Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the State.”
- Source
- Letters on England
- Date
- 1733
- English wording
- John Lockman — Translator · from French
Meaning of “As trade enriched the citizens in England, so…”
Voltaire argues that commercial wealth and political freedom reinforced one another in the England he was describing, connecting economic activity with civic power.
Where does it come from?
Letters on England, Letter X, “On Trade,” Project Gutenberg #2445, transcribed from the 1894 Cassell & Co. edition. Voltaire argues that English trade contributed to civic freedom and that freedom in turn extended commerce. The sentence is preserved as an eighteenth-century translated historical and political-economic argument, not a universal economic law or current empirical finding.