Description
Book SynopsisRethinking 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 a
Trade ReviewThe eighteen essays in Merchantilism Re-imagined make very clear the multifaceted nature of political economy in early modern Britain, both in terms of ideas and practise. Some of the essays argue powerfully for emphasizing certain policies where balance of trade considerations were incedental. Thus there are important essays on the significance of population and labour to conceptions of economic potential and power ... The volume provides a good sense of how historians are now weaving together a wide range of factors when exploring the significance of economic policy as a reason of state. Most of the essays are rich, insightful and suggestive. * Julian Hoppit, The Time Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsList of Contributors ; Acknowledgments ; Introduction-Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind ; Part 1: Circulation ; 1. Population: Modes of Seventeenth-Century Demographic Thought, Ted McCormick ; 2. Labor: Employment, Colonial Servitude, and Slavery in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic, Abigail Swingen ; 3. Money: Hartlibian Political Economy and the New Culture of Credit, Carl Wennerlind ; Part 2: Knowledge ; 4. Epistemology: Expertise and Knowledge in the World of Commerce, Thomas Leng ; 5. Natural History and Improvement: The Case of Tobacco, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson ; 6. Cameralism: A German Alternative to Mercantilism, Andre Wakefield ; Part 3: Institutions ; 7. Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy, Henry S. Turner ; 8. Companies: Monopoly, Sovereignty, and the British East Indies, Philip J. Stern ; 9. The Church: Anglicanism and the Nationalization of Maritime Space, Brent S. Sirota ; 10. Pirates and Smugglers: Political Economy in the Red Atlantic, Niklas Frykman ; Part 4: Regulation ; 11. Polycentric States: The Spanish Reigns and the "Failures" of Mercantilism, Regina Grafe ; 12. Financial Markets: The Limits of Economic Regulation in Early Modern England, Anne L. Murphy ; 13. Consumption: Commercial Demand and the Challenges to Regulatory Power in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ; Martyn J. Powell ; Part 5: Conflict ; 14. War and Peace: Trade, International Competition, and Political Economy, John Shovlin ; 15. Neutrality: Atlantic Shipping in and after the Anglo-Dutch Wars, Victor Enthoven ; 16. Rivalry: Greatness in Early Modern Political Economy, Sophus A. Reinert ; Afterword: From Mercantilism to Macroeconomics-Craig Muldrew ; Index
