Here are 100 books that Mercantilism fans have personally recommended if you like
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The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth is the second volume of my nationalism trilogy. When I published the first volume,Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, the accepted view on the subject of nationalism was that it is a product of economic development, specifically, of industrialization and capitalism. On the basis of historical evidence, I proved that its emergence had nothing to do with these economic phenomena: in fact, it preceded both. Reviews of Nationalism, noting that, for this reason, economic developments could not have caused nationalism, raised the question what relationship, then, did exist between nationalism and the economy, and this led me to investigate it.
This book is a rare attempt by an eminent economic historian to examine cultural determinants of economic growth and answer the question whyit happens, which distinguishes it sharply from the discipline’s exclusive focus on how it proceeds.
Landes, in other words, disentangles the explanation of causes from the preoccupation with the process, which is why I recommend this book.
Now that the old division of the world into the two power blocs of East and West has subsided, the great gap in wealth and health that separates North and South remains the single greatest problem and danger facing the world of the Third Millennium. The only challenge of comparable scope and difficulty is the threat of the environmental deterioration, and the two are intimately connected, indeed are one. David Landes argues that the North-South division is the great drama of our times, and that drama implies tension, passion, conflict and disappointment as well as happy outcomes. While Landes does…
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth is the second volume of my nationalism trilogy. When I published the first volume,Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, the accepted view on the subject of nationalism was that it is a product of economic development, specifically, of industrialization and capitalism. On the basis of historical evidence, I proved that its emergence had nothing to do with these economic phenomena: in fact, it preceded both. Reviews of Nationalism, noting that, for this reason, economic developments could not have caused nationalism, raised the question what relationship, then, did exist between nationalism and the economy, and this led me to investigate it.
The Wealth of Nations is the foundational text of modern economics, reflecting – contrary to the common notion – the clearly national consciousness of its author and demonstrating that modern economic imagination (and activity) is a product of nationalism.
Its nationalist inspiration is the main reason I recommend reading it, for the commonplace interpretations of this classic miss this most interesting aspect of the work. In addition, it is a delightful text.
First published in 1776, the year in which the American Revolution officially began, Smith’s Wealth of Nations sparked a revolution of its own. In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.
Criticizing mercantilists who sought to use the state to increase their nations’ supply of precious metals, Smith points out that a nation’s wealth should be measured by the well-being of its people. Prosperity in…
As a student of mythology and archetypal psychology, I invite you to interrogate your assumptions about self and society, to consider the narratives that we all take for granted. We live between great polar opposites. One is how our leaders embody old, toxic stories. The other asks who we might become if we imagine new ones. But only by dropping our sense of innocence and acknowledging the depths of our darkness can we open ourselves to the possibilities of real transformation. I invite you inside our mythic walls, to examine what it means to be an American. I hope to facilitate a collective initiation and invite you to think mythologically.
This country was settled primarily by Puritan extremists who imprinted their deep distrust of the body’s needs onto future generations. The Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination led to a uniquely American situation. As wealth became a sign of grace, poverty indicated moral failure.
Weber’s classic book describes the process in which a perspective that began in renunciation was transformed into the drive to work incessantly in the pursuit of worldly success and, eventually, conspicuous consumption. As the strictly religious fervor dissipated over time, the competitive quest for efficiency, productivity, wealth, and the self-validation they symbolized remained and became our most fundamental value.
What others would later call the “American Dream” endures because, like no other myth, it promises fulfillment both in this world and the next. This helped me understand our obsession with individualism and why America ignores or mistreats many of its children simply because their parents are…
In The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and relates the rise of the capitalist economy to the Calvinist belief in the moral value of hard work and the fulfillment of one's worldly duties.
The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth is the second volume of my nationalism trilogy. When I published the first volume,Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, the accepted view on the subject of nationalism was that it is a product of economic development, specifically, of industrialization and capitalism. On the basis of historical evidence, I proved that its emergence had nothing to do with these economic phenomena: in fact, it preceded both. Reviews of Nationalism, noting that, for this reason, economic developments could not have caused nationalism, raised the question what relationship, then, did exist between nationalism and the economy, and this led me to investigate it.
This book, originally published in 1960, is the classical statement of the still dominant position in economic history, which assumes that economic growth is natural and which I have proven wrong.
I recommend it to anyone interested in the current (unchanging for decades) state of the discipline as an essential model of what I was arguing against.
