The Way to Wealth Around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism

The Way to Wealth around the World: BenjaminFranklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism

SOPHUS A. REINERT

“TIME,” BENJAMIN FRANKLIN PROFESSED poignantly in his 1748 Advice to a YoungTradesman, “is Money,” an iconic statement that, by commodifying existence itself,helped articulate the emotive core of modern capitalism.1 Indeed, few historicalfigures today enjoy a more prominent place in the cultural and intellectual con-stellation of capitalism than that most elusive of Founding Fathers.2 His mythuniquely inspires and inflects economic life not only in America but across the world,from the impromptu exhortations of costumed impersonators in Boston to the mus-ings of Bangladeshi bloggers.3 A seemingly timeless herald and savior of capitalism,

The bibliography of Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth that informs this essay was compiled by myformer research associate Kenneth E. Carpenter, who additionally has long been a close friend andcolleague. I would further like to thank my research director, Cynthia Montgomery, for her unparalleledsupport, and Debra Wallace and Harvard Business School’s Knowledge and Information Services forhelping bring the project into the twenty-first century. Michael Hemmet masterfully created the affiliatedwebsite, http://waytowealth.org/, and I am indebted to Scott Walker of the Harvard Map Departmentfor the maps. I am further thankful to Kaitlyn Tuthill and particularly Lauren Pacifico for their invaluablehelp at various times, and to Sım Innes and Sarah Zeiser for their generous assistance with the Gaelicedition. The anonymous readers for the AHR improved the manuscript in countless ways, and audiencesin Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge, UK, Helsinki, and Paris gave valuable comments on different aspectsof it. I am particularly grateful to Jeremy Adelman, Jesus Astigarraga, Sven Beckert, Loıc Charles, PaulCheney, Sebastian Conrad, Hugo Drochon, Walter Friedman, Tom Hopkins, Sam James, Diana Kim,Jani Marjanen, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Michael O’Brien, Arnaud Orain, Erik S. Reinert, Daniel Rodgers,Julio J. Rotemberg, Emma Rothschild, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Jacob Soll, Michael Sonenscher, KoenStapelbroek, Mikko Tolonen, Richard Tuck, Carlo Augusto Viano, Francesca Viano, Carl Wennerlind,and the inimitable Robert Fredona.

1 Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in Leonard W.Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 41 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–2014) [hereafterPapers], 3: 306–308. Franklin’s papers have now been digitized as well. See The Papers of BenjaminFranklin, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/; and Founders Online: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,http://founders.archives.gov/about/Franklin.

2 For recent biographies, see Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 2003);and the unfinished yet exhaustive J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. to date (Phil-adelphia, 2005–2008). On Franklin’s pantheonization, see also Gordon S. Wood, The Americanizationof Benjamin Franklin (London, 2005); and for the foundational analysis of his relationship to capitalism,see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. PeterBaehr and Gordon C. Wells (London, 2002).

3 See, for an impressionistic example, usages ranging from those listed in Michael Zuckerman,“Benjamin Franklin at 300: The Show Goes On—A Review of the Reviews,” Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography 131, no. 2 (2007): 177–207; to Julfikar Islam, “Capitalist Ethos of Benjamin Frank-lin,” June 25, 2013, http://futurestartup.com/2013/06/25/capitalist-ethos-of-benjamin-franklin/; and RoyE. Goodman, “Afterword: Benjamin Franklin’s Material Presence in a Digital Age and Popular CultureWorld,” in Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Intellectual World (Madison,Wis., 2012), 167–170.

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hailed as “our global citizen to show the way to the next golden age,” Franklin isfrequently approached, caricatured, and interrogated in this ongoing period of eco-nomic turmoil for operational advice both personal and political.4 We can gain aricher and more nuanced sounding board for the preoccupations of our own timeby examining how he became such a savant of capitalism in the first place and to whatpurpose; the extraordinary yet hitherto unknown extent to which his economic ethoswas disseminated and acculturated internationally in the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries; and ultimately what perhaps was lost of his wider politicaleconomy during the global apotheosis of his writings.

That Franklin’s contribution to the development of capitalism has again attractedpopular and critical attention should come as no surprise.5 Perennial crises in, under,and of capitalism—ranging from the bankruptcies of individual actors to systemicglobal upheavals like the one we are currently experiencing—invariably inspirescholars and laymen alike to search beyond the level of immediate triggers, whetherold-fashioned fraudulent bookkeeping or the frenzied securitization of collateralizeddebt obligations, to consider longer-term imbalances and probe the murky depthsof economic “culture” itself.6 History can be a remarkably potent tool in such cir-cumstances, not as a repertoire of easy remedies but as a source for critical reflection,and the history of capitalism has naturally become a thriving subfield in recent years.7Simultaneously, the study of political economy, like intellectual history more gen-erally, has come increasingly to embrace its international—even global—elementsto reflect contemporary needs and preoccupations, producing a growing historiog-raphy engaged with analyzing and recasting the ways in which economic ideas, prac-tices, and ideologies have been codified, interpreted, translated, institutionalized,and acted upon around the world.8

4 Bruce Piasecki, Doing More with Less: The New Way to Wealth (New York, 2012), 15. See similarlyErin Barrett and Jack Mingo, Benjamin Franklin’s Guide to Wealth: Being a 21st Century Treatise on WhatIt Takes to Live a Thrifty Life (York Beach, Maine, 2004); and Steve Shipside, Benjamin Franklin’s Wayto Wealth: A 52 Brilliant Ideas Interpretation (Oxford, 2008).

5 For an overview, see David Waldstreicher, “Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, and Slavery,” inWaldstreicher, ed., A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (London, 2007), 211–236.

6 In the enormous literature on economic crises, see still Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z.Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 6th ed. (Houndmills, 2011). On thepolitics of change following such crises, see recently Francis Fukuyama, “What Crisis?,” in Nancy Bird-sall and Francis Fukuyama, eds., New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis (Baltimore, 2011),311–325; and with respect to the economic ideas underpinning them, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let aSerious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London, 2013). Forpopular examples of “cultural” explanations in the wake of recent financial crises, see Michael Lewis,Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street (New York, 1989); David Callahan, The CheatingCulture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (New York, 2004); John R. Childress,Leverage: The CEO’s Guide to Corporate Culture (London, 2013).

7 Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., AmericanHistory Now (Philadelphia, 2011), 314–335. As Michael Sonenscher put it, “it is almost impossible toassociate capitalism with a necessary configuration of production processes, products, markets, or legaland political institutions”; Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-CenturyFrench Trades (1989; repr., with a new preface, Cambridge, 2011), 375. Its history remains a remarkablytorn field along a wide ideological arc, but see for extremes Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity:Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago, 2010); and Bruce R. Scott, Capitalism: ItsOrigins and Evolution as a System of Governance (Berlin, 2011). For historical reflections, see still AlanMacfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford, 1987), 223–227.

8 See for discussion Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of PoliticalEconomy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); David Armitage, “The International Turn in Intellectual History,”in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Ox-

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ECONOMIC WORKS CAN OF COURSE take many forms across many genres, from thetheoretical to the prescriptive, from the hermetic to the popular.9 And while his-torians of economic ideas have long favored the technical history of doctrines in theirworks, what the Austrian Harvard economist Joseph A. Schumpeter referred to as“the history of economic analysis,” scholars have recently begun calling for a closerintegration of the history of political economy with the wider world of past expe-rience, whether in terms of capitalism, business behavior, and public policy or inrelation to cultural and social history more generally.10 Indeed, drawing on exem-plars from antiquity, political economy was long understood to encompass the man-agement both of individuals and of polities, bridging, so to speak, the gulf betweenXenophon’s Oeconomicus and his Poroi, his manual for gentlemanly household man-agement and his treatise on ways to increase the revenues of Athens.11 The processof domestic and international emulation on which the development of early modernpolitical economy depended was, for example, hardly limited to theories, policies,and technologies, but came to embrace popular economic modes and behaviorsthemselves, the very cultures of the competing economies. Emulation was, in short,concerned not merely with “useful knowledge” but also with “useful habits,” if not“useful cultures.”12 What exactly a “culture” is remains a matter of some contention,though few doubt its explanatory importance.13 Famously, though probably apoc-ryphally, the great management theorist Peter Drucker claimed that “culture eatsstrategy for breakfast,” a line of argument that has been used to explain the successof individual firms as well as countries and, through monikers such as “Asian Values”

ford, 2014), 232–252; Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York,2013). On the general historiographical phenomenon, see Kenneth Pomeranz, “Histories for a LessNational Age,” AHA Presidential Address, American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–22.

9 For recent work on more literary genres of early political economy, see among many others Cath-erine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the VictorianNovel (Princeton, N.J., 2008); Richard T. Gray, Money Matters: Economics and the German CulturalImagination, 1770–1850 (Seattle, 2008); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English FinancialRevolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

10 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (NewYork, 1954), 38; Emma Rothschild, “Arcs of Ideas: International History and Intellectual History,” inGunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzenund Theorien (Gottingen, 2006), 217–226, here 222; Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fallof Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Re-view 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1395–1425, here 1420–1421; Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign:New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012): 233–248.On Schumpeter, see Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative De-struction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

11 Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, trans. and ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy(Oxford, 1995); Xenophon, Poroi: A New Translation, trans. and ed. Ralph E. Doty (Lewiston, N.Y.,2003). On these see Sophus A. Reinert, “Introduction,” in Antonio Serra, A Short Treatise on the Wealthand Poverty of Nations, ed. Sophus A. Reinert, trans. Jonathan Hunt (London, 2011), 1–93, here 29–30.Franklin was, at the very least, familiar with the Oeconomicus through its translation in Robert Van-sittart, Certain Ancient Tracts Concerning the Management of Landed Property (London, 1767), 1–82,discussed in Georgiana Shipley to Benjamin Franklin, February 11, 1777, in Papers, 33: 303–306.

12 For a recent study of Europe’s rise to prominence in light of the early modern commonplace of“useful knowledge,” see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy(Princeton, N.J., 2002). This preoccupation is evident from early modern Italian traditions of “economiacivile” to German Cameralism; for examples, see Reinert, Translating Empire.

13 For what it is worth, I here follow the usage sanctioned by the Oxford English Dictionary, whichdefines “culture” as “The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a par-ticular nation, society, people, or period.”

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and “Killer Apps,” entire world regions. Indeed, the power of culture to stymie andto inspire economic development remains at the forefront of contemporary de-bates.14

From these perspectives, Franklin in many ways represents an exceptional his-toriographical case, globally spanning the emergence of political economy and thecodification of a quintessentially capitalist ethos.15 A writer on economic theory andpractice long known as “the apostle of industry and thrift,” he became one of themost influential, if unexpected, vectors of a distinctively “modern” culture of eco-nomic life—of the ethos, as so often has been argued, of “capitalism,” though theeighteenth-century idiom “commercial society” might be more appropriate.16 Frank-lin was in his own time already a living legend, and doubtless his personal reputationfacilitated the dissemination of his writings to an extent hardly matched in the historyof political economy. The oldest of the revolutionary generation, and a relentlesslyself-fashioning autodidact who grew up in the shadow of Harvard, he had amasseda considerable fortune as a printer before turning his polymath energies to the nat-ural and social sciences, not to mention the realm of political philosophy and pro-fessional revolutionizing. Franklin himself preferred to conceptualize his lifelongproject through a general vocabulary of “improvement,” a progressive term he em-ployed to justify and encourage worldly melioration across the wide spectrum ofhuman life, from the perfection of individual behavior to the pursuit of useful knowl-edge, the establishment of more rational institutions, the enhancement of agricul-

14 On the Drucker quote, see among many others Adam Bryant, Quick and Nimble: Lessons fromLeading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (New York, 2014), 9; and Curt Coffman andKathie Sorensen, Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch: The Secret of Extraordinary Results, Igniting the PassionWithin (Denver, Colo., 2013). If not this specifically, Drucker certainly said similar things, for a selectionof which see Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s EssentialWritings on Management (2001; repr., New York, 2008). For recent cultural arguments, see LawrenceE. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (NewYork, 2001); and on the level of organizations, see Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Lead-ership, 4th ed. (New York, 2010). See also the vast literature vivisecting the problematic business culturesof leading firms, often highly critical of their systemic consequences, including Vijay Prashad, Fat Catsand Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism (Monroe, Maine, 2002); and Kate Kelly, Street Fighters:The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street (New York, 2010). A key text in thistradition is now Michael A. Santoro and Ronald J. Strauss, Wall Street Values: Business Ethics and theGlobal Financial Crisis (Cambridge, 2013). On “Asian Values,” see among others Greg Sheridan, AsianValues, Western Values: Understanding the New Asia (Sydney, 2000); for the Protestant work ethic as acultural “killer app,” see Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London, 2012), particularly256–294.

