There are many writers that we might roughly describe as mercantilists or at least friends of people who were interested in the East for its exoticism. But actually the French physiocrats, so Adam Smith's Interlocutors in France, Francois Kenny and Turgot were interested in China for a different reason. They were more in keeping with a kind of camera list mentality. The Chinese aren't that interested in importing a lot of goods because they just don't particularly want them. So there's that kind of underpinning of telling people don't buy this good. It's not really necessary if they don't want it in the first instance.
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.
With
D’Maris Coffman
Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at University College London
Craig Muldrew
Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a Member of Queens’ College
and
Helen Paul, Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton.
Producer Luke Mulhall