Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times? (2024)

Mercantilism has had a “good press” in recent decades, in con­trast to nineteenth century opin­ion. In the days of Adam Smith and the classical economists, mer­cantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. But in our century, the general view of mercantilism has changed drastically: Keynesians hail mer­cantilists as prefiguring their own economic insights; Marxists, con­stitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and spe­cial privilege, hail mercantilism as a “progressive” step in the his­torical development of capitalism; socialists and interventionists sa­lute mercantilism as anticipating modern state-building and central planning.

Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries, was a system of statism which em­ployed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to indi­viduals or groups favored by the state. Thus, mercantilism held that exports should be encouraged by the government and imports discouraged. Economically, this seems to be a tissue of fallacy; for what is the point of exports if not to purchase imports, and what is the point of piling up monetary bullion if the bullion is not used to purchase goods?

But mercantilism cannot be viewed satisfactorily as merely an exercise in economic theory. The mercantilist writers, indeed, did not consider themselves economic theorists, but practical men of af­fairs who argued and pamphleteered for specific economic poli­cies, generally for policies which would subsidize activities or com­panies in which those writers were interested. Thus, a policy of favoring exports and penalizing imports had two important prac­tical effects: it subsidized mer­chants and manufacturers en­gaged in the export trade, and it threw up a wall of privilege around inefficient manufacturers who formerly had to compete with foreign rivals. At the same time, the network of regulation and its enforcement built up the state bureaucracy as well as national and imperial power.

The famous English Navigation Acts, which played a leading role in provoking the American Revo­lution, are an excellent example of the structure and purpose of mercantilist regulation. The net­work of restriction greatly penal­ized Dutch and other European shippers, as well as American shipping and manufacturing, for the benefit of English merchants and manufacturers, whose com­petition was either outlawed or severely taxed and crippled. The use of the state to cripple or pro­hibit one’s competition is, in ef­fect, the grant by the state of monopolistic privilege; and such was the effect for Englishmen en­gaged in the colonial trade.

A further consequence was the increase of tax revenue to build up the power and wealth of the English government, as well as the multiplying of the royal bu­reaucracy needed to administer and enforce the regulations and tax decrees. Thus, the English government, and certain English merchants and manufacturers, benefited from these mercantilist laws, while the losers included foreign merchants, American mer­chants and manufacturers, and, above all, the consumers of all lands, including England itself. The consumers lost, not only be­cause of the specific distortions and restrictions on production of the various decrees, but also from the hampering of the interna­tional division of labor imposed by all the regulations.

Adam Smith’s Refutation

Mercantilism, then, was not simply an embodiment of theo­retical fallacies; for the laws were only fallacious if we look at them from the point of view of the consumer, or of each individ­ual in society. They are not fal­lacious if we realize that their aim was to confer special privi­lege and subsidy on favored groups; since subsidy and privi­lege can only be conferred by government at the expense of the remainder of its citizens, the fact that the bulk of the consumers lost in the process should occasion little surprise.’

Contrary to general opinion, the classical economists were not content merely to refute the fal­lacious economics of such mer­cantilist theories as bullionism or protectionism; they also were perfectly aware of the drive for special privilege that propelled the “mercantile system.” Thus, Adam Smith pointed to the fact that linen yarn could be imported into England duty free, whereas heavy import duties were levied on finished woven linen. The reason, as seen by Smith, was that the numerous English yarn-spin­ners did not constitute a strong pressure-group, whereas the mas­ter-weavers were able to pressure the government to impose high duties on their product, while mak­ing sure that their raw material could be bought at as low a price as possible. He concluded that the

motive of all these regulations, is to extend our own manufactures, not by their own improvement, but by the depression of those of all our neigh­bors, and by putting an end, as much as possible, to the troublesome compe­tition of such odious and disagreeable rivals…

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer… But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to con­sider production, and not consump­tion, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

In the restraints upon the importa­tion of all foreign commodities which can come into competition with those of our own growth, or manufacture, the interest of the home-consumer is evidently sacrificed to that of the pro­ducer. It is altogether for the benefit of the latter, that the former is obliged to pay that enhancement of price which this monopoly almost always occasions.

It is altogether for the benefit of the producer that bounties are granted upon the exportation of some of his productions. The home-consum­er is obliged to pay, first, the tax which is necessary for paying the bounty, and secondly, the still greater tax which necessarily arises from enhancement of the price of the com­modity in the home market.2

Before Keynes

Mercantilism was not only a policy of intricate government regulations; it was also a pre-Keynesian policy of inflation, of lowering interest rates artificially, and of increasing “effective de­mand” by heavy government spending and sponsorship of meas­ures to increase the quantity of money. Like the Keynesians, the mercantilists thundered against “hoarding,” and urged the rapid circulation of money throughout the economy; furthermore, they habitually pointed to an alleged “scarcity of money” as the cause of depressed trade or unemployment.³ Thus, in a prefiguration of the Keynesian “multiplier,” Will­iam Potter, one of the first advo­cates of paper money in the West­ern world (1650), wrote:

The greater quantity… of money… the more commodity they sell, that is, the greater is their trade. For what­soever is taken amongst men… though it were ten times more than now it is, yet if it be one way or other laid out by each man, as fast as he receives it…it doth occasion a quick­ness in the revolution of commodity from hand to hand…much more than proportional to such increase of money…4

And the German mercantilist F.W. von Schrötter wrote of the importance of money changing hands, for one person’s spending is another’s income; as money “pass[es] from one hand to anoth­er… the more useful it is to the country, for… the susten­ance of so many people is multi­plied,” and employment increased. Thrift, according to von Schrötter, causes unemployment, since saving withdraws money from circulation. And John Cary wrote that if everyone spent more, every­one would obtain larger incomes, and “might then live more plenti­fully.”5

Historians have had an unfortu­nate tendency to depict the mer­cantilists as inflationists and therefore as champions of the poor debtors, while the classical economists have been considered hard-hearted apologists for the status quo and the established or­der. The truth was almost precisely the reverse.

In the first place, inflation did not benefit the poor; wages habitually lagged be­hind the rise in prices during in­flations, especially behind agri­cultural prices. Furthermore, the “debtors” were generally not the poor but large merchants and quasi-feudal landlords, and it was the landlords who benefited triply from inflation: from the habitu­ally steep increases in food prices, from the lower interest rates and the lower purchasing-power of money in their role as debtors, and from the particularly large increases in land values caused by the fall in interest rates. In fact, the English government and Parliament was heavily landlord-dominated, and it is no coinci­dence that one of the main argu­ments of the mercantilist writers for inflation was that it would greatly raise the value of land.

Exploitation of Workers

Far from being true friends of laborers, the mercantilists were frankly interested in exploiting their labor to the utmost; full employment was urged as a means of maximizing such exploitation. Thus, the mercantilist William Petyt wrote frankly of labor as “capital material… raw and un­digested… committed into the hands of supreme authority, in whose prudence and disposition itis to improve, manage, and fashion it to more or less advantage.”6 Professor Furniss comments that “it is characteristic of these writ­ers that they should be so readily disposed to trust in the wisdom of the civil power to ‘improve, manage, and fashion’ the economic `raw material’ of the nation. Bred of this confidence in statecraft, proposals were multiplied for ex­ploiting the labor of the people as the chief source of national wealth, urging upon the rulers of the nation divers schemes for di­recting and creating employment….”7 The mercantilist’s attitude toward labor and full employment is also indicated by their dislike of holidays, by which the “nation” was deprived of certain amounts of labor; the desire of the individ­ual worker for leisure was never considered worthy of note.

Compulsory Employment

The mercantilist writers real­ized frankly that corollary to a guarantee of full employment is coerced labor for those who don’t wish to work or to work in the em­ployment desired by the guaran­tors. One writer summed up the typical view: “It is absolutely nec­essary that employment should be provided for persons of every age that are able and willing to work, and the idle and refractory should be sent to the house of correction, there to be detained and constant­ly kept to labor.” Henry Fielding wrote that “the constitution of a society in this country having a claim on all its members, has a right to insist on the labor of the poor as the only service they can render.” And George Berkeley asked rhetorically “whether tem­porary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beg­gary?… Whether sturdy beg­gars may not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?” William Temple proposed a scheme to send the children of laborers, from the age of four on, to public workhouses, where they would be kept “fully employed” for at least twelve hours a day,” for by these means we hope that the rising genera­tion will be habituated to constant employment….” And another writer expressed his amazement that parents tended to balk at these programs:

Parents… from whom to take for time the idle, mischievous, least use­ful and most burdensome part of their family to bring them up with­out any care or expense to themselves in habits of industry and decency is a very great relief; are very much ad­verse to sending their children… from what cause, it is difficult to te11.9

Perhaps the most misleading legend about the classical econo­mists is that they were apologists for the status quo; on the con­trary, they were “radical” liber­tarian opponents of the established Tory mercantilist order of big government, restrictionism, and special privilege. Thus, Professor Fetter writes that during the first half of the nineteenth century, the

Quarterly Review and Blacicwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, staunch sup­porters of the established order, and opponents of change in virtually all fields, had no sympathy with political economy or with laissez-faire, and were constantly urging maintenance of tariffs, expenditures by govern­ment, and suspension of the gold standard in order to stimulate de­mand and increase employment. On the other hand the Westminster’s [journal of the classical liberals] support of the gold standard and free trade, and its opposition to any attempt to stimulate the economy by positive government action, came not from believers in authority or from defenders of the dominant social force behind authority, but from the most articulate intellectual radicals of the time and the severest critics of the established order.¹º

Southey Favors Nationalization

In contrast, let us consider the Quarterly Review, a high Tory journal which always “assumed that the unreformed Parliament, the dominance of a landed aristocracy… the supremacy of the established church, discrimination of some sort against Dissenter, Catholic, and Jew, and the keeping of the lower classes in their place were the foundations of a stable society.” Their leading writer on economic problems, the poet Robert Southey, repeatedly urged government expenditure as a stim­ulant to economic activity, and attacked England’s resumption of specie payments (return to the gold standard) after the Napole­onic Wars. Indeed, Southey pro­claimed that an increase in taxes or in the public debt was never a cause for alarm, since they “give a spur to the national industry, and call forth national energies.” And, in 1816, Southey advocated a large public works program for relief of unemployment and depression.¹¹

The Quarterly Review’s desire for stringent government control and even ownership of the rail­roads was at least frankly linked with its hatred of the benefits that railroads were bringing to the mass of the British population. Thus, where the classical liberals hailed the advent of railroads as bringing cheaper transportation and as thereby increasing the mo­bility of labor, the Quarterly’s John Croker denounced railroads as “rendering travel too cheap and easy—unsettling the habits of the poor, and tempting them to improvident migration.”¹²

The arch-Tory, William Robin­son, who often denounced his fel­low Tories for compromising even slightly on such principles as high tariffs and no political rights for Catholics, wrote many pre-Key­nesian articles, advocating infla­tion to stimulate production and employment, and denouncing the hard-money effects of the gold standard. And the Tory, Sir Archi­bald Alison, inveterate advocate of inflation who even ascribed the fall of the Roman Empire to a shortage of money, frankly ad­mitted that it was the agricul­tural class” that had suffered from the lack of inflation since resump­tion of the gold standard.¹³

Controls Under Elizabeth

A few case studies will illustrate the nature of mercantilism, the reasons for mercantilist decrees, and some of the consequences that they brought to the economy.

One important part of mercantilist policy was wage controls. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed one-third of the la­boring population of England, and naturally brought sharp advances in wage rates. Wage controls came in as wage-ceilings, in des­perate attempts by the ruling classes to coerce wage rates below their market price. And since the vast bulk of employed laborers were agricultural workers, this was clearly legislation for the benefit of the feudal landlords and to the detriment of the workers.

Textiles vs. Agriculture

The result was a persistent shortage of agricultural and other unskilled laborers for centuries, a shortage mitigated by the fact that the English government did not try to enforce the laws very rigorously. When Queen Eliza­beth tried to enforce the wage controls strictly, the agricultural labor shortage was aggravated, and the landlords found their statutory privileges defeated by the more subtle laws of the mar­ket. Consequently, Elizabeth passed, in 1563, the famous Stat­ute of Artificers, imposing com­prehensive labor control.

Attempting to circumvent the shortage caused by previous in­terventions, the statute installed forced labor on the land. It pro­vided that: (1) whoever had worked on the land until the age of 12 be compelled to remain there and not leave for work at any other trade; (2) all craftsmen, servants, and apprentices who had no great reputation in their fields be forced to harvest wheat; and (3) unemployed persons were compelled to work as agricultural laborers. In addition, the statute prohibited any worker from quit­ting his job unless he had a license proving that he had already been hired by another employer. And, furthermore, justices of the peace were ordered to set maximum wage rates, geared to changes in the cost of living.

The statute also acted to re­strict the growth of the woolen textile industry; this benefited two groups: the landlords, who would no longer lose laborers to industry and suffer the pressure of paying higher wage rates, and the textile industry itself, which received the privilege of keeping out the competition of new firms or new craftsmen. The coerced im­mobility of labor, however, led to suffering for all workers, including textile craftsmen; and to remedy the latter, Queen Elizabeth im­posed a minimum wage law for textile craftsmen, thundering all the while that the wicked clothing manufacturers were responsible for the craftsmen’s plight. Fortu­nately, textile employers and workers persisted in agreeing on terms of employment below the artificially-set wage rate, and heavy textile unemployment did not yet arise.

Enforcing Bad Laws

The program of wage controls could not cause undue dislocations until they were stringently en­forced, and this came to pass un­der King James I, the first Stuart king of England. Upon assuming the throne in 1603, James decided to enforce the Elizabethan control program with great stringency, including extremely heavy penal­ties against employers. Rigorous enforcement was imposed on min­imum wage controls for textile craftsmen, and on maximum wage decrees for agricultural laborers and servants.

The consequences were the in­evitable result of tampering with the laws of the market: chronic severe unemployment throughout the textile industry, coupled with a chronic severe shortage of agri­cultural labor. Misery and dis­content spread throughout the land. Citizens were fined for pay­ing their servants more than ceil­ing wages, and servants fined for accepting the pay. James, and his son Charles I, decided to stem the tide of unemployment in textiles by compelling employers to remain in business even when they were losing money. But even though many employers were jailed for infractions, such Draconian meas­ures could not keep the textile industry from depression, stag­nation, and unemployment. Cer­tainly the consequences of the policy of wage controls was one of the reasons for the overthrow of the Stuart tyranny in the mid-seventeenth century.

Mercantilist Practices in Colonial Massachusetts

The young colony of Massachu­setts engaged in a great many mercantilist ventures, with in­variably unfortunate results. One attempt was a comprehensive pro­gram of wage and price controls, which had to be abandoned by the 1640′s. Another was a series of subsidies to try to create indus­tries in the colony before they were economically viable, and therefore before they would be created on the free market. One example was iron manufacture. Early iron mines in America were small and located in coastal swamps (“bog iron”), and pri­mary manufactured, or “wrought,” iron was made cheaply in local bloomeries, at an open hearth. The Massachusetts government decided, however, to force the creation of the more imposing—and far more expensive—indi­rect process of wrought iron manufacture at a blast furnace and forge. The Massachusetts legisla­ture therefore decreed that any new iron mine must have a fur­nace and forge constructed near it within ten years of its dis­covery. Not content with this measure, the legislature in 1645 granted a new Company of Un­dertakers For An Iron Works In New England, a 21-year monopoly of all ironmaking in the colony. In addition, the legislature grant­ed the company generous sub­sidies of timber land.

