From the mid-16th to the 18th century, European power underwent a profound transformation. The strength of a state was no longer conceived only in terms of dynastic lineage, military glory, or defence of the true faith. Wealth ceased to be a mere effect of power and became one of its central drivers. Imperial Spain financed its domination with American silver; the Dutch Republic built a global power on finance, long-distance trade, and chartered companies; then England seized this legacy, absorbed it, and amplified it. From then on, controlling the seas, organising public credit, protecting manufactures, and guaranteeing commercial outlets became a matter of geopolitical survival.
This shift produced a new political language. Raison d’État—the art of holding on to power—extended to the art of administering the nation’s wealth: protecting supply chains, disciplining grain prices, attracting foreign artisans and capital, reserving certain markets, locking certain sea routes, financing a fleet. This is what has retrospectively been called “mercantilism”: a set of practices in which the state claims the right—and indeed the duty—to favour economic interests judged strategic for the power of the realm. When free trade appears in the British debate in the 18th century, it does not overturn this logic: it purports to serve the same end (enriching the country and weakening rivals), but by other means.
In England, this articulation between economy and power forms the very core of the political project after 1688. The “Glorious” Revolution, the rise of Parliament, the creation of a politically guaranteed public debt and a navy funded collectively, set up a durable alliance between the state and certain mercantile, manufacturing, and financial interests. England, then Great Britain, appears as a maritime and commercial power anxious to guarantee access to raw materials and outlets for its manufactures. The repeated wars against the Dutch Republic, Spain, and—above all—France should be read in this light: to prevent another empire from locking the routes on which the country’s prosperity depended.
Meanwhile, the interior of the realm was being reshaped. Sovereignty was no longer merely the sacred authority of the monarch. With Bodin, then Hobbes, the Levellers, and Locke, it became a promise of collective, material, and patrimonial security—one that now had to be justified before subjects capable of withholding obedience. Political power bound itself to protect the lives, property, and conditions of enrichment of certain groups—merchants, landowners, nascent industrialists—who demanded to be heard. It is in this convergence between external power and internal legitimation that the English political culture of the economy was born.
Power before the economy, then the economy as power
Spain and the Dutch Republic
In the previous article,1 we saw how the Spanish Empire, from the mid-16th century, turned colonial extraction of American silver into an instrument of imperial power. Silver flows were not just a commercial matter: they financed the army, diplomacy, and the monarchy’s public debt, and made it possible to hold together a vast and heterogeneous territorial ensemble. This dynamic illustrates a raison d’État that mobilises the external economy (precious metals, colonial taxes, control of routes) to sustain a military and dynastic policy. Politics, animated by this raison d’État, legitimates the economy because the latter materially feeds the former.
We also observed how the Dutch Republic brought forth another model by emancipating itself from Spain: a state of modest size that managed to extend its influence across the seas thanks to trading companies endowed with monopolies and regalian prerogatives, to modern financial institutions, and to manufactures more efficient than its rival’s. Here, raison d’État supports commercial and financial initiatives that, in return, buttress state power more durably, because they produce more value than the mere extraction of precious metals.
Imperial Spain and mercantile Holland show that, by the 17th century already, wealth is no longer only what the powerful possess: it founds their power.
From practice to theory: raison d’État
Whereas Machiavelli advised the Prince to use every means at his disposal, including ruse and force, to attain and keep power, Giovanni Botero, at the end of the 16th century, developed a concept of raison d’État more in keeping with Christian ethics.2 He gave it a political role—but also an economic one.
Botero argues that, to preserve the state, one must avoid discontents and favour internal tranquillity—something Machiavelli also recommends in The Prince (ch. 19), but in a morally minimal form: the people love tranquillity, and, so as not to incur their hatred, it is best to promote it whenever possible. Nevertheless, political necessity regularly requires favouring the soldiers’ party rather than the people’s. Moreover, for Machiavelli, money is not the sinews of war.3
Botero holds that internal tranquillity requires the material prosperity of the realm. He outlines a political-intervention strategy which, on the one hand, seeks to neutralise causes of disorder, and, on the other, “actively to foster the increase of the wealth … of the subjects and of the kingdom”.4 He recommends that the Prince implement an “economic government of society”5 through an early Catholic mercantilism:6 control of wheat prices when dearth threatens; condemnation of private monopolies on basic necessities; limits on the export of strategic goods; encouragement of useful trades (crafts, manufactories); curbs on the unproductive luxury of the court; incentives to attract foreign merchants and artisans; etc.
