Mercantilism was a set of economic practices adopted by European nations between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, in the context of the Great Navigations, which mark the transition between the feudal production model and the capitalist production model. The main features of mercantilism were the favorable trade balance (export rather than import) and metalism, which is the idea of accumulating as much precious metal as possible, since this was considered an indicator of a nation's wealth. The period of greatest development of commercialism was the sixteenth century, when the great navigations led to the discovery of the American continent.
