Strange Origins of Capitalism

This chapter builds upon preceding chapters, working towards a conclusion. Its first section discusses an under-rated example of British mercantilism in practice positively promoting eighteenth-century capitalism and economic development in one of the smaller (and most dynamic) nations of the West: Scotland. Scotland was a European nation, with trade links as close as those with England during the early modern period; after the Union 1707 it vanished as an independent kingdom and underwent a fundamental transformation in overseas trade in terms of volume and trade orientation, before contributing to the first industrial revolution. The chapter then wraps up by summarizing debates and discourses on the continent, by mainly focusing on some key ideas of the mercantilists and Cameralists on freedom, capitalism and economic development in early modern Europe—the age of capitalism’s ascendancy. These ideas were widely shared across Europe and outside the German-speaking lands, where Cameralism is usually located by scholars, thus suggesting a new use of the term mercantilism as a Sonderweg within a broader European mainstream way of thought that may be better encapsulated in the terminus technicus of Cameralism. The third section places debates about Cameralism and mercantilism in a wider scholarly perspective from Marx to Hilferding and Sombart. I conclude that Mercantilism on the one hand was not what it is usually assumed to have been, especially from a modern (neo)liberal perspective; on the other hand, what we can see as “mercantilist” social and market theory represented key ingredients to the making of modern capitalism, in Britain as well as beyond. This can be demonstrated focusing on continental European countries—here: the Germanies (mainly)—and their political economies in the age of capitalism’s ascendancy, usually embodied in the strange beast called Cameralism.