By Amy Weng

By the 17th century, discourses of the political economy were abundant. Notably, the mercantilist and writer Gerard Malynes (fl. 1585-1641) was among the first to extensively employ pathological analogies in his writings to evaluate economic health and advise policy.

In his 1601 essay titled A treatise of the canker of Englands common wealth, Malynes structures his argument for increased governmental trade regulation via a rhetorical framework of diagnosing the kingdom’s disease, explaining its cause, and prescribing a remedy. He argues that the commonwealth suffers from a shortage of money caused directly by “the abuse of the exchange for money” (A treatise 18), which takes the forms of selling domestic goods at low prices, buying expensive foreign goods, and exporting bullion. For Malynes, wars and piracy are also reasons for England’s money deficiency because the former increases money exportation and the latter hinders its importation (The maintenance 30). 

His rationale for why a trade deficit would be injurious is aptly summed up in a proverb that he employs—that money is “nerui bellorum”’ (A treatise 60), or the nerves of war. This phrase essentially means that a nation’s strength lies in its wealth, reflecting Malynes’ judgment that the quantity of physical money—not land or population or the quantity and quality of manufactured goods—is the most important asset of a country. The saying has been attributed to the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, but we have not yet found the source text. Although the Latin term “nervus” was also used to refer to general anatomical features like sinew or tendon, the connection of nerves to the brain was already established in the English language by the medieval period, as we can see in the concrete usage section of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that Malynes was deliberately using money to link the country’s strength in the battleground to the body politic’s brain, the center of both thought and action. As a result, any activity that depletes the physical treasures of the kingdom also brings about its enfeeblement. 

He makes his anatomical allegory even more explicit in his 1623 book The center of the circle of commerce, in which he argues that money also represents the liver, exchange the brain, and domestic goods the heart (128). For Malynes, the nation’s bleeding is caused by a consumption of the liver, which is in turn rooted in a neurological disease that only the politicians, as physicians of the commonwealth, can cure (The center 128). Here, he employs the medical meaning of consumption as a wasting disease, i.e., the outflow of humors (the essential bodily fluids) that leads to detrimental weight loss. Hence, an affliction in the brain causes life-sustaining fluids to drain out of the liver, the digestive organ that is responsible for nutrient absorption and storage. Consistent with his belief that money is the greatest treasure of the commonwealth, he esteems exchange, the process that determines the supply of money, to be the most important organ in the body: the brain. In classic mercantilist fashion, Malynes advocates for governmental control over economic affairs, which means that statesmen are those who have the authority and the right to correct problems in the market and set exchange rates for money, which is why he assigns them to be the doctors for the body politic. Fundamentally, Malynes’ theory is rooted in his belief that commodity prices and exchange rates can be manually and actively manipulated by controlling the amount of money in the nation, which puts him at odds with his contemporaries like Thomas Mun as well as modern conceptions of supply and demand. 

He further contributes an additional dimension of evaluating the ethics of goods based on a perception of their intrinsic qualities as extravagant or unnecessary, rather than simply for their place of origin. In addition to an overbalanced trade, he therefore also censures what we often now call luxury consumption: 

the vse of too much white Wine sophisticated into Claret, the Leggs full of dropsicke humors of consumption, by the immoderate wearing of Veluets, Silkes, Cambricks and Lawnes (The center 130) 

Tobacco, Orenges, and other corruptible smoaking things, or superfluous commodities bought at deere rates (Consuetudo 84) 

The term “dropsicke” refers to the disease of dropsy, which is the overaccumulation of fluid in body cavities or tissues. Here, Malynes evokes a rather odd image that combines two very different conditions, one which causes swelling and the other wasting. Later in the text, Malynes states that dropsy ultimately turns into consumption (The center 133). In other words, he is arguing that too many people indulging in costly and high quality goods causes the nation to first swell with bodily fluids that are being directed away from their proper course and then succumb to wasting and decay. In his comprehensive five hundred page guidebook Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-merchant sold in 1622, Malynes begins his concluding section with a warning that envy is the main driver of unethical expenditures: “THe triuiall vice of Enuie is said to be the mother of wickednesse…Her Pallace is a dim and hollow vault, wherin she waxeth pale and wan, as hauing the consumption of the liuer” (499). The immoderate demand for expensive, exotic textiles and intoxicants stems from the desire to possess conspicuous symbols of wealth and social status in a world of burgeoning global trade. He further remarks that passions like envy and malice blind people’s judgment (Consuetudo 409) and quotes that “inuidia, non culpa caecauit” (“envy, not fault blinded”; The maintenance 48). Malynes’ stance is consistent with the long-held notions that strong, negative emotions are harmful to health, and it attributes significance to the impact of psychological phenomena on not only a healthy mind, but also a healthy body.   

