Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Part I Rationale for the State's Expansion
- 1 Public Ownership and Welfare
- 2 An All-Encompassing Party-State
- Part II Methods of Remodeling the State
- Part III Comparisons Within Broader Frameworks
- Part IV Outlook for the Twenty-first Century
- Notes
- Index
1 - Public Ownership and Welfare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- Part I Rationale for the State's Expansion
- 1 Public Ownership and Welfare
- 2 An All-Encompassing Party-State
- Part II Methods of Remodeling the State
- Part III Comparisons Within Broader Frameworks
- Part IV Outlook for the Twenty-first Century
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Mercantilism and State Ownership
The emerging and then consolidating European monarchic states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited from the powerful examples of the medieval city-states such as Milan, Florence, Bologna, Genoa, and Venice a tradition of continuous interventions of the central power in the economic and social life of their communities, along with a strong impulse toward an incessant warfare of competition and aggression. In many respects some of these policies, which began to assert themselves forcefully also in England and France from the sixteenth century on and which came to be known as “mercantilist policies,” were actually extensions to the limits of the newly developing monarchical states of the traditional preoccupations and practices of the late Middle Ages. The modern states shaped themselves into strong and wealthy economic bodies by means of both internal and external conflicts. The internal conflicts pitted the central state power against the church, the nobility, the medieval parliaments, the districts, and the towns in a vast attempt to transform and reorganize society's economic and social structures. The external ones involved the newly rising states seeking a dominant place among the European nations and in trade (which henceforth included America and India). State making and state power were thus intertwined. The essential means of power, wealth, was increasingly viewed as indispensable for security, aggression, and eventual conquest. States sought to attain wealth by avoiding the export of bullion (gold and silver) and by securing a favorable balance of trade.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Redefining the StatePrivatization and Welfare Reform in Industrial and Transitional Economies, pp. 5 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997