It is a consideration of the economic history of France that most clearly brings out the fact that the mercantilism that was everywhere making its way was at least as much a matter of transformation and union at home as of barriers against the world outside. Louis XI (1461-1483) castdown the great houses of Burgundy and Anjou, of Orleans and Bourbon, resisted the narrow selfishness of the corporations, sought to bring about uniform weights and measures in France, and forbade the importation of foreign manufactures. The edict of 1539, which introduced freedom of trade in corn in the interior of France, particularly between the several provinces, sets out with the assertion that in a united political body the several districts should, at all times, help and support one another. The declaration in 1577 that trade, and in 1581 that industry, belonged to the droit domanial had not so much a fiscal as a centralising significance; as was the case generally with the ordinances dating from the time of the great de l'Hopital (Chancellor 1560-1568). Richelieu's razing of the fortresses of the nobility has often been extolled as one of the most important steps towards internal freedom of intercourse within France; his active measures for the creation of a French marine were among the most important contributions towards the development of an independent commercial policy in relation to other countries. Colbert's administration (1662-1683) was, primarily, a struggle against the municipal and provincial authorities; of whom Cheruel says that it was they really who hindered economic progress and the improvement of trade and manufactures. The submission of the towns to a uniform ordinance, the partial abolition of the provincial Estates, the diminution of the power of the provincial governor, and his replacement by the intendent; these were measures which, like his great road and canal works, his interest in posts and insurance, in technical and artistic education, in exhibitions and model buildings created by the state, in private and public model industrial establishments, his reform of river tolls, his union of the inner provinces in a uniform customs system, - all aimed at the one thing, to make of the French people under its brilliant monarchy a noble and united body, united in civilisation as well as in government, and worthy of the name of nation. The great laws of Colbert, the ordonnance civile of 1667, the edit general sur les eaux et les forets of 1669, the ordonnance criminelle of 1670, the ordonnance de commerce of 1673, founded the legal as well as the economic unity of France; even economically they are more important than the tariffs of 1664 and 1667, for these did not succeed even in removing the differences between the pays d'
etats and the pays d' election.
Austria, as late as 1748, had not got beyond a very loose association of provinces. It was then determined, in imitation of the Prussian administration, that things should be different. The Prussian government had been able, since the days of the Great Elector (1640-1688), and still more during the reign of Frederick William I (17I3-1740), to create a financial, economic, and military whole, such as there was no other on the continent, and this out of the most refractory materials, out of territories lying far apart and almost hostile one to another. What is more, this was successfully carried through at the very period when the administration had set before itself the purpose of retrieving lost time within the territories themselves, and securing what many other districts of Germany had already obtained by 1600, that is, their unity and self sufficiency. At the very time that it was engaged in Brandenburg, Pomerania, Magdeburg, East Prussia, and the Rhine provinces (Cleves and Mark), in subjecting the towns and the nobles to the authority of the state, and in creating a united provincial administration, it took in hand the task of giving the whole group of poor little territories a real political and economic unity, of taking part in European politics, and of securing, by an independent policy in trade and industry, for these northern lands, bare as they were of men, devoid as they were of maritime commerce or mines or considerable manufactures, a place by the side of the old and wealthy Great Powers. The whole character of the Prussian administration from 1680 to 1786 was determined by the way in which this state, with its small and broken geographical basis, set about combining a national policy in pursuit of German-Protestant and mercantilist objects, with the tasks of territorial rule handed down to it by the past; and by the way in which it carried out, in war and peace, in administration and economy, a national state policy in the "great style" with scarcely more than territorial means. Our present task has only been to shew how close was the connection, in Prussia as elsewhere, between, on the one side, reform and centralisation at home, the transformation of territorial economies into a national economy ("Volks" wirthschaft), and the mercantile system on the other; how, here as elsewhere, domestic policy and foreign policy supplemented one another as indispensable elements in one system.