But despite these subsidies and privileges, as well as additional large grants of timberland from the town governments of Boston and Dorchester, the Company’s venture failed dismally and al­most immediately. The Company did its best to salvage its opera­tions, but to no avail. A few years later, John Winthrop, Jr., the main promoter of the older ven­ture, induced the authorities of New Haven colony to subsidize an iron manufacture of his at Stony River. From the govern­ments of New Haven colony and New Haven township, Winthrop was granted a whole host of spe­cial subsidies: land grants, pay­ment of all costs of building the furnace, a dam on the river, and the transportation of fuel. One of Winthrop‘s partners in the ven­ture was the deputy-governor of the colony, Stephen Goodyear, who was thus able to use the power of government to grant himself sub­stantial privileges. But again, economic law was not to be denied, and the ironworks proved to be another rapidly failing concern.

Debtors’ Relief A Scheme To Aid the Rich

One of the most vigorously-held tenets of the dominant neo-Marx­ist historians of America has been the view that inflation and debt­ors’ relief were always measures of the “lower classes,” the poor farmer-debtors and sometimes urban workers, engaging in a Marxian class struggle against conservative merchant-creditors. But a glance at the origins of debtors’ relief and paper money in America easily shows the fallacy of this approach; inflation and debtors’ relief were mercantilist measures, pursued for familiar mercantilist ends.

Debtors’ relief began in the col­onies, in Massachusetts in 1640. Massachusetts had experienced a sharp economic crisis in 1640, and the debtors turned immediately to special privilege from the government. Obediently, the leg­islature of Massachusetts passed the first of a series of debtors’ relief laws in October, including a minimum-appraisal law to force creditors to accept insolvent debtors’ property at an arbitrarily in­flated assessment, and a legal-ten­der provision to compel creditors to accept payment in an inflated, fixed rate in the monetary media of the day: corn, cattle, or fish.

Further privileges to debtors were passed in 1642 and 1644, the latter permitting a debtor to es­cape foreclosure simply by leaving the colony. The most drastic pro­posal went to the amazing length of providing that the Massachu­setts government assume all pri­vate debts that could not be paid! This plan was passed by the upper house, but defeated in the house of deputies.

The fact that this astounding bill was passed by the upper house—the council of magistrates—is evidence enough that this was not a proto-Marxian eruption of poor debtors. For this council was the ruling group of the colony, con­sisting of the wealthiest mer­chants and landowners. If not for historical myths, it should occa­sion no surprise that the biggest debtors were the wealthiest men of the colony, and that in the mercantilist era a drive for spe­cial privilege should have had typ­ically mercantilist aims. On the other hand, it is also instructive that the more democratic and popularly responsible lower house was the one far more resistant to the debt relief program.

Paper Money Inflation

Massachusetts has the dubious distinction of having promulgated the first governmental paper mon­ey in the history of the Western world—indeed, in the history of the entire world outside of China. The fateful issue was made in 1690, to pay for a plunder ex­pedition against French Canada that had failed drastically. But even before this, the leading men of the colony were busy proposing paper money schemes. The Rev. John Woodbridge, greatly influ­enced by William Potter’s pro­posals for an inflationary land bank, proposed one of his own, as did Governor John Winthrop, Jr., of Connecticut. Captain John Blackwell proposed a land bank in 1686, the notes of which would be legal tender in the colony, and such wealthy leaders of the colony as Joseph Dudley, William Stough­ton, and Wait Winthrop were prominently associated with the plan.

The most famous of the infla­tionary land-bank schemes was the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740, which has generally been limned in neo-Marxist terms as the creation of the mass of poor farmer-debtors over the op­position of wealthy merchant-creditors of Boston. In actuality, its founder, John Colman, was a prominent Boston merchant and real-estate speculator; and its other supporters had similar in­terests—as did the leading op­ponents, who were also Boston businessmen. The difference is that the advocates had generally been receivers of land grants from the Massachusetts govern­ment, and desired inflation to raise the value of their specu­latively-held land claims.” Once again—a typically mercantilist project.

Keynes Wouldn’t Learn

From just a brief excursion in­to mercantilist theory and prac­tice, we may conclude that Lord Keynes might have come to re­gret his enthusiastic welcome to the mercantilists as his forbears. For they were his forbears indeed; and the precursors as well of the interventions, subsidies, regulations, grants of special priv­ilege, and central planning of to­day. But in no way could they be considered as “progressives” or lovers of the common man; on the contrary, they were frank expo­nents of the Old Order of statism, hierarchy, landed oligarchy, and special privilege—that entire “Tory” regime against which laissez-faire liberalism and clas­sical economics leveled their lib­erating “revolution” on behalf of the freedom and prosperity of all productive individuals in society, from the wealthiest to the humb­lest. Perhaps the modern world will learn the lesson that the con­temporary drive for a new mer­cantilism may be just as profound­ly “reactionary,” as profoundly opposed to the freedom and pros­perity of the individual, as its pre-nineteenth–century ancestor.

Footnotes

1 “The laws and proclamations…were the product of conflicting interests of varying degrees of respectability. Each group, economic, social, or religious, pressed constantly for legislation in con­formity with its special interest. The fiscal needs of the crown were always an important and generally a determining influence on the course of trade legisla­tion. Diplomatic considerations also played their part in influencing legisla­tion, as did the desire of the crown to award special privileges, con amore, to its favorites, or to sell them, or to be bribed into giving them, to the highest bidders…The mercantilist literature, on the other hand, consisted in the main of writings by or on behalf of ‘mer­chants’ or businessmen… tracts which were partly or wholly, frankly or dis­guisedly, special pleas for special eco­nomic interests. Freedom for them­selves, restrictions for others, such was the essence of the usual program of leg­islation of the mercantilist tracts of mer­chant authorship.” Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper & Bros., 1937), pp. 58-59. 2 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 625.

3 See the laudatory “Note on Mercan­tilism” in Chapter 23 of John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employ­ment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

4 Quoted in Viner, op. cit., p. 38.

5 Quoted in Eli F. Heckscher, Mercan­tilism (2nd Edition, New York: Macmil­lan Co., 1955), II, 208-09. Also see Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism (New York: Kelley and Millman, 1957), p. 41.

6 Quoted in Furniss op. cit., p. 41.

7 Ibid

8 See Furniss, op. cit., pp. 79-84.

9 Ibid., p. 115.

10 Frank W. Fetter, “Economic Arti­cles in the Westminster Review and their Authors, 1824-51,” Journal of Political Economy (Dec. 1962), p. 572.

11 See Frank W. Fetter, “The Eco­nomic Articles in the Quarterly Review and their Authors, 1809-52,” Journal of Political Economy (February, 1958), pp. 48-51.

12 Quoted in Ibid., p. 62.

13 See Frank W. Fetter, “The Eco­nomic Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and their Authors, 1817-1853,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy (June, 1960), pp. 91-96.

14 See the illuminating study by Dr. George Athan Billias, The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740 (University of Maine Bulletin, April, 1959).

***

Ideas on Liberty

A False Security

When designs are formed to raise the very foundation of a free government, those few who are to erect their grandeur and for­tunes upon the general ruin will employ every art to soothe the devoted people into a state of indolence, inattention, and security, which is forever the forerunner of slavery. They are alarmed at nothing so much as attempts to awaken the people to jealousy and watchfulness.

SAMUEL ADAMS, from the Boston Gazette of December 9, 1771

Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times? (2024)

FAQs

What is mercantilism your answer? ›

What is mercantilism? Mercantilism is an economic practice by which governments used their economies to augment state power at the expense of other countries. Governments sought to ensure that exports exceeded imports and to accumulate wealth in the form of bullion (mostly gold and silver).