State intervention should not, however, stifle economic initiative. It must be coupled with non-intervention to preserve the subjects’ wealth. Botero thus warns against fiscal arbitrariness, confiscations, the prince’s personal monopolies, or sudden taxes that strangle merchants. He recommends levying regular, predictable, and moderate taxes, because excessive levies ruin activity, push subjects to conceal their goods, and ultimately kill the sovereign’s tax base. In this sense, he sketches a form of legal and patrimonial security that is rational from the state’s point of view.
On economic matters, then, Botero goes well beyond Machiavelli: he develops a genuine economic policy that in many respects reflects the prescriptions of the Spanish arbitristas (discussed in the previous article) and foreshadows those of English mercantilist authors.
The English handover
Before examining several aspects of mercantilism, let us return to history. From the latter half of the 17th century, England borrowed several traits from the Dutch model:7 the centrality of the merchant marine; the protection of trade routes; the use of chartered companies to organise and monopolise Asian and Atlantic traffics; public indebtedness as a military lever; the idea that a state can lean on private mercantile interests to finance expansion. England first imitated the Dutch Republic, then surpassed it.
On the financial front: after 1688, British debt became “funded”, meaning it was no longer merely a set of private debts contracted by the sovereign, but a public debt whose interest service was guaranteed by taxes regularly voted by Parliament.8 Concretely, the Glorious Revolution transformed the repayment pledge: no longer the king’s word—already defaulted upon in the past—but the commitment of a government now answerable to the Commons for the raising and use of funds.9 This change, often dubbed the “financial revolution”, went hand in hand with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the establishment of a negotiable market for public securities.10 It gave England, then Great Britain, an unrivalled capacity to borrow, which enabled it to finance a global war-fleet and long wars against France throughout the 18th century.11
Historians have stressed that this mutation did not fall from the sky: it directly drew on Dutch practices of financing the state through politically guaranteed public credit—practices that William III imported in 1688—before being adapted and amplified within the English parliamentary framework.12 In other words, British military and imperial power no longer rested primarily on the monarch’s private wealth, but on an institutional alliance between Parliament and the country’s mercantile, financial, and manufacturing interests—an alliance that protects their capital while mobilising it for the realm’s geopolitical aims.13
The handover between the two European powers was not just economic, it was geopolitical. England understood that mastery of long-distance trade, colonies, and the seas was not only profitable—it was vital for its security and rank in Europe14. It was a direct translation of raison d’État into the language of the economy: for the realm to be strong, it must be rich; for it to be rich, it must control trade; to control trade, it must control the sea. The economy erects itself as a power strategy.
From then on, English foreign policy was organised at scale around a constant objective: to prevent any other European power—Spain, the Dutch Republic, then France—from obtaining a monopoly or durable superiority over sea lanes, colonies, raw materials, and export markets. The successive and numerous wars between Great Britain and its three main rivals, over the 17th and 18th centuries, illustrate this tension.15
France vs England: the structuring rivalry
Of these three rivalries, it is the opposition between France and England that conditions a large part of 17th- and 18th-century political history. Both monarchies sought power, each in its own way.
France—especially from Richelieu and then Colbert—conceived power in terms of monarchical centralisation, a large land army, internal control of the realm, and administrative oversight of the economy. The absolutist monarchy used the economy to finance war and the state apparatus, but that economy remained under tight tutelage. The centre decided, organised, protected certain strategic manufactures, imposed customs barriers, and subsidised colonial companies. The logic remained vertical: the economy was instrumentalised by the royal state.
England—especially after the Revolution of 1688—conceived power in terms of maritime domination, capture of external markets, and control of global commercial flows. It developed a state able to levy taxes and issue debt, but this state worked in close alliance with merchants, shipowners, and manufacturers. The logic was no longer purely vertical; it became coalitional: the state’s power rested on the economic interests of part of society.
This difference is both political and social: it stems from divergent conceptions of political power relations and of how society coheres—conceptions we will detail in the second part of our analysis.
Mercantilism vs free trade
Jealousy before sweetness
Modern trade did not emerge as a pacifying force—still less as a promise of universal harmony. It was born as a weapon of state. The empires of the 17th century competed directly for control of routes, customs, colonial monopolies, and strategic raw materials. Naval wars, blockades, import prohibitions, and chartered companies empowered to raise militias or administer overseas territories—these all belonged to ordinary commercial practice.16 Modern trade first presents itself as a field of confrontation between powers, not a neutral space of exchange between nations and individuals. In other words, trade is not doux—it is jealous:17 it entails the armed defence of one’s market share and the will to deprive the adversary of his.
Even Adam Smith—too hastily presented as a pacific theorist of free trade—does not tell an irenic story. He explicitly recognises that European expansion rested on colonial conquest, forced monopoly of markets, and the brutal exclusion of competitors.18 He criticises the violence and monopolies of the European commercial system, but accepts that some restrictions (such as the English Navigation Acts) can be justified in the name of national defence, in a world where naval power determines the state’s political survival. In other words, for Smith the issue remains primarily geopolitical: trade is inseparable from power, and power is a requirement of raison d’État.
