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

• Applicant: Dr. Matthias Bähr
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 401788016

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Ireland, Spain
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Jennifer Todd; Dr. Igor Pérez Tostado