Mercantilism: a materialist approach

Thomas Conti ()

Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2018, vol. 66, issue 2, 186-200

Abstract: Historians and economists have shown renewed interest in mercantilism over the last couple of years. From this interest, a dispute has arisen about whether mercantilism should be seen as an incoherent economic thought or if it is possible to ‘reconstruct’ its basic principles. In line with this latter attempt, this paper is intended to provide a materialist explanation for varying degrees of belief in shared mercantilist assumptions. My hypothesis is that belief in mercantilist assumptions is significantly dependent upon how economic and security issues materially interact in a given time and space, with uncertainty and insecurity profoundly favouring mercantilist dispositions in economic thought. To analyse this hypothesis, the paper sets the first steps for relating the credibility of mercantilism with changes in British economic and military history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Section 3 presents ideas to further investigate this hypothesis. Section 4 concludes the paper.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03585522.2018.1465847 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:sehrxx:v:66:y:2018:i:2:p:186-200

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/sehr20

DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2018.1465847

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Economic History Review is currently edited by Espen Ekberg and Francisco Beltran Tapia

More articles in Scandinavian Economic History Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().