Mercantilism is an old-fashioned view of economics which was prevalent between the 16th and 18th centuries. It saw national wealth as deriving largely from a country's stock of precious metals. The more precious metals a country had, the better; and the goal of economic policy was primarily to ensure a net positive inflow of precious metals through trade. Economic relations between countries were seen as essentially zero-sum; that is, the consensus was that one country could only prosper through trade at the expense of other countries. Having to buy goods from another country was seen as a bad thing because it caused some of the precious metals to leak away. The net effect of the mercantilist belief system was to limit the free operation of markets and introduce severe restrictions on economic activity, such as protectionist measures which restrained imports, and government grants of monopoly which allowed strict control of some aspects of the economy to be maintained.