15 In Sven Beckert’s words, the “point” here is “not [to] seek to illuminate a chapter of U.S. historyfrom a global perspective but rather to see the role of the United States in a larger transformation ofglobal significance”; Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of CottonProduction in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December2004): 1405–1438, here 1407. In this case, the “transformation of global significance” is the rise ofindustrial capitalist culture itself.

16 On Franklin as an “apostle of thrift” and vector of such capitalism, see among numerous othersHarold A. Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age of Plenty,” Harper’s Magazine 212 (January 1956): 64–68.The terms “capitalism” and “commercial society” are in effect frequently used synonymously; e.g., Greg-ory Blue and Timothy Brook, “Introduction,” in Blue and Brook, eds., China and Historical Capitalism:Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge, 1999), 1–9, here 4. As definitions of commercial so-ciety go, Antonio Genovesi’s description of a society in which everyone considers the world “throughthe eyes of a merchant” remains evocative; Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, 3 vols.(Naples, 1757–1758), 1: 11 n.




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tural output, the expansion of infrastructure and industry, and more generally thedevelopment of a virtuous and commercial, if parsimonious, society.17

Works relating to both extremes of the continuum of political economy, therealms of high theory and of economic culture, were increasingly circulated duringthe eighteenth century, but on vastly different scales and with rather divergentscopes. An increasingly important aspect of this information revolution was certainlythe rise of the business press, or “financial journalism,” across the European world,but though it influenced both economic theories and quotidian habits among sig-nificant parts of a given population, the quintessential evanescence of its outputmeant that the institution of news regarding trade mattered far more than the in-dividual news items themselves.18 Business news certainly conveyed information thatcontributed to the creation of economic knowledge and the standardization of eco-nomic practices in the early modern period, but it was not itself a repertory of cod-ified, durable contributions to political economy, whether in terms of elaboratinghigh theory or of systemizing ideals of individual behavior.

The arguably most widely disseminated eighteenth-century work on the high endof the spectrum, Adam Smith’s 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealthof Nations, would see no fewer than 94 editions, 107 if one counts condensed editions,in eight languages by 1850.19 A similarly careful study has not previously been un-dertaken with reference to what is arguably the bestselling example of the other end,Franklin’s The Way to Wealth (the title under which the piece was known from the

17 Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (New Haven, Conn., 2008),especially 220; and for similar usages see John Lauritz Larsen, Internal Improvement: National PublicWorks and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001). At-tempts are sporadically made to make Franklin a Physiocrat—famously by Lewis J. Carey, Franklin’sEconomic Views (Garden City, N.Y., 1923), 140; and most recently by Manuela Albertone, “Letturefisiocratiche della Rivoluzione americana: Il manosritto de marchese di Mirabeau sulla Dichiarazionedei diritti della Virginia e la risposta di Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours,” in Albertone, ed., Gov-ernare il mondo: L’economia come linguaggio della politica nell’Europa del Settecento (Milan, 2009), 171–201, here 174: “Franklin found in Physiocracy the systematization of his economic ideas.” Though hecertainly drew inspiration from the French sect, Franklin’s thought was far too eclectic, and too prag-matic, to qualify him as a card-carrying member. See for a similar argument Schumpeter, History ofEconomic Analysis, 199 n. 11; and Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklinand the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 258–259. Franklin often voiced a predilection for agricultureover manufacturing, but he also found the protectionist English Navigation Acts to be “wise with regardto foreigners”; “Marginalia in Protests of the Lords against Repeal of the Stamp Act,” in Papers, 13:207–232, here 219. The text appears in House of Lords, Protest against the Bill to Repeal the AmericanStamp Act, of Last Session (Paris [but London], 1766), 11. For one of many examples of Franklin seem-ingly drawing on Physiocratic arguments regarding the potential of manufactures to create wealth, seeBenjamin Franklin to Cadwalader Evans, February 20, 1768, in Papers, 15: 51–53; Franklin, “Remarkson Agriculture and Manufacturing [late 1771?],” ibid., 18: 273–274. For an argument that the coloniesshould “encourage necessary manufactures,” see, however, among others Benjamin Franklin toHumphry Marshall, March 18, 1770, ibid., 17: 109–110.

18 On the rise of this sort of information, see John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginningsof Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, andMoney Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam, 1991); John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Dis-tance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern AtlanticWorld,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 295–321.

19 Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Economic Bestsellers before 1850 (Boston, 1975), 22; building onCharles J. Bullock, The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana: An Essay (Boston, 1939). Forfurther work on the international influence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, see Cheung-chung Lai,ed., Adam Smith across Nations: Translations and Receptions of “The Wealth of Nations” (Oxford, 2000);Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of the “Wealth of Nations” in French and in France, 1776–1843(New York, 2002); Keith Tribe, general ed., A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (London, 2002).




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1770s), which first appeared as “Father Abraham’s Speech” in the Poor Richard’sAlmanack for 1758, the last that would ever be published. Long known as Franklin’s“most popular piece,” and indeed the work on which “Franklin’s currency in Amer-ican culture has really always rested,” it has been thought that 145 editions of thework appeared in at least seven languages before the end of the eighteenth century,eventually reaching thirteen languages, including modern phonetic writing.20 Topresent this work as an effort in “political economy” might seem overly convenient,but Franklin’s most succinct statement about “improvement” was indeed presentedas the exemplar of precisely the lower end of the “social science” of “political econ-omy” devoted to “a wise economy” well into the second half of the nineteenth cen-tury.21 Smith and Franklin, in short, whose works encapsulated the proverbial highand low of Enlightenment political economy, are thought to have enjoyed similarstandings in the constellation of book history.

Yet deeper bibliographical research reveals that Franklin’s work was in fact farmore widely influential than anyone has realized, indeed suggesting that it can serveas a gauge for the early development of something like a capitalist ethos in themodern world—the empire, so to speak, of capitalism.22 The result is the most ex-tensive bibliography ever put together of The Way to Wealth, and though the creationof an online interactive database will probably lead to the discovery of even more,the number of editions currently stands at more than 1,100, in twenty-six languages,by 1850.23 This makes it by far the single most widely printed economic work—that

20 On the number of editions and The Way to Wealth being Franklin’s most popular piece, see PaulLeicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brook-lyn, 1889), xxix–xxxi; see also the editorial introduction to “Poor Richard Improved, 1758,” in Papers,7: 326–340, here 328–329; as the basis for his fame see Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 179.Generally see also Sheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves(Princeton, N.J., 2012), 27–30; Jill Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” in Lepore, The Story of America: Essayson Origins (Princeton, N.J., 2012), 44–58, here 45. The epitome of its fame might have been its mentionin Leslie Dunkling and Adrian Room, The Guinness Book of Money (Enfield, 1990), 104, not to mentionthe fact that it long was taught at Harvard Business School as epitomizing American values and cap-italism itself; see Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Richard S. Tedlow, “Case I: Benjamin Franklin and theDefinition of American Values,” in Chandler and Tedlow, eds., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism:A Casebook on the History of American Economic Institutions (Homewood, Ill., 1985), 2–24, The Way toWealth being republished as “Exhibit I” on 9–14. The title The Way to Wealth could have been inspiredby works such as Thomas Tryon’s frequently republished The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness;or, A Discourse on Temperance and the Particular Nature of All Things Requisit for the Life of Man (London,1683), which had inspired Franklin greatly in his youth; see Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography,”in Alan Houston, ed., Franklin: “The Autobiography” and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue(Cambridge, 2004), 1–142, here 13, 28; and for other works with similar titles with which he could havebeen familiar, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3: 699 n. 23.

21 For example, Ambroise Clement, Essai sur la science sociale: Economie politique—morale experi-mentale—politique theorique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), 1: 65.

22 There have, of course, been excellent studies of Franklin’s international influence before; see, forexample, Louis K. Wechsler, Benjamin Franklin: American and World Educator (Boston, 1976), 106;Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia,1994); Harald Elovson, Amerika i svensk litteratur, 1750–1820: En studie i komparativ litteraturhistoria(Lund, 1930), 191–218; Antonio Pace, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia, 1958), 206–234; andfor The Way to Wealth in particular, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writerand Printer (London, 2006), 133–143; building on Claire Lienhardt, “‘Le Bonhomme Richard’ de Ben-jamin Franklin a la conquete de l’Europe: La diffusion d’un best-seller americain en France, en Grande-Bretagne et dans les Etats allemands des annees 1770 a 1830” (Ph.D. diss., Universite de Paris I—Sorbonne, 1999).

23 An interactive database of pre-1851 appearances of Franklin’s Way to Wealth can now be foundat http://waytowealth.org. As C. William Miller once put it, “dealing with books at one remove is certain




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is, a work principally relating to economic practices or ideas—in world history beforethe 1964 publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, better known as“Mao’s Little Red Book.”24 The British novelist and literary critic D. H. Lawrencefamously, and disparagingly, argued that Franklin had “set up . . . a pattern to Amer-ica,” and the unprecedented international fame The Way to Wealth enjoyed suggeststhat he might have done much more than that.25

Franklin’s short essay appeared in Breton, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish,Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ital-ian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansch, Russian, Slovak, Slo-venian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh. In book-historical terms, The Way to Wealtheffortlessly eclipsed the entirety of the Scottish Enlightenment, literally nearing bib-lical levels of dissemination, and was one of the first instances of an authenticallyhomegrown New World work conquering its former metropoles. The North Amer-ican colonies had, of course, long been a vital part of an increasingly globalizingworld economy, in which disparate institutions, resources, and economic activitieswere ever more tightly intertwined across the earth. But though they would remainperipheral in the production of economic theory and financial journalism alike untilthe late nineteenth century, Franklin seems empirically to mark a watershed, themoment at which the colonies began their ascent to global predominance in theproduction and dissemination of economic culture.26 Ever the astute observer, DavidHume marked the change well in a letter to Franklin that simultaneously underlinedthe increasing contemporary circulation of influence in the Atlantic world:

I am very sorry, that you intend soon to leave our Hemisphere. America has sent us manygood things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo, &c.: But you are the first Philosopher, andindeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her: it is our own Fault,that we have not kept him: Whence it appears, that we do not agree with Solomon, thatWisdom is above Gold: For we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter, whichwe once lay our Fingers upon.27

Given that Solomon’s fame derived precisely from his proverbs, the most coherentlyeconomic part of the Bible, Hume’s use of him might not have been entirely for-tuitous.28

to make any bibliographer uncomfortable,” but the possible benefits of the digital humanities will hope-fully outweigh the risks. Miller, “Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth,” The Papers of the BibliographicalSociety of America 63, no. 4 (1969): 231–246.

24 Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (San Francisco, 1990); on which see nowthe essays in Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge, 2014).

25 D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin” [final version], in D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lin-deth Vasey, and John Worthen, eds., Studies in Classical American Literature (Cambridge, 2003), 20–31,here 30.

26 McCusker, “The Demise of Distance,” 317.27 David Hume to Benjamin Franklin, May 10, 1762, in Papers, 10: 80–82, particularly 81–82. On

Franklin and Hume, see among others Michael Atiyah, “Benjamin Franklin and the Edinburgh En-lightenment,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150, no. 4 (2006): 591–606.

28 Book of Proverbs, on which see Roger Norman Whybray, The Book of Proverbs (Cambridge, 1972).On their economic dimensions, see Whybray, Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield, 1990);and now Timothy J. Sandoval, The Discourse of Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Leiden, 2006).




