frigeration was unavailable. Commerce was conducted in cities and towns, but transportation was limited to horse-drawn carts and vehicles. There were no telegraphs, no railroads and no steamships, with the result that information could take weeks or even months to reach outlying areas.
This was also the age of the European empire, a role that Great Britain relished. New lands and new opportunities for commerce had been discovered and were being exploited with goods flowing from India and Asia to Western Europe. At the same time, the American colonies, which had the advantage of being comprised largely of English citizens, were developing their own manufacturing and agricultural base, and a growing economy that they wanted to use to trade internationally.
The mid-18th century was also the age of mercantilism. Sometimes described simply as control of the economy by a central government, mercantilism came about in the fifteenth century in England and Western Europe, and evolved into sometimes conflicting laws and practices that regulated the economy. Smith suggested that there were four underlying principles behind mercantilism. First, he suggests that those who supported mercantilism believed that wealth consisted of money. Land and other resources were believed to be less important that currency. This, according to Smith, was because mercantilists could not understand how these resources could be converted to wealth. Mercantilists also held that there is a limited amount of wealth in the world; that it cannot be increased. In this atmosphere, the concept of increasing wealth cannot exist because there is a finite sum of wealth to begin with. Because of this, Smith's third observation of mercantilism emerges: in order for a country to increase its own wealth, it must somehow transfer wealth from another country while protecting its own. This leads to Smith's fourth observation that mercantilists encourage exports and ...