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.