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THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT FOR Franklin’s writing of The Way to Wealth was, as withso many revolutionary moments in history, a fiscal crisis. As the Seven Years’ Warraged across the world, Franklin headed for London to lobby against the increasedfiscal burden that had fallen upon the American colonies after the initiation of hos-tilities as the British government enacted emergency measures to meet wartime ex-penses.29 With his son and two slaves, he boarded a ship bound for England in NewYork Harbor on June 5, 1757, but it was forced to anchor off Sandy Hook, NewJersey, for two weeks because the captain feared a lurking French squadron in thenear Atlantic. To pass the time, Franklin turned to his pen, using that particularmoment, and those very particular conditions, to frame his short piece.30 The essay’smain narrator was Richard Saunders, the mercurial creation under whose pseud-onym Franklin had been publishing his famous Poor Richard’s Almanack for morethan two decades.31 Originally a hapless, poverty-stricken astrologer whose earliestproverbs frequently ridiculed both industry and prudence, he had by the 1750s be-come the stentorian voice of improvement in the population at large.32 This trans-formation had been a conscious choice. In his Autobiography, Franklin explainedthat, having observed how well his “Poor Richard’s Almanack” sold, he came to thinkof it as “a proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People, whobought scarce any other Books.”

I therefore filled all the little Spaces that occur’d between the Remarkable Days in the Cal-endar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality, as theMeans of procuring Wealth and thereby securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Manin Want to act always honestly, as (to use here one of those proverbs) it is hard for an emptySack to stand upright. These Proverbs, which contained the Wisdom of many Ages and Na-tions, I assembled and form’d into a connected Discourse prefix’d to the Almanack of 1757,as the Harangue of a wise old Man to the People attending an Auction.33

29 On this war, see among others Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain andFrance in a Great Power Contest (London, 2011). On the transformative power of related expenses, seestill John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.,1988); and Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in HistoricalPerspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 340.

30 Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 264–268; Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” 44–45; David Wald-streicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004),117. On the Seven Years’ War as a crucial context for Franklin’s work, see Douglas Anderson, TheRadical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, 1997), especially 156.

31 Saunder’s real identity remained elusive enough to be worth revealing well into the nineteenthcentury; see, for example, Vincenzo Lancetti, Pseudonimia: Ovvero tavole alfabetiche de’ nomi finti osupposti degli scrittori con la contrapposizione de’ veri ad uso de’ bibliofili, degli amatori della storia letterariae de’ libraj (Milan, 1836), 243. For earlier outings, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, 118–119.

32 Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 106–115; John Ross, “The Character of Poor Richard: Its Sourcesand Alteration,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 55 (1940): 785–794. On the structureof the text, see also Edward J. Gallagher, “The Rhetorical Strategy of Franklin’s ‘Way to Wealth,’”Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 4 (1973): 475–485. The classic history of the importance of such al-manacs in the early modern period remains Genevieve Bolleme, Les almanachs populaires aux XVIIe

et XVIIIe siecles: Essai d’histoire sociale (Paris, 1969); for caveats regarding which see Robert Darnton,“The Social History of Ideas,” in Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (NewYork, 1990), 219–252, here 240–244.

33 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 80. Franklin’s Way to Wealth remains among the most powerfulnegations of J. G. A. Pocock’s influential thesis that wealth and virtue by necessity were antithetical inthe early modern European world. See, for example, his The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine PoliticalThought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J., 2003). For other critiques fromdifferent perspectives, see among others Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive




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The bulk of Franklin’s Way to Wealth was dedicated to his retelling of a speech givenby a certain “Father Abraham” to “a great Number of People” who “were collectedat a Vendue of Merchant Goods” (“Fineries and Knicknacks,” to be precise) and“conversing on the Badness of the Times.” Not only were the times bad, but thepeople were worried that new “heavy Taxes” would “ruin the Country.” Father Abra-ham’s speech was a lengthy response to this proposition, taking the form of a mor-alizing medley of economic proverbs drawn from Poor Richard’s Almanack over thepast twenty-odd years (variations of “as Poor Richard says” are indeed repeated nofewer than forty-eight times).34 The vast majority of these had in turn been eitherrewritten or lifted directly out of a widespread European corpus of similar almanacsand anthologies of useful aphorisms—the most influential of which might have beenthe epoch-making Adagia of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but which included everythingfrom Aesop via the Bible to Jonathan Swift—further underlining the emulative andcumulative nature of early modern political economy.35 To the extent that many ofthese proverbs drew on venerable oral traditions of folk wisdom, parts of Franklin’sWay to Wealth could literally have harked back millennia.36 As Mark Twain remarkedso cruelly, Franklin’s were “pretentious maxims” that “had become wearisome plat-itudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.”37

However ancient the individual parts might have been, Franklin ably put themto new uses in a new context. British “taxes” were “indeed very heavy,” Father Abra-ham began, but America was beset by “much more grievous” burdens in the formof “Idleness,” not to mention “Pride” and “Folly.” Had people only been in bettercontrol of their lives, their work, and their expenses, government taxation wouldnever have posed such a problem in the first place. Simultaneously short and prolix,adopting the form, style, and mnemonic devices of works originally written for oralrecitation in relatively illiterate environments, the subsequent speech, really a flo-rilegium of around one hundred aphorisms and proverbs, was framed by an exis-tential dichotomy between “Idleness” and “Industry.”38 The former led to misery,crime, destitution, and sin, the latter to wealth, virtue, honor, respect, and salvation.

Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American His-torical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 705–736; Mark Jurdjevic, “Virtue, Commerce, and the EnduringFlorentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate,” Journal ofthe History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (2001): 721–743; Reinert, Translating Empire, especially 23.

34 The text is reproduced in Papers, 7: 340–350. For a more easily accessible edition, see BenjaminFranklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved: Father Abraham’s Speech (7 July 1757),” in Houston,Franklin, 264–271, here 264–265.

35 Stuart A. Gallacher, “Franklin’s ‘Way to Wealth’: A Florilegium of Proverbs and Wise Sayings,”Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48, no. 2 (1949): 229–251; Robert Newcomb, “The Sourcesof Benjamin Franklin’s Sayings of Poor Richard” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1957). On thesources of Franklin’s aphorisms, see also Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement,25. On the English context for these proverbs, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England,1500–1700 (Oxford, 2002). For a short selection of Erasmus’s aphorisms, see Desiderius Erasmus, TheAdages of Erasmus, ed. William Barker (Toronto, 2001).

36 Following the thread of Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba (Turin, 1989),they might have harked back to the frozen steppes of Ice Age Eurasia.

37 Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 138–140.38 Gallacher, “Franklin’s ‘Way to Wealth.’” On the role of proverbs in oral cultures, see Neil Post-

man, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 20th Anniversary Edition(London, 2005), 18–19, building on the work of Walter J. Ong; for a recent example, see Ong, Oralityand Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 30th Anniversary Edition (New York, 2012).




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This was not merely an individual prerogative, for Franklin inexorably related hisemphasis on personal industry to a clear sense of duty to one’s kin and polity: “Whenthere is so much to be done for yourself, your Family, your Country, and your gra-cious King, be up by Peep of Day.”39 Father Abraham’s advice touched upon theminutiae of the quotidian, the very stuff on which life depended. As he ludicallyrewrote a classic proverb that the English poet George Herbert in his time had drawnfrom medieval sources,

he adviseth to Circumspection and Care, even in the smallest Matters, because sometimesa little Neglect may breed great Mischief ; adding, For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for wantof a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken andslain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.40

The most minor oversight could, in short, cost you your life. But such unfailing “In-dustry” and “Care” were not enough unless maintained by “Frugality,” a sentimentThe Way to Wealth applied to both people (“A fat Kitchen makes a lean Will”) andpeoples (“The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her Outgoes are greater thanher Incomes”).41 Significantly, however, Franklin imbued these ideals of economicbehavior not only with existential necessity but also with social and moral preem-inence, for “a Ploughman on his Legs is higher than a Gentleman on his Knees.”42 Farfrom inward-looking, Franklin’s virtues were eminently social, depending on, and inturn being conducive to, questions of reputation, credit, and commercial sociabil-ity.43 The Way to Wealth, in other words, succinctly presented a worldly ethos in whichthe success of a polity, its social relations, and, ironically, the fate of imperial financesdepended on the civic-mindedness, industry, frugality, and calculated accumulationof its individual citizens; it depended on what Max Weber would call “the Spirit ofCapitalism.”44

Depending on one’s definition of such capitalism, however, Franklin’s Way toWealth makes for curious reading. For though industry and frugality can help paytaxes in the economic imaginary of the piece, and though such virtues are vehiclesof social status and cohesion, accumulated wealth seems good for little else. Nothingin the text itself suggests, for example, that capital might be fruitfully invested inventures or even spent, to mention uses with well-established pedigrees by the timeof Franklin’s writing, and it retained a very limited creative potential in the politicaleconomy of The Way to Wealth. What exactly an economy in which everyone workedand earned but nobody invested and consumed would look like simply lies beyondthe ambit of the text.45 Ironically, given the essay’s emphasis on industry and thrift

39 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 266.40 Ibid., 267; George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs (London, 1640), proverb 499; Iona Opie and

Peter Opie, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1951), 32.41 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 265.42 Ibid., 268.43 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early

Modern England (Houndmills, 1998), 1–2, 165.44 Weber, The Protestant Ethic. Franklin’s emphasis on the calculated accumulation of wealth, and

his consequence-oriented vision, also satisfies Thomas K. McCraw’s definition of “the essence of cap-italism” as “a psychological orientation toward the pursuit of future wealth and property”; see McCraw,“Introduction,” in McCraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Coun-tries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 1–16, here 4.

45 Forgoing consumption for investment is a classic national strategy in the history of development,




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as levers for social reputation and mobility, credit, too, was regularly disparaged forsimilarly political reasons: “he that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing.”46 Indeed, Fa-ther Abraham reminded his listeners to

think what you do when you run in Debt; You give to another Power over your Liberty . . . TheBorrower is a Slave to the Lender, and the Debtor to the Creditor, disdain the Chain, preserveyour Freedom; and maintain your Independency. Be industrious and free ; be frugal and free.47

Perhaps there were subterranean biblical criticisms of usury lurking between thelines of Franklin’s apologue, or perhaps it was simply a frank observation of the darkside of financial capitalism and common relationships of power between lenders andborrowers.48 It is in any case striking that one of the very few references to slaveryin this work on economic ethics takes the form of an allegory through which freedomemerges as a choice capacitated by personal habits of industry and frugality—arather sanguine proposition in a world as dependent on the commodification of hu-man life as colonial America.49

The only outside authority Franklin’s system seemed to allow for was in this casedivine, as he maintained that all the maxims would be “blasted without the Blessingsof Heaven.” This was why people should “be not uncharitable to those that at presentseem to want it, but comfort and help them. Remember, Job suffered, and was af-terwards prosperous.”50 But his relationship to biblical wisdom was not always sostraightforward. “There are no gains, without pains,” The Way to Wealth preached,adroitly overturning the biblical admonition that “By the sweat of your brow you willeat your food.” And Franklin easily transformed what for millennia had been un-derstood as an exacting divine punishment for original sin into a source of aspirationand a motive for progress.51 The independence—even salvation—of individuals aswell as polities was contingent on a sound, if rather grave, moral and material econ-omy, and all of this amounted, in Richard Saunders’s closing words, to nothing lessthan “the Sense of all Ages and Nations.” The habit of industry and frugality thatFranklin sought to inculcate in the working classes, people he later would conde-scendingly call “bonnes Creatures,” was, in short, a timeless ideal, seemingly unbound

for recent examples of which see late-twentieth-century China and Singapore in Richard H. K. Vietor,How Countries Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy (Boston, 2007).Forgoing consumption for savings that do not turn into investments, on the other hand, remains some-thing of an impossibility given the accounting identity that savings by default equals investments; for anintroduction, see N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Macroeconomics, 7th ed. (Boston, 2014), 268. Much,of course, depends on how both savings and investments are defined. On the rich history of such theories,see still Paul Studenski, The Income of Nations, 2 vols. (New York, 1961), vol. 1: History.

46 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 269. On the varieties of early modern credit, how-ever, see Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Dur-ham, N.C., 2013).

47 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 269–270.48 See on this the vast arc from Deuteronomy 23:19–20 to Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First

Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 2014).49 Though he does not make this point, see generally on the obfuscation of slavery in Franklin’s

writings Waldstreicher, Runaway America. See also Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of AmericanCapitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Di-rections (University Park, Pa., 2006), 335–361.

50 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 271; the Book of Job, particularly 42:7–17.51 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 265; Genesis 3:19.




