When Capitalism Was Kind, or: How Malachy Postlethwayt — England’s Most Improbable Economist — Almost Saved the World

Description

Join me on a quest to find England’s most improbable economist, born in 1707, whose life was hidden along the unprinted margins of history; yet his writings are so famous that his followers included Alexander Hamilton, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. He was an adviser to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. He is still popular among twenty-first-century scholars.

Malachy Postlethwayt was too influential by British society’s standards. For two decades, I had only snippets and shards of facts to challenge three hundred years of traditional brief narratives full of plausibilities, innuendos, and accusations about him. Was he a nobleman’s illegitimate son?

Then, I discovered a cipher that he embedded in a civil document and suddenly I could assemble this biography. The bonus prize? He pointed to the London suburbs of Poplar, Blackwall, and Limehouse where the early East India Company offered employee benefits like payroll deductions, health care, worker’s compensation, retirement homes and more before the first King George took the throne. How does this change 21st-century definitions of who are the real political conservatives regarding social safety nets?

And what did social influencer Malachy Postlethwayt do about it, especially as it affected the Royal African Company’s and Britain’s businesses in Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade? Did he really try to save the world?