histofthought1

516 Economic thought before Adam Smithed., Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 664,687. See also Odd Langholm,Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic EconomicSources (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979), pp. 30, 38n.MercantilismThe best introduction to the subject is an excellent work and a marvel ofcompression: Harry A. Miskimin's The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe:1460-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The greatclassic work, and deservedly so, is Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (2 vols,1935, 2nd rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1955). Heckscher's emphasis onmercantilism as building the nation-state has suffered from unfair criticism inrecent years. State-building, and Heckscher's stress on mercantilist ideology,simply need to be supplemented by insight into mercantilism as a system oflobbying for and achieving monopoly and cartel privileges and subsidiesfrom the state in return for political support and/or money to the Crown. I tryto begin such a synthesis in my "Mercantilism: ALesson for Our TimeT, TheFreeman, 13 (Nov. 1963), pp. 16-27, reprinted in Ideas on Liberty, Vol. XI(lrvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964). RobertB. Ekelund, Ir and Robert D. Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society:Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Station, Texas:Texas A&M University Press, 1981) tries to fill the gap left by Heckscher.But while its gloss on Heckscher is sometimes useful, Ekelund and Tollisonis excessively schematic, in the public choice tradition, undervaluing the roleof ideas in history, especially the role of free market and classical liberalideology.John Ulric Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540­1640 (1940, New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), is an excellent comparativestudy of the effect of mercantilist policies on industrial development inEngland and France. For England, S.T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Baltimore:Penguin Books, 1950), is trenchant and surprisingly hard-hitting. For France,Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (2vols, 1939, Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1964), is the classic work onColbert and on French mercantilism, despite his admiration for both. Thepost-Colbert French story in the seventeenth century is told in Cole's FrenchMercantilism, 1683-1700 (1943, New York: Octagon Press, 1965). WarrenC. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development,1680-1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), presentsan interesting revisionist critique of the extent of economic havoc actuallywreaked by Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.On the English monopoly foreign trade companies in the Elizabethan era,see Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. I: The American Coloniesin the 17th Century (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975).