William Pettigrew
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
(Please do not cite, quote, or circulate, without the written permission of the author:
William.Pettigrew@ccc.ox.ac.uk).
Debating the ‘National Interest’: Some Under Appreciated Connections between
Constitutional Change and National Economic Growth in England, 1660 - 1720
Celia Fiennes’ journeys around England in the 1690s provide one of the earliest,
comprehensive descriptions of England’s national economy at work. For Fiennes,
forming an ‘Idea of England’ at a time when the nation’s economic landscapes were
changing was ‘requisite’ especially for ‘those that serve in Parliament’. Informing
‘themselves ye nature of Land, ye Genius of the Inhabitants’ would assist MPs in
what Fiennes believed to be their primary role: ‘to promote and improve Manufacture
and Trade suitable to each and encourage all projects tending thereto.”1 Fiennes
imagined a national economy and expected the post-1688 Parliament to work to
expand that economy. Few historians of the period between the Civil War and the
Industrial Revolution have shared Fiennes’ expectation of an instrumental relationship
between Parliament and economic growth. This essay seeks to place political and
constitutional changes at the centre of Britain’s 18th century economic growth by
examining the economic consequences of passing the initiative for state regulation of
the economy from the Privy Council to Parliament. It connects this altered regulatory
mechanism to the changing structure and pattern of economic growth in this period.
Several economic historians have charted the growth of Britain’s national economy
during this period. Deane and Cole’s influential account charted a 200% increase in
the size of Britain’s economy between 1688 and 1770, at a time when the national
population increased by just 57%. Others have supported this view.2 Although Dean
and Cole’s narrative begins in 1688, a year typically highlighted in political and
constitutional rather than economic histories, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ played no part
in their discussion. Deane and Cole, however, explained their concentration on
economics by referring to the primacy of observation over explanation in economic
history.3 Such observation, can only offer a starting-point for the historian, whose
principle concern is with causation. Here the economic history of 18th century national
economic growth fails to deliver. In asserting the importance of economic theory as
an explanatory device, economic historians fail to appreciate how historically specific
such theory is and how economic activity, especially at the macro-economic level, has
always been embedded within institutional frameworks that exhibit an important
political aspect.4 Economic historians’ views of the nexus between political
1 Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (New York,
2000), 32
2
N F R Crafts, ‘British Economic Growth, 1700 – 1831: A Review of the Evidence’, The Economic
History Review, New Series, Vol. 36, no 2, (May 1983), 177-199
3
Phyllis Deane and W A Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688 – 1959: Trends and Structures
(Cambridge, 1962), 39
4
See Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957).Even economic historians sensitive to
political factors downplay the importance of constitutional change. William Cunningham dismissed
any effect of constitutions on the economy see William Cunningham, Politics and Economics An Essay
on the Nature of the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1885), 48
1
institutions and the market range from those who deny its existence to those who
characterise politics as epiphenomenal or chaotic, or ‘interrupting’, ‘polluting’ or
‘frictional’ within economic systems.5 Economic historians typically view economic
liberalism as a determinant of political liberalism.6 The relationship between
constitutional change at the turn of the 18th century and economic growth in the 18th
century at least complicates this view and comes close to suggesting a reversed
formulation.
Historians of politics have also tended not to examine the economic effects of
constitutional change. Attributing some connection between the Glorious Revolution
and economic growth would seem intuitive according to the assumptions of Whig
history, that great celebration of politics. Like economic history, Whig history
assumes progress; narrates in a linear, teleological fashion, and subscribes to a
timeless notion of human nature; but Whig historians did not implicate constitutional
changes in their accounts of economic growth. Whig historians’ desire to fetishise all
things political instead led them to brand economic phenomena as predictable.
Thomas Macaulay, the most eloquent of Whig historians and rarely one to downplay
the importance of political phenomena, described England’s economic growth as an
organic and spontaneous process that had often been jeopardised by the intrusions of
government:
“…profuse expenditure, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals,
disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations, have not been able to
destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private of private citizens have been able to create
it. …in our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries, been almost
uninterruptedly increasing; This progress, became at length, about the middle of the 18th
century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with accelerated
velocity. In consequence, partly of our geographical and partly of our moral position, we
have, during several generations, been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded
the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry.”7
Whig history’s ambitions for politics did not extend to demonstrating how economic
outcomes hinged on political changes. Instead political influences on the economy
remained ‘evils’ to be guarded against.
