hist12927 W3G-hist.cls December 19, 2019 10:4 HIST hist12927 Dispatch: December 19, 2019 CE: XXX Journal MSP No. No. of pages: 22 PE: XXXX 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 British Union and Empire in the Origin of Commerce: Adam Anderson as Eighteenth-Century Historian and Scottish Political Economist PAUL TONKS Q1 Yonsei University Abstract This article restores an important figure to the study of eighteenth-century British political and economic thought. A prominent Scottish financial administrator and author resident in Hanoverian London, Adam Anderson (1692–1765) evaluated the expansion of the British commercial empire in the eighteenth century. Anderson developed a sophisticated set of historical arguments about early modern British governance and its relationship to economic growth and societal development. Anderson focused on the evolution of Britain’s international commerce, imperial networks and modes of governance. He connected the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union, the development of overseas trade and empire- building. Despite the fact that Anderson set out a nuanced and compelling analysis of Britain’s financial revolution that eventually stabilized powerful structures of public and private credit, he has not received significant historiographical attention. This article elucidates his status as a leading historian of the early modern global expansion of European commerce and one of the most widely read and influential commentators on the eighteenth-century British empire. T his article restores an important figure to the study of eighteenth- century political and economic thought. Adam Anderson (1692– 1765) influentially evaluated British trade and empire in his widely read Origin of Commerce. Anderson’s Origin of Commerce was actually the first text to establish the international reputation of Scottish political economy for ‘large, systematic treatises that covered the subject with unprecedented thoroughness’. 1 Indeed it was both the first and Q2 largest book to outline major preoccupations of eighteenth-century Scottish political economy, constituting a genuine milestone. Scottish political economy made a great impact on Britain and the world because it focused on ‘the pursuit of national prosperity and well-being 1 Richard B. Sher, ‘Adam Smith and Scottish books on political economy’, in Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (eds), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, II: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–1800 (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 488. C  2019 The Author(s). History C  2019 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd