ABSTRACT
Mercantilism is a policy common among western European powers from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries that promoted a positive balance of trade by restricting imports, favoring nationally owned shipping, and encouraging exports. Corporatisms view of mercantilism is closer to realism insofar as it appreciates the power of mercantilism. Corporatism understands that mercantilism also greatly enhanced and concentrated private power. The key instruments of mercantilism were government regulations and private corporations chartered as monopolies by law. The force required to sustain trading monopolies led to frequent wars among the mercantile powers, as Coen suggests. Theorists like Hume and Rousseau believed that the war-prone international system generated by European mercantilism would tend toward a balance of power. Their insights are the foundation of the modern realist theory of international relations. The financial revolution that swept the Netherlands during the seventeenth century and England during the eighteenth century both perfected mercantilism and nourished the seeds of its demise.
