Mercantilism

 "Part of mercantilism’s wealth-acquisition strategy involved governments giving charters to joint-stock companies which conferred upon them a monopoly of a country’s trade in particular parts of the world. This produced outfits like the Hudson Bay Company, the Dutch East India Company, and the French East India Company. The most famous of such enterprises, the British East India Company, was created in 1600. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was exercising powers akin to a sovereign state throughout modern-day India and Bangladesh. The East India Company’s monopoly of British trade in these regions was gradually accorded subtle and, when necessary, unsubtle protection by British soldiers and the Royal Navy. Such were the close links that mercantilism forged between governments and many merchants."

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Mercantilist Follies, Then and Now – Samuel Gregg

Discredited mercantilist notions shape many of our present economic