ABSTRACT
Adam Smith, a leader in the Scottish Enlightenment, had put on paper a universal formula for prosperity and financial independence that would, over the course of the eighteenth century, revolutionize the way citizens and leaders thought about and practiced economics and trade. The great British economist Alfred Marshall called economics the study of "the ordinary business of life". According to Smith, mercantilist policies only imitate real prosperity and benefit only the producers and the monopolists. In 1763, he said, "the wealth of a state consists in the cheapness of provisions and all other necessaries and conveniences of life". David Hume debunked mercantilist claims that acquiring more specie would lower interest rates and promote prosperity. The mercantilists believed that the world's economy was stagnant and its wealth fixed, so that one nation grew only at the expense of another. According to the established mercantilist system, wealth consisted entirely of money per se, which at the time meant gold and silver.
