Mercantilism as a Coherent System, from Schmoller to Schumpeter’s Criticism
The term “mercantilism” appeared in British economic literature over the two last decades of the nineteenth century. Scholars used it together with the term “mercantile system” (see, for instance, Ingram 1888).
The same pattern occurred in Italy and France, as illustrated by the writings of Luigi Cossa or Emile Levasseur. The origin of the use of this term by the economists is to be found in the German economic literature. “Mercantilismus” was ascertained in the 1830s and thereafter popularised by the Historical School. Wilhelm Roscher (1851) defined it as a system aimed at the acquisition of precious metals and therefore distinct from Colbertism and the agricultural system.At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth century, Gustav Schmoller, William Cunningham and Eli Heckscher advocated the idea of a common doctrine. But for these scholars the question was not to bring together a certain number of economic writers who were assumed to share the same absurdity - an “obsession with bullion” (Wilson 1957: 182) and a faulty conception of wealth - but, on the contrary, to seek the coherence of these writers’ contributions in an area other than economic theory.