ABSTRACT
Mercantilism arose in England, as it did in the rest of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in response to a series of economic crises. In providing evidence not only of an under-reported aspect of the seventeenth-century New England economy, but also of how that aspect might have intersected with religious beliefs, Robert Keayne's Apologia, the author have argued, asks to be read as a revision of John Winthrop's Model. A statement about the primacy of contract and the judgment of individual contracting partners, Gerard de Malynes's definition of commutative justice seems at first glance to be supremely equitable. But when juxtaposed to the second of Winthrop's rules of mercy its limitations begin to surface. To the extent that commutative justice left the determination of an individual's socio-economic condition up to the marketplace, it undermined the model of Christian charity and posed a challenge to the Puritan faith.