Before going further, we must clarify what we call “mercantilism.” The term gives the misleading impression of a coherent economic doctrine shared by the European states of the 17th and 18th centuries. In reality, so-called mercantilism gathers heterogeneous practices and arguments: protection of certain manufactures; colonial monopolies; regulation of maritime trade; restrictions on exporting raw materials deemed strategic; support for the settlement of foreign artisans; grain price controls in times of dearth; curbs on the court’s unproductive luxury; etc. In short, what is called “mercantilism” is less a unified theoretical system than a bundle of state policies justified in the name of the realm’s power.19
Let us add that mercantilism, as a “doctrine,” was largely constructed retrospectively—first by critics like Adam Smith, who opposed their own ideal of freedom of trade to what they described as a tangle of restraints, monopolies, and privileges; then by 19th- and 20th-century historians who fixed this portrait as a nationalist, protectionist model.20 Mercantilism resembles a Weberian ideal type: a way of grouping, after the fact, under a single label, policies that all aimed to increase the state’s wealth but were neither uniform nor always compatible among themselves.
Thus, we are not dealing with a linear historical process beginning with a warrior mercantilism and culminating in a pacific free trade. Free trade does not emerge after mercantilism as its negation. It emerges within this world of armed commercial rivalry, guided by the same question as mercantilism: how to make the nation richer and stronger? From the 18th century, the free-trade discourse unfolds in the British Parliament and public sphere, contesting this or that tax, monopoly, or prohibition21 —yet still in the terms of raison d’État. It argues that freer exchange, productive specialisation, and less-encumbered circulation of goods will increase the country’s total wealth—and hence its international power.
In other words, 18th-century free trade is not anti-state: it is an alternative economic method to mercantilist prescriptions for increasing national power.
From imperial trade to the home market
Britain’s 18th-century home market did not exist “naturally.” It was politically constructed, through a combination of protectionist measures (tariff barriers, import and export bans, imperial monopolies) and by the forced integration of the colonies into the metropolis’ commercial circuits. These protections and privileges guaranteed safe outlets to British industry—textiles, wrought metal, consumer goods—which increasingly spoke of itself as a national interest to be defended.
This point is crucial for understanding England’s political change. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the nascent industry was not external to the state; it gradually instituted itself as one of the pressure groups that weighed on political decision-making.22 He describes, from the late 17th century and especially in the 18th, the emergence of what he calls the “political influence of industrialists”: owners of dispersed workshops, merchant-manufacturers in textiles, ironmasters, traders involved in processing. These actors demanded measures that protected or favoured British production—selective customs barriers, privileged access to colonial markets, secured supplies of raw materials, even repression of foreign competition.
From this perspective, imperial trade did not remain offshore. It fostered, within the country, a manufacturing economy oriented towards sale. In return, this manufacturing economy underpinned a political base. Industrial interests no longer contented themselves with economic existence—they sought, and to some degree managed, to orient the law. This shift means that the economy, via industry, began to claim weight over the state—and to legitimise that claim in the name of the nation as a whole.
From zero-sum to mutual gains
In doctrines labelled “mercantilist,” the wealth of nations often appears as a zero-sum game. The assumption is simple: there is a limited quantity of precious metals, of commercial outlets, and of scarce resources; if England wins, it is because the Dutch lose; if France secures a colonial monopoly, Spain is dispossessed. The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century and the Franco-British wars of the 18th followed this logic. Each treaty, each commercial privilege, each navigation right was perceived as a strategic advance at a direct rival’s expense.
That conception of trade, however, was far from unanimous. From the late 17th century—and more clearly in the 18th—another idea advanced: exchanges can be mutually beneficial. The argument remained national—we still spoke of enriching the country—but one began to assert that productive specialisation and the free circulation of goods increase the total wealth available.23 The maxim “produce more together” supplanted “take from the other,” even if, in practice, this rhetoric coexisted with policies of colonial monopoly and naval blockade.
Here a fruitful tension appears. Classical mercantilism stresses inter-national rivalry and the state’s need to supervise and steer that rivalry. Free-trade discourse insists on the efficiency of exchange and the idea that the growth of trade benefits all. But the two discourses do not exclude each other; they mingle—sometimes in the same texts and parliamentary debates, sometimes even in the same authors (for example, Nicholas Barbon).
Mercantilism and free trade valorise the economy
As noted above, the word “mercantilism,” often used as if it denoted a unified school, in fact corresponds to a set of practices and political justifications adopted by European states from the 17th century. These rested on three main pillars:
- Protecting and favouring activities deemed strategic for national power—shipbuilding, metallurgy, textiles, sugar refining, etc.
