Ricardos showed people how trade could be beneficial to both countries. Having an import that you actually use isn't a bad thing if you care about the welfare of the general public. People don't understand why it doesn't apply anymore, but then they're vulnerable to campaigns like by British. It is whether it ever happens that everybody trades on any basis or ever will happen. Adam Smith won the argument for a very long time. And my point is that these overseas trading empires in their 17th and 18th century form collapsed with the Atlantic revolutions.
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