USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Some nations needed colonies for raw materials, a labor supply, and a way to keep wealth within its control (by selling colonies the products their raw materials helped to produce). Essentially, colonies increased a nation’s wealth-building power and national security.

Detailed explanation-2: -Under mercantilism, colonies were important because they produced raw materials for the mother country, goods that the country would have to import otherwise (things like grain, sugar, or tobacco). The colonies also gave the mother country an outlet for exports, which increased jobs and industrial development at home.

Detailed explanation-3: -Adam Smith coined the term “mercantile system” to describe the system of political economy that sought to enrich the country by restraining imports and encouraging exports. This system dominated Western European economic thought and policies from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries.

Detailed explanation-4: -The mercantilist goal was to maximize a nation’s export surplus-the balance of trade, which was equated with the future prosperity and power of the realm-and the means were cheap production inputs, that is, cheap raw materials (for which colonies proved useful) and cheap, and therefore poor, labor at home.