- Guaranteeing exclusive outlets through colonies and control of the seas.
- Ensuring stable fiscal revenues to the sovereign, to finance army and fleet.
What matters here is less doctrinal coherence than the moral and political dimension of this discourse. Mercantilism legitimates the very search for wealth. It asserts that enriching the nation, supporting its manufactures, and defending its merchants constitutes a political duty. To serve trade is to serve the state—hence the common good. In a more Machiavellian than humanist sense, the economy thus acquires civic value: it ceases to be suspect—or at least equips itself with an answer to the traditional suspicion (that enrichment is rapacious, dissolving, corrupting).
One might think that the rise of a discourse favourable to free trade would sweep away this statist and martial frame. However, appearing from the late 17th century,24 it was carried by different social groups—import/export merchants, shipowners, exporting manufacturers, landowners depending on the products concerned—who sought to strike down this or that tariff, prohibition, or monopoly.
Julian Hoppit shows that Britain did not have a single “political economy,” but several “political economies” in permanent competition, each defending its sectoral and regional interests, each mobilising its own vision of what the country’s wealth should be.25 There was no simple replacement of mercantilism by free trade, but a plurality of argumentative regimes that coexisted, contested the state, and answered one another. The heterogeneity of voices nonetheless masked a common finality, especially in Adam Smith: the increase of national wealth as the basis of power.
The 18th-century discourses on free trade therefore do not contradict raison d’État; they reformulate it. They hold that the state must remain strong—and it will be stronger if the economy is freed from certain corporatist fetters, inefficient monopolies, and customs barriers. The economy is thus recognised as having a value of its own: not only does it serve the state, but the state must now legitimate itself by its capacity to foster economic prosperity. The balance of power between the political and the economic evolves: it is no longer only the economy that is summoned to serve power; power must justify itself by its service to prosperity.
This intellectual reversal prepares the next step of our analysis: within the realm, sovereignty is founded less and less on dynastic tradition, military glory, or religious protection, and increasingly on the consent of classes whose economic interests have a say.
Sovereignty reshapes itself around wealth and consent
Bodin: sovereignty to end the Wars of Religion
When Bodin wrote Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), France was torn apart by the Wars of Religion. The link between command and obedience was broken; the state appeared as a body gone mad, abandoned to civil violence. For him, continuity of political time had to be restored against this chaotic temporality of sedition. The answer was sovereignty.26
Bodin defined sovereignty as an absolute, durable, indivisible political authority endowed with coercive power. It no longer derived primarily from Christian morality or an ecclesiastical order; it derived from law. Subjects’ obedience ceased to be a religious duty oriented toward salvation and became a legal relation grounded in the state’s legitimate coercion.27 Sovereignty was thus conceived as an autonomous political authority, detached from the Church, charged with ensuring civil order.28
This authority was structured by a political transcendence. As Couzinet has shown,29 Bodin established an analogy between divine and human power: the sovereign is separated from the subjects as God is from creatures. This means the sovereign is not part of the political body in the same way as others. He appears as an external principle, whose first mark is the capacity “to make and to unmake the law”:30 the sovereign promulgates law and can also abolish it, because he is not bound by it. Sovereignty asserts itself as the principle of possible change.
But Bodin did not describe merely an abstract form of power. He concretely redefined the political bond as a public exchange: obedience in return for protection.31 Obedience is required of subjects; in return, the sovereign promises security—over the long term, security of life; in the short term, the guarantee of goods—personal possessions and land. In other words, the state promises not the salvation of souls, but the preservation of bodies and patrimonies.
This gesture is decisive. Sovereignty is justified not only by civil peace, but by the protection of subjects’ material wealth. The state thus tends to replace the Church as the instance that organises communities, disciplines conduct, and stabilises conditions of existence. On his side, the sovereign must govern himself—prudence, temperance, right measure—so that the excesses of his passions do not plunge the realm back into madness.
Hobbes: sovereignty as collective security
In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes took up the idea of absolute sovereignty but changed its logic. With Bodin, sovereignty remains thought in the model of divine power: the sovereign stands outside the social body and imposes obedience to restore civil peace. With Hobbes, the starting-point is no longer God or the ecclesiastical order, but England’s experience of civil war. Sovereignty results from human interactions: individuals make a common power because they cannot survive without security. It is therefore entirely secularised and explicitly aims at “peace” and “common defence.”
To show why such a power is necessary, Hobbes describes a state of nature in which there is a war of all against all, where there is “no power able to over-awe them all”.32 In this condition,
there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.33
This state is not only morally dangerous; it is materially unliveable, because it prevents any durable productive activity.
