The Mercantile System and Its Historical Significance: Illustrated Chiefly from Prussian History, Being a Chapter from the Studien Ueber Die Wirthschaftliche Politik Friedrichs Des Grossen |
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Adam Smith administration ALBERT ACHILLES Archbishopric of Magdeburg Ashley became beer Berlin Brandenburg towns burg centralisation centre civilisation coins colonial commercial policy competition corn course created creation currency districts division of labour Dutch economic bodies economic policy egoism eighteenth century Elector England English Estates everywhere export fifteenth forces foreign France Frankfurt Frederick French Germany Geschichte gild GUSTAV SCHMOLLER History Hohenzollern Holland HOUSE OF HOHENZOLLERN imperial important interests international law Italian Joachim Krefeld land larger Magdeburg manufacture Mark matter mercantile system mercantilist Middle Ages municipal national economy navigation laws neighbouring nomic ordinances period Poland political Pomerania princes privileges prohibition prosperity provinces Prussian regard regulations Riedel rule Saxony SCHMOLLER seventeenth and eighteenth seventeenth century shewed silk industry sixteenth century social Spain Stettin struggle tariff taxes Teutonic Order tion tolls town privileges towns and territories trade treaties uniform unity village wares whole
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Page 93 - It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in extent. A naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, shipping capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine ; the hum of the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days — ' much of the linen called Hollands is made...
Page 84 - But a great part of all the different branches of our woollen manufacture, of our tanned leather, and of our hard-ware, are annually exported to other European countries without any bounty, and these are the manufactures which employ the greatest number of hands. The silk, perhaps, is the manufacture which would suffer the most by this freedom of trade, and after it the linen, though the latter much less than the former.
Page 51 - The essence of the system lies not in some doctrine of money, or of the balance of trade; not in tariff barriers, protective duties or navigation laws; but in something far greater, namely, in the total transformation of society and its organization, as well as of the state and its institutions, in the replacing of a local and territorial economic policy by that of the national state.
Page 3 - The idea that economic life has ever been a process mainly dependent on individual action — an idea based on the impression that it is concerned merely with methods of satisfying individual needs — is mistaken with regard to all stages of human...
Page 48 - What, to each in its time, gave riches and superiority first to Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa; then, later, to Spain and Portugal; and now to Holland, France, and England, and, to some extent, to Denmark and Sweden, was a state policy in economic matters, as superior to the territorial as that had been to the municipal.
Page 50 - Only he who thus conceives of mercantilism will understand it; in its innermost kernel it is nothing but state making — not state making in a narrow sense, but state making and national-economy making at the same time; state making in the modern sense, which creates out of the political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened meaning. The essence of the system...
Page 7 - Schmoller summarises the result of his researches, "Each separate town felt itself to be a privileged community, gaining right after right by struggles kept up for hundreds of years, and forcing its way, by negotiation and purchase, into one political and economic position after the other. The citizen-body looked upon itself as forming a whole, and a whole that was limited as narrowly as possible, and for ever bound together. It received into itself only the man who was able to contribute, who satisfied...
Page 8 - ... municipal policy. The soul of that policy is the putting of fellow-citizens at an advantage, and of competitors from outside at a disadvantage. The whole complicated system of regulations as to markets and forestalling is nothing but a skilful contrivance so to regulate supply and demand between the townsman who buys and the countryman who sells, that the former may find himself in as favourable a position as possible, the latter in as unfavourable as possible, in the business of...
Page 60 - System which was original to England," and " the corner-stone of English prosperity." For Adam Smith's arguments against the bounty, see Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. ch. V. (ed. Rogers, ii. 81 seq.) ; and for Mr. Hewins' criticism and Professor Cunningham's rejoinder, Economic Journal, ii. 698; iv, 512.] for existence, in economic life in particular, as in social life in general, is necessarily carried on at all times by smaller or larger groups and communities. That will also | be the case in all...
Page 50 - The whole internal history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only in Germany but everywhere else, is summed up in the opposition of the economic policy of the state to that of the town, the district, and the several Estates; the whole foreign history is summed up in the opposition to one another of the separate interests of the newly rising states, each of which sought to obtain and retain its place in the circle of European nations, and in that foreign trade which now included America...