Historians of the 17th and 18th century Parliaments have, keen to deviate from
Whiggish interpretations, concentrated on the content of disputes within the
chambers; as well as Parliamentary personnel and procedure. These historians have
rightly conceived of Parliament as a group of individuals responding to different
5
Some scholars have underestimated the importance of politics to economic growth: see N S Buchanan
and H S Ellis, Approaches to Economic Development, (New York, 1955), 407: “…the really
substantive barriers to development are mainly noneconomic…”
6
Typically, the converse argument has been advanced – that economic growth has assisted political
liberty. For two similar arguments see Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1982) and
John Millar, The Advancement of Manufactures, Commerce and the Arts; and the Tendency of this
Advancement to diffuse a Spirit of Liberty and Independence (London, 1849, second ed.) col. 1, 279280
2
concerns at different times. Few historians have considered Parliament as a
constitutional form whose changing status within the English constitution during the
second half of the 17th century had macro-economic ramifications. These concerns
have, perhaps unsurprisingly, remained the prerogative of political scientists and
economists themselves.8
Those economists (rather than economic historians) who have sought to trace
economic growth back to celebrated political milestones, especially the Glorious
Revolution, have, however, committed the related historiographical sins of national
exceptionalism and linearity. Douglass North and Barry Weingast argued, in a hugely
cited article, that the key to British power in the modern era lay in the Glorious
Revolution’s cementing of property rights. The ‘sovereignty of Parliament’ prevented
the monarch from arbitrarily trampling upon its subjects’ economic interests.9 This
greater security for the economy helped to lower the national rate of interest, which
stimulated economic growth over the 18th century.10 For North and Weingast, the
national economic significance of Parliament after 1688 lay in its foiling previous
monarch’s rights to default on state loans. The creation of the Bank of England by
statute and the representation of its creditors in Parliament and that Parliament’s socalled ‘sovereignty’ within the state’s regulatory apparatus created an environment in
which the macro-economic benefits of a credit-based economy could be enjoyed. The
Glorious Revolution has become the founding myth for a new breed of Whig
economist historians whose broader historiographical targets connect them to a
8
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson usefully distinguished between policies and institutions. See
Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, 2006), 177 and 218: “Institutions
matter because they influence the future allocation of de jure political power; political actors wish to
control and change institutions because they want to lock in their current political power.” And 350:
“The outcome of the 17th-century conflicts in Britain [sic] was a set of economic institutions that gave
property rights to a broad set of people. The result was the ending of the Malthusian cycle and the
beginning of modern economic growth.” See also Adam Przeworski, ‘Political Regimes and Economic
growth’, in Journal of Economic Perspectives, (1993) and Francesco Giavazzi and Guido Tabellini
‘Economic and Political Liberalizations’ (Centre for Economic Policy Research, No. 4579, 2004) and
Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, ‘Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic
Change’ (Centre for Economic Policy Research, No 5654, May 2006)
9
See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (London, 1793) and Thomas Macaulay,
History of England (London, 1906) and then Douglass North and Barry Weingast, ‘Constitutions and
Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth Century
England’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 49, no 4, (1989). For a thesis that argues how
democratisation protects property rights see also Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and
Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990), 51. Acemoglu, Robinson, and Simon Johnson offer a reworking of North and Winegast’s argument in ‘The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional
Change, and Economic Growth’, The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 3, 546-575. See also
North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World A New Economic History (Cambridge,
1973), 154 and Gregory Clark, ‘The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England,
1540-1800’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 26, no. 4, (Spring, 1996), 563 -588. Clark noted
the ‘Whiggishness’ of North’s position and how property rights had been secured earlier in the 17 th
century and that growth did not derive from 1688 (in land values or return on capital). Clark did not
examine trade growth, however, or changing regulatory regimes. For a more historical treatment of
these issues and their connection to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ see Bruce Carruthers, ‘Politics, Popery
and Property: a Comment on North and Weingast, Journal of Economic History, vol. 50, 693-98.
10
Others argued that North and Weingast’s argument could only be sustained in reference to the
emergence of a party system that predated the Glorious Revolution. See Bruce Carruthers, City of
Capital (Princeton, 1996) and then David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State
(Cambridge, 2003). Stasavage noted how commercial classes did not dominate Parliament. The party
system played a part in unifying commercial interests with the landed Whig magnates to ensure that
those who lent the government money could use Parliament to ensure that those debts would be repaid.
