Economic historians like Joel Mokyr note a watershed transition between Mercantilist economics and modern Industrial Age economics around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off.
This shift in societal attitudes, led by a handful of enlightened thinkers of the day, is what Mokyr (2005) labels the Great Enlightenment, Jacob (1981) the Radical Enlightenment, McCloskey (2010) the Bourgeois Revaluation, and Goldstone (2002) the Engineering Culture.