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During the eighteenth century, London became the largest city in Europe and attracted many foreign visitors, and the task here is to analyze a set of Swedish travelers. Sweden was a predominately rural country, but urban development was an integrated aspect of its mercantilist policy; towns were the outcome of an active state promoting trade. With such an intellectual background, the Swedes going to Britain viewed London accordingly, as seen from above. However, these visitors also walked the streets of the British capital and saw an everyday life different from their Swedish setting. The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between these two ways of approaching London. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the development of foreign commerce and its effects on the overall European economy through an analysis of structural changes to Scottish trade within the area of the Baltic Sea from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century. Emphasis is given to the Baltic's decreasing prominence as a destination for Scottish exports and a source of imports due to the imposition of the English mercantilist taxation system in Scotland. Therefore, the author is broadly concerned with the effects of mercantilism and the colonial transatlantic trade on inter-European commercial development.

Our aim is to understand correlations between diplomacy and trade in Anglo-Portuguese relations from the mid-fourteenth century to the first decades of the fifteenth century. This we achieve through a combined analysis of treaties, their context and personnel involved, against the perceived development of Portuguese mercantile activity in England. The first section sets out to demonstrate how varying political and economic interests were reflected on the making of treaties, while in the second section a case-study of the effects of diplomacy on trade is presented [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to address some of the modulations of the Voyage in the literary work of João Penha (1839 -1919). Paratextually displayed in several books by this author, the Journey becomes a recurrent topic, alternating the perigrinatio literaris with the ups and downs of the peregrinatio amoris. This imaginary and interior journey (which could be included in the first area that Maria Alzira Seixo identified on the Poetics of the Voyage) coincides, in short, with a deep motus animi continuus of the poet, who succeeded in condensing the interpretation key of his work in the most original and controversial of his titles: The Overland Journey to the Dreamland [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the contradictory impulses inherent in the portrayal of a tradesman's wife in late sixteenth-century and early seventh-century English literature that was concerned with the urban merchant milieu. The literary attempts to place the tradesman's wife figure in the context of England's transition to mercantilism in the late sixteenth century are discussed. Other topics include mercantile expansion through metonymy and synecdoche, the merry wives of Windsor who challenge various notions of hierarchy, and characters that seem to be a drain on the domestic economy.

An essay is presented on the argument that Cheapside commercial street in London, England is a place of circulation. It offers some important perspectives on symbolic economy, exchange and equivalence, and gold as the universal equivalent at a time of mercantile transition and change. The author relates Cheapside street to the gold as a place of never-ending exchange and circulation and the various equivalents that marks the vision of social relations and institution in early modern London.

The article presents a study on social history of philanthropy in relation to mercantilism in Colchester, England. It investigates the poverty from the early sixteenth century to the seventeenth century, the impact of population growth to economic growth especially in agricultural productivity and food prices, wage rates and the problems of unemployment and underemployment. It highlights the analysis of the probate evidence in Colchester over the two centuries, which was supplemented by the borough documentation, that will chart the rise and fall of private philanthropy and will attempt to assess its changing contribution to the mixed economy of welfare during the epoch of substantial economic growth.

Monetary enrichment was among the hottest topics in mercantilist writings of France and England in the 17th century. How might wealth best be increased in a world that, until the close of this period, was to remain largely without the concept of the market? Colonies came to be seen as a means of increasing the home nation's wealth given the right political and economic conditions. The economists of the day enquired into whether colonies could enrich the nation, and if so, how they might best contribute to this. Three views on this formed over the course of the period. The first view was that the economic development of the colonies should be promoted as a basis for trade on a more equitable, albeit exclusive, basis with the home nation. The 'predatory' view saw the colonies as a means of enrichment through unfair trade with no major local investment. The third view held that colonies were the road to the impoverishment of the home country rather than its enrichment. These three views underpinned discussion of the colonial question throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how two historical women, Margery Kempe and Margaret Paston, were able to construct mercantile authority textually for themselves in the later Middle Ages in England. Problem with traditional medieval class structure; Information on the imposed sense of hierarchy upon the women active in their fraternity; Representation of economic aristocracy; Significance of gender in their role as middle-class businesswomen.

This paper studies the controversy around the readmission of the Jews to England in 1655-6. Only the economic arguments are considered. They are contrasted with the mercantilist model of Brems (1986). It is shown that some of the arguments in favour and against the readmission are according to the mercantilist doctrines, and others are not. More importantly, the study of the controversy highlights new topics that extend the mercantilist model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gradual evolution to free enterprise in England, which became quite pronounced about the time of Adam Smith, is explained in this paper in terms of nstitutional changes in therent-seeking society of mercantile England. In this explanation the role of ideas and influential writers is seen as subsidiary to the role of real economic and institutional forces in producing historical outcomes. Moreover, a major feature of our rent-seeking interpretation is that the poor design and... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article to show that low wages and a resultant competitive price level are not accurate generalizations for what professor Edgar Furniss has called the "later English mercantilists." Some writers who have treated the role of labor and wages in later English mercantilism have found widespread agreement that high wages are not harmful to trade or the economy in general. They have, however, usually maintained that this change in viewpoint appears in later English mercantile literature at about the middle of the eighteenth century. As early as 1894 Lujo Brentano isolated what he called a "transformation" in wage theory among the mercantilists. The conclusion that high-wage proponents appeared throughout the period in question argues against the opinions, cited in the article, that the change in viewpoint is to be explained by the socio-economic context of later eighteenth-century England. The findings favor the position that there was a body of doctrine among the later English mercantilists, which was a result both of the economic development that had been achieved during the period and of the desire to suggest theoretical foundations for policies to continue that development in the future.