Answer:
B. Having a lower cost of production than other firms or nations.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the seventeenth century, economic inquiry emerged as a separate science. But that didn't just happen overnight. The process of crude conceptualization and creation of political economic concepts had long before started to emerge.
Commodity, exchange, money, pricing, loan interest, commercial profit, and other economic concepts were already familiar to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus, and other peoples.
Ancient Egyptian papyri, the Hammurabi Code, the Vedas of Ancient India, Homer's Odyssey and other works of the ancient Greek poet, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle and other philosophers of Greek antiquity, etc., all include a wealth of information and ideas that are quite intriguing.
The ancients had very rudimentary knowledge of economic concepts.
The history of economic thought starts with the writings of Xenophon, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, who made the first theoretical step towards an understanding of the economy of ancient Greek society (which was at the stage of the collapse of the primitive-communal system and the rise of slavery) and articulated some remarkable ideas on value, commodity exchange, and the earliest forms of capital: trading (merchant's) and usury capital.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, commerce and monetary activities rather than manufacturing were where capitalist institutions initially emerged.
Eventually, this development of the future capital became known as Mercantilism, which represented the interests of the capital of the merchants in England, Italy, and France. The main spokespersons for it were Thomas Mun and William Stafford in England, Antonio Serra in Italy, and Antoine de Montchrestien in France.
The French mercantilist Antoine de Montchrestien first used the phrase "political economy" in his Treatise of Political Economy (1615), which offered advice on how to manage the state economy and increase the nation's riches. The phrase, which originally meant "the laws of state administration," was derived from three Greek words: "politikos" (state, social); "ikos" (home or its management); and "nomos" (rule of law).
The Physiocrats—Francois Quesnay, Turgot, and others—developed bourgeois political economics later, in the seventeenth century. French economist François Quesnay belonged to the Physiocratic school. He is renowned for publishing Tableau économique (Economic Table), which laid the groundwork for the Physiocrats' theories, in 1758. French statesman Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, also known as Turgot, was greatly inspired by Quesnay and was also an economist in his own right.
They changed the focus of economic inquiry away from the domain of circulation and toward the sphere of production, in opposition to the mercantilists.
Karl Marx observed in 1859 in the section 'Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities' in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 'The decisive outcome of the research carried on for over a century and a half by classical political economy, beginning with William Petty in Britain and Boisguillebert in France, and ending with Ricardo in Britain and Sismondi in France, is an analysis of the aspects of the commodity into two forms of labour – use-value is reduced to concrete labour or purposive productive activity, exchange-value to labour-time or homogeneous social labour.' In Capital (1867) he defined political economy: '… by political economy I understand the economy which since the time of W. Petty has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society'.
Marx made a distinction between such men as Petty, Smith and Ricardo and their successors. He wrote of the former that they devoted their efforts 'to the study of the real interrelations of bourgeois production', while the latter were 'content to elucidate the semblance of the interrelations' and to act in effect as apologists for the capitalist class. He called them 'vulgar economists'.
Engels had already warned, and shown great foresight, in 1843 when he wrote in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: 'The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgment become. For while Smith and Malthus found only scattered fragments, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light, yet they did not come to examine the premises and still accepted the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty'.