Champion of mercantilism, advocate of the "trade surplus" theory
A seventeenth-century English merchant and economic thinker, one of the most influential spokesmen of mercantilism, and a director of the East India Company. Before the birth of free-trade thought, mercantilism dominated Europe: they held that a nation’s wealth is the gold and silver it holds, so the state should encourage exports, limit imports, and keep as large a "trade surplus" as possible, so that specie flows in. Thomas Mun argued this theory systematically, holding that a nation grows rich through an overall surplus in foreign trade. This thought dominated European economic policy for centuries, until Adam Smith’s free-trade theory overturned it entirely.
Mercantilists believed an intuition: the richer a country, the more gold and silver it has, so it should export hard and import little, drawing other nations’ specie in. Thomas Mun was this theory’s clearest advocate. A century later, Adam Smith rebutted that true wealth is not gold and silver but a nation’s production and labor. This clash of ideas over "what wealth really is" was the most important turn before economics was born.
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