This book hinges upon ideas and discourses variously known under labels such as “Mercantilism” and “Cameralism”. Often viewed as antithesis of capitalism, inclusive institutions and good economy in the “West”, this book re-assembles them and builds them into a coherent origin story of modern capitalism. It explores the field of intellectual and conceptual history, especially the history of Renaissance and Mercantilism in a longer history of capitalism. Rather than hindrances, the author argues that Mercantilist and Cameralist political economies presented essential stepping stones of modern capitalism, in Britain and beyond. This book will be of interest to academics and students in general economic history, the history of capitalism, economic development and the history of economic thought.
Author(s): Philipp Robinson Rössner
Series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 175
City: Cham
Preface
Contents
List of Figures
1 Cameralism, Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind
Was English Really Capitalism’s First Language?
Freedom and Capitalism: Rethinking the Political Economy of Societal Change, 1300s–1800s
Cameralism, Mercantilism and the Making of the Wealth of Nations
Mercantilism, Liberalism and Capitalism: A Non-Anglocentric Perspective
Enter Cameralism: A Lost Road to Capitalism?
Deep and Hidden Histories of Laissez-Faire: Sketching the Argument
2 Debating Capitalism and Economic Modernity in Early Modern Europe
How Old Is Capitalism?
Political Economies of Markets and Economic Lives in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Historians’ Debates
Mercantilism, Capitalism and Nations That Did Not Fail: On the Origins of Prosperity
3 Early Modern Economic Lives
Pigs, Geese and Purgatory: Frameworks of Economic Life in Early Modern Continental Europe
Discoveries of the Future and the Origin of Economic Dynamics
Household Oeconomy, the Rise of Fiscal States and Societal Structure as a Force to Be Reckoned with When Explaining Political Economies of Development—The Very Peculiar Case of the Holy Roman Empire, pars pro toto
4 Early Modern Political Economy and the Market: A Life on the Margins?
From Oikonomics to Economics: Marginalizing Oeconomy
Origins of Growth and Early Modern Political Economy
Agrarian Economies and the Origin of Modern Economic Thought
5 Capitalism and Freedom in Pre-modern Thought
The Dark Origins of Liberalism
Dialectics of Modernity in Pre-industrial Europe
Freedoms in the Plural: Early Modern Discourses on “Liberty” (Fryheit)
Feudalism, Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Why Smithianism Didn’t Work
The Cameralist Way Towards Capitalism in Early Modern Europe
6 Creating Freedom, Constructing “Laissez-Faire”
Governing Freedom: Autocratic Origins of Laissez-Faire
Constitutional Black-Holes, Enlightened Despots and Cameralist Economic Enlightenment: How Laissez-Faire Was Created in Continental Europe
7 Strange Origins of Capitalism
Contrasting Capitalisms: British Capitalism Revisited Through a Scottish Lens
Mercantilism and “Capitalism on Home Ground”—Commercial Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century (1736–1771)
Leviathan Unchained: Industry and the Making of the Wealth of Nations
Conclusions: Cameralism, Mercantilism and Origins of Capitalism
Index