3
nationalistic and occasionally culturally supercilious ‘rise of the West’ tradition.11 For
economists, who often regard the premises of economic theory as timeless and
universal, political institutions have too often provided a prop for exceptionalist
narratives.12 The desire to attribute a similarly fixed constitutional form to the events
of the late 1680s and 1690s as political scientists can more satisfactorily attribute to
the United States constitution and the convention that led to it has encouraged these
‘New Institutional Economists’ to deploy a simplistic historical narrative to explain
the superior economic performance of ‘Western’ states with reference to
constitutional forms.13 Similarly, political scientists have sought, as so many
economists and deductive thinkers have with reference to historical phenomena, to lift
constitutional ideal types out of their historical contexts and have them solve the
problems facing contemporary developing economies.14 Their belief in the inevitable,
linear relationship between certain constitutional forms and certain beneficial
economic outcomes has idealised constitutional change and removed contingency
from the historical narrative. The Glorious Revolution formed a part of a much longer
process of political and economic change and its implications, as historians have long
known, were not always liberalising and ‘Whiggish’.
Similar accusations of linearity and idealisation can be levelled at historians of early
capitalist ideology and economic thought in the 17th and early 18th centuries.15 These
historians of liberalism have typically expressed caution about the Glorious
Revolution as a reforming moment, preferring to concentrate on a reaction against
liberal economic thought based on that thought’s socially levelling implications and a
hardening of economic restrictions as the power of the state increased in the early
years of the 18th century and the political and economic nexus became more and
more oligarchic in implication. In doing so, their accounts become collapsible into the
rhetoric of the country party opposition ideology of the first half of the 18th century
and they have become apologists for liberalism. Such historians have sought merely
to test the progressive implications of Whig narratives without, with the exception of
John Brewer, formulating new, non-Whiggish means, of analysing the period. These
historians of ideology have not sought to test the connections between that ideology
and institutional changes’ whose structural impact can be more easily documented.
Any attempt to reduce the economic thinking of the period into a catchall ideology
runs profound interpretive risks.16 Donald Coleman and Tim Keirn have understood
how Parliamentary pamphleteering on economic matters in this period sought to
11
See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1989)
For the problem of historical specificity in economic history see Geoffrey Hodgson, How Economics
Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London, 2001)
13
This process may have been inspired by Charles Beard’s analysis of the economic rationales for the
United States constitution. See Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States (New York, 2004)
14
Though one economist who stresses the importance of political freedoms to economic development
does not dabble in history in an unhelpful way: Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, (Oxford 1999)
15
See Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in 17 th Century England (Princeton, 1978) and
George Cherry, ‘The Development of the English Free-Trade Movement in Parliament, 1689-1702’,
Journal of Modern History, vol. 25, no. 2 (1953) and Steven Pincus, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment
Nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’,
The American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3, (1998) and Robert Ekelund and Robert Tollison,
Politicised Economies (Texas, 1997)
16
Here I am quietly referring to mercantilism and the ideas of Eli Hecksher in Mercantilism (London,
1934)
12
4
weigh up the respective merits of discrete policy proposals from the state or from
individuals.17 Economic historians have, however, long lampooned the principles of
mercantilists as erroneous and have therefore assumed that any economic growth
before Adam Smith must derive from forces beyond human control. But
Parliamentary pamphleteers fixated on schemes that would generate economic growth
without the need to speculate about theory. Historians ought to take them more
seriously.
