Person:

Rothschild, Emma

The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmental–economic–intellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past. One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, “strategy consultancies”, and very large government agencies (“sustainability is our ‘true north.’”)

This article looks at early proposals for an international archive, at the different respects in which archives are international or transnational, and at the development since 1946 of the archives of international organizations. It suggests that the history of the UN's involvement with archives is itself a development of historical and even political interest.

The article suggests that The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution can be the point of departure for a new economic history that combines the history of economic thought, economic-cultural history, especially of long-distance connections, and the history of ordinary exchanges in economic life.

In “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” written in 1934, the economist Frank Knight identified two tendencies—one towards gross inequality and the other towards new techniques of influence—that appeared to be leading to fascism in liberal democracies. Knight’s predictions were wrong in the 1930s. But his comments suggest interesting questions about economic history in a period of renewed nationalism, “intolerable insecurity,” and, in Knight’s words, “contempt for truth.”

The article explores early criticisms of Adam Smith, with particular reference to long-distance commerce, the Portuguese empire, and the writings of William Julius Mickle. The changing relationship between merchants and sovereigns, and between economic and political power, was of central importance, the article suggests, to disputes over Smith's ideas of self-interest.