トーマス・ヘップバーン : 『オークニー諸島の貧困』(1760年)(2)

概要

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Thomas Hepburn is an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister whose tract translated here presents a fine example of the work in political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. In it Hepburn acutely analyses the main causes of the poverty of the Orkney Islands, a remote area of Scotland where he served for nearly two decades. His main purpose was to defend the Earl of Morton, a Scottish nobleman who had been involved in a bitterly-fought epic court case called the 'Pundlar Process', about tyranny and oppression with which he had been charged by his own vassals. Hepburn in the end remits the Earl of Morton, citing many reasons why the Islands were suffering from poverty, other than the alleged tyranny and oppression. Hepburn is now an overlooked and almost forgotten figure who nonetheless shows how political economy characteristically emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment out of eighteenth-century British political culture and legal contexts.