Mercantilism was an economic theory and system that prevailed as the dominant governing force of economics throughout the 16th and 18th centuries. It was inspired by the prevailing nationalistic zeitgeist, where countries sought to maximize their wealth and power by artificially regulating the economy. At its most fundamental, mercantilism typically held the belief that global wealth was, essentially, fixed; thus, the only way to increase the total wealth of a nation was through the acquisition and hoard of gold bulks and other material resources. As such, the governments of this period went to great lengths to promote exports and decrease the nation’s import demand in order to reduce any drain on the pool of imported currency.

One of the primary methods through which mercantilism saw to achieve that goal was through tariffs on imports, as well as protections for domestic markets. By reducing competition, mercantilist nation governments also saw to attempt to increase the demand for local manufactured goods, as well as limit their population's access to imported goods, in order to maximize their economic production and associated wealth. Other methods used by mercantilist nations included subcontracting out work and the incentivizing of skilled tradesman to immigrate to the nation, as well as preying upon and colonizing other regional nations in order to maximize their naval, military and trading might and prowess.

Overall, mercantilism represented a long-standing belief that was further supported and perpetuated by the influence of powerful leaders like Machiavelli and Colbert during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century, and later, by Adam Smith and other philosophers of the eighteenth century. The notion of a “closed-economy” that artificially regulated production, imports and exports in order to maximize a nations hoarded resources, however, eventually proved to unworkable and unsustainable as capitalistic economics replaced and overthrew the theory of mercantilism in the mid-eighteenth century.