Navigation Acts and Mercantilism in the British Empire
The Navigation Acts were the constitutional scaffolding of the British mercantile empire, and they lasted, in their commercial substance, from 1651 to 1849. The system they created was, in two essential respects, a system for the redirection of trade. It required that the colonial trade be carried in British ships, that colonial enumerated commodities be landed in British ports before re-export, and that European goods be landed in Britain before re-shipment to the colonies. The 1651 Act, the 1660 Act, and the 1696 Act, taken together, were the legal foundation of the system. The repeal of the system, in the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, was the political moment the British Empire changed its commercial direction.
The Substance of the System
The principle the Navigation Acts sought to enforce was, in the formulation of the 1661 preamble, the reduction of the English colonies to “a certain and sure” market for English manufactures and the securing of English shipping in the carrying trade. The 1651 Act, passed by the Rump Parliament and titled “An Act for the Encouragement of the Navigation of this Nation of England,” prohibited the importation of enumerated colonial commodities in non-British ships, and required that goods from Asia, Africa, and the Americas be carried either in British ships or in ships of the producing country. The 1660 Act, passed by the Convention Parliament, expanded the enumerated list to include sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger, and other colonial staples, and required that enumerated commodities be landed in Britain before re-export to Europe. The 1696 Act, the Act for the Prevention of Frauds and the Regulation of Abuses in the Plantation Trade, established the administrative machinery — the colonial customs houses, the writs of assistance, the vice-admiralty courts — for the enforcement of the system.
The Acts were enforced incompletely. The Molasses Act of 1733, which imposed heavy duties on foreign molasses imported into the British North American colonies, was widely evaded. The colonial merchants, particularly in New England, found it cheaper to import French and Dutch West Indian molasses than British Caribbean sugar. The Sugar Act of 1764, which lowered the molasses duty to 3d per gallon, was an attempt to make the system enforceable. The enforcement of the system — the 1761 writs of assistance case, the 1765 Stamp Act, the 1767 Townshend Acts, the 1773 Tea Act, and the 1774 Coercive Acts — was the proximate cause of the American Revolution.
The Mercantile Theory
The economic theory the Navigation Acts embodied was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mercantile theory. The mercantile theory held that national wealth consisted in the accumulation of bullion, that the balance of trade should be favourable, and that the colonies existed to supply the mother country with raw materials and to absorb the mother country’s manufactured goods. The English mercantilists — Thomas Mun, Edward Misselden, and later Charles Davenant — were the theorists of the system. The system’s critics, inside the British Empire, were the colonial merchants and the small free-trade school that emerged in the 1690s and re-emerged in the 1750s. The theorist whose critique killed the system was Adam Smith.
The 1776 publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the intellectual event the 1846 and 1849 repeals look back to. Smith argued, in Book IV, that the mercantile system was an elaborate fraud on the consumer: “The general industry of society … can never be in the most flourishing state, when it is confined to a particular set of commodities.” The Navigation Acts, in particular, raised the cost of colonial consumption and the cost of European consumption of colonial commodities, and they did so for the benefit of a small group of British merchants. Smith’s argument was a critique of monopoly, and the repeal of the system was the political application of the critique.
The 1790s and 1800s saw the practical critique of the system in the work of the free-trade school — William Pitt the Younger, the Bullion Committee, the Board of Trade Reports — and in the political economy of David Ricardo. The 1840s saw the political critique in the Anti-Corn Law League of Richard Cobden and John Bright. The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws was the political application of Smith’s argument, and the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts was the administrative application of Smith’s argument.
The 1846 and 1849 Repeals
The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, passed by the Whig government of Lord John Russell, was the central political event. The Corn Laws — the 1815 Act imposing duties on imported grain — had been the high-water mark of the British landed interest’s protection of the home market. The repeal, forced by the 1845 Irish potato famine, the Anti-Corn Law League’s three-year campaign, and the conversion of Robert Peel and the Conservative Party, was the moment the British state officially committed itself to free trade. The 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, passed by the Whig government, completed the change. The 1849 Act admitted foreign ships to the colonial trade, and it admitted colonial-built ships to the British trade. The effect was the gradual erosion of the British shipping monopoly and the conversion of the British merchant marine into a competitor in the world market.
The political economy of the repeal is the right place to read the change. Cain and Hopkins, in British Imperialism: 1688–2015 (2016), treat the 1846–49 repeals as the moment the British Empire changed from a mercantile to a free-trade empire, and as the moment the gentlemanly capitalism of the City of London took over the leadership of the imperial project from the older industrial and landed interests. The argument is not unchallenged. Anthony Howe’s Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (1997) reads the transition as the conversion of a reforming intellectual movement into a governing ideology.
The 1947 GATT and the End of Imperial Preference
The post-1945 international economic order re-imposed a version of the free-trade principle on the British Empire. The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the first of the post-war multilateral trade agreements, was the institutional moment the British Empire officially renounced the imperial preference system that had been built up by the 1932 Ottawa Conference. The 1973 British accession to the European Economic Community, by which the British state committed itself to the EEC’s Common External Tariff, completed the conversion. The British state is, in the 2020s, a member of the WTO, a signatory of the 2019 EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and a regional participant in a free-trade system whose substantive content is no longer the one Cobden and Bright argued for in the 1840s.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Navigation Acts and the mercantile system has been shaped by three interventions. Charles Wilson’s Profit and Power (1957) and Lawrence Harper’s The English Navigation Laws (1939) produced the classical account of the system’s commercial function. Ralph Davis’s The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (1962) and The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (1979) produced the economic history. Anthony Howe’s Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (1997) and Peter Cain’s and Antony Hopkins’s British Imperialism: 1688–2015 (2016) re-framed the 1846–49 repeals as the moment the British Empire’s commercial logic changed. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to economic interest and to ideological commitment in the 1846–49 transition. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s commercial legacy a clean bill of health.