ABSTRACT
The genius of Adam Smith still influences, and is allowed to distort, the economic history of the seventeenth century. His description of the ‘Commercial or Mercantile System’ in the fourth book of The Wealth of Nations, although not inexact in itself, has unhappily provided writers with a title to cover a number of essentially different economic policies. Moreover, ‘the mercantile system’, not a seventeenth-century word but Smith's own invention, is often employed as a term of disparagement to dismiss economic ideas as silly or ignorant. But the real value of the academic theory of Mercantilisms, as expounded by List, Schmoller, and others, is to be found in the stress upon the fact that the principal policies which Smith grouped together, namely, the creation of national monopolies and national restrictions on commerce, were mainly political and not economic in character and aim. In so far as their analysis applied to the Cromwellian era, there is no doubt that they were right. This does not mean, however, that the pressure of economic interests upon the Government was insignificant.
