Rather than summarizing the argument presented in previous chapters I would like to offer a number of observations that emerge from the discussion and wider context of the book.

First of all, what we commonly take as the vanguard or mainstream elements of modern political economy (often emanating from the French physiocrats and Scottish Enlightenment) represent rather an exceptional offshoot from a larger common ground of political economy, known by its misnomers such as ‘mercantilism’ or, less frequently, ‘cameralism’. These are unhappy labels in any case, but probably too useful to be easily got rid of. I have discussed examples of such ‘cameralist’ – a second-order misnomer retained in the present work mostly for convenience and clarity – viewpoints on political oeconomies of statecraft and state capacity as seen through the lens of money, markets and manufacturing capitalism; but the problems and policies analysed in the previous pages have a much broader remit transcending the narrow boundaries framed by disciplinary labels such as scholasticism, bullionism, mercantilism, cameralism, physiocracy, classical liberalism and Historical School to name but the most common schools in pre-1850 economic thought.

Some of the questions discussed in the previous chapters have also informed narratives on global historical economic development: how does a country grow rich? Why do some nations develop faster over time than others? Why did the first industrial revolution occur in the West? While certainly not suggesting that the political economies I have discussed were the reason why Europe – or better: some regions in Europe – forged ahead faster than other world regions, utilizing key tools of capitalism: money, markets and manufacturing – the German-speaking countries showed no radical differences in market cultures and monetary design compared to the rest of Europe. Markets and money were principally known and organized along similar lines in other world regions, often for centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Coined money had emerged independently in separate parts of the globe since the seventh century bc, without much evidence of prior deep-level commercial interaction between these regions. Markets, too, seem to have been ubiquitous in human history (for millennia), and capitalist enterprise was known in medieval and early modern India and South-East Asia, and the Arab-speaking worlds, too.