NOTE VENUE & TIME/DAY. ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THOUGHT: 16th-19thCE.

Dominant from the 16th - 18th CE among colonial powers, mercantilism was a nationalist economic policy aimed at strengthening state power through trade operating on the following assumptions

Bullionism, an earlier form of mercantilism, focused specifically on the role of accumulating precious metals in national prosperity.

Emerging in 18th-century France from the Enlightenment, physiocracy challenged mercantilism by emphasizing agriculture and natural economic laws.

Eventually, these schools of economic thought were challenged by Adam Smith, Scottish philosopher of the Enlightenment and academic who authored the Theory of Moral Sentiments and an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Each theory reflects a different view of what drives national prosperity—mercantilism through trade and control, bullionism through metal accumulation, physiocracy through natural laws that deliver agricultural productivity and efficiency & Smith on the cultivation of the very sources of wealth of nations -- land, labour and capital.

His successirs, David Ricardo & Thomas Malthus, were divided on crucial policy questions like the Poor Laws & Corn Laws & strategic views on population & sustainability.

Each school of political economic thought provides the context of the great changes in the periods from the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492 to the end of the French Revolution in 1799 to the Second Agricultural Revolution (the Enclosures & Turnpike Trusts) & First Wave of the Industrial Revolution (Spinning Jenny, Crompton's Mule & Watt's Steam Engine).

Strangely enough, such debates continue between the right v left wings, neoliberals, neo-Keynesians & modern monetary theorists that their debates can't simply be dismissed as ancient history.