Keyword: «the science of commerce»

The economic discourse of the early Modern period offers an analysis of specific key phenomena: property, finance, commerce, trade, population growth and economic development, as well as studies of economic inequality and equity of distribution. Many of the leading philosophers of Modern times, from Nicolaus Copernicus to Adam Smith, have made huge contributions to economics. In the early Modern period, there were at least a dozen schools of economic thought. Impressively, by the end of the 18th century, many basic principles and laws relating to money, markets and trade had already been formulated and many of the methods of economics – model building, time series analysis, statistical estimation, game theory and decision theory – already existed.