The current literature on economic growth and constitutional change is, then, either
subjected to the unfortunate intellectual apartheid that separates both political and
economic history and history from political science, political economy, and
economics or it remains restrained by a series of reductive dichotomies in which the
narrative is either Whiggish of non-Whiggish18; the state is either regulating or
deregulating, protectionist or free trade, reactive to private interests or unresponsive.19
Faced with these fault lines in the literature, this essay attempts to formulate a more
agile conceptual framework in which I shelve the polarities of the literature and the
economic aspects of statecraft are judged as contemporaries increasingly judged them:
according to their ability to deliver national economic growth, as crucial components
of what pamphleteers called ‘the national interest’. The primacy of Parliament as the
regulator of the burgeoning national economy after 1688 assisted the realisation of
this national interest. With their inadequacies in mind, but inspired by the ambition,
range, and eloquence of all the historians I have cited, I seek to propose a new means
to approach the political and economic history of this period, without collapsing all
into a discreet political turning point – ‘the Glorious Revolution’; and focusing on the
interactions between political and economic change.20 This approach will celebrate
the Whig historians’ commitment to a broad field of view, as well as the
efficaciousness of human agency, volition, and, indeed, intention via the political
process, without resorting to the Whigs’ presentist and exceptionalist ideological
concerns about liberal capitalism as the potential nails in historical enquiry’s coffin.21
This approach admits the timelessness of economic rationality at the micro-economic
17
See Donald Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (London, 1969) and Davison, Lee, Hitchcock,
Tim, Keirn, Tim, and Shoemaker, Robert, eds., Stilling the Grumbling Hive (Stroud, 1992)
18
One exception is: John Brewer, Sinews of Power (London, 1989) is a challenge to the Whig
interpretation. Political scientist Charles Tilly reached this conclusion before Brewer, in fairness. 80:
One school of thought about democratisation is that of Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European
States, AD 990 - 1990 (Oxford, 1990), which saw the origins of democracy in the process of state
formation and connected the rise of representative institutions to the monarch’s need to raise funds via
taxation.
19
For the debate about whether the English state could be categorised as either regulating or
deregulating see J P Cooper, ‘Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in 17th-Century England’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 20 (1970), 73-99. Cooper’s final verdict
was appeared on page 99: “The English state was highly centralised in its control over its finances and
their administration and in part of the administration of justice; it was both too strong and too weak to
pursue either centralised regulation or laissez faire in its domestic economic and social policies.” Julian
Hoppit characterised issues before Parliament as problems to be solved. This view underestimates the
extent to which Parliament could act as an organ of government see Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary
Legislation, 1660-1800’, The Historical Journal, vol. 39, no 1, (March 1996), 109- 13; esp. 116 and
130
20
An ambitious and successful attempt to bring these literatures together appears in Rocco Pezzimenti,
Politics and Economics: An Essay on the Genesis of Economic Development (Leominster, 2004)
21
See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992)
5
level but will assume the contingency of macro-economic growth to the vagaries of
political phenomena.22
This paper offers a preliminary and exploratory account of some of the ways in which
the rising importance of Parliament changed Britain’s national economy. It
concentrates on a single problem – the economic consequences of the constitutional
changes often fallaciously labelled: ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’. It will examine that
problem’s political and economic aspects: first, what were the economic connotations
of political reform and, conversely, what were the political determinants of economic
growth at the turn of the 18th century in England? We have excellent studies of post
1688 state-building, party systems, financial, and commercial revolutions. But we
have no real appreciation of how that pillar of the Whig theory of history, the socalled sovereignty of Parliament, affected the evolution of the British economy. When
it comes to assessing the economic implications of the Glorious Revolution, the
sovereign Parliament makes an unlikely elephant in the room. Unlike North and
Weingast, I consider the ways in which the post-1688 Parliament enfranchised and
expanded new economic interests.
The phrase ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ is often deployed to describe the situation in
England after 1688 in which the King and Parliament shared sovereignty.23 The
phrase nevertheless captures the legislature’s improved power within the constitution
after 1688: the Bill of Rights’ presumed power to dictate to William III that the
monarch could no longer overrule statutes; but, as important, the Parliament’s control
of the monarch’s wealth and spending. In no real sense, however, was Parliament
sovereign within England’s constitution after 1688. The need for an executive branch
of the constitution was rarely doubted and Parliament was not tolerated to act as a
sovereign, arbitrary power.24 Older executive institutions did not die out. Although
Parliament began to meet every year after 1688, the monarch retained the right to
dissolve its meetings. The King’s Privy Council continued to meet regularly and the
King’s courts continued to administer justice. In this period, the executive expanded
its powers perhaps more dramatically than the legislative. The treasury and the
cabinet provide the two most important institutional expressions of the expansion of
executive control. Prior to 1688 (and to a lesser extent afterwards) Parliament
appealed to the Privy Council to help resolve issues that had become too complex and
because Parliament’s more deliberative format prevented a sound judgement on the
Examples of success with this approach are multiple. See especially, F Kearney, ‘The Political
Background to English Mercantilism, 1695 – 1700’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 11, no
3, 1959. I seek, in this essay, to formulate an over-arching argument that suggests smaller case studies.