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from the contextual chains to which he tied higher expressions of political economy.52

And yet, Franklin concluded with oblique but penetrating humor, “People heard it,and approved the Doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary, just as if it hadbeen a common Sermon”—just, one might add, as Franklin himself went off to Lon-don to complain about high taxes, ironically the very thing he suggested in the piecewas unproblematic. The only exception was Saunders himself, who, taking this aph-oristic precis of his own ideology to heart, reneged on buying a new coat and noblystepped out of Franklin’s oeuvre a paladin of capitalist common sense and an enemyof Veblenian conspicuous consumption.53

WHAT EXACTLY FRANKLIN MEANT by this particularly popular part of his literary outputremains something of a conundrum.54 Truth be told, he had already expressed thequintessence of The Way to Wealth in the opening line of his 1748 Advice to a YoungTradesman, which began with the statement “Remember that Time is Money,” andended by maintaining that “the Way to Wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the Wayto Market. It depends chiefly on two Words, Industry and Frugality.” Unbeknownstto early readers, Franklin would likewise castigate his children for their extravaganthabits in private correspondence, and in his policy proposals he similarly suggestedincreasing revenues by “rather discouraging luxury, than loading industry with un-necessary burthens.”55 In short, the economic vision he conveyed through much ofhis writing both public and private rested on the capitalization of life itself, everymoment and every act calculated toward dutiful, virtuous, and meaningful accu-mulation.56 Fittingly, he argued as a young man that “Life is a kind of Chess,” and

52 See, for example, Franklin’s marginalia in Anonymous, The True Constitutional Means for Puttingan End to the Dispute between Great-Britain and the American Colonies (London, 1769), 14, New YorkPublic Library, New York, *KF 1769; as well as his much later letters to Jan Ingenhousz (May 16, 1783),in Papers, 40: 8–13, and to the Duc de Deux-Ponts (on or after June 14, 1783), ibid., 163. On “bonnesCreatures” in the context of The Way to Wealth, see Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue entre La Goute etM.F. [1784],” ibid., 34: 11–20, here 19. On Franklin’s attempts to regulate the multifarious category of“the people” as well as elites through his earlier writings, see Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 93–94.

53 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved,” 271. On the conclusion as a call to “action,” seeGallagher, “The Rhetorical Strategy of Franklin’s ‘Way to Wealth.’” On conspicuous consumption, seeThorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899);on which see the essays in Erik S. Reinert and Francesca Lidia Viano, eds., Thorstein Veblen: Economicsfor an Age of Crises (London, 2012).

54 The locus classicus of the discussion regarding meaning in intellectual history remains QuentinSkinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols.(Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1: Regarding Method, 57–89; on which see recently Georgios Giannakopoulosand Francisco Quijano with Quentin Skinner, “On Politics and History: A Discussion with QuentinSkinner,” Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought 1, no. 1 (2012): 7–31.

55 Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” 306–308; Benjamin Franklin, “Reasons and Motivesfor the Albany Plan of Union (July 1754),” in Houston, Franklin, 238–255, here 251; Benjamin Franklinto Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, in Papers, 29: 612–615; Benjamin Franklin to John Paul Jones, November25, 1780, ibid., 34: 56–57. This was also the moral impetus behind his oft-quoted invective against certainkinds of poor relief in “‘Arator’: On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor,” ibid., 13: 510–516,here 515.

56 On the deeper history of such an ideology, see Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilmentin Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), 142–146.




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that the beloved game was an “image of human life” in which “skill” and “prudence”were the means of success.57

For the longest time, Franklin was taken literally. It was in this tradition thatWeber famously argued that he encapsulated “the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” with “al-most classical purity.” He had made acquisitiveness “ethically slanted,” yet “so com-pletely devoid of all eudaemonistic, let alone hedonist, motives . . . that it appearssomething wholly transcendent and irrational.” It is certainly true that The Way toWealth depicted an ideal life that was far from Epicurean, and that it presented “theduty of the individual to work toward the increase of his wealth,” yet it is not entirelyclear that Franklin “assumed” this “to be an end in itself.”58 The entire frameworkfor Abraham’s speech, after all, was meant to emphasize the relationship betweenthe industry of individuals, the integrity of their society, and their polity’s success ina war-torn world. But the most problematic aspect of the Weberian thesis was theuneasy relationship between Franklin’s avowed ideals and his personal habits. Andas historical scholarship began to peel back the layers of Franklin’s authorship, thisdiscrepancy became untenable to the point where Weber’s portrayal came even tobe considered “ludicrous.”59

Franklin became a “prophet of the American Dream” also because he “under-stood the value of a good hoax,” as Alan Houston recently put it, and historians andlaymen alike have certainly confused the historical Franklin with his literarypersonae to everyone’s detriment.60 Eloquently addressing this problem, Jill Leporehas drawn on the vast corpus of Franklin’s writing to recast The Way to Wealth as“a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.”61 Was Franklin’s car-icature of a homo economicus, so distant from his personal demeanor, ultimately asatire? There is indeed something reminiscent of Cervantes’s Don Quixote about TheWay to Wealth, its ironic layering of personae, of narrators within narratives, not tomention its mesmerizing tangle of understated humor and deadening seriousness.62

Such historical pranks can hold extraordinary explanatory potential, as Robert Darn-57 Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” in Papers, 29: 750–757; on which see Lemay, The Life

of Benjamin Franklin, 2: 126–130.58 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 9–12; and similarly Kurt Samuelsson, Ekonomi och religion (Stock-

holm, [1957]), 69. For a recent critique, see Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement,225–229. For an overview of the historiography reacting to Weber’s thesis in early modern England, seeBrodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, 2012),particularly 2–20.

59 Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Foundersand the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, 1988), 20. See generally Lepore, “The Way to Wealth.”

60 Alan Houston, “Introduction,” in Houston, Franklin, xiii–xxxviii, here xiv.61 Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” 45. See also Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s

Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 51–52. For other readings of TheWay to Wealth through this lens, see Cameron C. Nickels, “Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanacs: ‘TheHumblest of His Labors,’” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin(Philadelphia, 1976), 77–89; Paul M. Zall, Benjamin Franklin’s Humor (Lexington, Ky., 2005), 76–84;Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, 125. For thoughtful meditations on the problem, from ratherdifferent perspectives, see also Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 266 n. 35, and McCloskey, BourgeoisDignity, 146–150.

62 Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1605–1615).Franklin was fond of Cervantes (see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 2: 111) and knew his workalready by the early 1740s, long before the publication date of the beautiful edition in his library; seeentry 576, “Cervantes Saaveda, Miguel de,” in Edwin Wolf 2nd and Kevin J. Hayes, The Library ofBenjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 2006), 184.




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ton has so brilliantly shown, but “getting the joke” can be remarkably hard.63 InFranklin’s case, it was so hard that nobody, in essence, “got it” until two and a halfcenturies later, when about forty volumes of his writings had been published.64 TheBritish political philosopher John Dunn once quipped that the reception of a textusually stands “in a somewhat ironical relation to its author’s original intentions,”but it is hard to argue against the notion that Franklin’s wildly consequential joke—ifa joke it was—fell flat, in our time and his own.65 The Oxford English Dictionarydefines a “joke” as “Something said or done to excite laughter or amusement; awitticism, a jest; jesting, raillery; also, something that causes amusement, a ridiculouscircumstance.” If Franklin’s Way to Wealth indeed was a joke, it was a deeply tragi-comic one with a punchline centuries in the making, and it remains to be seen whowill have the last laugh.

Though engaging with a different problem from that of producing apt agents forcommercial society, a letter Franklin wrote from London a few months after com-pleting The Way to Wealth suggests another plausible—and not necessarily substi-tutive—reading of his essay. He accepted there that an elite interlocutor could “findit easy to live a virtuous Life without the Assistance afforded by Religion,” but fearedthat “a great Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women. . . who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to supporttheir Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which isthe great Point of its Security.” Trusting the common people to live without religionwould be the equivalent of “unchaining the Tyger.”66 And as Franklin soon wouldwrite to Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the most central figures of the ScottishEnlightenment, “exhort[ing] People to be good” required “shewing” them “how theyshall become so,” an “Art of Virtue” aimed at affecting nothing less than their “Hab-its.” In the realm of political economy, Franklin’s Way to Wealth was addressed notto the minds but to the hearts of men, and his aim was not simply to impact the worldof ideas but to influence sentiments, habits, and ultimately culture itself.67

63 Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin,” in Darn-ton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 75–106,here 78; drawing on Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, TheInterpretation of Cultures (New York, 1977), 412–453. See on this also Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke,“Robert Darnton,” in Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge,2002), 158–183, here 159–160, 168. For an example of the chthonic depths that one at times must exploreto “get” a historical joke, and of the riches that await down there, see Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes:An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 2008), especially ix.

64 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s methodological caveat might be illuminating in this regard: “Cock-fightsdo not provide a basis for inferences about the human species”; Rousseau, “Discourse on the Originand the Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early PoliticalWritings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), 111–222, here 156.

65 John Dunn, “The History of Political Theory,” in Dunn, The History of Political Theory and OtherEssays (Cambridge, 1996), 11–38, here 24; Reinert, Translating Empire, 10, 232.

66 Benjamin Franklin to Anonymous, December 13, 1757, in Papers, 7: 293–295. Franklin’s religiosityremains a matter of some contention. On his youthful, libertine 1725 A Dissertation on Liberty andNecessity, Pleasure and Pain, see Papers, 1: 57–72; and on his growing metaphysical skepticism, see Le-may, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1: 270–290. For his religious thought generally, see Kerry S. Walters,Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (Urbana, Ill., 1999). For a relevant discussion of Franklin and duplicity,see David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Prince-ton, N.J., 2008), chap. 3.

67 Benjamin Franklin to Henry Home, Lord Kames, May 3, 1760, in Papers, 9: 103–106. On the twomen, see Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford, 1972), 197–201. On Lord




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In this, capitalism was ironically somewhat like deism, best experimented with bymature minds, and just as Franklin worried about what the absence of organizedreligion might do to the working classes while privately he dabbled with deism, sohe enjoyed his luxuries while “ashamed of the Orders of my Countrymen for so muchTea, when necessaries are wanting for Cloathing [sic] and defending!”68 Once virtuehad become habitual, individuals would know how to take the next steps, whetherin religion or in their personal economy. Franklin himself worked relentlessly thefirst four decades of his life, after which he retired to pursue a life of leisure andlegend.69 What was deadly serious to one reader could be hilarious to another.Franklin was an inveterate wordsmith, deeply attuned to the colonial publishingculture he had done so much to establish, but he never doubted The Way to Wealth’sprincipal audience, nor its impact.70 As he put it in a letter accompanying a copy ofthe pamphlet he sent to the reformer and former attorney general of Quebec FrancisMaseres, “I enclose a little Piece I wrote in America to encourage and strengthenthose important Virtues” of “Industry and Frugality among the lower People.”71

He further elaborated on the pamphlet’s purpose, the stylistic choices driving it,and its widespread impact in his Autobiography:

The bringing all these scatter’d Counsels thus into a Focus, enabled them to make [a] greaterImpression. The Piece being universally approved was copied in all the Newspapers of theContinent, reprinted in Britain on a Broadside to be stuck up in Houses, two Translationswere made of it in French, and great Numbers bought by the Clergy and Gentry to distributegratis among their poor Parishioners and Tenants. In Penssylvania [sic], as it discourageduseless Expense in foreign Superfluities, some thought it had its share of Influence in pro-ducing that growing Plenty of Money which was observable for several Years after its Pub-lication.72

Perhaps The Way to Wealth really had been a “joke,” or perhaps, as with religion,Franklin considered this kind of work ethic necessary only for the lowest of peoples,as a first step toward leading rewarding and enlightened lives. We may never know.But to quote Horace’s Satires, “what’s there to forbid one who is laughing from tellingthe truth?”73

Franklin had written to change the “habits” of the “common People,” rejoicedlate in life at the apparent success of his endeavor, and actively worked to get thepamphlet translated.74 But he could not have known the true extent of its publishingsuccess, as it “passed,” in Carl van Doren’s memorable phrase, “from literature into

Kames, see also William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Studyin National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague, 1971).

68 Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Jr., March 16, 1779, in Papers, 29: 130–132.69 Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age of Plenty,” 65. For a similar argument, see Patrick Sullivan,

“Benjamin Franklin, the Inveterate (and Crafty) Public Instructor: Instruction on Two Levels in ‘TheWay to Wealth,’” Early American Literature 21, no. 3 (1986/1987): 248–259.