The exit from this conflictual state is through a pact. Each individual renounces his natural right to govern himself and transfers it to a single person (or an assembly) on condition that all others do the same. Hobbes describes this moment as a “covenant of every man with every man”34 that produces a real unity: the multitude melts into a single person, the state. This common power, he says, is a “mortal God,” to whom we owe—“under the immortal God”—our peace and defence, because all have ceded to it their strength so that it might impose internal order and protection against enemies.
This pact formalises a clear political exchange: obedience for security. The passions that incline men to peace are not only the fear of dying, Hobbes explains, but also the “desire of such things as are necessary to a commodious living”35 and the hope of obtaining them by their own industry. The security promised by the sovereign is thus not only the absence of murder; it is the possibility of stable material life—without pillage—where one can work, accumulate, enjoy the result. Even if Hobbes gives primacy to political order over all else, this secular order remains inseparable from material security: it must ensure the conditions of a minimal common wealth that legitimates sovereignty.
From Leveller popular consent to Parliament as guardian of consent
During the English Civil War, the Levellers radicalised an idea already present among natural-law theorists—that power derives from the community—by demanding that power remain subject to present, effective, and widely shared consent. Their text, An Agreement of the People (1647), presents itself as “a contract or general agreement of the people for a present and firm peace, founded on common right, freedom, and safety”,36 and demands parliaments elected frequently, of limited duration, answerable to the electors. The Levellers affirm that no government can bind someone who has not consented himself: “the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee” … “every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government”.37 This thesis universalises the criterion of consent: it is not only civil peace (Hobbes), it is the political freedom of each that founds obedience.
After the Glorious Revolution (1688), this demand for consent did not disappear—it was transformed. The constitutional settlement following the ousting of James II did not proclaim the direct sovereignty of the people, but constrained the Crown to govern under condition. The Bill of Rights (1689) set out “ancient rights and liberties”38 which it chiefly claimed to reaffirm. It declared illegal the unilateral suspension of laws, taxation without a vote of Parliament, and prosecutions against subjects who addressed a petition to the king. Above all, it introduced a novel limit: “raising or keeping a standing army”39 within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law. The king could no longer dispose of an internal armed force without parliamentary approval. In other words, material coercion—the capacity to enforce obedience by force—was now submitted to collective consent mediated by Parliament.
This logic became institutionalised in the 1690s. The Triennial Act (1694) imposed regular general elections and the obligation to summon Parliament frequently.40 After 1694, the Commons were renewed at short intervals; MPs could no longer consider themselves settled for decades; and the king could not govern long without recalling the representatives. Party competition then literally raged,41 crystallising around the wars with France and their financing: the Whigs—among whom were merchants, industrialists, and Protestant landowners42— supported state interventionism that favoured English exports and joined the Crown in its desire to contain France. They were behind the creation of the Bank of England, which lent massively to the state and fed the country’s commercial credit43. The Tories, representatives of the hereditary landed aristocracy, were loath to squander their patrimony on military enterprises that mainly benefited the Whigs.
A conjunction of factors thus contributed to a rebalancing of power between Parliament and monarchy: the increased frequency of elections and the length of parliamentary sessions; fierce political oppositions; the influence of merchants and industrialists; the state’s repeated recourse to Parliament to fund ever-costlier wars;44 the inflation in the number of statutes passed.45
This process did not achieve the political equality dreamt of by the Levellers—suffrage remained censitary and male; Parliament an oligarchy—but it took up their central intuition: authority must be periodically reconfirmed. Consent was no longer thought as a unique founding act, but as a repeated process paced by elections. No longer the absolute sovereign protecting goods (Bodin), nor the Leviathan guaranteeing common security (Hobbes), but an executive dependent on a Parliament elected periodically, to which it must constantly justify its use of the nation’s resources. This amounts to relocating the Levellers’ popular-consent idea into an oligarchic yet durable frame: the wealth of the realm—taxes, public debt, army—is henceforth politically negotiated.
Locke: property as the political language of wealth
When John Locke published the Two Treatises of Government at the end of 1689, England had lived through a century of rupture: civil war, the execution of Charles I, the republican experiment, the Restoration, the failed exclusion of a Catholic king, then the deposition of James II in the Glorious Revolution. Locke wrote in a tumultuous historical moment. The Treatises were largely drafted in the 1680s, in the Whig context of struggle against hereditary absolutism. But publicly they appeared once the essentials were secured: the monarchy had been placed under parliamentary control, and the exercise of power was now supposed to answer to the consent of the governed.
