Mercantilism
16 Mar, 2023
330 Economics
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, between the 16th and 18th centuries, Europe was dominated by an economic way of thinking called mercantilism. The key idea was that exports should be as high as possible and imports minimised. For more than 300 years, almost every ruler and political thinker was a mercantilist. Eventually, economists including Adam Smith, in his ground-breaking work of 1776 The Wealth of Nations, declared that mercantilism was a flawed concept and it became discredited. However, a mercantilist economic approach can still be found in modern times and today’s politicians sometimes still use rhetoric related to mercantilism.
Guests
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D'Maris Coffman No other episodes
Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at University College London -
Craig Muldrew No other episodes
Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a Member of Queens' College - Helen Paul
8 episodes
Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton
Reading list
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The Atlantic World
D'Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O'Reilly (eds.) (Routledge, 2019) Google Books → -
Revisions in Mercantilism
D. C. Coleman (Methuen, 1969) Google Books → -
Great Economic Thinkers
Jonathan Conlin (ed.) (Reaktion Books, 2018) Google Books → -
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, 2020) Google Books → -
The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution
Oliver M. Dickerson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951) Google Books → -
Mercantilism
Eli Heckscher (Routledge, 1994) Google Books → -
A Short History of Mercantilism
J. W. Horrocks (Routledge, 2017) Google Books → -
Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662-1776
Terence Hutchison (Wiley-Blackwell, 1988) Google Books → -
Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language
Lars Magnusson (Routledge, 2015) Google Books → -
The Political Economy of Mercantilism
Lars Magnusson (Routledge, 2015) Google Books → -
Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind
Philipp Robinson Rossner (Palgrave Pivot, 2020) -
A History of Economic Thought
Eric Roll (Faber & Faber, 2002) Google Books → -
The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy
Ivano Cardinale and Roberto Scazzieri (eds) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Google Books → -
Free Market: The History of an Idea
Jacob Soll (Basic Books, 2022) Google Books → -
Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire
Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) Google Books → -
Mercantilism and the East India Trade
P. J. Thomas (Routledge, 2020) Google Books → -
Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and 'Projecting' in Early Modern England
Koji Yamamoto (Oxford University Press, 2021) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m001k0zv
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k0zv
Auto-category: 330 (Economics)