70 On this aspect of Franklin’s work, see now Douglas B. Thomas, “Recasting Franklin as Printer:A Note on Recent Historiography,” in Kerry and Holland, Benjamin Franklin’s Intellectual World, 103–117.

71 Benjamin Franklin to Francis Maseres, June 17, 1772, in Papers, 19: 179–181.72 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 80.73 Horace, Sermones 1.1.24, “ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?,” in The Complete Odes and Satires

of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 191.74 For the case of Italian, see, for example, Papers, 21: 251 n. 7, regarding Franklin’s correspondence




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the general human speech.”75 And it did so not only in English, but also all acrossthe Babel of the European world—which during this period of imperialism came tomap ever more neatly onto the world as such—attempting to inflect economic moresprecisely in the way Franklin had hoped. The text was sometimes mangled, some-times stripped of its narrative framework, a few times translated into images, but itscore message was so succinct, so aligned with the perceived exigencies of commonsense, and, importantly, so eminently readable and marketable that the vast majorityof translations were remarkably faithful. In short, they presented no pretense ofanalytical rigor or coherence, and not a single reasoned argument in the sense thata seasoned reader of Smith’s Wealth of Nations would appreciate.

FRANKLIN’S BIOGRAPHERS READILY ADMIT that he was no “abstract or systematicthinker,” and no less an authority than Schumpeter found “little to commend forpurely analytic virtues” in his political economy.76 Partly, this was a result of Frank-lin’s scholarly profile and his somewhat polymath dilettantism. Partly, however, italso reflected his intended audience, which differed greatly from the more sophis-ticated readership addressed by works such as Richard Cantillon’s near-contempo-rary Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General, which extolled not only the wealth-creating power of capitalist investments but also the risk-taking role of entrepreneursin commercial societies.77 Franklin and Cantillon both engaged with recognizablycapitalist problems, but they addressed very different aspects of them with dramat-ically different styles and degrees of theoretical complexity. And it was not thatFranklin could not write more technical treatises in the field. In fact, he often did,but The Way to Wealth partook in a register of political economy that no longer isrecognized as such.78

Yet, at the time, observers felt rather differently about the matter. An 1801 Dan-ish edition of The Way to Wealth aiming to be a “New Year’s Gift to Old and Young”claimed that Franklin had produced “the best practical economic system that oneso far has seen,” and it was used to teach students political economy in Havana, Cuba,in 1835 in an edition applauded by an economic journal in faraway Italy.79 Adopting

with Carlo Giuseppe Campi. For French, see among other places ibid., 25: 62–63 n. 2, 158 nn. 1–2;Franklin to Courtney Melmoth (on or after January 28, 1778), ibid., 534–535.

75 Carl van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), 268; quoted also in Lepore, “The Way toWealth,” 45.

76 Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, 2; Schumpeter, History of EconomicAnalysis, 199 and 199 n. 11. As Paul W. Connor aptly put it, “America’s evangel of the Enlightenmenthas been shredded and dissected until one suspects that whatever intellectual coherence the man retainsis due to scholarly oversight”; Connor, Poor Richard’s Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New AmericanOrder (New York, 1965), 3.

77 Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en general (London [but Paris], 1755); on whichsee Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon, Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford, 1986).

78 See, for example, his 1751 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Coun-tries, &c.,” in Papers, 4: 227–234 (introduction on 225–227). Franklin also engaged with some of thegreatest theoretical economists of his age. For evidence regarding the reciprocal theoretical exchangebetween Franklin and Adam Smith, for example, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3: 606–609.

79 Benjamin Franklin, Nytaarsgave for Unge og Gamle, eller den Kunst at blive riig og lykkelig, trans.Carl Friedrich Primon (Copenhagen, 1801), 3–8; Franklin, “Camino de la fortuna, o la ciencia del buenRicardo,” lesson 8 in Mariano Torrente, ed., Revista general de la economıa polıtica, 3 vols. in one (Ha-




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a more historical perspective on political economy, Franklin’s Way to Wealth con-tributed to, and was rapidly absorbed by, this discourse, on all levels, with the aimof addressing poverty and changing habits. In so doing, it very much aligned itselfwith the seventeenth-century English Society for the Reformation of Manners, itselfa darling of economic theorists in the tradition of John Locke and John Cary, andits echoes can perhaps be heard most strongly in the similarly widespread nineteenth-century tradition of combating pauperism through moralizing self-help doctrines andthe gradual codification of an “American” work ethic during the following century.80

But where Locke had argued for the necessity of corporal punishment to instillthe proper habits in children, The Way to Wealth took the form of a carrot ratherthan a stick.81 It was meant to empower people by changing the way they thoughtabout their current and future welfare. While Smith’s Wealth of Nations was read byan educated elite, Franklin’s Way to Wealth was included in popular education alsoas a means of encouraging what Peter Burke has so disparagingly referred to as “thepetty-bourgeois ethic,” a culture of industriousness, of honesty, of frugality, of allthe virtues thought necessary for individual and aggregate success in a world in-creasingly characterized by international economic competition.82 In Carlo Ginz-burg’s terms, it was certainly an example of “indoctrination of the masses fromabove,” but it simultaneously harked back to his halcyon age of “hidden but fruitfulexchanges, moving in both directions between high and popular culture,” in thatFranklin and his subsequent editors put existing “popular” aphorisms and expres-sions to new, more focalized use.83

The 1785 Gaelic edition is a case in point. Inserted in a dual-language anthologyof Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases at the behest of David Steuart Erskine, LordCardross, 11th Earl of Buchan, Franklin’s Way to Wealth was the sole piece in thevolume appearing only in Gaelic.84 The earl himself, a former student of Adam Smith

vana, 1835), 3: 69–76; on which see the review that appeared in Annali universali di statistica, economiapubblica, storia, viaggi e commercio, vol. 50 (Milan, 1836), 207–208.

80 On these societies, see Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cam-bridge, 1999). On the political economy of this movement, see Reinert, Translating Empire, especially76. On this vein of nineteenth-century poor relief in America, see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Mod-ernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, 1995), and on Franklin’s role in inspiring it, seeparticularly p. 19. Similar studies for other regions and periods may help further chart Franklin’s impactglobally. For an example of such a text, see the manifestly Franklinian broadside by Mathew Carey,Advices and Suggestions to Increase the Comforts of Persons in Humble Circumstances (Philadelphia,1832). On Carey see Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of EarlyAmerican Industry (Baltimore, 2007). For context, see also Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: MarketSociety and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); and for the Franklinianwork ethic in the subsequent period, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America,1850–1920, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2014). For even more recent cases of The Way to Wealth influencing theself-help literature, see Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 180.

81 Cf. John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” in Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cam-bridge, 1997), 182–198.

82 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Farnham, 2009), 213. For an ironictake on Franklin’s fame as an “oracle of the bourgeoisie,” see Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age ofPlenty,” 65.

83 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Johnand Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980), 126. For a similar argument, see William Pencak, “Poor Richard’sAlmanac,” in Waldstreicher, Companion to Benjamin Franklin, 275–289, here 288.

84 David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchanan, “Address to the Inhabitants of the Highlands ofScotland,” in Donald MacIntosh, A Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases (Edinburgh, 1785),




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at the University of Glasgow, wrote a short introduction to the essay, addressed to“the Inhabitants of the Highlands of Scotland,” explaining why:

Noble race of my native land, I am as proud of your prowess as of the fact that your bloodcourses through my veins; and it shall ever be my wish to testify my high admiration. I wasthe first man to don your manly dress in the Lowlands after the prohibition was revoked, andthat in time of snow and storm. When I can discern opportunities where I can render as-sistance in stimulating professional, fishing, or other employment throughout the country, itwill be my pleasure to do so. Meantime, I place within your reach, embodied with the Prov-erbs, old sayings rich in thought, written by the wise and venerable Franklin, of America.These will be fruitful to you in wisdom in the world’s ways; and if you will add these to yourfaith in Jesus Christ, knowledge of God, His love and obedience in your hearts, in your dailywalk and conversation, you will be esteemed by all, and will enjoy peace and happiness within.Farewell.85

Franklin was, in short, brought into dialogue with classical proverbs of Gaelic highand popular culture, and compared in importance to Scripture itself, as part of theearl’s project to encourage “employment throughout the county.” Erskine’s projectcertainly echoed older traditions of “improvement” in Scotland, particularly RobertWallace’s 1753 claim that the Highlands could “only be civilized by being made in-dustrious,” but Franklin’s short text proved a remarkable vehicle for this civilizingand industrializing project.86 And Erskine did everything in his power to identify withthe intended audience, not only through their shared bloodlines but also through hischampioning of popular traditions. The wearing of kilts and tartans had been bannedin the wake of the Jacobite uprisings of 1745–1746 in an attempt to domesticate thewarrior clans of the Highlands. With the so-called “Dress Act” having been repealedin 1782, Erskine now sought cultural clout by donning their “manly dress” in a “Timeof snow and storm”—subtly recasting the gendered qualities of an economic ethosoften criticized for its effeminacy at the time—all seemingly to influence, like Frank-lin, the habits of the lower classes and increase their “wisdom in the world’s ways.”87

By pandering to and manipulating their cultural traditions, Erskine sought throughFranklin to show the Highlanders not only the way to wealth but also the way to themodern world.88

73; and Benjamin Franklin, “An t slighe chum sai’-bhris,” trans. Robert Macfarlane, ibid., 74–83. Onthe Earl of Buchan, see Ronald G. Cant, “David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan: Founder of theSociety of Antiquaries of Scotland,” in A. S. Bell, ed., The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition: Essays to Markthe Bicentenary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Its Museum, 1780–1980 (Edinburgh, 1981),1–30.

85 The letter was translated in Benjamin Franklin, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself,ed. John Bigelow, 4th ed., 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1902), 1: 604 n. On his relationship with Smith, see IanSimpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995), 136–137.

86 Quoted in Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment(Edinburgh, 2013), 7. On Wallace see Yoshio Nagai, “Robert Wallace and the Irish and Scottish En-lightenment,” in Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka, eds., The Rise of Political Economy in the ScottishEnlightenment (London, 2003), 55–68.

87 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” inPocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the EighteenthCentury (Cambridge, 1985), 103–123, here 114.

88 Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1993); Hugh Trev-or-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm andTerence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), 15–42; Malcolm Chapman, “‘Freez-




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Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, The Way to Wealth was disseminated withthe hope of creating better workers throughout the European world, and increasinglyso during the systemic transition of “industry” from a moral characteristic to aneconomic activity based on coal-consuming manufacturing. The local Society of Em-ulation thought the pamphlet useful to disseminate among “workers” during theearly years of industrialization in the Belgian city of Liege, and across France it wastranslated in the 1820s and 1830s to encourage urban laborers recently arrived fromthe countryside to trust and utilize savings institutions, which had been largely un-familiar to them while they were working in the agricultural sector.89 The raw hoard-ing of idle wealth depicted in Franklin’s original was, finally, turned into fruitfulcapitalist accumulation, channeled into productive activities through an ever-ex-panding banking system, by then the default savings mechanism on both sides of theAtlantic. His maxims, rebranded “Advice to Labourers,” were so important to thewhole economic system that they “should be hung up in every cottage,” accordingto the Labourers’ Friend Society of London—a relationship between industriousnessand industry that found visual expression in a London broadside of 1849, whichsurrounded Franklin’s aphorisms with images of wage-laboring men, industrial tools,and towering views of smokestacks and factory buildings.90 Franklin’s ideas con-nected earlier conceptions of an Industrious Revolution to the Industrial Revolutionas they left their largely agrarian colonial origins, still characterized by Cimmerianinstitutions of slavery and bound labor, to form nothing less than a catechism of“free” industrial capitalism in the European core.91 Indeed, his work was one of theprimary vehicles of the empire of capitalism itself, understood not simply as thegrowing and ever more globalized network of economic activity taking shape in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as the spatial expansion of aneconomic ideology.

Throughout the world, The Way to Wealth was seen to teach lessons in individualand political welfare that transcended space, time, and, importantly, class, unifying

ing the Frame’: Dress and Ethnicity in Brittany and Gaelic Scotland,” in Joanne B. Eicher, ed., Dressand Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time (Oxford, 1995), 7–28, here 8.

