According to google, Mercantilism was a popular economic philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this system, the British colonies were moneymakers for the mother country. The British put restrictions on how their colonies spent their money so that they could control their economies.
I think it's important because scientists need to be able to communicate.
Think about why you write a lab report. When we write lab reports, we are effectively communicating how we did our experiment, our results, and what we think about those results.
We need to have transparency and be able to replicate results in order to know if they are accurate to our hypothesis. Theories are not 100% proven. We only know what we are able to observe and all measurements have their limitations.
