Mercantilism in Fantasy

Juliet McKenna's latest series Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution has merchants plotting a coup against the corrupt aristocrats running a country. The first book is Irons in the Fire. She is a first class worldbuilder

Terry Pratchett? A bunch of the Discworld books set in Ankh-Morpork cover just this kind of thing. Try: Going Postal or Making Money.

waylander said:

Juliet McKenna's latest series Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution has merchants plotting a coup against the corrupt aristocrats running a country. The first book is Irons in the Fire. She is a first class worldbuilder

Click to expand...

Ooh, good catch! I heard Juliet read from this series at NewCon last year - I want to read it, but she doesn't have much out in ebook format at the moment.

You might take a look at the Thieves World novels. They tell loads of stories set within one city, and I recall a number of stories about merchants and others of that ilk.

Technically 'mercantilism' is the economic philosophy popular during the age of exploration where it was believed the economic interests of a nation could best be served by it accumulating large amounts of precious metal.

Many fantasy stories have the accumulation of precious metal as a theme.

For research you might like to read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, written 1776. It has a long discussion about mercantilism, and a lot about trade and economy.

You might look at Charlie Stross' Merchants War books, which are largely about economics. The basic premise is that there is a parallel world to ours, accessible by a small number of people, but which is at a much earlier stage of tech. development; so if you have the knack you can hop over there and invent the light bulb, etc.

The almighty Jack Vance wrote a number of fantasy/SF novels in which the plot was about the main character trying to get by (and eventually get rich) in strange, richly-imagined societies full of intrigue. Maske: Thaery, Showboat World and Night Lamp are good examples. Few of his novels really deal with world-shaping stuff; personal enrichment and often revenge are more usual.

Have you tried the light novel series Spice & Wolf? The main character is a small-scale merchant who gets tangled up in larger commerce intrigues (some between guilds, if I recall), though he also gets caught up in religious intrigues due to the supernatural nature of his traveling companion (the "Wolf" of the title). The setting is analogous to Europe in the late Middle Ages, which is the era you're looking for.

There's 3 volumes in English so far, and Yen Press has been translating and releasing at a rate of one volume every six months. I only read the first volume; the English feels very plain and utilitarian, though I can't say how much of that is stylistic preservation of the original Japanese prose and how much is the translator's own style.