89 Benjamin Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard (Liege, 1828); on the dissemination of whichsee Societe Libre d’Emulation de Liege, Proces verbal de la seance publique, tenue le douze juin 1828(Liege, 1828), 102. Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard, et Conseils pour faire fortune, avec une noticesur Benjamin Franklin et l’ordonnance de Louis XVIII sur la Caisse d’epargne et de prevoyance (Dijon,1827), 41–53; Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard et Conseils pour faire une notice sur BenjaminFranklin, avec une notice sur Benjamin Franklin et les statuts de la Caisse d’epargne et de prevoyance deGrenoble (Grenoble, 1834). On this shift from hoarding to investment as being “close to the conceptualheart of capitalism” in the American context, see (surely among others) Joyce Appleby, Capitalism anda New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), 23–24.

90 Labourers’ Friend Society, Useful Hints for Labourers (London, 1841), 2; Benjamin Franklin, PoorRichard’s Way to Wealth (broadside) (London, 1849).

91 On the “Industrious Revolution” as it compares to the “Industrial Revolution,” see Jan de Vries,The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cam-bridge, 2008). For a poignant reminder of the unacknowledged importance of slavery in Franklin’s world,and his own complicity in it, see Waldstreicher, Runaway America; and more succinctly David Wald-streicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and VentureSmith,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 268–278; Rockman, “The Unfree Origins ofAmerican Capitalism.”




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social ranks around industrious virtues across and inside empires both old and new.92

Anyone was capable of “making a fortune [far fortuna]” by working hard, the textsometimes conveyed explicitly, a far cry from earlier Machiavellian resorts to for-tuna-controlling violence and heroism.93 As a Norwegian edition published in theformerly Hanseatic town of Bergen put it in 1841, The Way to Wealth was “a pock-etbook for all classes.”94 At times it was even hailed, with erudite references to Pe-trarch and the cyclicality of time, as a means of reversing the relative decline of apolity in the face of international rivalries by rendering subjects more productive andthus competitive.95 Its most striking manifestation as a vector of sociability mighthave been in Hungary, where it was translated in the tumultuous revolutionary yearof 1848 to show how—on the model of the United States, the preeminent multiethnicpolity in the translator’s mind—members of a divided political community couldcome together around a shared economic ethos.96

Franklin’s apothegmatic style was undoubtedly responsible for the work’s wide-ranging publishing success across such a broad array of contexts and, though heemulated an ageless European tradition, would help launch what some scholars haveidentified as a quintessentially American convention of proverbial politics, at homeand abroad.97 The coherence of Abraham’s speech resulted rather from the thematicunity of the individual precepts than from their sequential architecture, and the text’sepisodic nature, seemingly assembled rather than composed, lent itself well to rotememorization, oral recitation, and promulgation in different media such as icono-graphical broadsides. The near-biblical popularity of The Way to Wealth was, in short,a reflection not merely of the religious veneer that Franklin layered upon it throughthe device of presenting his maxims in the form of a sermon, but also of his abilityto emulate the very techniques of the Scriptures’ historical diffusion.98

92 See, for example, Benjamin Franklin, Buon uomo Ricciardo e la costituzione di Pensilvania ital-ianizzati per uso della democratica veneta ristaurazione (Venice, 1797), 1.

93 Benjamin Franklin, “La strada di far fortuna o la Scienza del buon’-uomo Riccardo,” in FrancescoSoave, Trattato elementare dei doveri dell’uomo . . . a cui e stata aggiunta La scienza del buon uomo Ric-cardo di Franklin (Pisa, 1831), 69–84. See also the similar anonymous review of “Saggi di morale e dieconomia private di Beniamino Franklin . . . ,” Antologia: Giornale di scienze, lettere e arte [Florence],no. 122 (February 1831): 112–118, here 118.

94 Benjamin Franklin, Den gamle Richards Kunst at blive rig og lykkelig: Tilligemed godt raad til enung Mand (Bergen, 1841), i. On Bergen, and why Franklin’s Way to Wealth might have found fertileground there, see Egil Ertresvaag, Et bysamfunn i utvikling, 1800–1920 (Bergen, 1982); and now ArnvedNedkvitne, The German Hansa and Bergen, 1100–1600 (Cologne, 2014).

95 Benjamin Franklin, Mezzo facile di pagare le imposizioni, ossia, La scienza di Riccardo Saunders(Turin, 1797), 5–6, recalling a Petrarchan discourse of decline and political economy discussed in Rein-ert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.” The connection between the economic welfare ofindividuals and of polities in Franklin’s Way to Wealth was, less eruditely, explicitly argued for even indistant Halifax; see Franklin, “The Way to Wealth,” Nova-Scotia Magazine 4, no. 10 (1791): 603–606

96 Benjamin Franklin, Franklin az oreg Rikhard neve alatt, trans. Lajos Szilagyi (Oradea, 1848); onwhich see Anna Katona, “The Hungarian Image of Benjamin Franklin,” Canadian-American Review ofHungarian Studies 4, no. 1 (1977): 43–57, here 47. For a readable account of the 1848 revolutions,including the failed one in Hungary, see Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York, 2009),particularly 140–151.

97 Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are the Best Policy: Folk Wisdom and American Politics (Logan, Utah,2005), 8; Mieder, “Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Proverbs,’” in Mieder, American Proverbs: A Study of Texts andContexts (Bern, 1989), 129–142; Mieder, “‘Early to Bed and Early to Rise’: From Proverb to BenjaminFranklin and Back,” in Mieder, Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age(1993; repr., New York, 2012), 98–134.

98 On the longer history of the Bible’s dissemination among the illiterate, see Lucy Grig, “The Biblein Popular and Non-Literary Culture,” in James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper, eds., The New




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Visual depictions of The Way to Wealth in the 1840s had less in common withSmith’s Wealth of Nations than with the long tradition of illustrated Gospels stretch-ing from the sixth-century Gospel of Saint Augustine to early-nineteenth-centuryillustrated broadsides, works that similarly conveyed inspirational stories and max-ims to change notions of virtuous behavior in new contexts through the amalga-mation of words and images.99 And, much like the Gospels, Franklin’s Way to Wealthstrove to proselytize through timeless truths, the “Sense of all Ages and Nations.”Aphorisms were “forms of ‘eternity,’” as Friedrich Nietzsche would put it, “on whichtime tests its teeth in vain.”100 Among Franklin’s many achievements was abstractingfrom his far more complicated New World context to render a work ethic based on

Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to 600 (Cambridge, 2013), 843–870; andMarie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, “Literacy and the Bible,” in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, eds.,The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: From 600 to 1450 (Cambridge, 2013), 704–721. ForFranklin’s Way to Wealth in this context, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin, 135–136.

99 The Saint Augustine Gospels, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Lib. MS. 286,f125r; James Catnach, The Prince of Israel: The Most Remarkable Events in the Life of Our Lord JesusChrist (London, 1824).

100 Friedrich Nietzsche, Gotzen-Dammerung; oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (Leipzig,1889), 103.

FIGURE 1: Benjamin Franklin, Bowles’s Moral Pictures; or, Poor Richard Illustrated: Being Lessons for the Youngand the Old, on Industry, Temperance, Frugality, &c. (Manchester: Bancks and Co., 1816). Courtesy of the KressCollection of Business and Economics, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.




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FIGURE 2: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Way to Wealth [broadside] (London: David Bogue and HenryVizetelly, 1849). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and TildenFoundations.




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the self-made embrace of “industry” and “frugality” a sanctified and commonsensicalpart not only of the bourgeois worldview but of ideal popular culture in the indus-trializing West.101

Already by 1775, a Milanese publisher had used The Way to Wealth’s popularityas a measurement of modernity, finding no similar publishing successes throughout

101 On the politics of common sense at the time, and Franklin’s importance for it, see Sophia Rosen-feld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), particularly 179, 184–185.

FIGURE 3: The Saint Augustine Gospels. Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Lib. MS. 286, folio125r. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.




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“ancient history”; another editor claimed that its influence had been so vast as tomake it “worth more than a hundred thousand volumes in folio.”102 Encounteredmore widely than any comparable text, it was used to teach children of both sexes

102 Benjamin Franklin, “La maniera di farsi ricco chiaramente dimostrata nella prefazione di unvecchio Almanacco di Pensilvania, intitolato � Il povero Riccardo fatto benestante del signor Beniamino

FIGURE 4: James Catnach, The Prince of Israel: The Most Remarkable Events in the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ(London: J. Catnach, 1824). Courtesy of the Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology,Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.




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how to read in cities throughout industrial Europe, from London to Copenhagen andMainz, and was even taken as the exemplar to demonstrate eighty-four differentstyles of German calligraphy in a volume published in Karlsruhe in 1846. Not onlydid people learn to read with Poor Richard, he taught them how to write as well.103

Of the more than eleven hundred editions that were published before 1851, at leastseventy-six were schoolbooks, and another thirty-six can only be classified as chil-dren’s books, some even taking the form of rebuses and inspirational StaffordshireChina. Just between those two categories, in other words, The Way to Wealth sawmore appearances than Smith’s admittedly vastly more voluminous Wealth of Nationsdid in total. Yet, proving its bearing on the whole spectrum of political economy, itwas also included in a French melange in the late 1840s, alongside far more the-oretically sophisticated essays by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Nicolas de Con-dorcet, Francois Veron Duverger de Forbonnais, and David Hume.104 A Prussianrecounting of The Way to Wealth, again published in the notable year 1848, evencompared Franklin to Smith, two political economists who ostensibly reached similarconclusions regarding modern economic life from vastly different starting points andby vastly different means.105

BUT IF FRANKLIN WENT VIRAL in the late eighteenth century, the patterns of his con-tagion are telling, and though decidedly embedded in wider global structures, po-litical economy remained a predominantly European and American phenomenon inthe period.106 The Way to Wealth embraced the world, but though it played a rolein the globalizing process of the time, it was far from globalized.107 Plotting thelongitude and latitude of the known editions that came out between 1757 and 1850and subsequently rendering maps charting the work’s diffusion with graduated sym-bols reveals a web-like pattern that empirically confirms what many might haveguessed. The catechism of capitalism remained limited to the European world even

Franklin,” trans. Carlo Giuseppe Campi, in Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue (Milan,1775), 81–103, here 81f–82f; Benjamin Franklin, Maniera di farsi ricco (Milan, 1704), v–vi.

103 See among others Benjamin Franklin, “Veien til Rigdom; eller den fattige Jacob, som har nok,”in P. Foersom, ed., Læsebog for døttreskoler (Copenhagen, 1814), 89–99; Benjamin Franklin, “Der Wegzum Wohlstand von Franklin,” in Ch. Th. Roth, ed., Zweites Lehr- und Lesebuch sittlich-religioses El-ementar-Werk fur die oberen Abtheilungen der Volksschulen (Mainz, 1839), 330–337; Lesebuch mit 84verschiedenen Handschriften (Karlsruhe, 1846).

104 Benjamin Franklin, “La science du bonhomme Richard: Ou le chemin de la fortune,” in EugeneDaire and Gustave de Molinari, eds., Melanges d’economie politique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1847–1848), 1: 631–639. The historiography of eighteenth-century political economy has been remarkably rich in recentyears. For highlights, see among others Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Con-dorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Hont, Jealousy of Trade ; John Shovlin, ThePolitical Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.,2006); Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of theFrench Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 2007); Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and theFrench Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).

105 W. Dieterici, ed., Uber Preußische Zustande, uber Arbeit und Kapital: Ein politisches Selbstgesprach(Berlin, 1848), 40–42.

106 E.g., Reinert, Translating Empire ; Andrew Sartori, “Global Intellectual History and the Historyof Political Economy,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 110–133.

107 On this heuristically significant difference, see David Armitage, “Is There a Pre-History of Glo-balization?,” in Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013), 33–45.




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as it circumnavigated the globe, from Philadelphia through London to Moscow toLaunceston, Tasmania, and on to Natchez, Mississippi, and Bridgetown, Barba-dos.108 Only five of those more than eleven hundred editions seem to have beenpublished south of the equator: two in Argentina, two in Brazil, and one in Oceania.

108 On the power of circumnavigation, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigationfrom Magellan to Orbit (New York, 2012).

FIGURE 5: Benjamin Franklin, The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man’s Pocket (New York: S. Wood,[1811]), 8. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.




