England's Treasure by Foreign Trade. Or, the Balance of our Foreign Trade is the Rule of Our Treasure.

£1,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The “classic of English Mercantilism” (Carpenter) and the earliest exposition of the theory of the balance of trade. Originally published in 1664, the first edition is of the utmost commercial scarcity. “For those who want to read a single example of mercantilist writing, it is difficult to better Thomas Mun’s England’s Treasure By Forraign Trade, completed in 1628 and published posthumously in 1664. Adam Smith at any rate regarded it as perfectly representative of a vast body of similar literature: ‘The title of Mun’s book,’ he said, ‘became a fundamental maxim in the political economy, not of England only, but of all other commercial countries’” (Blaug). “Mun argued that the balance of trade was the principal determinant of specie flows and the exchange rate. England’s Treasure demolished the previous mercantilist literature which advocated detailed interventionist policies to sustain the English money supply and the exchange rate, such as banning gold exports, currency appreciation, lowering the metallic content of the currency, and encouraging the domestic circulation of foreign coin. Mun reiterated the fundamental balance of payments equation that specie flows must be determined primarily by the excess of exports over imports, and therefore insisted that there could not be a sustained loss of gold and silver while there was a trade surplus, while none of the above expedients could prevent a monetary outflow in the face of a sustained deficit. His book hammered home the s

• Binding: Hardcover

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