Daily Inspiration Quote by Dudley North

Trade isn’t a glamorous ocean voyage; it’s a circulation system. Dudley North’s line cuts against the perennial fantasy that a nation can get rich by chasing distant markets while neglecting the everyday commerce happening at home. The intent is corrective and political: he’s arguing with mercantilist instincts that treated foreign trade as the scoreboard and home trade as background noise. North insists they’re structurally linked, not rival arenas.

The subtext is almost modern in its systems thinking. “Subsist” is doing heavy lifting: foreign trade doesn’t merely benefit from home trade, it depends on it to exist in any durable way. Domestic exchange builds the infrastructure of credit, distribution, production, and consumption that makes exports possible and imports absorbable. A country without a healthy internal market can’t reliably supply goods abroad, finance shipments, or weather shocks. Foreign trade becomes a thin crust over a hollow economy.

Context matters. Writing in late 17th-century England, North is watching a commercial society emerge: expanding finance, colonial networks, and growing urban demand. Policy debates fixated on hoarding bullion and managing trade balances. North, often read as an early free-trade thinker, is quietly shifting the frame from national treasure chests to national throughput. Prosperity isn’t a pile of gold; it’s the repeated, boring act of people buying and selling to each other.

There’s also a subtle warning embedded in the calm tone: if lawmakers strangle domestic trade with monopolies, restrictions, or punitive taxes while privileging export schemes, they’re sabotaging the very foreign trade they claim to champion.