Mercantilism

Definition

Mercantilism is a system of economic policy and a corpus of economic doctrines which developed side by side from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The main goal was to increase a nation’s wealth and power by imposing government regulation to promote the nation’s commercial interests by maximizing exports and limiting imports.

Mercantilism, Colbertism, Cameralism

Mercantilismis a system of economic policy and a corpus of economic doctrines which developed side by side from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. As a theory, mercantilism marks the decisive step in the emancipation of thinking about economic phenomena from scholastic theology to political economy and economics as a social science of its own. With respect to economic policy, mercantilism took a variety of different forms according to the different political, economic, and social conditions prevailing in European states during the early modern period. As a consequence, there are national variants of...