Today we might be witnessing “a new international neomercantilist moment,” and scholars of international political economy (IPE) should be prepared to navigate the neomercantilist currents swirling in the ideological wake of neoliberalism. Such is the conclusion of Eric Helleiner’s The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History. While germane to contemporary concerns, the book represents the culmination of Helleiner’s years of scholarship on neomercantilism and the non-European sources of IPE thought. It more than delivers the promise of its title and will be invaluable to IPE scholars, global intellectual historians, and those invested in addressing the Eurocentric moorings of the discipline of international relations (IR).
Helleiner defines “neomercantilism” as a distinctly post-Smithian ideology. While neomercantilists share with pre-Smithian mercantilists a commitment to augmenting state wealth and power through government activism, they are distinguished from their predecessors by their premeditated repudiation of liberal free trade doctrines (tellingly, many of Helleiner’s neomercantilists are apostate free traders). Based on this careful definition, the book mounts a four-pronged thesis about neomercantilism’s multiple intellectual origins, internal ideological diversity, complex networks of circulation, and roots in endogenous mercantilist traditions. The argument targets the conventional IPE view of neomercantilism, which canonizes Friedrich List’s writings and decodes protectionist arguments in Asia and the Americas as derivatives of the Listian template. Helleiner dismantles this diffusionist story by demonstrating the limited or absent influence of List on neomercantilist positions adopted outside Europe. Leaving the proverbial streetlight of List’s National System of Political Economy, Helleiner searches for the origins of neomercantilism in pragmatic responses to geopolitical vulnerability, endogenous mercantilist traditions, and ideological borrowing between the peripheries of the world economy.
The book comprises four parts. The first part covers List’s intellectual antecedents, contemporaries, and followers in the US-French-German context. In addition to providing an excellent overview of the Listian paradigm to the newcomers to the field (though even here Helleiner innovates by interpreting Mahadev Govind Ranade’s thought as a strand of “colonial neomercantilism”), this section establishes the benchmark against which the subsequent sections delineate the diversity, polycentrism, and endogeneity of neomercantilism. The second part turns to Henry Carey’s “American School” and maps out its underappreciated impact on neomercantilist thought, from Canada and Germany to Japan and Ethiopia. Also noteworthy here is attention to Henry Carey’s father, Mathew Carey, as an intellectual conduit between the Irish and the American moments of neomercantilism. Part three is arguably the pivot of the book, bringing the whole weight of the thesis to bear on an analysis of East Asian neomercantilism. As significant as Helleiner’s dissection of endogenous mercantilist traditions is his illustration of East Asia’s regional intellectual ecology, where one finds antecedents and doctrines traveling from China’s Legalist school to Tokugawa Japan’s kokueki thought to Korea’s Gaehwa movement. The final section widens the aperture to take a snapshot of neomercantilist experiments in Ottoman Egypt, Latin American republics, imperial Russia, and the Asante Empire, among others. The geographic spread does more than just cover the rest of the world but challenges the reader to think outside the nation-state form, not least by comparing the political economy of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism to that of the swadeshi movement in colonial India. The book’s conclusion traces the postwar legacies of neomercantilism, highlighting their formative imprint on the Bretton Woods architecture and the Non-Aligned Movement, before ending on the postneoliberal drift to neomercantilism.
A study that traverses multiple centuries, regions, and intellectual traditions is no doubt ambitious, and Helleiner readily anticipates some skepticism on this account. To this reviewer, the book’s historical research sufficiently girds its argumentative arch, though regional specialists might have their disagreements with Helleiner’s rendering of particular texts and traditions. Of greater interest to a broader audience would be the conceptual and methodological threads that stitch together the historical analysis.
One such thread is the imperial political ontology of neomercantilism. Helleiner’s story is set in a world of imperial and subimperial polities, one where hierarchy and not anarchy is the ordering principle. One is struck by the extent to which the historical figures examined in the book readily assume that they inhabit a world of empires rather than nation-states (which ironically puts them ahead of mainstream IR theory that still operates on premises of methodological nationalism). They conduct their debates over free trade, protectionism, and interventionism in the language of “colony,” “dependency,” and “tributary,” terms replete with the odium of economic subordination as much as political subjugation. In these debates, one finds the term “civilization” assuming a definitive political economic content, one predicated on industrialization, economic diversification, and competitiveness. Against this backdrop, neomercantilism manifests variously in a defensive strategy of avoiding peripheralization or an offensive strategy of economically dominating other polities. If it is admitted that the contemporary world order has not shed its “imperial constitution” after formal decolonization, the implications of the analysis for the present moment become more salient.
The same thread also implicates questions of historical method. Helleiner’s rendering of global neomercantilism generates palpable resonances across disparate regions, periods, and ideological traditions. Exemplary in this regard are Zheng Guanying’s observations on a global “commercial warfare” embroiling China, and Fukuzawa Yukichi’s tasking of Japanese merchants with the duty to “wage the war of trade.” It is difficult to overlook the parallels with the early modern European view of commerce as war by other means, except that Zheng and Fukuzawa draw their inspiration not from Josiah Child or Jean-Baptiste Colbert but from a Chinese mercantilist tradition dating back to the third century BCE. Helleiner offers a contextual explanation of such resemblances, averring that neomercantilist ideas are prone to crop up under conditions of heightened geopolitical rivalry and vulnerability, which aligns Zheng’s China and Fukuzawa’s Japan (both subjected to “unequal treaties”) with Alexander Hamilton’s fledgling United States. Even though Helleiner does not elaborate the point, one can infer that when the conditions that engender neomercantilism become generalized across the geopolitical terrain, they can coalesce into a “neomercantilist moment” such as the post-Napoleonic period, the late nineteenth century, and the interwar years. Here one might have expected a more sustained theorization of the relationship between neomercantilist ideas and their contexts, not least because Helleiner has shown elsewhere that projects of state-building under geopolitical duress can lead to the adoption of liberal rather than neomercantilist policies.
Relatedly, a major conceptual question left unresolved is the status of “mercantilism.” Unlike neomercantilism’s clearly post-Smithian provenance, mercantilism features in Helleiner’s account almost as a transhistorical doctrine, extending at least back to the third century BCE and potentially occurring whenever commerce is instrumentalised in interpolity conflict. Such historical extension cuts against the received understanding of mercantilism as a distinctly modern language of statecraft responding to the novel conditions of a world economy forged by the violence of colonialism and merchant capitalism. If Helleiner intends to liberate “mercantilism” from its temporal/modern as well as its geographic/European prison (and thereby refashion an actor’s category into an investigator’s category), then this would necessitate a more focused theoretical engagement than the book presently furnishes.
The Neomercantilists is at once a timely intervention at a juncture of resurgent protectionism and geopolitical competition, and a timely contribution to the IPE literature that now abounds in global histories of liberalism and Marxism but lacks a matching study of neomercantilism. As such, it merits a place on the shelf next to Eli Heckscher’s classic study of mercantilism.
