ABSTRACT
It was usual, a generation or more ago, to register that presence as 'mercantilism', a 19th-century shorthand for what, in the 18th century, was labelled, reprovingly, as the 'mercantile system', the system identified enduringly with Louis XIV's first great rontriJ!ettr Kinlrfll des fiJl[mres, Jean-
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Baptiste Colbert.' But the 19th-century shorthand, and its additional associations with Alachtpolitik, served mainly to reinforce the point of the earlier 18th-century critique, making it easier for 20th-century liberal and Marxist historiography to consign 'mercantilism' to a discrete epoch in the broader story of European industrialization by equating it with a pre-history of industrial and economic development dominated by princely courts, luxury goods, restrictive guild practices and a misguided obsession with trade balances and bullion flows. Taking these as its cue, and the implication that (for better or worse) mercantilism entailed war and revolution, modern liberal and l\!larxist historiography (particularly after the Second World War) consigned Colbert's system to an economic ancien regime happily displaced by the British 'industrial revolution' of the late 18th century. Reacting against earlier and misleading parallels between late 19th-century Germany and misconceived characterisations of French 'industrial policy' in the age of Louis XIV, modern historiography turned, understandably, away from anachronistic claims about the part played by governments in promoting economic change, concentrating instead upon reconstructing the decentralized processes involved in changes in market structure, population levels, capital formation and per-capita output in the country in which mechanized production was first established. Most recently, the same overdrawn antithesis has been given a libertarian twist (as a sort of retrospective celebration of Silicon Valley's triumph over the Politburo) in which a centralized French 'fountain of privilege' has been set against decentralized British 'old corruption' as the basis of an explanation of the two countries' divergent political and economic fortunes during the 18th century. 11
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The aim of this essay is to try to show how Rousseau 's celebration of Lyon echoed more elaborate discussions of the problem of establishing and maintaining markets for French goods in the early 18th century, when, like any government (despite the best efforts of Louis XIV), the French monarchy had little or no power to determine what took place beyond its borders. As a form of shorthand, the phrase 'fashion's empire', referred to a range of elaborately designed and often very expensive artefacts. In a more extended sense, it referred to a very subtle and decentralized process of social mimicry and emulation generated, firstly, by the 'commerce' between men and women in different positions within the social hierarchy and, secondly, by the pricing and marketing strategies adopted by different networks of traders - from the great Parisian court merchants, to wholesalers exporting to remote colonial markets, to retailers, furnishers and auctioneers -at different stages in the product cycle. Rousseau's poem echoed the claim that the connection between the three - the expensive artefacts, the pricing and marketing strategies of specialized networks of traders, and the 'commerce' between men and women in different positions within the hierarchy of ranks-added up to a system of trade that was both compatible with, but insulated from, the price-driven mechanisms ruling international markets.
