17th-century business was especially vulnerable to the period's instability, for at its highest levels business was inextricably bound up with systems of political power. The connection was most direct in the case of state finance, among the most profitable sectors of early modern business. Governments had been poor credit risks since the early fourteenth century, and as a result soldiers, military suppliers, and other creditors would accept only cash; governments also had difficulty in moving money across long distances (necessary in an era of international warfare) and in assuring the regular flow of money over time (necessary since tax collections did not coincide with expenditures). Businessmen with established credit could meet all these needs, and their indispensability assured them enormous profits. The Dutch banker Louis de Geer (1587-1652) exemplified these possibilities when he took over large sectors of the Swedish economy, in exchange for lending money to Gustavus Adolphus (ruled 1611-1632). But the same governmental untrustworthiness that made the financiers' fortunes regularly unmade them as well, for governments had little hesitation about defaulting on loans as soon as competing bankers offered alternative sources of cash. In France these tacit bankruptcies were often accompanied by show trials in which financiers were prosecuted for their excess profits. After the most famous of these in 1661, the financier and official Nicolas Fouquet barely escaped with his life, and was condemned to lifelong imprisonment in an isolated fortress.

Faced with these risks, the business class could never cut itself off from leading aristocrats and officials, who supplied the political protection and introductions that bankers needed in such tumultuous times. Governments relinquished their reliance on such financiers at very different rates. In the Netherlands reliable state finances were established in the mid-seventeenth century, and the English followed their model. The Bank of England (created in 1694) placed state loans on reliable foundations and diminished the need for the great financiers. France on the other hand continued to need their services until the revolution in 1789.

Power and commerce mixed in other ways during the seventeenth century, most directly in the exploitation of Europe's colonial empires. Already in the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal had organized imperial systems that sustained important mercantile networks. For the rest of Europe, however, profitmaking imperialism was essentially a 17th century creation. The first Dutch efforts to trade with the Far East came in 1595; in 1600 the monopoly Dutch East India Company began operations, with permission from the state to undertake such essentially political tasks as establishing a military and diplomatic presence in the regions where it traded. The company used these rights to the fullest, so that by the 1630s it held a string of fortresses and permanent trading centers across the Indian Ocean and had forced Asian rulers into a series of advantageous trade agreements. England attempted to keep up with its own monopoly East India Company, but above all launched concerted efforts to profit from the Americas. Until 1661 French efforts were much less impressive. Thereafter, Jean-Baptiste Colbert channeled state support to imperial ventures as well, financing a large French navy and encouraging French efforts in Canada, India, and the Caribbean. . .

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