His proposed remedy thus directly addresses the brain of the body politic: “the exchange for all places ought to be kept at a certaintie in price, according to value for value” based on gold and silver (The center 100) and that the Crown levies high import tariffs (105). He argues that the effective state regulation of exchange would be so beneficial for the kingdom that even the immoderate use of a luxury like white wine would “rejoyce the Heart, and take away the melancholike disease of the mind, which commonly procureth the disease of the Body. Finally, The Body will be cured of the said consumption” (The center 132). In his allegorical framework, rejuvenating the heart means bolstering the competitiveness of domestic goods, and taking away the brain’s disease means setting favorable exchange rates that enrich the kingdom’s treasuries. While Malynes employs many vivid metaphors and examples to make his argument, his key takeaway message is simple and clear: let lawmakers manipulate practices of exchange so England can have more money. 

Like Malynes, the merchant Edward Misselden (fl. 1615-1654) undertakes a medical analysis of England’s trade problems by esteeming the role of money as the blood of England’s body politic: “And thus the Hepatites, or Liuer veine of this Great body of ours being opened, & such profusiōs of the Life bloud let out; & the Liuer or fountain obstructed, & weakned, which shuld succour the same; needs must this Great body languish, and at length fal into a Marasmus, or Hectike Feuer” (Free Trade 10). For Misselden, money is the blood of the body politic, so its outflow not only starves England into marasmus, i.e., severe malnourishment from wasting, but also gives the kingdom exhaustion accompanied by the unpleasant symptoms of fever. However, the two men fundamentally disagree on the scope of the causes of England’s decay of trade and the solutions they advise, to the extent that Misselden even accuses that Malynes “must Maligne, or not be Malynes” (The circle 43). While Malynes insists that the “heauenly Mistery” of exchange (The center 139) is the direct and immediate cause of the commonwealth’s disease, Misselden introduces a multidimensional analysis: 

The rather, for that, as there are many Causes discussed and discoursed of at this time, of the decay of Trade; so also are there many Remedies: wherein if either the Causes be mistaken, or the Remedies ill applyed; the present sicknesse of the Trade, may be brought from a disease in Fieri, to an Habituated and in Facto, as the phisitians Schoole hath it (Free Trade 6) 

Misselden not only differentiates between proximate and remote causes, but also efficient and deficient ones. He defines the deficient causes to be the kingdom’s want of money due to wars and piracy and individuals’ want of East India Company (EIC) stock (Free Trade 28), whereas the efficient causes are usury–the charging of high interest rates on loans–and unnecessary lawsuits (Free Trade 29). Again, we find a denouncement of luxury, as he calls for “restraint of the Excesse of the Kingdome” in the form of usury, which he calls “a Viper in a Kingdome that gnaweth through the bowels thereof,” and prodigality, which he names as “a Canker that fretteth and wasteth the stocke” (Free Trade 96). Snakes are traditionally regarded as symbols of sin, and the venomous viper would only be even more stigmatized with notions of evil. On the other hand, a canker is an incurable sore or cancer that destroys one’s body. The underlying logic for tying usury and excessive spending together is that they are both motivated greed for material resources, whether money earned through exorbitant interest rates or possession of rare, costly, yet unnecessary items imported from abroad. However, the difference in the metaphors implies that usury is detrimental because it is perceived as an immoral agent of wrongdoing, whereas prodigality is harmful because it leads to health complications for the body politic; the first depends on a judgment of the action’s innate ethical properties, while the other is an ethical attitude based on its observed consequences. 

Although the two men lambaste each other with verbal attacks on the minute details of their respective analyses, we see that they retain the same ethical attitudes towards excessive expenditures on foreign goods. Both employ considerable amounts of medical terminology to make their arguments about the political economy, and their discourses mark significant attitudes towards the trading and using of goods before the emergence of capitalism and modern market economies that rely heavily on debt on both the individual and national levels.