“The Myth of Mankind and the Representation of People in Late 18C British Dictionaries of Trade and Commerce”.

ABSTRACT: The investigation aims at analysing the two general notions of mankind and people in two lexicographic reference works on trade and commerce published in London in the 1750s: Richard Rolt’s A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756; hereafter ND) and Malachy Postlethwayt’s The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (2nd1757; hereafter UD). The 1750s are a watershed at different levels, historians agree that after the mid-century many causes difficult to identify and analyse in isolation mark a turning point in the life of ‘people’ (and British people in particular; Mokyr 2005 and 2009: 4, Hoppit 1996: 519) as regards demography (political arithmetic), health conditions, social conditions, production systems and technological progress (Mokyr 2009: 81), literacy, dissemination of useful knowledge (Mokyr 2009: 26), national identity and the expansion of the empire (colonies, relationships, trade and commerce, merchandising, financial and economic issues, welfare, etc.). The notions of mankind and people become pivotal to represent the new and expanding idea(l)s, processes, and realities (or entities expressed by). Alongside their more general, neutral, and sometimes ‘vague’ meanings, they are recursively associated with more specific and marked circumstances, events, situations, ‘entities’, etc., and are recorded in myriad language expressions within the dictionaries of trade and commerce: these multiword expressions and contexts of use are the focus of the present study.