Early Modern Economic Lives

This chapter provides a concise overview on early modern European economic lives—the groundwork or empirical pre-text for subsequent analyses of political economic and economic discourse relating to the mercantilist spectrum: trade, urban industry and the improvement of economic lives by a combination of private vices and public virtues. Early modern economic lives, as well as underlying cosmological outlooks, midframes and time horizons, especially the virtues of the “here-and-there” compared to the Afterlife and Purgatory, Hell and eternal time, combined with social inequality embodied particularly within a framework of noble privileges, demesne systems and feudal economy provided a material and mental framework different from post-1800 capitalism. Political economy was adjusted accordingly (and looked very different from post-1800 political economy). This has often led to modern scholars putting mercantilism, Cameralism and other contemporary political economies in boxes were they ill-fit or do not really belong (e.g. “heterodox”, suboptimal, rent seeking, etc.). In order to understand pre-industrial capitalism and its dynamics we need to shed modern concepts and definitions of it. Accordingly, political economy during the early modern period often started with modelling the agrarian household—as city life and urban economic activities still represented a life at the margin. However, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries political economy turned more and more towards the margins, picking up questions of trade, competitiveness and economic development on a larger scale, integrating into their models agrarian lives on the ground, and taking account of the prevailing frameworks of hindrances and negative dynamics.