Pre-romantic mercantilist thought fixated on the state, not the nation

Evidence

The collective entity to [peoples of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] was not a nation unified by common race, speech, and customs: the only decisive factor for them was the state… . Mercantilism was the exponent of the prevailing conception of the relationship between the state and nation in the period before the advent of romanticism. It was the state and not the nation which absorbed its attention. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s understanding of origins: what ‘the nation’ meant in the tradition’s era was state-centric, before romantic nationalism.