Tomás de Mercado

• 1. Introduction

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  Tomás de Mercado, a Spanish Dominican friar who lived from 1525 to 1575, died at sea on a voyage back to Mexico. Even his birthplace is uncertain, because Seville and Mexico are both possible. What he left behind was the Summa de Tratos y Contratos of 1571, a title that means Manual of Deals and Contracts. In it, a churchman takes on the practical questions of commerce. Why would a friar and theologian write for traders? What did he believe a fair price was, and who had the right to set it? And why did the wider world only take notice of him in the twentieth century?

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• 2. Between Two Worlds

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  Mexico City is where Mercado first appears as a teacher. After joining the Dominicans as a young man, he became a lecturer in Arts at the priory there. He then returned to Spain to study at Salamanca University. At Salamanca he went on to lecture in philosophy, moral theology and law. His next post was the Exchange House of Seville, which the source describes as the centre of Spain's international money-flows. A scholar of law and moral theology was now working at the place where the money moved. The book that followed was written with that world in view.

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• 3. A Book for Merchants

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  In 1569 Mercado published a work titled De los tratos de India y tratantes en ellas. It was prepared at the request of Sevillian merchants. The Summa of 1571 was an expanded edition of that earlier book. He wrote it for businessmen as well as for scholars, and the result was no dry treatise. It contains many general digressions on social issues, often in very lively language. Among its subjects, one question about everyday life received particular attention, and it concerned the price of wheat.

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• 4. The Fair Price

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  Wheat was the example Mercado chose when he analysed the just price. The Spanish government fixed the price of grain through a rule called the tasa del trigo. Mercado strongly supported it on social and ethical grounds. He held to this even if it meant producers had to sell at a loss. He also treated the price controls of the Spanish authorities as a divine obligation owed to the prince. In his view the prince was responsible for the tranquillity and peace of the kingdom. This made Mercado a vigorous supporter of state intervention in the economy. Luis de Molina and Leonardus Lessius took the opposite side. They considered any intervention by the authorities inopportune, because they thought it would breed corruption and clientelism. Mercado's moral reasoning was not limited to grain, however. One chapter of the Summa turned to human beings who were bought and sold.

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• 5. The Slave Trade

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  A full chapter of the Summa is devoted to the African slave trade, and Mercado was highly critical of it. He saw clearly that the idea of just enslavement did not match what actually happened in the trade. His criticism had limits, though. He regarded it as acceptable for Europeans to buy people who had already been enslaved by Africans. He also accepted the enslavement of captives taken in war and of people sentenced for crimes. A third category he allowed was children sold by their parents out of necessity. The same book that defended fixed grain prices on moral grounds therefore drew its own lines in this chapter. Those lines rested on a concept of just enslavement that he otherwise rejected as a description of the real trade.

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• 6. Rediscovery

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  In 1954 the economist Joseph Schumpeter discussed Mercado in his History of Economic Analysis. The book was published after Schumpeter's death and edited by Elisabeth Boody Schumpeter. That discussion carried Mercado's name beyond the Spanish-speaking world. The strong revival of monetarist economics since then has drawn further scholarly attention to him. Mercado is linked with Martín de Azpilcueta, and together the two are credited with founding an economic tradition called Iberian monetarism. Both belong to a wider intellectual current often known as Late Scholasticism, or the School of Salamanca. The friar who may have been born in Mexico is now remembered as one half of a partnership with Azpilcueta.

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