From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Another Bite at the Apple: Isaac Newton's Time as a Man of Politics and Economics
Date May 10, 2021 2:20 AM
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[Newton may have been exceptional, but he can no longer be seen as
William Wordsworth’s Romantic genius soaring in strange seas of
thought alone, an abstract mind divorced from the mundane concerns
that affect every human being.] [[link removed]]

ANOTHER BITE AT THE APPLE: ISAAC NEWTON'S TIME AS A MAN OF POLITICS
AND ECONOMICS  
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Patricia Fara
May 2, 2021
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ Newton may have been exceptional, but he can no longer be seen as
William Wordsworth’s Romantic genius soaring in strange seas of
thought alone, an abstract mind divorced from the mundane concerns
that affect every human being. _

Isaac Newton, by Sir James Thornhill, 1712,

 

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’.
The opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s _The Go-Between _(1953) has
become a historical cliché. Yet contrary to its implications, the
past has no independent existence, but is being continually updated by
scholarly travelers: it is a constantly shifting territory, an
endangered world plundered by souvenir-hungry historical tourists.

Since his death in 1727, Isaac Newton has been reborn in various
incarnations that reflect the interests of their creators as much as
the realities of his existence. His monument in Westminster Abbey
records not only his contributions to physics, but also his commitment
to biblical studies and the timetables of ancient chronology, while
the posthumous statue in Trinity College Cambridge shows an enraptured
Enlightenment gentleman wielding a prism like an orator’s baton. The
tale of the falling apple began circulating only in the nineteenth
century, and his alchemical interests were suppressed until the
economist John Maynard Keynes unleashed a flurry of investigations
after the Second World War.

Newton’s definitive biography remains _Never at Rest_ (1980) by
the American historian Richard Westfall, who subsequently undertook a
prolonged psychoanalytical investigation of his authorial relationship
with his subject. In an extraordinary article, Westfall outlined the
conclusions he had drawn about himself. “Biography…cannot avoid
being a personal statement,” he declared, confessing that he had
painted “a portrait of my ideal self, of the self I would like to
be.” As he continued soul-searching, he accused himself of
resembling a puritanical Presbyterian elder determined to preserve
unsullied Newton’s reputation as a scientific genius, and he
admitted downplaying Newton’s thirty years of financial and
political negotiations at the Mint.

I hold no such qualms. Immersed in modern concerns about global
capitalism and international exploitation, in _Life after
Gravity _(2021) I explore Newton’s activities during those last
three decades that so discomfited Westfall. Many scientists regard his
London years as an unfitting epilogue for the career of an
intellectual giant, but economists see matters differently. More
interested in falling stock markets than in falling apples, they are
untrammelled by assumptions that the life scientific is the only one
worth living. According to them, once Newton had tasted fame and the
possibilities of wealth, he wanted more of both. And that entailed
moving to the capital, where he earned a fortune, won friends and
influenced people. I can only speculate about reasons – professional
insecurity, the anguish of an impossible love affair, private worries
about intellectual decline as he aged – but Newton engineered his
move with great care. Determined to make a success of his new life, he
broke definitively away from provincial Cambridge with its squabbling
academics, and dedicated himself to his new metropolitan existence.

While he worked at the Mint, Newton continued to confirm and refine
his theories of the natural world, but he was also a member of
cosmopolitan society who contributed to Britain’s ambitions for
global domination. He shared the aspirations of his wealthy colleagues
to make London the world’s largest and richest city, the center of a
thriving international economy. Like many of his contemporaries, he
invested his own money in merchant shipping companies, hoping to
augment his savings by sharing in the profits (although he sustained a
substantial loss during the South Sea Bubble crash of 1720).

An uncomfortable historical truth is often glossed over: until 1772,
it was legal to buy, own, and sell human beings in Great Britain.
Newton knew that the country’s prosperity depended on the
international trade in enslaved people, and he profited by investing
in companies that carried it out. For fine-tuning his gravitational
theories, he solicited observations of local tides from merchants
stationed in trading posts. And when he was meticulously weighing gold
at the Mint, he must have been aware that it had been dug up by
Africans whose friends and relatives were being shipped westward
across the Atlantic, where they were forced to cultivate sugar
plantations, labor down silver mines, and look after affluent
Europeans.

National involvement in commercial slavery was a collective
culpability, and there is no point in replacing the familiar “Newton
the Superhuman Genius” with the equally unrealistic “Newton the
Incarnation of Evil.” By exploring activities and attitudes that are
now deplored, I aim not to condemn Newton, but to provide a more
realistic image of this man who was simultaneously unique and a
product of his times.

Newton was a metropolitan performer, a global actor who played various
parts. Since theatricality was a favourite Enlightenment metaphor, I
chose to experiment by structuring my narrative around a dramatic
conversation piece by William Hogarth: _The Indian Emperor. Or the
Conquest of Mexico_ (1732). It is seeped in Newtonian references. For
example, centrally placed on the mantelpiece, Newton’s marble bust
gazes out across an elegant drawing room, while the royal governess
bids her daughter to pick up a fan that has dropped to the floor
through the power of gravity. On a small makeshift stage, four
aristocratic children arranged in a geometric square perform a revived
Restoration play about imperial conquest and the search for gold.
Traveling round the picture – the room, the audience, the stage –
as if I were a fly on its walls, I describe how Newton interacted with
ambitious wheelers and dealers jostling for power not only in Britain,
but around the entire world.

Newton may have been exceptional, but he can no longer be seen as
William Wordsworth’s Romantic genius soaring in strange seas of
thought alone, an abstract mind divorced from the mundane concerns
that affect every human being. Ensconced in a powerful position, he
took decisions and implemented policies that contributed to fostering
the exploitation and disparity lying at the heart of modern democracy.
As a privileged British academic, I benefit from being enmeshed within
a global economic system that promotes inequality, and whose growth
has been linked with the rise of science and the rise of empire since
the mid-seventeenth century.

Exploring Hartley’s foreign country of the past can help to reveal
how we have reached the present, but for me the main point of doing
that is to improve the future. The current state of the world is not
pre-ordained. Instead, multiple individual choices have shaped the
direction humanity has collectively taken, and millions of others will
affect what lies ahead. Ensuring a better future requires that
everybody – you, me – take personal action. In writing this book,
I have tried to analyse some of the ways in which our predecessors
went wrong: we must avoid repeating their mistakes.

_PATRICIA FARA, an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, UK, is
the author of several acclaimed books on the history of science,
including her award-winning _Science: A 4000 Year History_. Her
latest publication, _Life after Gravity
[[link removed]]:
Isaac Newton’s London Career_, will be published in the US in May
2021._

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