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The vast majority appeared along a crescent drawn up across the northeast coast ofthe United States and following the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic littoral, throughthe British Isles and into Northern Europe. And as demonstrated by a more spe-cialized heat map tallying appearances geographically and normalizing them by area,in this case within a seventy-mile radius of the space of publication, The Way toWealth’s spatial saturation was greatest on the northeast coast of the U.S. and in theEnglish Midlands, the Low Countries, northern and particularly eastern France,Germany, and northern Italy. Its near-complete absence, even within continentalEurope, from the publishing spheres of Portugal, Spain, western France, southernItaly, Greece, and most of Eastern Europe is equally conspicuous.

Strikingly, as the accompanying maps demonstrate, most places in which The Wayto Wealth was published saw only one or a handful of editions, and only Edinburgh,London, Paris, Philadelphia, and New York saw more than twenty. Of these, Londonand Paris were the undisputed centers of dissemination with more than a hundrededitions each, which indubitably also reflected their respectively unique roles in thepublishing worlds of the English and French languages. Workers in the industrialcenters of the European world, and a few of its colonial outposts, were to be taught

FIGURE 6: One of numerous different children’s mugs adorned with illustrations and proverbs drawn fromBenjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth produced in Staffordshire in the early nineteenth century. Mug in author’sprivate collection. Photo courtesy of Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.




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the virtues of industry—their suppliers of raw materials, cheap labor, and for a longtime slaves in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and also most of Australia and LatinAmerica less so. Indeed, appearances of The Way to Wealth coincide almost per-fectly—down even to the intensity of territorial saturation—with the first areas ofthe world to enter the Industrial Revolution.109 Correlation is, of course, not cau-sation, but the geographical relationship between early industrialization and the pro-liferation of Franklin’s industrial ethos is suggestive enough to invite further, morespecific regional studies. What does, however, become clear from mapping the dis-semination of this work is that the spatial enculturation of capitalist motives, values,and habits during this first period of globalization diverged markedly from capital-ism’s worldwide reach as an economic system connecting and harnessing capital,land, resources, commodities, markets, and workers of varying degrees of free-dom.110

Not only did Franklin partake in the establishment of a global, if circumscribedand at times thinly stretched, web of commonly accepted ideas regarding ideal eco-

109 On the Industrial Revolution in different regional contexts, see still Mikulas Teich and Roy Por-ter, eds., The Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the USA (Cambridge, 1996).

110 That large parts of the globe were introduced to capitalism without its ostensibly concomitantvalues and institutions suggests one of undoubtedly many causes contributing to the uneven economicdevelopment observable globally at the time, without the need to resort to the biological determinismof works such as Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton,N.J., 2007).

FIGURE 7: Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, 1757–1800.




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nomic behavior, but the cumulative dissemination of The Way to Wealth throughoutthe European world also affected this web’s density in the first half of the nineteenthcentury.111 Often, the work entered new regions through their central publishingplaces before further editions were released in minor satellites, whether spatial orlinguistic. In Italy, for example, it ventured from major publishing centers such asMilan and Venice to Udine, Lugano, Livorno, Cremona, and Orvieto.112 In Finland,it first arrived in Swedish translation, before Finnish editions appeared in minortowns from one extreme of the country to the other, from Porvoo (Borgå) to Oulu(Uleåborg).113 The same, in many ways, was true for the translations from major tominor languages within the countries of Europe. In France, The Way to Wealth cameout in French before Breton; in Britain, it was printed in English before Gaelic and

111 On such webs at the time, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-EyeView of World History (New York, 2003), 214–221.

112 Benjamin Franklin, Il para-miserie di B. Franklin: Consigli per divenir ricchi (Udine, 1825); Frank-lin, La scienza del buonuomo Riccardo di Beniamino Franklin (Lugano, 1828); Franklin, “La strada difar fortuna,” in Anonymous, ed., Letture elementari pe’ fanciulli (Leghorn [Livorno], 1829); GiovanniTamassia, Ragionamento sulle statistiche ed altri opuscoli di economia politica: Aggiuntovi il volgarizza-mento dei mezzi di avere sempre denaro nella borsa, e del Trovato economico di Franklin (Cremona, 1832),81–89; Benjamin Franklin, La strada di far fortuna: Almanacco per l’anno bisestile 1840 (Orvieto, 1839).

113 Benjamin Franklin, Wanhan Richardin aawe-ja neuwo-kirja opettawa kuinga hanen halullinen Luki-ansa taitaa tulla rikkari, onnelliseri ja kunniotettawari (Turku [Åbo], 1826); Franklin, Rikkauden awainja onnen ohjat, eli Wanhan Richardin keinot kaikkinaiseen menestykseen (Oulu [Uleåborg], 1832); Frank-lin, Neuwoja kaikille saadyille rikkaaksi ja onnelliseksi paastaksensa (Porvoo [Borgå], 1845).

FIGURE 8: Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, 1757–1850.




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Welsh; in Switzerland, there were editions in French, German, and Italian beforea Romansch edition at long last appeared in Chur, in mountainous KantonGraubunden.114

And, not surprisingly, the total number of appearances exploded with the adventof steam printing in the nineteenth century. While fewer than three hundred editionswere published before 1800, more than eight hundred appeared between 1800 and1850.115 This intensity has so far never been matched in the rest of the world, if onlybecause digital technologies and infrastructure have made such regional publishingprojects obsolete; today, The Way to Wealth is permanently at one’s fingertips in mostlanguages one can think of, everywhere local by virtue of its very virtuality. None-theless, the web of physical publications would become truly global in the second halfof the nineteenth century. A Japanese translation appeared at the time of that coun-try’s own period of industrialization during the Meiji Restoration, and a dual French-Chinese edition appeared in Beijing in 1884.116 By the early twenty-first century,

114 Benjamin Franklin, Guizieguez ar pautr-cos Richard (Morlaix, 1832); Franklin, “An t slighe chumsai’-bhris”; Franklin, Almanac Rhisierdyn, neu gasgliad o ymadroddion doethion (Pont-y-Fon, [1790?]);Franklin, Inschin da vegnir rechs, cun suondar ils cusseigls e proverbis dil vegl Heinrich da Benjamin Frank-lin, augmentai e dai ora en Romonsch cun la biographia da quest vitier (Chur, 1850).

115 On the coming and consequences of the steam press, see recently Nicole Howard, The Book: TheLife Story of a Technology (Baltimore, 2009); and Aileen Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Cham-bers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860 (Chicago, 2012).

116 Imai Terako, “Nihon ni okeru Furankurin no juyo�—Meiji jidai,” Tsudajuku daigaku kiyo� , no. 2–4

FIGURE 9: Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, 1757–1800.




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Franklin had become one of capitalism’s most iconic faces, adorning even the glob-ally revered and reviled U.S. $100 bill.117

By simple arithmetic, Franklin must have “influenced” millions of readers, butthe untold majority left no traces of how they read The Way to Wealth, how they feltabout it, and how, or even whether, it ultimately impelled them to change theirways.118 Intellectual dissemination cannot straightforwardly be equated with culturalimpact, and though Franklin unquestionably contributed—perhaps more than anyother single author—to the codification of ostensibly bourgeois values in the Eu-ropean world, the extent to which he in effect succeeded in changing habits, let aloneamong the very lowest classes that so preoccupied him, remains open to debate. Washe, as Franklin himself suggested with regard to the virtue of “Humility,” better at

(1982): 1–39. I am grateful to Garon, Beyond Our Means, 388 n. 30, for this reference; Benjamin Franklin,La science du Bonhomme Richard; ou, Le chemin de la fortune (Beijing, 1884).

117 It is a fitting irony that the world’s perhaps most powerful bill, the almighty 1,000 Swiss franc note,is embellished with a portrait of the Basel art historian Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche’s friendand professor, for whose decidedly mixed feelings about capitalism see John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardtand the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal, 2000). See also Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt:A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000).

118 As Herbert Applebaum has similarly noted, “It is rare to find writings about work written bypeople who work for a living.” See his The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Albany,N.Y., 1992), 401. For his reading of Franklin, see especially 400–406.





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securing “Appearance” than “Reality”?119 Indeed, American historians have recentlyundermined one of the nation’s most cherished myths by revealing the extent towhich dominant practices of capitalism diverged from Poor Richard ’s vision of moralaccountability and financial scrupulousness during the nineteenth century, andwhere some scholars find an early embrace of capitalist worldviews among workersand artisans, others emphasize protracted processes of resistance and negotiation.120

Yet, however fashionable, it would be too facile to dismiss Franklin as a mere myth-maker. Poor Richard’s Almanack was second only to the Bible in popularity in the

119 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 76. For a similarly myth-making text, see his “Information toThose Who Would Remove to America (February 1784),” in Houston, Franklin, 341–348; on which seeWaldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification.” On this myth, and Franklin’s role in it,see recently also Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Bal-timore, 2009), 259. See more generally also Nian-Sheng Huang and Carla Mulford, “Benjamin Franklinand the American Dream,” in Carla Mulford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin(Cambridge, 2009), 145–158.

120 See, for example, Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Makingof the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008), discussed and contextualizedin Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign,” 244–245; as well as the essays in Michael Zakim and Gary J.Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America(Chicago, 2012). Compare further Rockman, Scraping By, 141–142, 259, to Joyce Appleby, Inheriting theRevolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), especially 56. For a criticalanalysis of the historiography regarding the extent to which capitalist values came to shape workers’behavior in the early republic, see Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” particularly335–346.





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American colonies, and his Way to Wealth was called upon to teach schoolchildrenof all backgrounds to read in places with mandatory primary education such as Prus-sia, and would soon become a mainstay of working-class self-help literature.121 Per-force he must have influenced not only the ideas but also the habits of popular cul-ture, though in different places at different paces and to different degrees. The globalmapping of this process lies beyond the plausible scope of any single article, but theunparalleled dissemination of Franklin’s text at the very least invites further, morelocalized studies to chart its relationship not only to industrialization but also to theglobal evolution of economic culture.122

And of those who did put pen to paper to express their thoughts regarding TheWay to Wealth, not everyone appreciated its triumphant march across the expandingEuropean world even at the height of its impact. The Presbyterian James WaddelAlexander was so worried about Franklin’s influence in this regard in the late 1830sthat he warned against this “pecuniary gospel,” which “perhaps” was “as familiar tothe minds of the American people, as any human productions.” The “Maxims” itoffered were, he thought, “undeniable,” yet, he concluded, “I fear that the boy whois bred upon such diet . . . will be not merely rich, but miserly.”123 There was simplysomething too limiting, too persnickety, about this vision of virtuous economic be-havior. It is a criticism that has resurfaced frequently since. For Weber, Franklin’sessay was so inhuman as to be “irrational”; Mark Twain considered it “calculatedto inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages”; and D. H.Lawrence soon followed suit: “the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjaminintended was a neat back garden.” The Way to Wealth’s ideal citizen, a literary chi-mera where Benjamin Franklin, Richard Saunders, and Father Abraham intersected,was ostensibly “the Perfect Man of the future, in the Millennium of the world.” Yethe was ultimately “a virtuous little automaton,” the homo economicus “Franken-stein’s Monster.” For “the ideal being was man created by man,” but “so was thesupreme monster.”124 Franklin was the Victor Frankenstein of capitalism, The Wayto Wealth the Promethean scientist’s laboratory notebook.125

It was a reading that Franklin himself, in many ways, had encouraged. In fact,one of the reasons for the longevity and success of his particular vision of virtuous

121 Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55. On mandatory schoolingin German-speaking Europe, see James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Or-igins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (1988; repr., Cambridge, 2003); for Franklinianthemes, see 41. For a contemporary analysis, see also Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the GermanNation, trans. Bela Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Keith Tribe (Indianapolis, 2013). On Franklin’sworking-class readers, see among others Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British WorkingClasses, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 64, 69, 407.

122 Franklin’s global popularity, in short, adumbrates, yet again, the fruitfulness of a social historyof ideas. For a recent ethnography of the relationship between intellectual, social, and cultural history,see Judith Surkis, “Of Scandals and Supplements: Relating Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Mc-Mahon and Moyn, Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, 94–111.

123 Charles Quill [James Waddel Alexander], The Working-Man (Philadelphia, 1839), 56–57.124 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 12; Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin”; D. H. Lawrence, “Ben-

jamin Franklin” [first version], in Lawrence, Greenspan, Vasey, and Worthen, Studies in Classical Amer-ican Literature, 180–190, here 180. For a somewhat different take on these criticisms by “haters of thebourgeoisie,” see Harvey C. Mansfield, “Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding,” in PeterBerkowitz, ed., Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (Stanford, Calif., 2003),3–28, here 10 n. 15; Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 7–8.

