This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For roughly three centuries, European governments treated trade the way a besieged army treats supplies: as a fixed store to be hoarded rather than a process that could grow. Mercantilism held that a nation's wealth was measured chiefly by its stock of gold and silver, and that international trade was a zero sum contest in which one country's gain was necessarily another's loss. A government that wanted to grow richer, on this view, had only one honest path: sell more to foreigners than it bought from them, and use the state's own power, tariffs, subsidies, chartered monopolies, colonial law, to make sure that balance tipped its way. Unlike the ideologies that came after it, mercantilism never claimed an independent theory of who should rule or why; it took the sovereign's authority for granted and asked only how that authority should be used in the economic sphere. The answer was: to make the nation stronger relative to its rivals, whatever the cost to the individual merchant, consumer or colonial subject caught inside the system.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's controller-general of finances from 1665 to 1683, gave the doctrine its most complete practical expression, so much so that French historians still call the approach colbertisme. He raised tariffs on foreign manufactures, chartered state-favoured companies with monopoly trading rights, subsidised domestic industries judged strategically important, and built a navy and merchant marine capable of enforcing France's colonial trade laws. Those laws were the doctrine's sharpest edge: colonies existed, under mercantilist theory, to supply raw materials the mother country could not produce itself and to buy back finished goods manufactured at home, with foreign trade legally closed off in both directions. A Caribbean sugar planter or a Massachusetts merchant did not choose this arrangement; it was imposed as the logical extension of a doctrine that measured the colony's whole value in terms of what it added to the mother country's bullion reserves.
That imposition carried consequences its architects did not intend. Historians link the resentment built up under mercantilist trade restriction directly to the revolutionary movements that followed it, the American Revolution most prominently among them, in colonies that had spent generations paying prices set by a metropole they had no vote in. The doctrine's intellectual death came from a different direction entirely: Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations argued that wealth was not a fixed stock to be captured but something trade itself could create, so that voluntary exchange between nations, like exchange between individuals, could leave both sides better off rather than one richer at the other's expense. Laissez-faire capitalism took shape in direct opposition to everything mercantilism had assumed, and though no government has ever practiced Smith's doctrine in its pure form, no serious economic theory has defended mercantilism's zero sum premise since.