by Hugh Brogan
Third, and last, we must note the most insidious, and perhaps the worst, evil of the system, which was that everyone – King’s friends, civil servants and Whig reformers alike – had a stake in it. Boards, committees and incompetents might proliferate to the general confusion. Everyone was conditioned, almost unconsciously, to avoid the thought of fundamental alteration. Some politicians’ actions might carry them and their countrymen long leagues towards radical change: thus the younger Pitt greatly enlarged the scope and effectiveness of Edmund Burke’s ‘economical reform’, transmuting what had started as a mere attempt to curb royal patronage into a true modernization of English government. But the politicians’ vision remained bounded by horizons beyond which not even the Pitts, Burke or Charles Fox could look. This made them curiously helpless when a crisis arose which posed fundamental challenges to the old order. There is no sure evidence that even Chatham, in office and in health, could have settled the American question peaceably, to the enduring satisfaction of both sides. His assumptions were too much those of George III.
In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that the attitude of the British to the Empire which they had acquired was not very enlightened. Distinctions must be made. Some Britons still regarded the New World as potentially a most lucrative investment; others still hoped to find a better life by going there; others, especially in the political class, saw the Empire, east and west, as both a burden and a glory. But it seems safe to say that on the whole a profound indifference to, almost an unawareness of, the colonies’ existence was the commonest stance, even during the excitements of the Seven Years War. The colonists could thus count among their blessings a complete security against interference from British public opinion. The ending of this security was to make a great difference for the worse. The waking of the American Revolution in the Stamp Act crisis awoke the slumbering English too, impelling them to ask themselves what they thought of the colonies. They replied, as men always do in such cases, with a torrent of cliché, on this occasion about the Mother Country. They took great pride and pleasure, they decided, in owning an empire (provided it cost them nothing), and their tone (caught from their betters, the politicians) became highly patronizing. They could make nothing of the American view that the colonists owed allegiance, not to their British fellow-subjects, but to George III as their common King. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of our subjects in the Colonies.’ It was shallow, foolish and harmless – until the explosion of 1774, when the North ministry was able to fan this feeling into a flame of support for its severe American measures, and thus sweep aside all opposition in its drive to disaster.
But the great emergency was far below the horizon in 1750. In that year the Empire was still very much what it had always been, with nothing worse to perplex it than the perennial problems of the French, the Spanish and the Indians, and organized according to the set of economic and political principles commonly known as mercantilism.
The term is convenient, but treacherous. It was never a coherent, universally practised creed, and to present it as an obsolete economic theory, or, contrariwise, as a forerunner of the economic policies of modern nation-states, is to over-simplify. The word itself is nineteenth-century; Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), was the first commentator to identify the thing – he called it ‘the mercantile system’. Different countries adopted different varieties of it at different times. Generalizations about mercantilism are therefore certain to be unsound, and in what follows I confine myself to the British variant. Still, there was nothing unique about the English system, except the size of its success. Identifiably mercantilist doctrines were widely popular for many centuries, and at some time or other were adopted as government policy by every important state in Western Europe. In fact mercantilism was one of the most universal expressions of the old order of the West. Its rise and decline corresponded closely to the rise and decline of that order. It was scarcely coincidental that 1776 sawthe emergence not only of Adam Smith, the critic of mercantilism, but also of Jeremy Bentham, the critic of Blackstone, and Thomas Jefferson, the critic of the old politics. A moment of general crisis had arrived.
Yet the British mercantile system, if judged by its own tenets, was one of the old order’s most solid successes. In the mid-eighteenth century its achievements were clear for all to see. The Empire was the chief of them, for it encompassed, explained and made possible all the others.
Such a monumental structure could never have been erected by a purely economic theory. Mercantilism was a political as well as an economic doctrine. As one of its supporters asked, ‘Can a nation be safe without strength and is power to be compassed and secured but by riches? And can a country become rich anyway but by the help of a well-managed and extended traffic?’ Mercantilism reflected the realities of a world in which inter-state competition in all fields was deadly and incessant. It also intensified that competition: a large part of a mercantilist ruler’s purpose was to deny to his rivals, and secure to himself, as big a piece as possible of what was thought to be a largely static quantity: the wealth of the world. It was in part a system of defensive commercial regulation; but was also the continuing, institutionalized expression of the ambitious, aggressive, outward-looking spirit which had inspired the first American settlements, the first quest for the world’s trade. Other considerations had played a part in colonization, but commercial greed had never been lacking, and as greed was rewarded by success, the ever-wealthier merchants of an ever-wealthier England rose in influence. Their views began to colour those of statesmen and theorists. The great Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) urged the need for a strong navy, as encouraged by the Navigation Acts, to check the ‘immoderate desire’ of other states ‘to engross the whole traffic of the universe’. When the Second Dutch War broke out in 1664, General Monck commented on its origins, ‘What matters this or that reason. What we want is more of the trade the Dutch now have.’ Fifty years later John Withers, author of The Dutch Better Friends Than the French, remarked, ‘If those Froglands were once crushed the trade of the world would be our own.’ Such men demanded wars, plantations and Acts of Parliament to help on the quest for riches; the rulers of England, looking to the military strength, prosperity and quiet of the realm, were happy to co-operate; and so mercantilism was born, to put its stamp indelibly on the Atlantic Empire, both in its creation and government.