Locke worked with the language of the state of nature, used before him by Hobbes, Grotius, and the Salamanca theologian-jurists who had described an original humanity that was free and equal, with no natural superiority of one man over another.46 Likewise, the idea that political authority must justify itself—and could no longer simply be received as a providential order—was well established in 17th-century Europe. In other words, Locke reworked an already circulating grammar, rearranging it for the political needs of his time.
This working-over of an available natural-law language is particularly clear on property: among medieval and Renaissance theologians, we already find the idea that use, the cultivation of land, or the transformation of matter can ground legitimate appropriation.47 Locke puts the accent on labour and valorises it by arguing that an individual acquires a right over a thing by mixing his labour with it. The conflict between private appropriation and common goods runs through the Middle Ages (Franciscan poverty, customary collective-use rights), through local enclosures, through moral controversies over accumulation. A long philosophical tradition—having already identified problems, justifications, and limits—thus precedes Locke’s reflection on property.
What is decisive in Locke is not so much the grounding of property in labour as the way he articulates three things. First, the individual owns himself: “every man has a property in his own person”.48 Second, by mixing his labour with something “common”—cultivating a field, felling a tree, transforming a material—he legitimately makes it his. Third, the introduction of money normalises unlimited accumulation: excess wealth is no longer morally suspect insofar as it results from labour and is mediated by exchange.49 By this conceptualisation, Locke naturalises growing economic inequality. Inequality no longer appears as a wound to social order but as the ordinary effect of the free use of one’s labour and money.
In parallel, Locke takes up the theme of consent that the Levellers had made explosive in the 1640s. The Levellers had held that no man is bound to a government he has not personally consented to, and that legitimate power must be periodically reconfirmed by representatives who can be held to account. Locke recasts consent as the foundation of civil power.50 Yet in him, consent does not serve a universal social democracy; it provides the legal basis to delegitimate an arbitrary sovereign and to justify a government grounded on representatives51 —in practice, the parliamentary regime that emerged from 1688. He thus digests a radical popular demand and renders it compatible with a property-based, oligarchic parliamentarianism.
Finally, Locke condenses into a formula the political and economic thrust of late-17th-century England: the end of government is the preservation of “property” in the broad sense—life, liberty, and estates.52 Civil power is defined no longer primarily by its sanctity, nor even only by its capacity to impose peace (Hobbes), but by its explicit mission to safeguard the subjects’ material security. At that moment, the protection of goods is no longer merely a sovereign’s promise (Bodin), nor a rational condition of obedience (Hobbes), nor a militant claim (the Levellers). It becomes the proclaimed raison d’être of legitimate government.
By the end of the 17th century, Locke had given a coherent philosophical language to an order already in place—one in which sovereignty was constrained by political consent and private wealth was accorded public standing, with labour and improvement treated as its principal justification even as rents and interest remained within the regime of property.
Annex — Anglo-British Wars (1650–1800)
From 1650 to 1800, England and then Great Britain waged a series of naval and colonial wars against the Dutch Republic, Spain, and France. These wars pursued a common objective: to secure maritime trade, control colonial wealth flows, and prevent the emergence of a continental bloc capable of stifling that trade.
Wars with the Dutch Republic
The four Anglo-Dutch wars arose first from England’s will to impose the Navigation Act (1651)—which reserved colonial trade to English ships53—and later from Britain’s will to punish the Dutch Republic’s “benevolent” neutrality toward the American insurgents and their allies.54 At bottom, these were wars over freight, marine insurance, factories, and customs.
| Conflict (dates) | Immediate cause | Strategic stake for England / Great Britain |
|---|---|---|
| First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) | Navigation Act (1651) closing colonial trade to Dutch ships; naval incident in 1652 | Break Dutch supremacy in European and colonial freight; impose the Royal Navy as arbiter of maritime trade |
| Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) | Reciprocal seizure of ships and colonial rivalry (Africa, the Americas) | Increase control of routes and colonial factories; capture the profits of oceanic trade |
| Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) | Charles II’s secret alliance with Louis XIV to force the Dutch to yield commercial primacy | Subdue the rival mercantile republic and secure English access to European and colonial markets |
| Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784) | Dutch trade with American insurgents and Dutch adhesion to a hostile “armed neutrality” | Prevent neutrals from protecting the enemies’ trade; re-assert Britain’s monopoly over Atlantic seas |
Wars with Spain
The thread here is the struggle for the Atlantic empire. In the 1650s Cromwell launched a war of conquest against Spain in the Caribbean—the “Western Design,” which brought Jamaica to England. In the 18th century, London and Madrid clashed over whether British commerce would be free in Spanish America, leading to the War of Jenkins’s Ear; then Spain joined France against Great Britain during American Independence to exploit British weakening.
