Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris
and tolls had traditionally been administered by cities, towns, or parishes.11 The English monarch’s coffers, topped off by duties and subsidies imposed on goods both entering and leaving the country, came increasingly to be identified in mainstream political writing with the wealth and weal of the nation.
This identification was given considerable impetus by the Reformation and the resulting centralization of England’s political power in the king and the state. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, England witnessed a sustained standardization of economic policy and practice, motivated in large part by the objective of ensuring a ready supply of royal treasure in the event of war against hostile European Catholic powers. The emergent discourse of England’s national wealth was also bolstered by the opening up of new sea trade routes to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the resulting pirate wars waged against Spain and the Ottomans by crown-sanctioned privateers and freebooters such as Sir Francis Drake. Even though the main beneficiaries of such activities were the queen and the privateers themselves, Drake and his ilk were lionized as national heroes who had “enriched [their] Countries store.”12 The rise of new associations of capital for foreign trade also helped fuel a sense of economic nationalism. Like Drake, these associations were lent legitimacy by the crown as representatives of the nation: whereas earlier merchant adventuring companies had been identified with cities, a charter in 1566 was awarded to the Merchant Adventurers of England. The brace of new early modern English regulated and joint-stock trading companies—including the Muscovy Company (chartered in 1555), the Levant Company (1581), the East India Company (1601), and the Virginia Company (1606)—likewise claimed to represent the interests of the nation, even as they lined the pockets of their principals and major shareholders.13 It is no accident that two of the mercantilists, Misselden and Mun, were officeholders in English trading companies—Misselden with the Merchant Adventurers and Mun with the East India Company.
As Heckscher argued, the growing alignment of mercantile interests with those of the English crown and nation hardly constituted a mercantile system. Yet his Hegelian alternative to the Smithian state policy paradigm seems itself problematic. To view mercantilism as primarily a set of ideas about commerce is to run the risk of parenthesizing its material forms and effects, whether economic or cultural. To the extent that mercantilism existed at all, it may be more accurate to understand what von Schmoller termed its “nation-making” power at the level not of ideas or statecraft but of discourse. This new understanding would entail recasting mercantilism as something more than simply an ideology and less than a mode of state-controlled production, accumulation, distribution, or exchange. Throughout this study, I propose to analyze mercantilism as primarily a discursive rather than an ideological or economic system. It may not be a particularly coherent discourse but, like any other, it is characterized by certain strategies of signification, by means of which it produces both knowledge and power. Here I follow the lead of Mary Poovey, who in her remarkable study A History of the Modern Fact analyzes mercantilism as a discourse in which numerical representation first became the epistemological bedrock of truth. In this, she signals a large debt to Michel Foucault’s interpretation of mercantilism in The Order of Things as constituting a new mode of representation founded on precise exchange.14 My analysis differs from both Poovey’s and Foucault’s, however, inasmuch as I am interested in mercantilism as a discourse less of “factual” or “precise” representation than of transnational typology. It is this typology that has bequeathed the framework within which the West continues to imagine both national and global economy.
Understanding mercantilism as a discourse, however, necessitates a preliminary sketch of its admittedly vague ideological premises. The disparate body of work produced by Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun is rife with disagreement, much of it vehement, about how England’s economy was organized, the nature of its dysfunctions, and what the sovereign needed to do (or not do) to manage England’s trade with other nations.15 But all four writers shared fundamental assumptions. Each saw the wealth of the nation as the responsibility of the state, and the prince as the fons et origo of the nation’s riches, even as he is aided and abetted by merchants. And each assumed that the goal of mercantile activity is to increase the nation’s wealth, less in the form of productivity or capital assets than of money—that is, gold and silver treasure acquired from abroad. The early “bullionist” mercantilists of the 1590s and 1600s, Malynes and Milles, believed that the nation’s treasure should be hoarded at all costs, and any export of bullion out of England vigorously discouraged. The later “balance-of-trade” mercantilists of the 1620s, Misselden and Mun, tolerated the export of limited quantities of bullion, but only as capital guaranteed to bring back more gold and silver into the country’s coffers.16 Despite these differences, all four writers subscribed to a zero-sum conception of global wealth, according to which one nation’s gain was almost invariably another’s loss. Foreign countries, then, were rivals and even enemies. Because of the conviction that global commerce entailed England’s competing with other nations for finite quantities of bullion, mercantilist discourse displays a marked xenophobic tendency: Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and occasionally the “Jewish nation” and the Low Countries are cast as the villains from whom English bullion must be protected or expropriated.
Despite this hostility, all four men argued that England’s wealth could be augmented only if England joined with other nations in observing certain universal laws of commerce. In doing so, they followed the doctrine of cosmopolitan universal economy advanced by classical writers from Plato to Plutarch, according to which global commerce followed inevitably from the dispersal of necessary resources and commodities around the world. The difference was that the English mercantilists adapted this doctrine to explain trade between nations.17 In Free Trade, or The Meanes to Make Trade Florish, for example, Edward Misselden makes the case that
to the end there should be a Commerce amongst men, it hath pleased God to inuite as it were, one Countrey to traffique with another, by the variety of things which the one hath, and the other hath not: that so that which is wanting to the one, might be supplied by the other, that all might have sufficient.… Which thing the very windes and seas proclaime, in giving passage to all nations: the windes blowing sometimes towards one Country, sometimes toward another; that so by this divine justice, every one might be supplyed in things necessary for life and maintenance.18
Likewise, in his voluminous treatise of 1622, the Lex Mercatoria (or the “Law-Merchant”), Gerard Malynes argues that despite the “great diuersitie amongst all Nations … in the course of trafficke and commerce,” there is a “sympathy, concordance and agreement, which may bee said to bee of like condition to all people.” These universal laws of global “trafficke and commerce” between “Nations,” he insists, are “an inuention and gift of God.”19 Even as he attributes the doctrine of cosmopolitan economy to God, Malynes relies here—as he does throughout his treatise—on the Roman jurists’ distinction between ius, or prince’s law, and lex, or customary and natural law. His association of mercantile trade with the latter was part and parcel of the transformation of economics from a subset of ethics to an autonomous, protoscientific discipline. For the medieval scholastics, economics had tended to be a matter of individual morality; “good” practices of commerce avoided the sins of covetousness, miserliness, usury, and luxury. By contrast, the mercantilist appeal to the higher laws of “nature” helped ratify a new object of knowledge: an orderly, systematic sphere of transnational commerce whose workings could be ascertained through empirical observation.20
Perhaps the natural law that most distinguishes mercantilist conceptions of national wealth production is that of the balance of trade. Misselden articulates it as follows: “If the Natiue Commodities exported doe waigh downe and exceed in value the forraine Commodities imported; it is a rule that neuer faile’s, that then the Kingdome growe’s rich, and prosper’s in estate and stocke: because the ouerplus must needs come in, in treasure.”21 Although this theory was explicitly outlined only in the work of the so-called balance-of-trade mercantilists, a version of it is also implicit in the work of the earlier bullionists. Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun took it as a rule of thumb that selling native commodities to strangers brings treasure into the nation, while the import of foreign wares stands to lose it.