Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

HEN Adam Smith described the “system of commerce” or “the mercantile System” that had become “the modern system” of regulation in book 4 of The Wealth of Nations, he necessarily included in his account a description of the emergence of the modern European colonial system. Just as the mercantile system was supported by the avaricious and absurd views of shopkeepers and merchants, so the Europeans sought colonies in the first instance because of “the same passion which has suggested to so many people the absurd idea of the philosopher’s stone.” The Council of Castile sought colonies in the New World exclusively in “the hope of finding treasures of gold there.” “The first adventurers of all the other nations of Europe, who attempted to make settlements in America,” Smith noted with contempt, “were animated by the like chimerical views; but they were not equally successful.”1 With these elegant words and with his tightly reasoned arguments, Smith seared into the imagination of generations of scholars and historians the ineluctable association between mercantilism and the origins of early modern European empires.