In Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedy Twelfth Night, Feste, Olivia’s jester, continually describes ambivalence in terms of imported iridescent material, describing Orsino’s mind as an opal and iridescent silk, referencing the multi-coloured Peruvian gemstone that flashes between turquoise and orange: ‘Now, the melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal’ (ii .vi.80). Valerie Traub has recently suggested that ambivalence may be a productive and uniquely early modern way of thinking through issues of race and gender. This chapter argues that the language of iridescence, coupled with the play’s multicultural setting, allows Shakespeare to explore not only what an ambivalent mind might look like, but also to champion and embrace ambivalence of identity, including foreignness, gender, and sexuality.

Merchant power was underpinned by state support. European rulers knew that helping their national merchant group take over control of market segments, especially internationally, would bring revenues to the state and enrich the population, for instance craftsmen manufacturing goods for exports. The resulting mercantilist policies included well-known systems of privileges encouraging imperial preference and corporate long-distance ventures such as the East India Companies, but also policies aiming at mitigating deflationary tendencies harmful to credit, or encouraging manufactures for export through guild regulations such as quality controls. In a context of early modern markets monopolized by merchant rings, the resulting Mercantilist theories and policies were much more practical and rational than claimed by later classical economists, with complex debates over what means to choose to encourage national merchant groups, and to whose benefit these policies would mainly redound. Legal regimes were also mobilized, with both Common law and Continental (Roman) law providing extra protection to merchant groups in bankruptcy proceedings, partnership protection and legal evidence.

Aggregate analysis was central in political economy from its very inception. Early economic thought (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) focused on national issues like inflation and trade, leading to proto-macroeconomic theories. Mercantilism advocated state control to accumulate wealth (primarily precious metals) through trade surpluses supported by colonialism. Concurrently, early monetarists, observing inflation following New World discoveries, developed precursors to the quantity theory of money, arguing that money accumulation primarily fuels price increases, not real wealth improvements. Hume refined this approach, arguing that an increase of the money stock may increase income in the short run while in the long run this translates in inflation. The French physiocrats, led by Quesnay, offered the first systemic model (Tableau Économique) of the entire economy, comparing the circulation of wealth to that of blood and identifying agricultural labour as the ultimate source of value. Smith, inspired by Newtonian mechanics, proposed market gravitation towards equilibrium as the unifying principle of market economics. His followers, like Say (introducing Say’s law stating that supply creates its own demand), Ricardo (focusing on value theory and income distribution), and Marx (analysing capital accumulation and economic crises) further developed aggregate analysis, often diverging significantly in their theses despite sharing Smith’s Classical roots.

Western monetary philosophy since Aristotle has focused on money as a means of private exchange and precious metal coins whose value was determined by their intrinsic metallic content. From the outset, Chinese philosophers instead attributed the invention of money to rulers who created money to bring relief to their destitute subjects. This chapter traces the development of Chinese monetary thought and the theoretical foundations of fiat currency in the pre-imperial and early imperial eras. The basic ideas of money as a creation of the state to serve its goals (known as the chartalist theory of money) were laid out in the “Ratios of Exchange” chapters of the Guan Zi, probably compiled in the 2nd century BCE. This chapter analyzes the chartalist foundations of Chinese monetary theory, their implementation under the first empires, and the dissident views voiced by philosophers, historians, and statesmen from the Han to the Tang dynasty.

Chapter 3 summarizes that doctrine’s three variants, emphasizing how the current iteration hearkens back to the original article by appealing to the interests of the most powerful states. Major elements in the latest version of Mercantilism emerged as a US response to the competitive challenge from Japan. Although this proved to be an overreaction, it did set important precedents for the discriminatory measures – both positive and negative – that Washington would later use in its trade war with Beijing.

This chapter examines the historical development of economic thought concerning international trade, tracing its evolution from early barter systems to contemporary theories. It explores mercantilism, classical theories of absolute and comparative advantage by Smith and Ricardo, and neoclassical economics’ focus on consumer preferences. The chapter delves into imperfect competition, introducing concepts like monopolistic power and product differentiation, which led to ‘New Trade Theory’. It also discusses efficiency maximisation, non-discrimination principles like MFN and national treatment, trade in services, and international vertical integration. The chapter concludes by emphasising the significance of reciprocity in trade relations and the role of the WTO in promoting international cooperation and reducing trade barriers.

According to Dazai Shundai, the most effective way for feudal domains to amass wealth and resolve their fiscal difficulties is to promote the production of crops and other products for which the domain’s soil and geography provide a particular advantage. Domain governments should then manage trade in these products with other regions in order to maximize profits for the domain, rather than allowing private merchants to dominate this trade. From the perspective of traditional Confucian teachings it is not ideal for rulers to pursue profit through commerce, but this is an acceptable emergency measure to deal with a time of crisis.