The earliest theorists were not especially interested, for the most part, in colonies: they hoped to extinguish Dutch competition (for a time their chief problem) by other means. But by the late seventeenth century the English overseas possessions had come to play an essential part in mercantilist thought. Economic self-sufficiency was, as always, the aim, but now it was conceived on an imperial, not merely national scale. All members of the Empire – colonies and mother country – would contribute to the prosperity of all; outside supply, of skills or produce, would not be needed. From this basis the trade of the world would be captured, and thus the wealth and glory of England would be splendidly augmented. The colonies were merely an expedient. Not for a moment were they supposed to have any purposes of their own. They existed for the sake of the mother country which had founded and nourished and now protected them. There was no room for sentiment or imagination in the great maritime and commercial struggle. The colonists’ interests could never be allowed to take precedence over England’s. According to a commentator in 1696, ‘The same respect is due from them as from a tenant to his landlord.’ Their role was simply to provide, cheaply, those things – chiefly crops such as sugar, rice and tobacco – which the English could not or would not grow at home. They would thus emancipate England from dependence on foreigners. They would furnish the English merchant with a market which he could profitably monopolize, once effective laws had been passed excluding foreign competitors; and such laws, the celebrated
Navigation Acts, were passed between 1651 and 1696.
The Navigation Acts were many, and the system they established was never wholly symmetrical or thoroughly efficient. But their principal provisions, as set out in the Acts of 1660 and 1696, were clear and practical enough. Their purpose was to restrict the colonies to the functions listed in the last paragraph and to monopolize the profits of the carrying trade, indeed of all forms of economic activity, so far as was possible: no foreigner should grow rich as a result of activities carried on within the English realm or colonies. Under penalty of forfeiture of ships and goods it was laid down that all vessels importing or exporting goods to or from any English ‘lands, islands, plantations or territories’ in Asia, Africa or America, or carrying goods from such possessions to the English realm, or carrying exports out of the realm, must be ‘truly and without fraud’ English, with English masters, and crews three-quarters English. Foreign goods might come to the realm in such vessels only, or in vessels of their countries of origin (a blow against Dutch middlemen, this). Any ling, stock-fish, pilchard, cod-fish, herring, whale-oil, whale-fin, whale-bone, whale-blubber, etc., imported in foreign bottoms ‘shall pay double aliens custom’. The American colonies might export certain specified, or ‘enumerated’, products (sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and other dyes, specklewood)7 only to each other or to England; customs officers in the plantations were to have the same powers as those in the realm, and plantation laws which clashed with the Navigation Acts were declared to be ‘illegal, null and void, to all intents and purposes whatever’. The system was rounded off by some lesser provisions, and in 1696 the Board of Trade was set up to administer it.8
It is impossible to decide exactly how successful the system was. According to British merchants, times were always bad, foreign competition was always dangerous, even under the Navigation Acts (and since those acts were defied by vast numbers of smugglers, the merchants may not have been entirely wrong). However, some observations may be ventured.
The mercantile system was selfish and nationalistic – arising from a condition of conflict, no doubt, but making that condition worse. According to C. M. Andrews, the greatest historian of colonial America, ‘It fomented war in provoking an economic struggle among the commercial and industrial nations for place, power, and wealth.’9 It sacrificed the Empire’s periphery to its centre, and all loftier considerations to those of commerce and power. Against this it can only be urged that rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with the world as they found it, and mercantilism was at least a rational and in many ways a beneficial response to trying circumstances.
More particularly, the British system turned, as we have seen, on tropical and sub-tropical staple products. They were raised by plantation owners in the mainland colonies south of Pennsylvania and in the British West Indies, whose prosperity was made possible by the importation of vast numbers of African slaves, in itself a lucrative staple trade.10 There were some crucial differences between the mainland and island planters. The mainland planters, whose crops were less profitable, bought fewer slaves, a much higher proportion of them women, and treated them better (since replacements for the dead or incapacitated were expensive). The proportion of black slaves to free whites was far, far greater on the island plantations, and so was discontent. The planters were to a great extent absentees. Consequently imperial protection, against rebellion as well as invasion, was much more important to the islands than to the mainland. Secondly, sugar was so incomparably the most valuable colonial crop that the absentee planters were able to buy themselves into Parliament and the ruling class of landed gentlemen, to form, in alliance with the sugar merchants,
a powerful lobby known as the West India interest. By contrast, tobacco planters were content to be colonists. They regularly exceeded their incomes in the attempt to live magnificently at home. Their credit was good, but they over-strained it: by the outbreak of the Revolution, it is estimated, they owed more than £4 million sterling to London.
