ABSTRACT
The discovery in the 1490s of the Americas and new ocean routes to India and the Spice Islands initiated a new transoceanic trade in luxury goods. The conception of foreign trade as sheer necessity, which remained in vogue well into the eighteenth century, had everything to do with the belief that no country could be self-sufficient. The idea of a divine interest in international trade was by no means an early modern invention. The belief in a God-ordained international trade reached unprecedented popularity in the second half of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the Renaissance discourses in which the idea of a providential origin of international trade gained a foothold was French political philosophy. Free trade in the modern sense of the term, meaning an unregulated international trade without import and export barriers, came into vogue only later and had far fewer supporters.
