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

在近代早期，身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履行着从人类身体中获利的使命，而且在这样做的过程中，往往违反了尊重死者的基本规则。然而，到目前为止，身体的经济学在其基本意义上还没有得到文化史和经济史的承认。为了填补这一空白，并将文化史和经济史方法结合成一种单一的方法，我的项目将开发一种新的分析工具：新经济。在这个初步定义中，死亡经济是可变的做法，它使身体服从商业剥削的逻辑，也是特定的机构，改变了经济、伦理、宗教和纯洁等规范性力量领域的星座，以及围绕适当对待死者的冲突。在这种重新定位中，我的项目首次汇编了一部对经济史敏感的身体的文化史。其目的是将身体的经济应用作为潜在的规范性极端情况来处理，以获得对早期现代时期如何处理规范性多元化的新见解。该项目使用微观历史案例研究，重点关注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：第一，作为高度敏感的伦理“边缘案件”--邻居、亲戚、受信任的机构和敌对团体对身体的经济处理(身体算术)；第二，身体从其原始空间、社会甚至文化背景中剥离出来的经济方面，从而以完全不同的方式使其正常化(身体运输)。作为该项目的一部分，对都柏林、伦敦、梅努斯和牛津的来源进行了分析，并将其用作现代早期对死者的经济剥削的类型学的基础。此外，该项目应用身体的例子来重建经济处理的做法和规范多元化的理由，并利用死亡经济的概念，提出了将文化史和经济史相结合的方法。

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.