Question

Mercantilist theories are at the base for why the nations of Europe took colonies and established the Colombian Exchange with the New World.

True

False

Answer 1

Mercantilist theories indeed prompted European nations to establish colonies and the Colombian Exchange, aiming to amass wealth through controlled trade and exploitation of colonial resources.

Step-by-step explanation:

The statement that mercantilist theories are at the base of why the nations of Europe took colonies and established the Colombian Exchange with the New World is true. Mercantilism, a dominant economic philosophy from the 1500s to the late 1700s, posited that wealth was finite and that to increase national power and wealth, a country needed to amass gold and silver, favorably balance trade, and control colonial markets for exports and imports. European nations such as England, France, and the Netherlands followed Spain and Portugal in seeking New World colonies to supply raw materials and serve as marketplaces for their manufactured goods, fueling colonial economies and mercantilist policies.

Answer 2

False

Step-by-step explanation:

It is called mercantilism to a set of political ideas or economic ideas of great pragmatism that were developed during the sixteenth, seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century in Europe. It was characterized by a strong State intervention in the economy, coinciding with the development of monarchical absolutism.

It consisted of a series of measures that focused on three areas: the relationships between political power and economic activity; State intervention in the latter; and the control of the currency. Thus, they tended to the state regulation of the economy, the unification of the internal market, the growth of population, the increase of own production - controlling natural resources and foreign and domestic markets, protecting local production from foreign competition, subsidizing private companies and creating privileged monopolies-, the imposition of tariffs on foreign products and the increase of the money supply -through the prohibition of exporting precious metals and inflationary coinage-, always with a view to the multiplication of fiscal revenues. These actions had the ultimate goal of forming the nation-state as strong as possible.

Mercantilism came into crisis at the end of the 18th century and practically disappeared by the mid-19th century, with the emergence of new physiocratic and liberal theories, which helped Europe recover from the deep crisis of the seventeenth century and the French Revolutionary Wars.