2017 Reprint of 1960 First Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. In the text Professor Rostow gives an account of economic growth based on a dynamic theory of production and interpreted in terms of actual societies. Five basic stages of economic growth are distinguished with detailed discussions of each stage including illustrative examples. Rostow also applies the concept of stages of growth to an examination of the problems of military aggression and the nuclear arms race. The final chapter includes a comparison of his non-communist manifesto with Marxist theory. Remains a classic text…
I am a retired professor of History and International Political Economy. Unraveling knotted masses of string was a relaxing, enjoyable activity for me while growing up. As a historian, I continue to pick apart entangled matters, particularly about capitalism as a complex system. Networks give structure to complex systems, and I find networked merchants in the modern era (ca. 1500- 1945) especially fascinating to study. Who were they? How did they create opportunities and work across borders and cultures? How did they work around adversities? How did they both perpetuate and diversify their networks? How did they link to and collaborate with one another? How do networks evolve?
I gravitate to this work because it demonstrates how messy trade circuits can be, emerging more organically than by design. British merchants didn’t just do business with British colonists in the Americas; ditto Dutch merchants with folks in Dutch possessions (and ditto every other imperial power that thought it had exclusive commercial dibs on its own colonies).
Nope, don’t worry about those mercantilist strictures: networked Dutch and British merchants found ways to collaborate across boundaries and across cultures in the colonial era, from New York to the Caribbean to Suriname—and the slave trade was no small part of their motivation.
Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been…
I’m a Canadian political economist working in Australia as an Associate Professor in International Relations and Political Economy at the University of Wollongong, just south of Sydney. I’ve been fascinated by the history of capitalism and money since post-graduate school. Eventually I had some time to do a deep dive into the existing scholarly literature on money and have so far written two books on the topic and multiple articles. I hope you enjoy my book recommendations as much as I enjoyed reading them.
I would argue that the history of capitalism is also the history of money. You can’t understand one without the other.
The Currency of Empire is masterfully written and researched.
Why I loved this book so much is not only because it filled many gaps in my knowledge of the history of money in the United States, but also that it has a keen focus on political power and the different interests among the colonists and England.
If you want to understand how money and monetary systems are created within relations of power this book is essential for you. Another must-read that should not be missed.
In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas.
The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation. As Barth shows, money was also a flash point for resistance; many colonists acutely resented their subordinate economic station,…
I’m fascinated by systems of thought and very interested in understanding how we can improve our ability to create a better society for all. I think the past makes a good laboratory for investigating these kinds of questions. I got interested in early modern economic theory while researching the English East India Company for my dissertation in the sociology department of Columbia University, which was a great place for historical and computational sociology. I now teach economic sociology and theory as a professor at Yale University, another institution with amazing strengths in history, data science, and computational methods.
This book is a classic and a pleasure to read. If you like Natalie Zemon Davis, you will like Joyce Appleby. It is a terrific introduction to the fascinating world of early modern economic thought and solidifies the importance of mercantilist thought in the era of power and plenty and ships of the line.
My grandfather was a labour activist in Hull in the UK and my father had many classic labour texts such as the book by Tressell, listed below. That got me interested in the world of work and later more specifically in managing people. I moved from studying economics to employment relations /human resource management. Given that most of us (workers) spend 80,000 hours of our lives at work - more time than we are likely to spend on any other activity during our lifetimes - how we spend these lives has remained a source of fascination
It was on the shelf at home (a big red covered book with very small print!) and is very much seen as a classic of working-class literature.
Tressell wrote this semi-autobiographical account of his time as a housepainter and presented the workers as philanthropists who work desperately hard to enable profits for the bosses. The book was rejected by publishers in his lifetime and only published after his death, his daughter having saved the book from his desire to burn it after rejection from several publishers.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics as the only hope for a civilized and humane life for all. This Wordsworth edition includes an exclusive foreword by the late Tony Benn.
As a Professor of Economic History at the Oxford University, I taught the history of economic thought and wrote articles and a book in the field (The Nobel Factor).I love the limpid style and encompassing view of the classical economists (the first century after Smith). Their literary and academic styles have been abandoned, but they still have a great deal to teach. The role of land and natural resources as a factor of production in their theory has become relevant again as the environment comes under pressure. I also published in several other fields. My latest book is Understanding the Private-Public Divide: Markets, Governments and Time Horizons (2022).
Despite its austere title and exterior, this may be the best book ever written in the history of economic thought.
At its heart is the debate between defenders of fiat money and adherents of the gold standard during the Napoleonic wars in Britain, and some decades afterwards. This debate set the parameters of monetary discourse from that day to this – whether money should serve the economy or vice versa.
Written with unmatched clarity, precision, and penetration.
In this book, originally published in 1937, Jacob Viner traces, in a series of studies of contemporary source-material, the evolution of the modern orthodox theory of international trade from its beginnings in the revolt against English mercantilism in the 17th and 18th centuries, through the English currency and tariff controversies of the 19th century, to the late 20th century. The author offers a detailed examination of controversies in the technical literature centering on important propositions of the classical and neo-classical economists relating to the theory of the mechanism of international trade and the theory of gain from trade.
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.
More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these…
