Introduction

This chapter describes that non-European contexts and actors played an important role in stimulating and reorienting ideological debate about mercantilism. It examines the relationship between English commercial interactions and the formulation of economic theory by analysing the East India Company's operations in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The chapter suggests that the corporate structure provided by the East India Company was central to the formulation of mercantilist doctrine. Historians of early modern commerce and political economy remain pessimistic about the conceptual utility and explanatory power of the term 'mercantilism'. In Eurocentric accounts of mercantilism, the overseas trading corporation is the primary executor of mercantilist doctrine because corporations proposed to channel international exchanges in ways that ensured their domicile economy would benefit at the expense of both European trading rivals and the international customers and suppliers of the corporations in places like Surat, Batavia, Cape Coast and Aleppo.