page_title: History of economic thought
section_title: Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Pierre Le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguilbert
hierarchical_section_title: History of economic thought / Mercantilism and international trade (16th to 18th century) / Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Pierre Le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguilbert
caption_attribution_description: Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert, French law-maker and a Jansenist, one of the inventors of the notion of an economical market (1646 – 1714)
context_page_description: The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st Century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, scholasticists such as Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.
  In the Western world, economics was not a separate discipline, but part of philosophy until the 18th–19th century Industrial Revolution and the 19th century Great Divergence, which accelerated economic growth.
context_section_description: In 1665–1683 Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) was minister of finance under King Louis XIV of France, and set up national guilds to regulate major industries.  Silk, linen, tapestry, furniture manufacture and wine were examples of the crafts in which France specialized, all of which came to require membership in a guild to operate in until the French Revolution. According to Colbert, "It is simply and solely the abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power."
  In 1695 French economist Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert (1646–1714) wrote a plea to Louis XIV to end Colbert's mercantilist program, containing the first notion of an economical market, becoming the first economist to question mercantile economic policy and value the wealth of a country by its production and exchange of goods instead its assets.
caption: Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert (1646–1714)
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