What was the economic philosophy of mercantilism choose 1 answer choose 1 answer? ›

Mercantilism was based on the idea that a nation's wealth and power were best served by increasing exports and reducing imports. It's characterized by the belief that global wealth was static and that a nation's economic health relied heavily on its supply of capital.

How did Adam Smith question the ideas of mercantilism? ›

In Adam Smith's seminal work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he rejects the basic tenets of mercantilism and argues that the division of labor and the market process it allows for are the phenomena behind economic growth.

What is mercantilism pdf? ›

Mercantilism is economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state. Adam Smith coined the term “mercantile system” to describe the system of political economy that sought to enrich the country by restraining imports and encouraging exports.

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Mercantilism is a protectionist view of trade that focuses on self-sufficiency and nationalism rather than trade and globalization. It is generally considered an archaic view of economic systems, which leads to inefficiency, conflict, and less value creation.

What is mercantilism quizlet? ›

Mercantilism. An economic policy under which nations sought to increase their wealth and power by obtaining large amounts of gold and silver and by selling more goods than they bought. Effects on Economy.

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An example of mercantilism was the Sugar Act of 1764 which made colonists in America had to pay higher tariffs and duties on imports of foreign-made refined sugar products. Mercantilism is an economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy.

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The most important economic rationale for mercantilism in the sixteenth century was the consolidation of the regional power centers of the feudal era by large competitive nation-states.

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As such, mercantilism became the key economic model of the time. It encouraged the colonists to purchase goods from England rather than rival nations. The colonies sent raw materials to England where they were manufactured into finished products and sold to the colonists.

Is mercantilism still used today? ›

The mercantilist era has passed. Modern economists accept Adam Smith's insight that free trade leads to international specialization of labor and, usually, to greater economic well-being for all nations. But some mercantilist policies continue to exist.

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Mercantilism is a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.

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Under mercantilism, colonies were important because they produced raw materials for the mother country, goods that the country would have to import otherwise (things like grain, sugar, or tobacco). The colonies also gave the mother country an outlet for exports, which increased jobs and industrial development at home.

What is mercantilism in one word? ›

Mercantilism, also called "commercialism,” is a system in which a country attempts to amass wealth through trade with other countries, exporting more than it imports and increasing stores of gold and precious metals. It is often considered an outdated system.

What are the two causes of the rise of mercantilism? ›

Several causes were responsible for the rise of mercantilism: Firstly, the gradual emergence of money economy replacing subsistence economy was a primary factor for the rise of mercantilism. Secondaly, the emergence of the Northern Trade Zone gave a great imetus to the rise of mercantilism.

What is the main goal of mercantilism? ›

The mercantilist goal was to maximize a nation's export surplus—the balance of trade, which was equated with the future prosperity and power of the realm—and the means were cheap production inputs, that is, cheap raw materials (for which colonies proved useful) and cheap, and therefore poor, labor at home.

Mercantilism | Definition & Examples | Britannica ...Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com ›

Mercantilism, economic theory and practice common in 16th–18th-century Europe that promoted governmental regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of...
What is Mercantalism? Mercantilism is an economic theory that holds that a nation's wealth can increase when the government regulates the nation's wealt...
Mercantilism is an economic theory that advocates government regulation of international trade to generate wealth and strengthen national power.

What is one word to describe mercantilism? ›

Mercantilism, also called "commercialism,” is a system in which a country attempts to amass wealth through trade with other countries, exporting more than it imports and increasing stores of gold and precious metals.

What is mercantilism in a sentence? ›

England developed many colonies under mercantilism in order to increase its trading territory. The nation is attempting to sell more goods than they purchase, following the ecomonic policy of mercantilism. Great Britain imposed a policy of mercantilism upon all of its colonies.

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Introduction: My name is Wyatt Volkman LLD, I am a handsome, rich, comfortable, lively, zealous, graceful, gifted person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.