Political Economy and Imperial Practice

Mercantilism has been an important organizing concept not only for Atlantic and early American history but for the disciplines of sociology, economics, and political science as well. What do scholars mean by mercantilism? This article demonstrates that while there are a variety of definitions, most include two concepts. Most scholars argue that before the era of free trade there was a widespread consensus about economic goals. And, second, they contend that all mercantilists insist on the finite nature of the world’s wealth. Atlantic historians and early American historians have by and large maintained that because there was a mercantilist consensus in Europe the differences among empires had to do with the different endowments that the Europeans encountered on the periphery. They have also suggested that deviance from mercantilist goals must have derived from the structural weakness of early modern states. The British Empire in particular, we are told, was incapable of enforcing its mercantilist economic legislation. Against these claims, I suggest that there was a lively debate within the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about political economic issues. Far from accepting the finite nature of wealth, many Britons argued that property was based on human labor and that therefore there was the possibility for limitless economic growth. Because there was no mercantilist consensus about political economy, imperial policy both in Britain and the colonies was necessarily a politically contested issue. This essay contends therefore that Atlanticists and early Americanists need to reinsert accounts of party political debates over imperial political economy, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, into their accounts of Atlantic development and the origins of the American Revolution. Cathy Matson, Christian J. Koot, Susan D. Amussen, Trevor Burnard, and Margaret Ellen Newell comment on Steve Pincus’s essay. The Forum concludes with Pincus’s reply.