This approach is similar to that adopted by O Brien et al in Patrick O’Brien, Trevor Griffiths, Philip
Hunt, ‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English Cotton Textile
Industry, 1660 – 1774’, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 44, no 3, (Aug, 1991), 395423
23
For a clear denial of the existence of Parliamentary sovereignty in this period see Frederick Maitland,
The Constitutional History of England: A Course of Lectures (Cambridge, 1950). Much of the
overstatement about Parliamentary sovereignty derives from a mistaken belief of the practical
importance of Locke’s Two Treatises
24
In 1689, Parliament experimented with a new constitutional form: an executive body supported by
statute and designed to enforce a traditional state prohibition on the export of wool. But its failure
proves that Parliamentary sovereignty was regarded as a form of Parliamentary dictatorship that the
Protectorate had helped to discredit. See Robert Lees, “The Constitutional Importance of the
‘Commissioners for Wool” of 1689. An Administrative Experiment of the Reign of William III.”
Economica, No. 40. (May 1933), 147-168
22
6
issue.25 The Privy Council met throughout the year. Despite having to meet regularly
and for longer stretches of time, the Parliamentary calendar prevented it from being in
a position to respond to economic grievances and suggestions throughout the year.
The King in Council often responded to requests for proclamations to regulate the
economy once bills to the same affect had failed and the Parliamentary session had
ended.26 Interested parties often turned to the Privy Council to help enforce statute.
Prior to 1688, nearly one fifth of Royal Proclamations about the economy sought to
support statutory regulations.27
Nonetheless, Parliament began, after 1688 to gain more experience of the business of
government to add to its traditional remits as a vehicle of representation and as a
forum for the execution of justice. In the national economic sphere, Parliament’s
significance grew. Parliamentary statutes began to compete more successfully with
Privy Council orders and Royal Proclamations as state-sponsored means to regulate
the national economy.28 From the Restoration to the arrival of William III, the Privy
Council issued on average 4 royal proclamations about the economy a year. By the
1690s, however, the Privy Council began to concentrate on routine business to do
with the Channel Islands, as well as some judicial and personnel issues, leaving the
business of macro-economic regulation largely to Parliament. Accordingly, from 1689
to 1714 the average annual number of royal proclamations concerning the economy
reduced to less than 1. By the early 18th century, the Privy Council focused on ships
passes, judicial disputes in the colonies, and personnel and probate issues and almost
abandoned its traditional control over economic regulation.
Much of the Privy Council’s withdrawal from national economic concerns in this
period has to do with the career of its sub-committee on commercial matters - the
Lords of Trade and Plantations. Founded in 1675, the Lords of Trade, was designed to
assist in enforcing the Navigation Acts and impose Royal government on the
proprietary and charter governments. As a committee of the Privy Council, the Lords
of Trade could ‘command the respect, attendance, or opinion’ of the Admiralty and
25
See records of the Privy Council, The National Archives, Kew (herafter PC), PC/56 1662-64, 15
October 1662, fol. 170, regarding Lindsey Level: “The Board taking into Consideration an Order of the
House of Commons in Parliament of the 19th May last (this day…his Majestie present in Councill)
whereby the said Houses did humbly recommend to his Majesty that the preservation of the Levell of
the fenns called Lindsey Levell, and made it their humble Request to his Majestie to give himselfe the
trouble to call all parties…before him and to hear their severall Claymes and Interests and that his
Majesty be attended with the Votes, and Report of the said House relateing to that businesse.”
26
PC/64 1673-4, April 18, 1673, fol. 8
27
This reduced to a fifth after 1688. See also Clayton Roberts, ‘Privy Council Schemes and Ministerial
Responsibility in Later Stuart England’ American Historical Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April, 1959), 564582
28
I use the same definition of economic to qualify legislative acts and petitions as that used by M R
Julian. It includes all public economic bills and private bills whose impact could be felt across the
economy such as transport and infrastructure bills. Estate and private naturalisation bills have been
excluded. See M R Julian, English Economic Legislation 1660 – 1714, (London School of Economics,
M Phil thesis, 1979), 175.I derive information about legislative attempts in Parliament from Julian
Hoppit (ed.), Failed Legislation, (London, 1997) and information about Royal Proclamations from R
Steele, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, 1485 – 1714, vol. 1
England and Wales, (Oxford, 1910). PC/64 1673-4, 7 July 1675, fol. 461- petition of the Tanners to
continue a statute to allow the export of leather. Some scholars of state regulation of the economy have
been too quick to assume a zero-sum relationship between Privy Council attempts to regulate and
Parliamentary attempts. See especially R W K Hinton, ‘The Decline of Parliamentary Government
under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts’, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. 13, (1957), 116-32
7
Treasury.29 From 1696, the reformed Board of Trade, without access to the
constitutional means to act unilaterally, became an information gathering body.
