The Other Face of Mercantilism

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Abstract
‘In England’, Sir John Seeley once wrote, ‘it is our custom to I alter things butto leave their names unaltered.’ Anyone who wished to test the truth of the dictum historiographically might examine the history of the word ‘mercantilism’. It has borne many, sometimes oddly conflicting, meanings, but they have had at any rate one thing in common: they have all been in some degree unpalatable to those reared in the traditions of English liberal thought. It was as the conspiracy of a mercantile minority out to line its pockets at the expense of the rest of the community that the system was first depicted by the classical economists. The interpretation of the German school of historical economists a century later was certainly no less distasteful to the liberal mind. To Bismarckian Germans it might appear seemly to condone the pursuit of aggression and covet its rewards. But even Chamber-lainites—like W. A. S. Hewins—amongst English historians had their doubts, and to George Unwin state ‘policy’ was simply a sham—the supreme illustration of the evils of bigness. The economic actions of the political body were not even the early thrustings of a lusty infant, but the morbid twitchings of disease. And Unwin, who believed that historians should be concerned with the life of communities, not with the actions of states, found more sympathizers in his profession (one suspects) than Cunning-ham, who was nearer to the German tradition. Others, misliking what they took to be the moral and intellectual confusion of mer-cantilists and their works, agreed to deny any title of coherence to folly so diverse and deplorable.

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