ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the debates of the 1620s in which different views clashed on such matters as the consequences of the outflow of monies, trade balances and the very nature of trade crises like the one that developed in England at the beginning of the 1620s. The chapter shows how the contemporary discussion of the 1620s' crisis gave rise to a specific literature dealing with economic issues which concerned the balance of trade and many have preferred to call 'mercantilist'. That it aroused in such an economic context does not of course delimit its analytical value. On the contrary, in order to understand and find remedies for the crisis, people like Thomas Mun had to rethink how the economy operated. As Supple so acutely puts it, there is surely 'a strategic connexion between economic dislocation and development of economic thought'. The process of rethinking implied the emergence of a kind of analysis quite different from the existing one.