| Conflict (dates) | Immediate cause | Strategic stake for England / Great Britain |
|---|---|---|
| Anglo-Spanish War (1654–1660) | Cromwell’s “Western Design”: offensive against the Spanish Indies; seizure of Jamaica (1655) | Weaken Catholic Spain’s empire in the Caribbean; open to the English the trade in sugar, silver, and Atlantic routes |
| War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720) | Philip V’s attempt to retake possessions in Italy despite Utrecht | Prevent a Bourbon Spain from reconstructing a great Mediterranean power; maintain the Utrecht balance |
| War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739–1748) | Commercial disputes in the West Indies (Spanish right of search, ship seizures, colonial monopolies) | Impose British commercial freedom in Spanish America; defend privileges obtained after 1713 |
| Anglo-Spanish War (1779–1783, within the US War of Independence) | Spain joins France against London to exploit the American revolt | Cut back British maritime power; recover strategic positions (Gibraltar, Florida); weaken the British empire |
Wars with France
These wars show the rise of a global geopolitical issue. In the late 17th century, England and then Great Britain fought to block Louis XIV’s expansion and prevent a Franco-Bourbon hegemony over Europe and the Spanish empire. By the mid-18th century the rivalry became imperial: the Seven Years’ War decided who would control North America and India and made London the leading maritime power. After 1763, France backed American independence to shatter that hegemony. From 1793, London entered the coalitions against Revolutionary France to contain an ideological and military power that threatened both the Low Countries and the routes to India—especially after the French expedition to Egypt (1798).
| Conflict (dates55) | Immediate cause | Strategic stake for England / Great Britain |
|---|---|---|
| War of the League of Augsburg / Nine Years’ War (1689–1697) | Louis XIV’s expansion towards the Rhine and the Spanish Netherlands | Prevent France from dominating north-western Europe and locking the Low Countries—a vital zone for North Atlantic trade |
| War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) | Death of Charles II of Spain; risk of a Franco-Spanish dynastic union under the Bourbons | Block the formation of a Bourbon bloc controlling both France and the Spanish empire (ports, American silver, Mediterranean routes) |
| War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748) | Dispute over the Austrian Habsburg inheritance; opening of a Franco-British overseas front | Contain France in Flanders and contest colonial markets (Americas, India) |
| Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) | Global imperial rivalry (North America, India) + continental realignment in Europe | Break the French colonial empire and establish Britain as the leading maritime and commercial power |
| American War of Independence (1778–1783) | France seizes the American insurgency to avenge 1763 and weaken British naval supremacy | Reduce British hegemony over the Atlantic; for London, defend the empire and sea lanes against a Franco-Spanish coalition |
| Wars against Revolutionary France (First Coalition 1793–1797; Second Coalition 1798–1802) | Execution of Louis XVI; expansion of the French Republic; French expedition to Egypt (1798) | Contain the French Revolution; protect the Low Countries; above all secure sea lines to the Mediterranean and India |
Notes
1 https://damiengimenez.fr/lage-des-empires-extractifs-et-commerciaux-lespagne-et-les-provinces-unies-xvie-xviie-siecle/#Deux_modeles_pour_une_meme_finalite_la_puissance
2 Domenico Tarento, « Le discours de la raison d’État » in Alain Caillé, Christian Lazzeri, Michel Senellart, Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique, La Découverte, 2011.
3 Discours sur la première décade de Tite-Live, II, X.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 – For grain police measures, the attraction of foreign artisans, and the promotion of trades: Della ragion di Stato, book VIII.
– For monopolies and court luxury: Della ragion di Stato, book VII.
– For the prohibition on exporting strategic resources and the admission of foreign merchants as an instrument of power: Della ragion di Stato, book VIII; Relazioni universali, 1591–1596, vol. devoted to the Spanish Monarchy / to the Repubblica di Venetia.
7 Nicholas Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume I: The Origins of Empire, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 21 sq.
8 Douglass C. North & Barry R. Weingast, « Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England », The Journal of Economic History, vol. 49, no 4, 1989, p. 803-832 ; David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
9 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756, Macmillan, Londres, 1967. See also Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1990 ; Gary W. Cox, « War, Moral Hazard, and Ministerial Responsibility: England after 1688 », The Journal of Economic History, vol. 71, no 1, 2011, p. 133-161.
10 P. G. M. Dickson, op. cit. ; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783, Unwin Hyman, Londres, 1989.
11 Ibid. ; Gary W. Cox, op. cit.
12 P. G. M. Dickson, op. cit. ; Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009 ; Steven Pincus & James A. Robinson, « What Really Happened during the Glorious Revolution? », in Sebastian Galiani & Itai Sened (dir.), Institutions, Property Rights, and Economic Growth: The Legacy of Douglass North, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
13 John Brewer, op. cit. ; Dan Bogart & Gary Richardson, « Parliament and Property Rights in Britain, 1600-1830 », European Review of Economic History, vol. 15, no 4, 2011, p. 1-36.
