Mercantilism, Vol. I

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Eli Heckscher (1879–1952) was a professor at the Stockholm School of economics for 36 years, a giant of economic and intellectual history, and a leading figure in Sweden of conservative liberalism, active in public discourse.

One of his major scholarly achievements is Mercantilism (Swedish, 1931; English, 1935; revised edition, 1955), treating hundreds of years of writings and developments, mainly in England, France, and Germany.

In the Introduction to the 1994 Routledge republication of Mercantilism, Lars Magnusson writes:

[T]he first volume deals with mercantilism as a system of unification. It includes a detailed presentation of the legislative measures taken by national states during the Early Modern era in order to establish a centralized regulative order in an economic sense. The second…volume…begins with Part II “Mercantilism as a system of power”… [Heckscher] seems wholeheartedly to accept the argument by the historicists that the aims of mercantilist policy were to strengthen the power of the state… Part III is devoted to a discussion of mercantilism as a system of protection. It is here that Heckscher presents his famous distinction between a “policy of provision”, so characteristic of the economic administration of medieval towns, and the “system of protection” which belonged to the mercantilist period… Heckscher adds that the system of protectionism could, by and large, be explained by a socio-psychological attitude: “a fear of goods” [which] had its roots in the autarky of the medieval age…. [Heckscher suggests that mercantilist writers] were obsessed with the view that economic development hinged upon a vast circulation of money… In the last section, Heckscher discusses mercantilism as a conception of society.

The present republication is made by permission of Heckscher’s grandson, Sten Heckscher.