 |
The First
British Empire
&
Mercantilism
Richard Temple,
Lord Cobham,1675-1749 |
|
Reading
Notes & Questions |
The revolutionary generation's political world was shaped by three related forces:
|
The First British Empire:
A term describing the Empire that emerged in the 17th century, peaked in
the 18th century, and declined in the Age of Revolutions that ushered in
the 19th century. [Look at the BBC site
Trade before Empire or Empire before Trade?]
 | Background:The plantations of the early
17th century. Economic interest was the principle motive although with
the New England colonies religion was also a strong factor.
 | Commercial ventures & trading company charters
|
| Proprietary charters - Maryland, Caribbean islands |
| Covenant type settlements in Connecticut and Rhode Island |
| By 1650 there were four kinds of colonial structures,
illustrating the untidy manner in which the empire emerged
 | royal colony |
| trading company enterprise |
| proprietary colony |
| covenant community
|
|
|
Mercantilism: "Theory & system of political economy in Europe after
the decline of feudalism, based on national policies of accumulating
bullion, establishing colonies, and a merchant marine, and developing
industries and mining to attain a favorable balance of trade." [American
Heritage Dictionary]
| Emergence of a world market and the policy of
mercantilism
| New World gold and silver to Spain in 16th and 17th centuries used to buy products from England,
France and Holland |
| 18th century great increase in global trade and emergence of "world
market" |
| English, French, and Dutch use profits for tea, spices, silks and cotton from
East Asia and India to sell in Europe |
| British ships carry goods to Africa to trade for slaves and shipped to America
to buy tobacco. The tobacco was sent back to England, processed and sold in
Europe for cash. |
| Slaves were perhaps the most profitable trade. Click on the thumbnail image
and note the slave trade pattern. |
| Trade enabled England and France to overtake Spain, Portugal and Holland
in the 18th century |
| England and France built profitable empires in the 18th century. |
|
Mercantilist
Economics:
From the mid-seventeenth century,
the British passed a succession of Navigation Acts and Acts of Trade
aimed at the following imperial goals:
| Colonial
shippers must use only British vessels.
|
| Certain
products could only be shipped through British ports.
|
| Foreign
ships trading with the colonies had to stop first at a British port
to pay duties.
|
| Colonial
manufacturing was essentially permitted only for home consumption
not export and certain goods were only to be purchased from Britain
itself.
|
|
|
| Restoration Empire, 1660-1688. With the
return of the Stuart monarchy after the Civil War and Cromwell's
Commonwealth, London moved to bring more coherence and order to the
ramshackle empire, building on some of Cromwell's efforts at
mercantile regulation in the 1651Parliamentary Act. Note in this
phase the basic importance of commerce and mercantilist
ideas
| First Navigation Act, 1660:
certain colonial staples like sugar and tobacco had to be
shipped to England or another British colony. This illustrates
the mercantilist principle of "enumerating" certain
strategic commodities. |
| Staple Act, 1663: European
goods had to be shipped via England into the colonies. This
protected English merchants, giving them a monopoly in supplying
manufactured good to colonial markets |
| Colonial export duties: In
1673 Parliament closed a loophole in regulating
enumerating goods. Colonial merchants had been avoiding
the Navigation Act by simply stopping at another colonial port
before trading their goods outside the empire. The 1673 law
established export duties (equivalent to the import duties in
England) at the original colonial port.
| This law required colonial
customs officials to collect the export duties.
For the first time a group of imperial office-holders
appeared in the colonies. |
|
| Lords of Trade (a new
agency in England to oversee imperial trade, was established in
1675. It was a committee of the Privy Council. |
| The drive for consolidating imperial
authority in the Restoration era produced in the colonies
various reactions against some royal governors' use of their
power and against the new royal officials in America.
|
|
| Imperial Structure
& Policy after the Glorious Revolution, 1688-1714: In
this period, which saw England involved in wars with other
European powers, the strategic importance of colonies was added to
the traditional economic motivation for Empire.
| William and Mary reasserted the policy
of imperial regulation
| Replaced the Lords of Trade with the Board
of Trade, a fifteen-man committee of powerful
noblemen and colonial experts. In theory it was to be the
central agency for administering colonial affairs. |
| Navigation Act of
1696: continued the older restrictions and
regulations, bolstered by more efficient enforcement such as
registration of commercial ships and establishment of
vice-admiralty
courts in the colonies. |
| But William did not move to consolidate
imperial power over individual colonies by regularizing
their governments. He perpetuated the mixed structures that
had existed in the 1670s:
| Royal Colonies [Crown appointed
governor and Council]
| New Hampshire |
| Massachusetts: royal governor
but with a council nominated by the Assembly and
confirmed by the governor |
| Virginia |
| New York |
| New Jersey |
|
| Proprietary Colonies
| Pennsylvania |
| Maryland (royal from 1688
to 1715 when the Calvert proprietary rights were
restored) |
| Carolina until divided into
North and South Carolina in the 18th century as
royal colonies |
|
| Corporate Charter Colonies
| Rhode Island |
| Connecticut
|
|
|
|
| By 1714 (the beginning of the
Hanoverian dynasty) the First British Empire still had
its characteristic contradictions. Its structure did not
conform to the consolidated, uniform system suggested by
the mercantilist theory of Empire. During the first five
decades of the Georgian Age there was a growing division
between the theory of empire and the realities of
politics in the mother country and its
colonies. See
Topic 3. |
|
|
|
