Mercantilism was an economic policy followed by European nations between 1500-1800 to increase national wealth and power. Leaders believed the key was accumulating gold and silver by ensuring trade surpluses through government intervention. They promoted manufacturing exports, established colonies for resources, and opened foreign markets through trade agreements or force. This mercantilist approach helped drive globalization and eventually led to the industrial revolution in nations like Britain.
Mercantilism was an economic policy followed by European nations between 1500-1800 to increase national wealth and power. Leaders believed the key was accumulating gold and silver by ensuring trade surpluses through government intervention. They promoted manufacturing exports, established colonies for resources, and opened foreign markets through trade agreements or force. This mercantilist approach helped drive globalization and eventually led to the industrial revolution in nations like Britain.
Mercantilism was an economic policy followed by European nations between 1500-1800 to increase national wealth and power. Leaders believed the key was accumulating gold and silver by ensuring trade surpluses through government intervention. They promoted manufacturing exports, established colonies for resources, and opened foreign markets through trade agreements or force. This mercantilist approach helped drive globalization and eventually led to the industrial revolution in nations like Britain.
Mercantilism was an economic policy followed by European nations between 1500-1800 to increase national wealth and power. Leaders believed the key was accumulating gold and silver by ensuring trade surpluses through government intervention. They promoted manufacturing exports, established colonies for resources, and opened foreign markets through trade agreements or force. This mercantilist approach helped drive globalization and eventually led to the industrial revolution in nations like Britain.
MERCANTILISM Mercantilism was an economic doctrine followed by European countries between 1500 and 1800. This was the time when Europe was evolving into the nation-states that we know today, such as Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and so on.
The rulers and leaders in these emerging nations sought to answer the following fundamental question: how can we, as a nation, become strong and secure? These leaders defined a strong country as one that could build and pay for a powerful military, whether on land or at sea, and secure access to vital goods.
The answer they came up with was to accumulate wealth, in the form of gold and silver. In the mercantilist era, precious metals and gemstones were the store of value and currency of exchange. Mercantilist countries decided they had to obtain and stockpile as much gold and silver as possible.
To do this, mercantilists would have to travel far and wide across the world and engage in trade, and to ensure that the trade left them with more gold and silver than they had spent, i.e. exports had to be greater than imports. This is called a trade surplus.
To ensure a trade surplus, governments became very important.
Governments used their powers to ensure domestic importers did not become more powerful than exporters, and to encourage other countries to open their markets and engage in international trade. This was the beginning of what we call today globalization. It started in the 16th century.
As competition among mercantilist countries increased, they began to
realize it was more efficient to simply take control of foreign territories in order to gain from trade, especially territories that contained valuable commodities, such as cotton in India, or gold in South Africa. So eventually, the process of seeking markets in accumulate more national wealth led to colonialism.
Since agriculture existed everywhere around the world, mercantilists
1 identified manufactured goods, especially things made from metals, or machinery of various sorts, such as clocks, as the most promising export sector. So mercantilist governments began to promote manufacturing, often at the expense of farmers in their own countries. This policy eventually led to the industrial revolution, associated closely with the country that rose to great power in the mercantilist era: Great Britain.
