18 - The political economy of rising capitalism

Summary

The emergence of capitalism as an economic system was a process that spread over a lengthy historical period with a wide-ranging and diversified geographical scope. The publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations represented a point of departure, a crucial moment in the establishment of a set of concepts and instruments of analysis that are still used today in order to express and understand economic reality. The overseas territorial and commercial expansion set in motion by both the Portuguese and the Spanish in the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, and in which they were later followed by the Dutch and the English, created an unprecedented trading dynamic at the world level. Economic change channeled through transformations in international trade and monetary systems also gave rise to different forms of perception of a reality that was now being understood through numbers, calculations, measurements, statistical information, and political arithmetic.