One of the first ‘Mercantilists’ (See our entry on Political Economy), the central premise of Thomas Mun’s economic theory was that gold was a stable measure of wealth, and trade should be centrally regulated by the government to produce an excess of exports over imports in order to gain more gold for the country.

Mun wrote the influential treatise A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indies (1621) which argued against the prevailing opinion that the export of gold bullion (specifically by the East India Trading Company) was responsible for the economic slump. This treatise demonstrated that the re-exportation of goods ‘

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First published 05 October 2004

Citation: Editors. "Thomas Mun". The Literary Encyclopedia. 5 October 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5846, accessed 9 February 2010.]