Title: Mecantilism
1 2This is a painting of a French seaport from 1638
at the height of mercantilism.
- Between 1600 and 1800 most of the states of
western Europe were heavily influenced by a
policy usually known as mercantilism. This was
essentially an effort to achieve economic unity
and political control. No general definition of
mercantilism is entirely satisfactory, but it may
be thought of as a collection of policies
designed to keep the state prosperous by economic
regulation.
3Mercantilism - is the economic theory that a
nation's prosperity depends upon its supply of
capital and that the global volume of trade is
unchangeable. The amount of capital, represented
by bullion (amount of precious metal held by the
state), is best increased through a favorable
balance of trade with large exports and low
imports.
4 Mercantilism helped create trade patterns
such as the triangular trade in the North
Atlantic, in which raw materials were imported to
the metropolis and then processed and
redistributed to other colonies.
- Mercantilism suggests that the government should
advance these goals by playing an active,
protectionist role in the economy by encouraging
exports and discouraging imports, especially
through the use of tariffs. The economic policy
based on these ideas is often called the
mercantile system.
5Almost all the European economists who wrote
between 1500 and 1750 are today generally
considered mercantilists however, these writers
did not see themselves as contributing to a
single economic ideology. The term was coined by
the Marquis de Mirabeau in 1763, and was
popularized by Adam Smith in 1776.
6- Baptised June 5, 1723 July 17, 1790 was a
Scottish political economist and moral
philosopher. His Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations was one of the
earliest attempts to study the historical
development of industry and commerce in Europe.
That work helped to create the modern academic
discipline of economics and provided one of the
best-known intellectual rationales for free trade
and capitalism.
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