Abstract
Although the benefits of competition and free trade have dominated political approaches to economic policy for the last thirty years or so, the ideological framework for such ideas dates mostly from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this essay, I will make the case that political economy first evolved from the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a means of dealing with the problem of overpopulation and lack of agricultural employment by advocating the benefits of market-oriented commercialisation to provide industrial work. This was further expanded as foreign trade and colonisation became seen as means to economic growth and specifically national wealth. Writers were generally strongly oriented towards the nation state as the instrument of government to promote industrial policy, and most, although not all, authors thought that a surplus of industrial exports was the best policy to promote growth. The state which was most successful at implementing such policies was England and then Britain. This essay will focus on both the evolution of writings concerning political economy and government policy in the strongest commercial states of the period from 1600 to 1800, England, France and the United Provinces.
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Notes
- 1.
Prem Sikka, the co-author of Reforming HMRC: Making it Fit for the Twenty-First Century in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/08/hmrc-thrall-big-business-tax-collection-labour.
- 2.
This translation is taken from John Wheeler’s Treatise on Commerce of 1601, who translated it verbatim from Mayerne. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 137–138.
- 3.
This commission, however, only lasted until 1604 (Cole 1931, pp. 80, 86, 93).
- 4.
However, this is based on a single letter to the king (Murat 1980, p. 133).
- 5.
However, Montchréstien used the word happiness quite often to describe the aims of policy (Montchréstien 1889 [1615], pp. 99, 147, 153).
- 6.
Perry Gauci, ‘Malynes, Gerard (fl. 1585–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn., Oct 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17912, accessed 17 Jan 2017].
- 7.
Perry Gauci, ‘Mun, Thomas (bap. 1571, d. 1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn., Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19527, accessed 17 Jan 2017].
- 8.
The later was also from a mercantile background and was eventually lynched by the Orangists in the uprising of 1672.
- 9.
The key figure here was Samuel Hartlib and his circle (Slack 2014, pp. 98–108).
- 10.
Rowan Lawrence, Early Modern English Nationalism? The Uses and Connotations of the Term Nation in Elizabethan and Jacobean English-Language Printed Discourse (University of Sidney PhD, 2012).
- 11.
- 12.
However, it was fundamentally underpinned by the misery of the slave trade, which was increasingly criticised with the rise of the Abolitionist movement.
- 13.
There were notable exceptions such as Jacques Savaray’s Le parfait négociant, published in 1675 which was prepared based on his work for the commission revising the trade laws.
- 14.
Much of the pamphlet was taken up with the need for a public economy being in conformity with general laws and legislators. He also discusses the Spirit of a people in relation to economic policy rather than policy itself.
- 15.
However, he did advocate regulation to prevent the over issuance of paper credit by banks (Smith 1976 [1776], p. 324).
- 16.
As Stedman Jones has noted, a preceding work which influenced Ricardo, Jean Baptise Say’s Traité d’économie politique, published in 1803 also retreated from political advocacy, but for different reasons. For Say, it was because of the rise of Napoleon to become Emperor (Stedman Jones 2004, pp. 110–111).
- 17.
See above p. 3.
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Muldrew, C. (2018). Politics and Economics of Markets. In: Cardinale, I., Scazzieri, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44254-3_4
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