composite monarchy. When the problem of sovereignty is placed at the center of analysis, the novelty of the post-Seven Years’ War period becomes clearer, as does the play of similarity and difference between anti-imperial and reformist colonial political economy.