ABSTRACT
Questions of international economic relations loomed so large on the horizons of all the authors of this epoch that we have already had to refer more than once to their propositions about these problems. It is nevertheless necessary to return to the charge and to examine some of these propositions more closely in order to introduce another batch of writings and to extract from them what contributions to analytic economics they may contain. I shall group those propositions under the headings of Export Monopolism, Exchange Control, and Balance of Trade. Doctrines concerning the second and third, particularly the third, are usually considered the core of that imaginary organon, the ‘mercantilist system’ of traditional teaching. To many economists, they mean in fact the whole of it. This tradition was established by Adam Smith, whose famous attack upon what he called (following, perhaps, the lead of the physiocrats) the Commercial or Mercantile System (Wealth, Fourth Book) centered in an argument about the balance of trade, although he was not blind to other aspects.
