For 200 years, European powers treated trade as a war for a fixed pile of gold

From the 16th to 18th centuries, mercantilist doctrine held that a nation grew rich only by exporting more than it imported and hoarding the resulting gold and silver, treating global wealth as fixed and one country's gain as another's loss. Colonies existed largely to feed this machine. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations later dismantled the theory, arguing real wealth is a country's capacity to produce, not the metal sitting in its vaults.

— Wikipedia contributors, Mercantilism — 16th–18th centuries