Although it had been designed to preserve the monarch’s traditional control over
overseas trade revenues, the Board became almost from its inception, effectively a
sub-committee of the House of Commons, which regularly called upon the Board’s
commissioners, many of whom were MPs, to write reports and present them to the
House and its various committees.30 When the Board attempted to initiate reform, as
with regards to its proposed reform of the Poor Law in the 1690s, the legislature
refused to cooperate.31 The Treasury and Parliament habitually ignored the board’s
suggestions about customs duties before the board’s commissioners began to cease to
make such recommendations.
As the Privy Council disengaged from economic regulation, Parliament became more
heavily involved. Parliament achieved 4 economic statutes on average per year from
1660 to 1688 and 11 per year after the Glorious Revolution and before 1714. Before
the Glorious Revolution, the Privy Council, via Royal Proclamations maintained, on
average, a 68% control over state attempts to influence the national economy. After
1688, that proportion of control had reduced to just 7% (at a time when the average
yearly total state attempts to influence the national economy increased by 54% across
the periods 1660 – 1688 to 1689 – 1713). The increased number of Parliamentary
statutes accounts for the majority of this increase in state interest in the national
economy (yearly averages of statutes either side of the Glorious Revolution increased
by 166% while the decrease in proclamations was 79%). The success rate of
legislative attempts in Parliament also improved. All legislative attempts benefited
from an improved success rate after 1688 from 20% between 1660 and 1688 to 50%
from 1689 to 1714. The success rate of economic initiatives, according to my own
definition, was less impressive, but nevertheless improved from 22% to 36%.
The constitutional changes traditionally associated with the Glorious Revolution
altered how the English state regulated its economy. ‘Parliamentary supremacy’
perhaps better conveys Parliament’s changed status within the English constitution
than ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’.
The supremacy of statute and Parliament in economic matters was matched by
changes in Parliamentary personnel and procedure. An increased proportion of MPs
came from commercial backgrounds, echoing a belief that merchants ought to control
commercial policy. The percentages of members of Parliament who were merchants
increased from 3.7 per cent in the period from 1660 to 1690 to 7.9 per cent between
1690 and 1715.32 The increased participation of merchants in the Parliamentary
process after 1688 confirms the extent to which merchants wished to serve as political
representatives of their markets and how they increasingly viewed the state via
29
See Ian Steele, The Politics of Colonial Policy, (Oxford, 1968), 9, 125 see also Robert Lees
‘Parliament and the Proposal for a Council of Trade 1695/6’, English Historical Review, Vol. 54, No.
213, (Jan 1939), 38-66
30
In many instances, the Board of Trade appears to have gathered information for Commons inquiries
on the basis of which the Commons, rather than the Board, made decisions. See CO389/23 ff. 256-266
(May 14, 1713) see also ff. 272-286.
