500
This economic philosophy widespread in the 1600s and 1700s was chock-full of fallacies. For example, people who believed this philosophy thought that the amount of wealth in the world was fixed, that imports were good and exports were bad, that colonies were important for a country’s economic well-being, and that gold and silver constituted the wealth of a nation. Adam Smith debunked many of these ideas in his Wealth of Nations.
What is mercantilism?