Rethinking Mercantilism brings together a group of young early
modern British and European historians to investigate what use the
concept "mercantilism" might still hold for both scholars and
teachers of the period. While scholars often find the term
unsatisfactory, mercantilism has stubbornly survived both in our
classrooms and in the general scholarly discourse. These essays
propose that it is largely impossible to rethink "mercantilism,"
given its unique status as a non-entity, by looking for
"mercantilism" itself. Economics as a discipline had not emerged by
the seventeenth century, yet economic considerations were part of
most intellectual pursuits, whether scientific, political,
cultural, or social. Thus, the search for "mercantilism" is best
undertaken through an investigation of how economic considerations
were embedded in debates throughout the early modern intellectual
landscape. With this in mind, this book seeks to rethink
"mercantilism" inductively rather than deductively. Such an
approach not only frees the debate from the strictures and
assumptions of historiography reaching back to the Scottish
Enlightenment, but also avoids viewing the period through the lens
of modern economics. Exploring the period in its own terms makes it
possible to revisit fruitfully and more holistically some of the
traditional component parts of "mercantilism" such as the
relationship between wealth and money, the modern state and
commerce, economic and political thought, and power and prosperity
only now informed and inflected by the questions raised in new
approaches and trends to the intellectual, political, social, and
cultural histories that populated the early modern world. The goal
of this volume is not to abandon mercantilism as a concept but to
rethink its intellectual and political content. First, rather than
an ideology driven primarily by self-evident and narrow economic
self-interest, "mercantilism" was inseparable from the rich
transformations emerging out of the rapidly changing early modern
intellectual landscape; as such, the study of mercantilism no
longer appears solely as a subject of the history of economic
thought, but part and parcel of early modern intellectual history
more generally. Second, the book argues that the common vision of a
"mercantile system" premised upon a coherent, strong, and expansive
nation-state is unsustainable. The cornerstone of "mercantilism"
has long been the assumption of a strong and coherent state
apparatus with the authority to manage and manipulate the sphere of
commerce for its own ends. This volume explores the implications on
our understanding of early modern economic thought of the recent
recognition among historians that the early modern state was rather
weak, decentralized, and amorphous. Moreover, the fact that recent
research has continually re-emphasized the role of a variety of
political communities (not just the state, but also church,
corporations, and communities of pirates and smugglers) in shaping
public life recommends questioning which polities mercantilism
sought to serve, and vice versa, at any given time. These and other
questions will primarily be pursued in the English context, with
occasional comparisons to the continental experience.
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