14 P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume II: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2006 (1998), p. 1.
15 See the annex « Les guerres anglo-britanniques (1650-1800) » at the end of the article.
16 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2005.
Hont shows that modern trade develops within a framework of permanent inter-state rivalry, and that the early theorists of trade—including Adam Smith—still thought in terms of national survival, power, and external security rather than universal harmony.
17 The expression ‘doux commerce’ refers to Montesquieu (Book XX of The Spirit of the Laws), and ‘jealousy’ to Hume’s essay, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’.
18 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, W. Strahan & T. Cadell, Londres, 1776, Livre IV ; see also Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 2005.
Smith criticises the violence and monopolies of the European commercial system, but accepts that certain restrictions (such as the English Navigation Acts) can be justified in the name of national defence. Hont interprets this position as a strategic reformulation—rather than an abandonment—of raison d’État.
19 Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, Allen & Unwin, Londres, 1935 (1ʳᵉ éd. suédoise 1931).
Heckscher offers a structured definition of mercantilism as a state economic policy aimed at accumulating power and precious metal; it is one of the principal sources of the view of mercantilism as a coherent doctrine.
20 Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language, Routledge, Londres / New York, 1994.
Magnusson emphasises that ‘mercantilism’ is a retrospective discursive construction, largely defined in opposition to Smithian free trade, and that it should therefore be treated as a political and administrative language rather than as a systematic economic theory.
21 Julian Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660-1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017.
22 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Making of Modern English Society, 1750 to the Present, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Londres, 1968 ; éd. revue Penguin, 1999, p. 30-31.
Hobsbawm insists that the rise of British manufacturing is not merely an economic phenomenon: it produces a new social force that intervenes in public debate and political decision-making, demanding that the state protect and serve its interests.
23 For example, Dudley North, in his Discourses upon Trade (1691), sets out the first developed argument in favour of free trade. Jean-François Melon, in the 1730s, advocates resorting to economic competition rather than to armed force. He also anticipates the economic importance of the development of new techniques and of occupational mobility between sectors of activity (Istvan Hont, op. cit., p. 30 sq.).
24 See previous note.
25 Julian Hoppit, op. cit.
26 Luc Foisneau (ed.), Politique, droit et théologie chez Bodin, Gotius et Hobbes, Éditions Kimé, 1997, p. 11-12.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 4.
30 Ibid., p. 66.
31 Ibid., p. 13.
32 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Project Gutenberg e-text, accessed 2 Nov. 2025. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., I, 17. The other quotations in the paragraph are taken from the same chapter.
35 Ibid., I, 13.
36 https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/leveller-anthology-agreements
37 Thomas Rainsborough during the Putney Debates : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney_Debates
38 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
39 Ibid.
40 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMar/6-7/2/contents
41 https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/research/parliaments/parliaments-1690-1715 ; https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/parliament/1695
42 Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson., « The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth », American Economic Review, 95/3 (2005), p. 546–579 ; Steven Pincus and James Robinson, « What Really Happened During the Glorious Revolution?, » NBER Working Paper 17206 (2011), https://doi.org/10.3386/w17206.
43 Ibid.
44 Gary W. Cox, “Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?”, The Journal of Economic History, 72/3 (2012).
45 Julian Hoppit, op. cit.
46 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150-1625, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001. The jurist-theologians of the Second Spanish Scholastic maintain that no person and no people is by nature subject to another. In particular, Francisco de Vitoria affirms, in the Relectio de Indis (1539), that the Indians of the New World are “true owners” of their lands and of their political authority, and therefore not natural subjects of the emperor or the pope; Francisco Suárez (De legibus ac Deo legislatore, 1612) holds that political power resides first in the free and equal human community, which delegates authority, and not in any immediate right of the king. Hugo Grotius (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625) describes an original condition in which things are held in common and in which rights (property, legitimate authority) arise from human agreements.
47 Ibid.
48 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, in The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, vol. 4: Economic Writings and Two Treatises of Government, London, Rivington, 1824 (12th ed.), Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund. En ligne : https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/locke-the-works-of-john-locke-vol-4-economic-writings-and-two-treatises-of-government (consulté le 28 octobre 2025).
49 John Locke, op. cit., II, V, §46-48.
50 Ibid., II, IV, §22.
51 Ibid., II, XIX, §221-222.
52 Ibid., II, IX, §124.
53 https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/navigation-act-and-anglo-dutch-wars
54 https://www.britannica.com/event/Anglo-Dutch-Wars
55 The dates indicated correspond to direct English/British involvement.