Dead Capital? The Economics of the Corpse in the British Isles (c. 1600–1830)

在近代早期，尸体是一种宝贵的物质资源。牧师和教区，医生和博物学家，甚至企业和公司都坚定地致力于从人类尸体中获利，这样做往往违反了尊重死者的基本原则。然而，到目前为止，在其基本意义上的尸体经济学还没有得到文化史或经济史的认可。为了填补这一空白，并将文化史和经济史方法结合为一个单一的方法，我的项目将开发一种新的分析工具：“死亡经济”。在这个初步的定义中，死亡经济是可变的实践，它使尸体服从于商业剥削的逻辑，也是特定的机构，在经济、伦理、宗教和纯洁的规范力场中改变星座，以及围绕着适当处理死者的冲突。在这种重新定位中，我的项目首次编纂了一部与经济史敏感的尸体文化史。目的是将尸体的经济应用作为潜在的规范极端情况来处理，以便获得关于规范多元化在早期现代时期是如何处理的新见解。通过微观历史案例研究，该项目侧重于英国和爱尔兰剥削死者的做法。因此，它考虑了两种截然不同的规范冲突情况：首先-作为一个高度敏感的伦理“边缘案例”-邻居，亲属，信任机构和竞争团体对尸体的经济处理（尸体算术）；其次，尸体的经济方面从其原始空间，社会甚至文化背景中取出，从而以完全不同的方式使其正常化（尸体运输）。都柏林、伦敦、梅努斯和牛津的资源被作为项目的一部分进行分析，并被用作现代早期对死者进行经济剥削的类型学的基础。此外，该项目以尸体为例，重建经济处理的实践和规范多元化的正当性，并使用尸体经济的概念，提供结合文化史和经济史的方法论。

In the early modern period corpses were a valuable material resource. Vergers and parishes, doctors and naturalists, and even businesses and corporations were stalwart in their mission to profit from human cadavers and, in doing so, often broke the fundamental rule of respecting the dead. To date, however, the economics of the corpse in its basic sense has not been recognised by either cultural or economic history. In order to fill in this gap and to combine cultural and economic history approaches into a single method, my project will develop a new analysis tool: 'necro-economies'. Necro-economies are – in this preliminary definition – variable practices, which subject corpses to a logic of commercial exploitation, and also specific institutions, changing constellations in the normative force field of economics, ethics, religion and purity, as well as conflicts surrounding the appropriate treatment of the dead. In this reorientation, my project compiles for the first time a cultural history of the corpse sensitised to economic history. The aim is to process the economic application of corpses as potential normative extreme situations in order to gain new insights into how normative plurality was handled in the early modern period. Using micro-historical case studies, the project focuses on the English and Irish practice of exploiting the dead. As such, it takes two vastly different normative conflict situations into account: First – as a highly sensitive ethical 'borderline case' – the economic treatment of corpses by neighbours, relatives, trusted institutions, and rivalling groups (corpse arithmetic) and second, the economic aspect of corpses taken from their original spatial, social or even cultural context, thereby normalising them in completely different ways (corpse transports). Sources in Dublin, London, Maynooth and Oxford are analysed as part of the project and used as the foundation for a typology of the economic exploitation of the dead in the early modern period. In addition, the project applies the example of corpses to reconstruct practices of economic handling and justification of normative plurality and, using the concept of necro-economies, contributes methodology that combines cultural and economic history.