31
In relation to the Board’s attempt to reform the poor law in the 1690s, J P Cooper concluded: “The
prospect of informed collaboration between Commons and the executive failed.” See Cooper,
‘Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in 17th-Century England’, 96
32
For growing mercantile interest in Parliament in this period see Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade,
(Oxford, 2001), 197
8
Parliament as a means to protect and enlarge their economic concerns.33 The House
also began to take trade business more seriously. A 1703 ruling dictated ‘no bill
relating to trade or the alteration of laws concerning trade be brought into the House
until the proposition shall have been first examined and debated in the grand
committee for trade, and agreed unto by the House.’ Between 1690 and 1702,
committees of the whole house heard 20 per cent of commercial bills. By Anne’s
reign the percentage had improved to 57 per cent.34
Plotting Parliament’s increased interest in the economy begs the question: interest in
what economy? Such an increase could be explained by a spontaneous increase in the
size of the economy that was the cause rather than the result of state intervention. This
is to some extent true, for the economy did not wait for state interventions before it
could function. But, increased state interest in the economy did not result in a
decreasing economic growth. The state had always maintained an interest in the
economy. Indeed, economics and politics were inseparable to the early 18th century
policy-maker.35 Such classical economic motifs as ‘economic man’ who naturally
trucked and bartered describe a timeless human instinct, but were the invention of the
late 17th and 18th century. A decreasing proportion of these state enactments about the
economy prohibited or regulated trade in a conventional sense and many more
stimulated new trades in new areas of the economy or assisted in deregulating other
trades completely. An ‘economic state of nature’ had to be invented to make such
enactments more palatable. Pamphleteers had to make the case that free trade
represented some kind of primordial, default setting for the economy.36 Policy
makers, in short, had to be convinced of the merits of deregulation.
The growing economic importance of Parliament helped to realise the old idea of a
national economy, which was based upon old statutes, especially the Statute of
Artificers; balance of trade conceptions of national and international trade; royal
proclamations; a national coinage depicting national insignia. From the middle ages,
the king’s sovereignty included not only the kingdom’s resources but also his
subject’s economic opportunity. Both could be purchased (along with the right to
regulate town economies via borough corporations) and the proceeds helped to
prevent monarchical reliance on Parliament.37 The Civil Wars of the mid-17th century
demonstrated that the monarchy could not retain the national economy as its personal
demesne. The House of Commons ensured that the beneficiaries of national economic
growth would also be nationally politically enfranchised. The long established link
between the House of Commons and the national tax base assisted the understanding
that representation increasingly offered a means for individuals not only to protect
their economic interests but also to advance those interests. This understanding began
to produce dramatic macro-economic affects by the 1690s as Parliament either made
33
For the numbers of these merchants directly involved in the Africa trade debates in Parliament and
for changes in political culture that saw merchants engage more with the political process and the
changed relationship between politics and economics that this records, William Pettigrew, ‘Free to
Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688 – 1714’, William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 64, no. 1, (2007)
34
For the 1703 ruling see Gauci, The Politics of Trade, 227
35
This need not make ‘economic’ legislative actions distinguishable with hindsight
36
I offer a case study concerning the slave trade below to illustrate this
37
Further discussion of the emergence of national economy see Joyce Appleby “Ideology and theory:
The Tension between Political and Economic Liberalism in 17th-Century England” AHR, LXXXI,
(1976), 504
9
attempts to regulate the national economy more enforceable or offered its
representatives the opportunity to sustain lobbying campaigns to deregulate areas of
the economy.
Within Parliament, the institutional expression of a national economy, there emerged
an intellectual construction that summarised the bridges between the policy aims of
the government and those Parliamentary lobbyists who increasingly sought to
influence state involvement in the economy – the ‘national interest’. Pamphleteers
invoked this expression to gain state approval for their proposals and to deflect
accusations that their concerns did not extend beyond their own self-interest.38 The
phrase came to embody a mixture of concerns: full employment, sufficient national
income to sustain military campaigns abroad, and a favourable balance of trade. All of
these concerns would be supported by the over-arching meaning of the phrase:
national economic growth.
