Mercantilist Literature Consisted Mainly of Writings on Behalf of Merchants and Businessmen Who Had the Usual Capacity for Identifying Their Own with the National Welfare

The mercantilist literature, on the other hand, consisted in the main of writings by or on behalf of "merchants" or businessmen, who had the usual capacity for identifying their own with the national welfare. Disinterested exposition of trade doctrine was by no means totally absent from the mercantilist literature, and in the eighteenth century many of the tracts were written to serve party rather than self. But the great bulk of the mercantilist literature consisted of tracts which were partly or wholly, frankly or disguisedly, special pleas for special economic interests. Freedom for themselves, restrictions for others, such was the essence of the usual program of legislation of the mercantilist tracts of merchant authorship.

--Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 59.