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CHAPTER 4 Thomas Mun and the Finite Zeitgeist Thomas Mun (1571–1641), like his associate Edward Misselden, is known to posterity for two books, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indies (1621) and Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade (posthumously published in 1664), in which seemingly opposing economic views are espoused. While the ‹rst book was simply too much like the common run of pro–East India Company propaganda to make a lasting impression,1 the second became a classic almost overnight. The second edition of Englands Treasure hit the stalls in 1669, the third in 1698, the fourth in 1700 (packaged with Lewes Roberts’s Merchants Map of Commerce), the ‹fth in 1713, and the sixth in 1755. Adam Smith even referred to it by name.2 Mun was often cited by fellow seventeenth-century writers: approvingly by Roger Coke, Nicholas Barbon, and the two anonymous treatises known as Englands Great Happiness (1677) and Britannia Languens (1680).3 Modern commentators, impressed by what they see as marked differences between the Discourse and Englands Treasure, often speak of the latter as if it were Mun’s only work and take him for a champion of the free play of market forces.4 But that was not the way in which the ‹rst generation to read Englands Treasure understood its author. Among leading members of the Royal Society such as Robert Boyle and John Beale, the signal importance of Thomas Mun was the way in which he proposed that England achieve the minimization of imports and maximization of exports needed to create a positive trade balance. As James Jacob put it, Mun’s insistence on hard work and plain living and his attack on luxury, especially imported luxury goods, as ruinous to prosperity chimed with their own views on the desirability of reconciling wealth and virtue.5 Boyle and Beale belonged to a group of “social Baconians” (as Mayling Stubbs put it) who aimed “to transform England into an island utopia by means of technology and reason, ingenuity and industry,” but always with a moral weather-eye on the dangers of unleashed economic forces—a vision for which they were convinced they found substantial support in 74 Mun’s treatise.6 Beale, for example, speci‹cally proposed to use Mun’s ideas to combat John Houghton’s acceptance of “prodigality” as a foundation of prosperity.7 While the twentieth-century analyst may better understand the implications of Mun’s arguments, the seventeenth-century reader was the more accurate interpreter of their grounds. Mun’s case parallels that of Edward Misselden: the policies he supported did not logically derive from the assumptions upon which he wished to ground them (even in EnglandsTreasure ), and his attempts to make them ‹t within the bounds of the universe of value created logical gaps in his argument that could not be bridged.8 The families of Thomas Mun and Gerard de Malynes may have crossed paths long before these two men did, for Thomas’s grandfather, John Mun of Hackney, held the of‹ce of provost of moneyers at the Royal Mint from 1553 to 1561,9 while an uncle, William, was also a moneyer at the mint. If Malynes senior did bring his family over during the great recoinage of 1560–61, he might have worked directly under “John Monnes.” Thomas Mun’s father and elder brother were mercers. Only brother Edward broke the family mold by joining the church and rising to the position of subalmoner to Queen Elizabeth. Thomas was not quite two years old when his father died in 1673, and not quite three when his mother’s remarriage gave Thomas and his brothers yet another mercer, Thomas Cordell, for a stepfather . It was in Cordell’s footsteps as a director of the East India Company that Thomas Mun would eventually follow. Thomas Mun spent a great part of his early career in Italy, where, by his own account, he became close enough to Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1587–1609), to be lent 40,000 crowns interest-free for transmission to Turkey to purchase merchandise for Italy.10 Mun imported English tin, lead, and cloth, dealt in alum, and possibly acted as a factor for the Levant Company. Floated with borrowed capital, Mun’s schemes came to a ‹nal crash; by 1607 he had “absconded,” having been “adjudged bankrupt by a Florentine court.” Was it adding insult to injury that he ‹nally had to pawn “some of his...

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