The Idea of a Mercantile State

Abstract

The chief purpose of this paper is to formulate a question. What, to put the matter briefly, have we in mind when we talk of the mercantile state; and what functional value is possessed by our ideas about it when we are engaged in the processes of reconstructing the political and economic life of the centuries in which it is commonly believed to have flourished? Various meanings have been given to the words mercantile system and also to the more austere mercantilism which German scholarship has coined for us to use when we wish to attempt a distillation of the policies attributed to practitioners of that system. Most of us would doubtless be ready to admit that these terms of art of the economist have been useful in bringing large groups of facts and theories into focus; and therein lies their justification. But the concepts which they awkwardly try to express have had a steadily diminishing utility in recent years as our knowledge has advanced, and (like other premature generalisations in the history of ideas) it would seem that they are being perpetuated because we shrink from generalising anew.