The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State are Leaving Communities Behind. Raghuram Rajan
– a practice which was called mercantilism. It was thought this would create more domestic jobs and income, exactly the argument that today’s populist politicians put forward. A collateral benefit would be that as a country sold more abroad than it imported, it would accumulate gold and silver, allowing it to reduce its dependence on foreign loans. So over and above the domestic restraints on competition, nations imposed tariffs on imports, and encouraged exports by offering subsidies. Not only did all this subject domestic consumers to yet higher prices, it gave domestic producers yet another layer of protection from the need to compete and innovate. Indeed, that was the purpose of mercantilism – to favour domestic producers over consumers.
Mercantilism, as we have seen with the recent export-led growth of Asian economies, can be helpful in the initial stage of a country’s growth, provided other countries do not join in. If, however, other countries practise a tit-for-tat mercantilism, it impoverishes everyone. Moreover, as economic philosopher David Hume argued, if a country did prove successful in exporting more than it imported through mercantilist policies, the resulting inflow of gold and silver would eventually raise domestic wages, rendering its producers uncompetitive.22 Furthermore, mercantilism, appealing as it was to producer interests in the short run, created distortions over the long run. It led to inefficient production methods and investment in the wrong industries. It raised prices of goods domestically, and hurt consumers who consequently had to consume less. It prevented the imports of capital equipment that could help make industry more competitive (in some industries, then as now, countries also forbade the export of capital equipment or knowhow or even travel by expert workers for fear of giving up their competitive edge). Finally, it made producers yet more dependent on the sovereign for protection, preventing them from emerging as an independent power.
Clever monarchs repeatedly emphasised national identity as an alternative to religious, regional, feudal, or community loyalties. This made mercantilism easier for the public to swallow. Nationalism helped justify higher prices, for they were the cost of keeping jobs at home, thus making the nation stronger. For example, the preamble to the Book of Rates in 1610 (which set trade tariffs in England) appealed to this sentiment, stating that importing unfinished raw materials from other countries was better for ‘the people of our kingdom might thereby be set on work’. Other finished goods imports were frivolous and not ‘for the necessary use of our subjects or any ways for enriching our kingdom’. If it was desirable to prefer ‘our own people to strangers’, it was better to set tariffs on such imports ‘than that the people of our own kingdom should not be set on work or the country impoverished by the importation of unprofitable or unnecessary merchandises’.23 There is probably no pithier statement of mercantilist nationalism – import less, consume less, produce more!
Nationalism attempted to bring the country together under one monarch. The advantage, then as now, is that it provided a potent force to motivate citizens to support a national programme, usually war, as the power of religion to motivate waned. It also allowed the monarch to break down internal barriers – instead of town-based guilds with small local markets, the monarch encouraged nationwide guilds. The disadvantage, then as now, is that it could be misused to persuade people to support unnecessary wars or policies like mercantilism that served narrow interests, and were against the collective good.
Fortunately for England, it was hard to suppress competition and the market indefinitely. As with the feudal manor, market forces started eroding some of these cozy restrictive arrangements.24 Skilled craftsmen who were unwilling to put up with the guild’s anticompetitive rules moved to suburban and rural areas, outside the guild’s reach.25 Adam Smith wrote, ‘If you would have your work tolerably executed, it must be done in the suburbs where the workmen, having no exclusive privileges, have nothing but their character to depend upon, and you must then smuggle it into the town as well as you can.’26
Competition from foreign producers was also a constraint on how restrictive local guilds or monopoly companies could be. In countries with long coastlines close to major towns such as England or the Netherlands, ships could bring goods quickly in bulk. If there was a sufficient gap between foreign and domestic prices, either because the guild set prices high or because it produced too little given unexpected demand, imports would flood in. The guild could collude with the mercantilist government to impose high tariffs, but with governments having limited resources with which to police borders, smuggling went on all the time to thwart such intent.27 Most entities therefore had to be somewhat competitive, and could not become overly dependent on the state for protection and profits. Along with its independent gentry, therefore, England had a number of independent merchants and craft-masters, even amidst the monarchy-sanctioned monopolies.
In the next section, we will see how the monarchy became constitutionally limited and more able to borrow directly from citizens, but once it achieved this, it had no real need to continue to privilege certain businesses, especially as it also built out a reliable revenue service to collect its taxes. Conversely, with the government more predictable and solvent, business did not need the extra protection of organisations like guilds or merchant companies. Guilds became largely toothless in the two most constitutionally limited and market-oriented European states, England and Holland, by the end of the seventeenth century. They morphed into brotherhoods and friendship societies, characterised by annual dinners full of pomp and show and plenty of alcohol, but with little actual business.28
SUSTAINABLE FINANCING FOR THE STATE
Let us return to the problem of state revenues. Ideally, the state’s freedom to act would be limited to legitimate actions, not arbitrary or despotic ones, but it should have the capability to act firmly and quickly to deal with the nation’s domestic or external problems when needed. Herein lay the catch. If the king had a powerful standing army and a professional revenue service that collected substantial taxes, that is he had the capability to act, he also typically obtained the freedom to commit any act – hence the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV in France, for example. An alternative was to have a king with very modest government capability, for example one with a small army and no revenue service, as in England under the Stuarts. However, even though the weak monarchy’s capabilities were constrained by the need to raise money to fund any new action, it had not given up its freedom to act. As a result, it tussled constantly with Parliament. England needed firm prespecified boundaries on what the monarch could do so that he could be freed to roam within them.
The gentry and the increasingly independent merchants and moneylenders were a potential bulwark against the king, a force that could place these boundaries. The king had to unite the forces against him, though, for them to have enough influence. This the Stuarts unwittingly managed to do.
The Stuarts’ Errors
The Stuarts’ need for funds led them to antagonise the propertied, both landowners as well as businessmen. James I started selling knighthoods, a practice continued by his son, Charles I. When the going rate for a title declined because so many were sold, they sold higher titles and even peerages. Not only was the old aristocracy aggrieved because their status had been diluted as they were joined by the newly wealthy, even the latter were angry because the titles they had paid so much for were devalued through overissue. Businessmen were angry because customs duties were raised frequently without notice or Parliamentary approval, and when no other sources of revenue could be found, loans were extracted forcibly from the wealthy, offering little prospect of repayment. There were other irritations, but having united powerful elements of the landed interests and rich businessmen against them, was it any surprise that the English Civil War between the Royalist supporters of the Stuarts and the Parliamentarians ended in the victory of the latter and the beheading of Charles I in 1649? Parliament and the forces it represented, when provoked, was stronger than the king.
The Stuarts got another chance. After the death of the parliamentary leader, Oliver Cromwell, the Stuarts were restored to the throne. However, what Talleyrand said of the Bourbons was true of the Stuarts too: ‘They