Book review: The neomercantilists: A global history
| Author | Sean T. Byrnes |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221097995 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Even when considering these critiques, Nuclear Reactions remains an excellent
scholarly work. Bell’s theory of nuclear opportunism is innovative and intuitive in
explaining how nuclear weapons are used to further pre-existing strategic goals, rather
than driving states to adopt new ones. The book is thorough, with Bell presenting
convincing and highly detailed evidence in his case studies to support his theory while
acknowledging potential pitfalls. It can easily be recommended to experts in the fields
of nuclear deterrence and, more broadly, foreign policy, as well as to readers with a
more casual interest in these areas.
Eric Helleiner
The Neomercantilists: A Global History
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. 414 pp. $49.95 (cloth)
ISBN: 9-781-50176-012-9
Reviewed by: Sean T. Byrnes, Western Governors University, Salt Lake City, USA
For all the disruptions of the COVID-19 era, and bien pensant handwringing about
Donald Trump and Brexit, we remain firmly in an age of economic liberalism. Trump,
after all, barely lasted four years in office, while Brexit, in retrospect, seems less about
rejecting liberal trade policies and more about refusing to implement them coherently.
Talk in the corporate world of supply chain “resiliency”is certainly more tactical than
ideological—in general, one sees few challenges to liberal orthodoxy in mainstream
discourse. All of this spurs the hope that Eric Helleiner’s illuminating study, The
Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, gains a broad readership outside the
academy, as Helleiner has excavated an intellectual world that seems, in the breadth and
diversity he restores to it, bracingly new.
The book, as the title suggests, explores “neomercantilism,”an ideology that
Helleiner defines as a “belief in the need for strategic trade protectionism and other
forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power in the post-
Smithian age”(4). “Post-Smithian”here serves more as an intellectual than chrono-
logical distinction. All of the thinkers he studies were working with an awareness of the
impact of Adam Smith’sThe Wealth of Nations (1776) on discussions of political
economy—distinguishing them from the pre-Smithian mercantilists of sixteenth and
seventeenth century fame. Neomercantilism was therefore something of an insurgent
tradition from the start, fighting against Smith’s liberalism, which rode to prominence
on the back of the British Empire following the Napoleonic Wars. Nearly all in the book
are thus critics of perfidious Albion, whose switch from ardent protectionist to free
trader was described by one, Friedrich List, as kicking “away the ladder by which [one]
has climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing ... after”(3).
Helleiner’s main contention is that neomercantilism has not yet been appreciated for
its true intellectual variety, global reach, and diverse origins—especially those outside
Book Reviews 151
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