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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (35862)	4/25/1999 11:56:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Blue, you are quite right about Mercantilism's not being limited to the French. I quote from the same source I used for the Physiocrats: The "Mercantilists" refer to a group of thinkers which emerged largely in Britain, France and Holland in the 17th Century. In that "most horrible century" engulfed with recurrent national, religious and civil wars throughout Europe, the first concern of sovereigns was the raising of taxes to finance their wars and weaken the enemy; the second concern, given the sudden explosion of overseas trade after the discovery of the Americas and the sea- routes to Asia, was the impact of trade on the national economy and the competition for exclusive trading privileges. Thus, the question that the most prominent policymakers asked their advisors was how to generate taxable wealth in the national economies and the nature of the link between trade and wealth (and also the form of trade - recall that during this period charter companies with monopolies over trading areas such as the East India Company were prominent). These advisors were joined by merchants, company officials, politicians, bankers, scholars, soldiers, clergymen, physicians and even poets in lively debates put forth in polemical sixpenny tracts and public pamphlets. It is this assortment of not-very-impartial people who constitute the "Mercantilists". The Mercantilists tended to equate wealth with money (the concept of taxation arising from circular flows of "income" and not stocks of wealth being largely alien to them). Thus, they argued that to increase the wealth of a nation, governments should actively seek to ensure that money (specie or bullion) be attracted to that country. The means by which they promoted this included alternatively restricting the export of bullion, ensuring a favorable trade balance by restricting imports and promoting exports, lowering interest rates, etc. The "liberal" offshoot of the Mercantilist school was more flexible towards free trade, but failed to achieve the insights necessary to move away from equating wealth to money. The works of Thomas Mun (1621, 1694), John Locke (1692) and Sir James Steuart (1767) are the prime examples of the first tendency, whereas those Sir William Petty (1662), Sir Josiah Child (1693) and Sir Dudley North (1691) are examples of the latter. Prominent opponents of many Mercantilist ideas include Richard Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and, most famously, David Hume and his friend Adam Smith. econ.jhu.edu But the Physiocrats, of course, being French, were primarily interested in attacking the French (Colbertian) variety of Mercantilism. Joan