ABSTRACT
If the Cultural Turn of the last quarter of the twentieth century contributed to a slow marginalization of economic history and the history of economic thought, the nancial crisis of 2007-8 and the Great Recession that followed arrested and eventually reversed that process. In the last few years, scholars have begun to re-visit many of the canonical works of political economy, beginning with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Much of their enthusiasm lies in the prospect of interrogating the intellectual origins of the neoliberal emphasis on free markets and free trade. As a consequence of the renewed interest in putatively heterodox economic ideas, authors, classically dismissed as ‘mercantilist’ by mainstream economics, have received considerable attention, which in turn has mirrored an outpouring of empirical work on how early modern empires were actually governed. Smith’s arguments about the central role of the Atlantic economy in catalyzing economic development in Britain, a narrative which inspired generations of scholars including Karl Marx himself, remain more widely accepted than his speci c critiques of mercantilism (Zahedieh, 2010, pp. 1-3; Stern and Wennerlind, 2013, pp. 3-4).