Chapter 1 is the theoretical basis for the rest of the book, fully outlining the regulatory mercantilist framework, its origins, distinctions from other modes of regulatory governance, and its characteristics. This chapter considers the approach of regulatory capitalism and how it has been the Commission’s approach to technology regulation until relatively recently, aligned with the idea of the regulatory state and the reliance on expert-led forms of self-regulation or regulatory networks as a means of achieving economic goals based on a logic of efficiency rather than one of security. It outlines the ideas of mercantilism and its core features, expanding on how regulatory mercantilism draws from these principles, representing a changed paradigm in technology regulation in which the logic is one of security, with security and economy being mutually constitutive policy objectives, motivated by concerns over external dependency and guaranteeing sovereignty. It highlights the more interventionist approach to regulation that is adopted within a regulatory mercantilist approach, the renewed emphasis on industrial policy, and the regulatory export of standards as global standards.

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

Chinese politics has been dominated by leaders hailing from Shanghai. Xi Jinping was its party secretary; so was Li Qiang, China’s current premier. After Tiananmen, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji scaled the Shanghai Model to the whole of China. The Shanghai Model, the genesis of the China Model, was statist and extractive. An illustration was the development of Pudong, which relied on mass evictions of rural residents, offering low or no compensation, and auctioning off land to highest bidders. The huge spreads between acquisition costs and auction prices fueled Shanghai’s development but brought modest benefit to the average Shanghainese. The poorest segment of the Shanghai population lost relatively to other segments of the population but also lost absolutely to its former self. The income level of Shanghai’s individual proprietors was also low, relative both to rich provinces such as Zhejiang but to a poor province such as Yunnan. The statist Shanghai Model was not innovative. Shanghai lagged Zhejiang and Jiangsu in patents. By measures that track more closely the welfare of the individual citizens, the Shanghai Model is not a resounding success, and yet this is the model that has prevailed in China since 1989.

How were England’s wetland margins imagined at a new scale, as a site of reform and profit at the heart of a thriving polity? This chapter traces the iterative rewriting of wetlands in histories, geographies, agricultural books, and pro-drainage pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth century. Driven by desires to unify England and amplify national wealth, these improving authors reconceived the meanings and management of wetlands and common lands. Scholars have often identified this period as a hinge between long-standing beliefs that topography and climate shaped human bodies and societies and a new conviction that soil, water, and air could and should be altered through human intervention. This chapter suggests that environmental determinism and environmental reform were not antithetical impulses but instead two sides of the same coin. Improving authors interlaced older humoral theories with new ideas about political economy to articulate fen futures. In recasting wetlands as unruly, unhealthy, and unproductive, ambitious wetland projects became a ‘cure’ for the nation’s most pressing maladies, promising to produce productive land and industrious subjects.

The chapter distinguishes two types of economic warfare: ’capacity-focused economic warfare’ and ‘market-focused economic warfare’. The latter dominated the era of mercantilism. Still, the practices of economic war during the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ that opposed France and England were manifold and evolved throughout the period. The British pursued an aggressive strategy of market-focused economic warfare until the Pax Britannica made it largely superfluous. On the other hand, from 1713 on, the French tried to disentangle economic competition from military conflict, in times of both peace and war. Even if Napoleon was a mercantilist, the Continental System is best understood as a failed gamble on capacity-focused economic warfare rather than an exercise in mercantilism. This prepared the post-1815 advent of the liberal international order in which economic competition and war became separate entities.

European colonial ventures in the Americas depended on Native American trading routes and economic practices, even as they transformed them. Europeans initially sought to extract valuable resources, but this endeavor always intersected with the day-to-day business of men and women alternately competing and cooperating to sustain their communities. European traders and settlers thus fit into networks crossing imperial and cultural boundaries that were simultaneously economic, familial, and political. Trading networks soon connected the violence of Indigenous land dispossession for the purposes of food cultivation and the export of staples such as sugar, tobacco, and rice with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported tens of thousands of captives each year from Africa to the Americas by the end of the seventeenth century. Over time, colonial settlers increasingly struggled against imperial governments for control over land, trade, and profits, with revolutionary political consequences in the eighteenth century.

What drove the transformation of Britain’s population, economy and environment so that by 1819 it was arguably the most rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society in the world?

Chapter 6 studies East Asian economic growth and development strategy. It starts with a section on how economic growth and the theory of growth have been constructed. It then discusses the East Asian economic miracle – rapid growth in GDP per capita with relative equity. Most East Asian countries have chosen a hybrid path, often emulating each other and building on recent successes. Most adopted the developmental-state strategy to different degrees and at different points, and they generally view modernization as a way to regain their past glories. This chapter focuses on material wealth production, with a particular emphasis on how East Asian nations adapt and innovate. It also discusses the consequences of East Asian growth in terms of the rise and fall of nations, the “rich nation, strong army”, the contest of political systems, and the environment. Uneven economic growth is a source of a shifting balance of power.