Throughout the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, cameralism was influential in Northern European states—for example, in Prussia and Sweden—and its academics and practitioners were pioneers in economic, environmental, and administrative knowledge and technology; for example, cameralist accounting, still used in public finance today.
Thus, oeconomics was a broader domain in which the investigation of nature merged seamlessly with concerns for material and moral well-being, in which the inter-dependence of urban and rural productivity was appreciated and stewarded, in which "improvement" was simultaneously directed toward increasing the yields of agriculture, manufacturing and social responsibility.
[12] However, cameralism was developed with regard to the landlocked nature of many of the German states of the 18th century and attempted to substitute the whole production process, whereas mercantilism relied on access to raw materials and goods from the colonial periphery.
The growth of cameralist studies, which played an important role in Prussian civil service training, may be traced to Justi's admiration for the Imperial examinations of China.
[9] Cameralist teachings departed from the traditional legal and experience-based education usually given to civil servants and focused instead on a broad overview of classical philosophy, natural sciences and economic practices such as husbandry, farming, mining and accounting.
Defunct Former Cameralism gained traction in Sweden after the country had lost most of its possessions in Pomerania and the Baltic region after its defeat in the Great Northern War.
[27] The Swedish example shows how cameralism, as a part of the early modern concept of economy, gave rise to a wide range of activity today associated with public and social policy.
Around the highly developed Swedish bureaucracy coalesced a structure of entrepreneurs, educators and scientists that strove to mobilise the resources of the country for the betterment of the population and strengthening of the state.
[13] In Sweden, this is exemplified by the botanist Carl Linnaeus and his pupils, who were prominent advocates of cameralism and strove both to cultivate foreign cash crops such as tea and the Mulberry tree, on the leaves of which the silk worm feeds, and to find domestic substitute for imports such as coffee, projects that even though they were failures entrenched the role of the scientist and the expert as a useful instrument of state interests.