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Translating Hemp into a Transatlantic ‘Band of Reciprocal Interest’: The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce as a 1760s' Actor Network
Author(s) -
Green Georgina
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12351
Subject(s) - rhetoric , enlightenment , negotiation , the arts , reciprocal , sociology , aesthetics , political science , law and economics , law , epistemology , social science , philosophy , linguistics
Inspired by actor‐network theory, this article begins by focusing on the Society of Arts’ overarching aims to encourage improvement and reinforce the bonds between Britain and its North American colonies, but also attends to the details of the controversy over a specific premium for encouraging North American hemp production. This controversy documents the society's negotiation of uncertainty, even as its surface rhetoric promotes a vision of inevitable improvement. This leads to a double vision of the society as a failed tool of mercantilism but also an enduring collective experiment, reinterpreting the tension between nationalism and Enlightenment in its goals.