Britain throve on the system as she was meant to. She had become the staple for her colonies: all colonial produce passed through her ports in its quest for European customers, and she reaped the middleman’s reward. She enjoyed a monopoly of the colonial market for manufactures, which stimulated her industries, and was independent of potentially hostile sources for supplies of such essential commodities as naval stores: tar, pitch, rosin, turpentine, hemp, masts, yards, bowsprits. The slave-trade was a risky and often unprofitable business to individuals, but it helped to make the fortune of Bristol and Liverpool. The merchant marine benefited from the Navigation Acts, as planned, and thus furnished a reserve of trained seamen and seaworthy vessels, most useful to the Royal Navy in time of war. The various customs duties brought in handsome revenue returns for the government, and places in the customs service were useful additions to patronage. The trade and tax structure meant that there was a constant drain of bullion from the colonies to the realm, which appeased the constant mercantilist anxiety about a shortage of precious metals. Finally, the fences which Britain erected round her Empire denied its products to her rivals. Decidedly the mother country seemed to have little reason to complain of mercantilism.11
Nor was it so oppressive to the colonies as it may seem. Great Britain wanted her plantations to be contented and prosperous, and took steps to make them so. The tobacco colonies of the south mainland – Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina – were allowed to trade only with Britain; but they were given a monopoly of the British market, heavy duties being placed on foreign leaf and British farmers being forbidden to grow any.12 Similar advantages were given to South Carolina, which grew rice and indigo; and of course to the sugar islands (which otherwise would have suffered from the competition of cheap French sugar). The colonies of the north mainland – Pennsylvania to New Hampshire – had their own profitable place in the system. The British West Indies became dependent on them for provisions. New Englanders were encouraged by the imperial government to build and sail ships, and eventually supplied nearly a third of all British
bottoms, owning half of the 3,000 vessels involved in the colonial trade. Perhaps the colonies’ chief gain was in the political and military sphere. Britain, a careless mother, expected her children to be self-supporting; they were to be a source of profit, not expense; but, with some consistency, and whether the Navigation Acts were obeyed or not – they often were not, for an illicit trade with the French and Spanish colonies became a valuable source of income to the North Americans – she did not interfere with their internal government, beyond occasionally disallowing a colonial law; and she protected them against France and Spain. The colonies were well aware of political and military problems, and that islands and plantations could change hands at peace conferences. To them therefore it mattered little that no large British force was sent to America until the Seven Years War: they were protected equally, or better, by the mother country’s victories on European battlefields, or at sea. For the rest, they were sure of some assistance and support in their perennial struggle against the French- and Spanish-supported Indians. The Board of Trade could plan intelligently, and sometimes rescue a desperate situation. For example, the incompetent heirs of the founders and proprietors of South Carolina, declared under Queen Anne to be ‘the frontier colony of all Her Majesty’s plantations on the Main in America’, might have been left to ruin their province and enjoy their charter in peace for far longer, had not the Yamasee Indians in 1715, in a war arising out of the misdeeds of the Indian traders, shown vividly how a weak government in one colony could injure the whole British position in North America. The war wiped out the Indian trade of the Carolinas for a time and revived French and Spanish strength in the area. The southern flank of the British might be turned, or their traders and settlers confined to the coastal plains. The colony survived – just – but its defence had clearly become too important to be left to incapable private management, so the Board of Trade endorsed a revolt of the settler
s in 1719, and in 1729 the proprietors were bought out, South Carolina being ‘taken into the King’s hand’ – that is, becoming a crown colony of the usual type, with a Crown-appointed governor.
On the whole, then, the mercantilist system must be reckoned to have fulfilled the purposes of its makers: it made the prosperity of all parts of the Empire possible. Its drawbacks were its inefficiency and incompleteness – the Board of Trade could never induce Parliament to make it watertight, and the customs officers were too few, too ill-paid, too corrupt to plug the gaps. It was, economically, increasingly obsolescent. But its destruction was to come from quite different causes.
In 1756 the war that had been threatening between France and Great Britain since their last peace (1748) burst into life; and before long the helm of British government had been seized by the man of genius, Pitt the Elder, vaingloriously but truly saying, ‘I know that I can save the country and that I alone can.’ For the war had not been going well; and Pitt incarnated the logic of mercantilism – logic which, ruthlessly pursued, would bring victory. Pitt was not afraid of the harsh international conflict, the scramble for power and profit, from which mercantilism sprang. On the contrary, he rejoiced in it. Faith in Britain’s divine mission inspired him, as it had inspired those earlier pirates, the Elizabethan sea-dogs. He had long correctly identified France as Britain’s last rival, and now he fell upon her with wild ferocity. Her capacity for sea trade and sea warfare must be destroyed. Britain must be aggrandized with France’s spoils. As to the cost of such an onslaught, of such a daring bid for pre-eminence, it could (Pitt thought) be met, ultimately, from the proceeds of war; until they were realized, his colleague, Newcastle, might usefully struggle to raise money by loans and taxes. Meanwhile the French sugar islands, Canada, India and the Floridas were seized, and the French navy was destroyed at Quiberon Bay. Overnight, it seemed, Pitt had doubled the extent of the British Empire with one hand, while sustaining with his other Frederick of Prussia’s struggle in Europe against hopeless odds. Frederick’s role was to keep the French too busy to defend their Empire. ‘I have conquered Canada in Germany,’ Pitt boasted.
