This volume adds a new voice to the discussion of mercantilism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the period that economic historians call the “mercantilist age.” As opposed to previous generations of economic historians, who constructed the concept of mercantilism and then debated the extent to which the economic theory and practice of the time reflected it, the scholars assembled in this collection set themselves the goal of “re-imagining” mercantilism. As declared in the introduction, they take “an inductive rather than deductive approach, concerned less with determining what mercantilism was and more sensitive to the ways in which the various and sometimes even conflicting categories it conjures up could be approached differently.” Thus, they say, mercantilism, “properly refracted and contextualized,” can still provide valuable lenses through which to see early modern political economy” (4).
Viewed in the light of the scholarly literature of the last twenty-five to thirty years,...