Debating Capitalism and Economic Modernity in Early Modern Europe

This chapter reviews historians, economists’ and other scholars’ debates on markets, mercantilism and state formation since the Renaissance with specific respect to economic policies known under the “mercantilist” and “Cameralist” label, and their contributions made to the unfolding and idiosyncratic varieties of capitalism in early modern Europe. Markets were ubiquitous in early modern Europe, and mercantilist–Cameralist political economy was positively attuned towards regulating and perfecting markets in the interest of the common good. The central argument is that we cannot see “state” and “economy” as either separate or different interest spheres in the way many scholars still do today (Most recently, Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty [London: Penguin, 2019]), nor were mercantilism and Cameralism “anti-market” in any way (quite the contrary). By the same token the present chapter also calls us to critically engage with the notion that before the eighteenth-century continental European societies were leaning more towards traditional notions of a “moral economy” which would only later, during Polanyi’s Great Transition, be gradually surpassed by a more capitalist mentality and outlook on the material economy. In this way the chapter offers a new view on the dynamics of markets and political economy in pre-industrial Europe that transcends both popular narratives on European society “before capitalism”, as well as mercantilism and related political economies as anti-market and welfare-reducing.