It is the early modern prehistory of this unlikely romance’s most striking detail—the pathologization of foreign bodies as the enabling discursive condition for the globally connected nation-state—that I seek to clarify in Sick Economies. This has entailed my thinking about “the nation” in ways that are somewhat different from what is now customary in Renaissance studies. The growing body of scholarship on early modern discourses of nationhood has focused largely on political, legal, and linguistic fictions of England or Britain.3 In doing so, however, it has almost entirely ignored an important genre of literature from the period: the so-called mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century. In a series of treatises that endeavored to explain and manage the vicissitudes of international commerce, English mercantilists arguably offered the first systematic articulation of an object that now serves as one of the master tropes and characters of the drama of modern nationhood—the national economy.
Admittedly, the word “economy” did not acquire its modern, nation-specific sense of “the economy” until after World War II. In Tudor England, the term was used almost exclusively to refer to the maintenance of individual households and, by metaphorical extension, larger establishments and communities.4 Nevertheless, the broad outlines of a discourse of English national economy are visible in the work of four early seventeenth-century writers, sometimes referred to as the “four Ms”: Gerard Malynes, Thomas Milles, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun. Their treatises—now collectively regarded by economic historians as the canonical documents of early English mercantilism—mark the emergence of a recognizably modern, commercial conception of the nation. Significantly, the simultaneous naturalization of the global and pathologization of the foreign that is the hallmark of modern economic tropes like the “Asian flu” is anticipated by English mercantilist writing, in which metaphors of disease are likewise rhetorically central. Some of these diseases—canker, hepatitis—have subsequently lost their economic connotations. Others—most notably consumption—remain integral to the modern economic lexicon but have by and large shed their pathological senses. In early modern England, all these terms were key figures in a double helix of medical and mercantile signification. Pathology and economy, I shall argue, were interconstitutive domains of discourse. Each helped create the other’s horizons of textual and conceptual possibility; changes in one helped produce changes in the other. By attending to the work of the mercantilist writers and their contemporaries, then, we can recover an important yet largely forgotten chapter in the shared prehistories of our modern notions of global commerce and disease.
The Discourses of Mercantilism
Mercantilism is, however, a highly problematic term. If “the early modern English economy” is an anachronistic or catachrestic signifier, calling into being a concept that had no precise label in the Renaissance, so equally is “mercantilism.” Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun did not regard themselves as “mercantilists,” nor did their contemporaries view them as belonging to any coherent, let alone nameable, school of thought. On the contrary, the men regarded each other largely as ideological adversaries: much of what is now considered the mercantilist canon consists of Malynes’s shouting matches with Misselden. Not surprisingly, then, many historians have questioned whether mercantilism ever really existed. “As a matter of fact,” one scholar complains, “mercantilism was never an entity, never a system, never a coordinated or coherent body of policy or practice.”5
This phantom “entity” or “system” was, in fact, born nearly two centuries after the fact. Mercantilism was for the most part the brainchild of Adam Smith, though he himself never used the term. The latter is a nineteenth-century neologism derived from the title of chapter 1 of book 4 of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), “The Principles of the Commercial or Mercantile System.” In Smith’s historical analysis, the mercantile system preceded the age of capitalism proper and was distinguished by the mistaken equation of wealth with money or bullion. For Smith, the system also entailed regulatory and monopolistic economic policies that he attributed to the “[self-] interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers,” straw men in opposition to whom he made his case for unimpeded free trade.6 From the moment of its late eighteenth-century conception, therefore, “the mercantile system” was a loaded construct, serving a fundamentally rhetorical, not to mention political, purpose.
Such is the shadow cast by Smith in economic history, though, that a mercantilist epoch was for a long time an article of faith, and his assumptions concerning mercantilism went virtually uncontested. Smith’s critical analysis of the mercantile system styled it as not simply a precursor of capitalism but also an exercise in statecraft. The system was more than a mode of commerce, therefore; it was above all a mode of governmental management of commerce. This view was seconded even by Smith’s fiercest detractors. Karl Marx regarded the mercantile system as a necessary, state-sponsored variant of the protocapitalist “Monetary System.”7 And Gustav von Schmoller, the nineteenth-century German Kathedersozialisten, characterized mercantilism “in its innermost kernel [as] nothing but state-making—not state-making in a narrow sense, but state-making and national-economy making at the same time.”8 In Smith’s, Marx’s, and von Schmoller’s analyses, then, mercantilism was posited as a necessary, liminal stage in a teleological account of both economic and nationalist history—the system of governmental policies that provided the bridge from the petty bourgeois production of the urban city-state to the free market capitalism of the globally connected nation-state.
This view of mercantilism as a system of state policy persists in much scholarship on early modern culture. In her brilliant study of Francis Bacon’s science and its relationship to economics, for example, Julie Robin Solomon characterizes mercantilism as “governmental strategies” that were designed to “control those facets of commercial culture not comprehended within older and more traditional or customary protocols.”9 But the Smithian perspective is not the only version of mercantilism that retains critical currency. A significantly different interpretation was advanced in the middle of the twentieth century by Eli Heckscher, the influential Swedish economic historian. Heckscher conceded that mercantilism was “a phase in the history of economic policy” and that “the state was both the subject and the object of mercantilist economic policy.” But he deviated from both the mainstream Smithian position, that mercantilism was a system of state management of commerce, and the opposing extreme, that there was never any such thing. Instead, he argued that “mercantilism never existed in the sense that Colbert or Cromwell existed. It is only an instrumental concept which, if aptly chosen, should enable us to understand a particular historical period more clearly than we otherwise might.”10 In neo-Hegelian fashion, Heckscher proceeded to characterize mercantilism as less a material structure or system than a loose collection of seventeenth-century ideas about government intervention in foreign trade.
Heckscher may well have been right that the evidence discounts the historical existence of a mercantile system as such, at least in the sense of any coherent, coordinated set of commercial policies implemented by early modern European nation-states. But, as Heckscher himself acknowledged, that does not mean there were no significant trends during the period in state policy regarding the practice of international commerce. There had been trade networks across Europe for centuries, of course, networks in which the state was increasingly implicated. But until the middle of the sixteenth century, international commerce tended to be seen as the activity less of nation-states themselves than of people or trading associations identified with specific urban locations. Merchants from London potentially competed as much with traders from Bristol or Norwich as with their counterparts from Antwerp or Venice. Certain developments in English state policy, however, had spurred the cultural production of new, economically based conceptions of nationhood.