125 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Ox-ford, 1998), 105.




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capitalist behavior was that it escaped the idiosyncrasies of its own context by single-mindedly evading almost all specificity, all nuance. The one instance in which Frank-lin referred to existing institutions regarding debt slavery as opposed to the libertiesof a “free-born Englishman” was, simultaneously, the one passage that most oftenwas changed as the text migrated into other contexts. The Way to Wealth was, ingeneral, no merchant’s handbook, with contextually dependent references to existinginstitutions or commercial practices; nor did it meddle in politics or formal juris-prudence. Even the means of production in the society it depicted, the most prev-alent sectors of its economy, and the nature of its labor remained hidden behind itsrhetorical strategies to render relentless work and frugality commonsensical. In spiteof, or perhaps because of, its ostensibly populist grounding, the text remained dog-gedly abstract and therefore feasibly universal. From a largely rural mid-eighteenth-century colonial context of agricultural work based in large part on indentured andslave labor, The Way to Wealth lent itself effortlessly to the increasingly industrializedand unfettered labor markets of nineteenth-century metropolitan Europe.

THE PROBLEM, OF COURSE, WAS that by virtue of the very abstractions facilitating itssuccess, The Way to Wealth taken alone failed to convey Franklin’s decidedly mixedfeelings about the pursuit of profit for profit’s sake. He had, for example, little regardfor Holland, the polity that at first glance one would think most closely aligned withthe virtues of The Way to Wealth. The country “appears to want Magnanimity,” hewrote in 1781 after Dutch sovereign lenders proved less enthusiastic in their supportof the American Revolution than he had hoped, further noting, “Some Writer, Iforget who, says, that Holland is no longer a Nation, but a great Shop; and I beginto think it has no other Principles or Sentiments but those of a Shopkeeper.”126 AndFranklin nurtured a lifelong preoccupation not only with the problem of imperialrelations over and between polities, but also with a parallel tension between wealthand power within political communities. Already in a 1764 pamphlet, he had notedthat

Power, when separate from great Property, and properly restrained by salutary Laws, is sofar from being prejudicial to Society, that it cannot well exist or continue without it. But Powerunited with great Wealth, is all that is necessary to render its Possessor absolute, and everything, under him, at his own Disposal. Great Riches alone, says a late Writer, in a privatePerson, are as dangerous to the Prerogatives of the Crown as to the Rights of the Subject. . . Look through all History, and the Experience of Ages will demonstrate this Truth.127

126 Benjamin Franklin to Charles-Guillaume-Frederic Dumas, August 6, 1781, in Papers, 35: 341.Franklin’s phrase recalls Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,edited by Edwin Cannan with a preface by George J. Stigler, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1977), 2: 129: “To founda great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a projectfit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers;but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”

127 Benjamin Franklin, “Explanatory Remarks on the Assembly’s Resolves,” March 29, 1764, in Pa-pers, 11: 134–144, here 143–144. For context, see Nathan Kozuskanich, “‘Falling under the DominationTotally of Presbyterians’: The Paxton Riots and the Coming of the Revolution in Pennsylvania,” inWilliam Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania’s Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 7–35, here 15.




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Strikingly, Franklin relied on the same epistemological argument to warn of thepolitical collaterals of economic inequality as he had when charting The Way toWealth a few years earlier: the authority of common sense derived from “all history,and the Experience of Ages.” At times, however, he doubted the virtues not only ofcapital accumulation but of commercial society tout court. He must, for example,have had Jean-Jacques Rousseau in mind when, sometime after 1770, he annotatedan argument dichotomizing the state of nature and civil society thus:

The Difference is not so great as may be imagined. Happiness is more generally and equallydiffus’d among Savages than in our civiliz’d Societies. No European who has once tastedSavage Life, can afterwards bear to live in our Societies. The Care and Labour of providingfor artificial and fashionable Wants, the Sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluousPlenty, whereby so many are kept poor distress’d by Want. The Insolence of Office, the Snaresand Plagues of Law, the Restraints of Custom, all contribute to disgust them with what wecall civil Society.128

That Franklin was not doctrinal should come as no surprise, except, perhaps, tothe most fervent originalists.129 Indeed, as Daniel Libeskind has argued, “the af-fective state of anxiety is a key component of architecture.”130 Why should Franklinnot at times have doubted the nature of the brave new world he helped construct?His uncertainty regarding commercial society might ultimately reflect back on theprotean core of capitalism itself, ever changing and adapting across time and space.We still live in a world in which, as Smith explained, “Every man lives by exchanging,or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what isproperly a commercial society.”131 Franklin, too, was engaged in the study and con-struction of such a society, and his “science” of improvement was deeply preoccupiedwith what Emma Rothschild has so elegantly called “economic sentiments.”132 Butfor all the minute calculations that went into his suggestion for economic behavior,these sentiments were far more attuned to the importance of social and politicalcohesion, to what his contemporaries knew as “sociability,” than many later readerswould assume. As Franklin wrote to the English theologian, natural philosopher, andpolitical theorist Joseph Priestley, he put improvements in “the Power of Man overMatter” resolutely second to the hope “that Men would cease to be Wolves to oneanother” and learn “Humanity.”133

128 Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in Matthew Wheelock, Reflections Moral and Political on GreatBritain and Her Colonies (London, 1770), 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., United States,E187.C72, vol. 26, no. 1, reproduced in Papers, 17: 380–400, here 381–382. See, for a similar argument,Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early PoliticalWritings, 111–222.

129 The role of the American Founding Fathers in contemporary politics remains incessantly poly-valent, stretching across the spectrum from Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes, to Elizabeth Price Foley,The Tea Party: Three Principles (Cambridge, 2012). On uses of Franklin to negotiate the American Dreamin relation to this, see among others Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 180.

130 Daniel Libeskind in Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the VisualArts (Berlin, 2007), 239.

131 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1: 26.132 Rothschild, Economic Sentiments.133 Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, February 8, 1780, in Papers, 31: 455, echoing a classical

trope on the need to overcome man’s lupine behavior popularized in early modern political philosophyby Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [De Cive], ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge,1998), 3. On this see also Francois Tricaud, ‘“Homo homini Deus,’ ’Homo homini lupus’: Recherche




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Franklin’s rhetorical strategy in The Way to Wealth was so successful that thiswider set of political and economic proclivities—which he elsewhere thought es-sential for the development of commercial society—including not only relative eco-nomic equality but also comparatively liberal political institutions, fell entirely by thewayside, whether in tsarist Russia or contemporary China. Large parts of the de-veloping world today embrace the capitalist elements of Franklin’s writings whilepaying scant attention to their intended social and political foundations. Indeed, onefinds calls to “produce inexpensive, good translations” not of Franklin but of “Burke,Locke and other thinkers, and spread the texts widely” to “counter democracy’sglobal retreat.”134 This while central facets of capitalism itself, as it has developedin recent decades, are being tested with increasing intensity in the developed world,whether by academics and politicians, through popular protests such as the OccupyMovement, or in mainstream media, precisely for its failure to sustain Franklin’sprecarious balance between “wealth” and “power.”135

The Way to Wealth, with its spectacular success in print during the first period ofglobalization, provides a unique opportunity to meditate on the historical vagariesof capitalism and of commercial society, on New World slaves and Old World factoryworkers, Scottish Highlanders and Hungarian nation-builders. We could also haveadded to this story the curious ways by which Franklin’s tedious Poor Richard cameto be usurped by Ayn Rand’s even more dismal John Galt in the phantasmagoria ofcapitalism, and with what consequences.136 In his own time, Franklin the deist fearedthat abolishing traditional religion would “unchain the Tyger.”137 Similarly, Franklinthe spendthrift and bon vivant designed his aphorisms to discipline workers in com-mercial societies by sublimating their passions into industry, frugality, and the pur-suit of profit. With time, and not without irony, the capitalist ethos he helped devisewould unchain tigers of its own. Perhaps deservedly, the ahistorical single-mind-edness of his Way to Wealth took on a life of its own, further simplified to the pointwhere the proverb that best summarizes the course of global capitalism over the pastfew decades might very well be chart-topping New York entertainer Curtis “50 Cent”Jackson’s rather more accentuated slogan “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.”138 Hearing hisrapper colleague Kimberly “Lil’ Kim” Jones wax lyrical about expensive cars and

des deux formules de Hobbes,” in Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur, eds., Hobbes-Forschungen(Berlin, 1969), 61–70. On the cardinal importance of sociability in eighteenth-century political economy,see again Hont, Jealousy of Trade. On Priestley, see Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of JosephPriestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773, 2 vols. (University Park, Pa., 1997, 2004).

134 Walter Russell Mead, “A Strategy to Counter Democracy’s Global Retreat,” Wall Street Journal,January 1, 2014, A13. For an upbeat account of such democratic “crises of confidence,” see DavidRunciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crises from World War I to the Present (Prince-ton, N.J., 2013).

135 For recent examples see Janet Byrne, ed., The Occupy Handbook (New York, 2012); WarrenBreckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York, 2013), 280–288.

136 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York, 1957), which inspired such jovial works as Donald L. Luskinand Andrew Greta, I Am John Galt: Today’s Heroic Innovators Building the World and the VillainousParasites Destroying It (New York, 2011). On Rand, see now Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: AynRand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009).

137 See again Franklin to Anonymous, December 13, 1757, in Papers, 7: 293–295.138 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, studio album (Aftermath Entertainment, 2003); Get Rich or Die

Tryin’, feature film directed by Jim Sheridan and starring “50 Cent” (Paramount Pictures, 2005). Thelate Roger Ebert’s suggested alternative title for the movie might be an even more accurate, if vexing,summary of currently thriving subcultures of capitalism: “I Got Rich but Just About Everybody Else Died




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murdering people “for the Benjamins [$100 bills],” we might find ourselves facingFranklin’s painful punchline after all.139

The problem may lie partly with the limited capacity of proverbial arguments tocommunicate complexity.140 In reducing wisdom to sound bites, proverbs are by ne-cessity caricatures; trenchant yet necessarily insufficient, they can only ever representfragments of understanding in any given context. If we are stuck with simple truths,though, we would do well to remember that Franklin’s cherished “Way to Improve-ment” aimed ultimately not at riches but at “Humanity,” that wealth was for him ameans and not an end.141 The early-fifth-century Greek philosopher Synesius ofCyrene reported in his Praise of Baldness that Aristotle, in a lost work On Philosophy,believed that the ancient wisdom of long-gone civilizations, those that had fallenvictim to the “immense destructions of mankind,” had survived through the ages onlyin the form of “clever and concise expressions.”142 Civilizational and existentialthreats are always around the corner, but, in a more practical vein, looking over theall too real devastation wrought by the alluringly clever yet naively dogmatic eco-nomics of the last decades, we might ask ourselves now what economic wisdom wewish to pass on to future generations, and in what form.143

Tryin’, and So Did I, Almost”; Ebert, review of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ for the Chicago Sun-Times, No-vember 10, 2005, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/get-rich-or-die-tryin-2005.

139 Puff Daddy, featuring Lil’ Kim, the LOX, and the Notorious B.I.G., “It’s All about the Benja-mins,” on Puff Daddy & the Family, No Way Out (Bad Boy Records, 1997).

140 See, for an illuminating similar argument regarding Powerpoint presentations, Brian Fugere,Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide(New York, 2005), 56–58.

141 Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, February 8, 1780, in Papers, 31: 455.142 Synesius, Encomium calvitii, 22. 85 C., in Aristotle, Aristotelis Fragmenta selecta, ed. William David

Ross (Oxford, 1955), 75.143 For a somewhat dated overview of our troubles, see Martin Rees, Our Final Century: Will the

Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? (London, 2003). On the politics of remembrance, andwhether there will be any remembering going on at all, see Reinert, “Conquest, Commerce, and De-cline.”

Sophus A. Reinert is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Busi-ness, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard BusinessSchool. He is a historian of political economy and author of Translating Empire:Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Harvard University Press, 2011),which won the 2012 George L. Mosse Prize, the 2012 EAPE-Myrdal Prize, andthe 2012 Joseph J. Spengler Prize, as well as numerous articles, cases, and editedvolumes.




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Documents

The Way to Wealth Around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism