2 - Merchants and States

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Any study of the effects of politics on economic life, especially longdistance trade, runs a grave danger of ratifying the present from the past. We know that one country which created a merchant empire also produced late in the eighteenth century the Great Transmutation of commercial, scientific, and industrial revolutions. There is the obvious danger of seeing the whole period from 1350 to 1750 as a prolegomena to this achievement, and merely looking for the processes in this long early modern period that contributed to the end result of British supremacy. Such an approach can produce distortions of the actual experience of those centuries. Even European “expansion” was not new in the late fifteenth century. Relevant and cautionary here are works by Jones and Scammell; they point to a very long history of European expansion, both internal and external, far predating 1492 or 1498. Scammell's whole book is designed to show elements of continuity in European expansion from 800 to 1650 (he should have gone on to 1750, for it is about then that we can begin to find generic change).

My contribution to this collection lies at the cutting edge of economic history today, for it tries to analyse the effect of one exogenous variable, namely politics, on economic behavior. Before World War II, at least in the English-speaking world, economic history was concerned with wider influences, with political, social, and even ideological and religious impacts on economic activity. Subsequently, economic historians did two things.