Abstract

Jia Wei claims in the Introduction to Commerce and Politics in Hume's History of England that significant aspects of Hume's achievement as a historian have yet to be properly appreciated. She intends to shed new light on 'the relationship between the three Humes: Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist'. She continues: More specifically, this book pays greater attention to broad social, economic, and institutional changes which Hume wove into an entirely innovative fabric of causation. This becomes evident by examining three aspects of Hume's History: first, his championship of modernity, which he integrated into a historical narrative of England's development as a...