War and Economic Activity

This chapter stresses how the prevalent activities in every epoch have conditioned the thought of economists on the theme of war. European national states arose and fixed their frontiers in the 1500s and 1600s through a series of wars. At that time, the interest of the state was that of the monarch. The first economists, the French and English mercantile schools, posed as the main economic problem the power and enrichment of the state, and since the technology in that period made it difficult to produce new wealth rapidly, it was considered much simpler to seize the wealth of other countries. Consequently, as far as the mercantile school was concerned, winning wars was an indispensable way to reach economic goals. War also fostered basic economic activities, such as international trade, which was often aggressive and linked to colonial conquest. If this was the prevalent opinion, starting at the end of the 1600s some economists began to consider the negative effects of aggression in trade and to propose a view of international trade as a pacifying and civilizing activity in which the interest of the buyer and the seller balanced. Later on, at the end of the 1700s, with the start of the process of industrialization that allowed for a noteworthy increase in productivity and production, the English and French free traders held that it was not the power of the state, but the well-being of its citizens, that should be the goal of economic activity. Well-being would be achieved through competition in production in a situation of free trade and international peace. Warfare, as it was then seen, was destined to disappear with progress in economic development. So peace was actively sought later on in the late 1800s and early 1900s when some free trade economists came to sustain that this was the main aim of the economy and engaged, sometimes personally, in pacifist activities (Bastiat, Passy). The thought of economic sociologists during the same period when dealing with the relations between war and economic activity was also important.