The Man

Thomas Mun was born in 1571 and died in 1641. He is described in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB ) as an "economic writer"

[*] Introduction to a facsimile edition of Thomas Mun's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664), in the series Klassiker der National Okonomie (Classics of Political Economy), edited by Professor Horst Claus Rechtenwald and published by Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen, Dusseldorf, Federal Republic of Germany in a separate small volume in German translation with the title "Uber den Handel: Thomas Mun's Ideen im Lichte unserer Epoche" ("A Discourse on Trade: Thomas Mun's Ideas in Contemporary Light"), 1989.

(1921–2, XIII, p. 1183); however, he wrote not to serve party politics but for science (Heckscher, 1935, p. 184, note 7). Son of a mercer, John Mun, he had a stepfather who was also a mercer, and a grandfather and uncle who, as moneyers of the Royal Mint, may have given him an early insight into currency matters. His career as a merchant started about 1596, before the founding of the East India Company in 1600, and he spent some time in Italy, from perhaps 1597 to 1607, where he seems to have failed and absconded because of bankruptcy. In Leghorn, he was known to have been a factor of the merchant William Galloway, who was inscribed on the lists of the Levant Company, trafficking between London and the Eastern Mediterranean, and to have dealt in importing into Italy lead, tin and cloth, while exporting alum. He maintained an account with the bankers Matteo and Lorenzo Galli of Florence (DeRoover, 1957). His Italian experience is mentioned twice in England's Treasure , once in recounting that the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand the First, had lent him 40,000 crowns and allowed him to export it in specie to import goods from Turkey (pp. 18–19)^[1] and again to make the point that exchange manipulation cannot determine the rate of exchange, as Gerard Malynes, an intellectual adversary in London, maintained it did:

I have lived long in Italy where the greatest Banks and Bankers of Christendom do trade, yet could I never see nor hear, that they did, or were able to rule the price of Exchange by Confederacie, but still the plenty or scarcity of money in the course of trade did always overrule them and made the Exchange to run at high or low rates. (p. 51)

Mun returned to London from Italy sometime after 1609, married in 1612, and in July 1615, "as a well known merchant" (DNB , 1921–2, XIII, p. 1184) was elected a member of the committee, or a director, of the East India Company. He spent the rest of his life actively promoting the Company's interests and was said to have been "its ablest advocate" (Chaudhuri, 1965, p. 20). He refused, however, certain responsibilities within the Company — in November 1621 to go to India to inspect the Company's "factories," and in March 1624 to serve as deputy governor of the Company. He none the less played a prominent role in the Company's decisions, his name appearing frequently in the Company's minutes, opposing resettlement in Bantam in Java in the 1618–19 war in Asia, advocating instead withdrawal to north India; propounding in 1626 the theory that the Company would have to earn a return three and a half times the original cost of its goods bought in Asia to cover freight, customs, goods exported and other costs and to make a profit; persuading the Court in 1626 to change the manning and stowage of the Company's ships bound for India to another port to lessen the danger

from French ships with letters of marque; insisting in 1627 with the governor, but vainly, on the necessity of sending shipping to realize on the Company's assets in India; proposing in 1632 expansion of the investment in Coromandel factories from £15,000 to £20,000 (Chaudhuri, 1965, pp. 67, 68, 71, 102).

Mun's name also turns up among those lending money to Lionel Cranfield, a financier of the early seventeenth century, who borrowed money and received deposits from a wide circle to invest in syndicates formed to take over offices, farm taxes, and buy up properties sold off by the crown (Tawney, 1958, p. 111). The amounts and dates are not stated, but they were probably before 1613 when Cranfield became a minister in James I's government.

Most important for the East India Company, and certainly for economic thought, Thomas Mun was put forward by the East India Company as its representative in the critical times of the 1620s, and to serve on Crown Commissions to make recommendations to the Privy Council on the privileges of the Company in exporting foreign coin. Mun submitted four memoranda to the Commission on Trade appointed in October 1622 that settled down to write its report in the spring of 1623. Their wording follows closely portions of England's Treasure , establishing that the origin of that book goes back to the early 1620s, and not, as previously thought, to the last years of the decade (Supple, 1954, pp. 91–2). Other parts have been traced to 1626 or 1627 (DeRoover, 1957). In any event, Mun proved persuasive on these governmental commissions, fighting off proposals that the East India Company be forbidden to export gold and silver coin and bullion to Asia to buy spices, silk, and calicos. In particular, he was one of twelve signatories to the June 1622 Report of the Clothing Committee of the Privy Council — his name misspelled as Thomas Man in the careless orthography of the day — that set out a host of recommendations for overcoming the decay of cloth exports, but explicitly defended the East India Company against the accusation of 'taking away of money to furnish their trade, and return only commodities again' (Thirsk and Cooper, 1972, pp. 210–16). He delayed for some years a proposal by Gerard Malynes to appoint a Royal Exchanger to monopolize all dealings in foreign bills of exchange. Even here, however, he ultimately triumphed because the experiment adopted in 1627 lasted only a short time before it was recognized to have failed.