1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910554277703321

Autore

Erikson Emily

Titolo

Trade and nation : how companies and politics reshaped economic thought / / Emily Erikson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, New York State : , : Columbia University Press, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

0-231-54544-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (311 pages) : illustrations

Collana

The Middle Range Series

Classificazione

NW 2350

Disciplina

381.0942

Soggetti

Merchants - History - Great Britain - 17th century

Free trade - History - Great Britain - 17th century

Great Britain Commerce History 17th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Introduction -- Chapter One. The Declining Importance of Fair Exchange -- Chapter Two. Transformative Debates -- Chapter Three. Key Actors, Institutions, and Relations -- Chapter Four. Authors and Their Networks -- Chapter Five. Representation, Companies, and Publications -- Chapter Six. Why Not the Dutch? -- Conclusion -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

In the seventeenth century, English economic theorists lost interest in the moral status of exchange and became increasingly concerned with the roots of national prosperity. This shift marked the origins of classical political economy and provided the foundation for the contemporary discipline of economics. The seventeenth-century revolution in economic thought fundamentally reshaped the way economic processes have been interpreted and understood. In Trade and Nation, Emily Erikson brings together historical, comparative, and computational methods to explain the institutional forces that brought about this transformation.Erikson pinpoints how the rise of the company form in confluence with the political marginalization of English merchants created an opening for public argumentation over economic matters. Independent merchants, who were excluded from



state institutions and vast areas of trade, confronted the power and influence of crown-endorsed chartered companies. Their distance from the halls of government drove them to take their case to the public sphere. The number of merchant-authored economic texts rose as members of this class sought to show that their preferred policies would contribute to the benefit of the state and commonwealth. In doing so, they created and disseminated a new moral framework of growth, prosperity, and wealth for evaluating economic behavior. By using computational methods to document these processes, Trade and Nation provides both compelling evidence and a prototype for how methodological innovations can help to provide new insights into large-scale social processes.