Parliament offered the national interest its best constitutional buttress. Statute
therefore became the state’s most important economic lever after the Glorious
Revolution. Before 1688, Parliament worked alongside the royal prerogative and
rulings from Privy Council to regulate the economy. After the arrival of William of
Orange, the strengthened Parliament became the senior partner in the process of
arbitrating on macro-economic concerns. As one foreign observer recorded of the
mentality that informed this belief in the importance of Parliament as the most
suitable regulator of the national economy at this time: “que les affaires n'y seraient
jamais assez bien regles a moins que ce ne fut le parlement qui en eut la direction”.39
Echoing Celia Fiennes, other contemporaries made a connection between these
political reforms and commercial improvements. Charles Davenant asked:
“…why the care of liberty and preserving our civil rights should be so much recommended in a paper
relating to trade we answer that …. If the wealth and power of a country depend upon good
government and stability of its affairs, it must certainly import that all the different ranks of men
contribute their utmost that things may be well administer’d.” 40
Davenant followed Machiavelli’s celebration of freedom and greatness that derived
from empire. Nicholas Barbon agreed:
“, … in England, where the government is not despotical; but the people free; and have as great a
share in the sovereign legislative power, as the subjects of any state have, or ever had … and where
the flourish of trade is as much the interest of the King as of the people, there can be no such cause of
fear.”41
38
The conceptualisation of a national economy was also assisted by political arithmetic and the
compilation of national economic statistics. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact:
Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), 126
39
A rough translation is: ‘Our affairs will never be well enough regulated unless Parliament has the
direction’ Frederic Bonet, 13 January, 1696. Frederic Bonet was resident in London on behalf of the
elector of Brandenburg. Bonet is quoted in Robert Lees, The Constitutional Importance of the
‘Commissioners of Wool’ of 1689’, 150 fn. 10
40
Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance
of Trade, (2nd ed. London 1700), 17-18, 261-263
41
Nicholas Bardon, Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), 20
10
As early as the 1640s, Henry Parker believed that Parliamentary systems served to
favour economic growth because they enfranchised the mercantile interest:
“tis admirable to see what vast revenues are purchased by some nations (especially where democracy
takes place) out of mere commerce; and how far other nations in the mean time (especially such as
are swayed by monarchs) though more commodiously situated, and advantageously qualified,
otherwise do neglect the same. The reason hereof may be, because in popular states the merchant
usually has more administration of public affairs: whereas in monarchies, those that have the charge
of the rudder, have commonly little insight into trade, and as little regard of traders.” 42
By the second half of the 18th century, this view received more sophisticated
discussion. The Scottish political economist, John Millar wrote with the period after
1688 in England at the forefront of his mind:
“By a constant attention to professional objects, the superior orders of mercantile people become
quick-sighted in discerning their common interest, and, at all times, indefatigable in pursuing it.
While the farmer, employed in the separate cultivation of his land, considers only his own individual
profit; while the landed gentleman seeks only to procure a revenue sufficient for the supply of his
own interest as well as of every other; the merchant, though he never overlooks his private
advantage, is accustomed to connect his own gain with that of his brethren, and is, therefore, always
ready to join with those of the same profession, in soliciting the aid of government, and in promoting
general measures for the benefit of their trade. The prevalence of this great mercantile association in
Britain, has, in the course of the present century, become gradually more and more conspicuous, The
clamor and tumultuary proceedings of the populace in the great towns are capable of penetrating the
inmost recesses of administration, of intimidating the boldest minister, and of displacing the most
presumptuous favourite of the back stairs, The voice of the mercantile interest never fails to
command the attention of government, and when firm and unanimous, is even able to control and
direct the deliberation of the national councils.” 43
In the1670s, Thomas Sheridan, like Fiennes, saw Parliament as the merchants’ best
platform: “Since then it [trade] is so necessary, it deserves the Parliament’s best care
to restore it to what it has been, or make it what it should be.”44 For Locke in the Two
Treaties on Government, the legislative branch of government provided the purest
expression of popular consent and was, therefore the best vehicle for the societal
protection of property.
But all of these thinkers remained vague about the mechanics of this relationship.
How did it operate?45 The rising importance of Parliament as state regulator of the
economy formed a part of a larger change of political culture. This modern political
culture had two hallmarks: first, adherents appealed to a political (but not party)
ideology of natural rights synonymous with individual economic self-interest and
offering a politico-economic bond between liberal economics and notions of
government. Proponents regarded the individual’s right to pursue economic interests
Henry Parker, Of a Free Trade (London, 1648), 3-4 see also Sir William Temple, ‘Essay on
Government’ in The Works of Sir William Temple, (London, 1750),110
43
John Millar, ‘The Advancement of Manufactures, Commerce and the Arts; and the Tendency of this
Advancement to diffuse a Spirit of Liberty and Independence’ in An Historical View of the English
Government, From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, in four volumes,
edited by Mark Salber Philips and Dale R. Smith, introduction by Mark Salber Philips (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 2006)
44
Thomas Sheridan, A Discourse of the Rise and Power of Parliaments, (London, 1677), 182
45
Though Locke does not proceed to give many details of the mechanics of representation see J R Pole,
Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London, 1966)
42
11
as politically stabilising and a fundamental duty of government.46 Their political credo
advanced their commercial interests and mapped economic concerns onto political
methods. By articulating an ideology that celebrated the societal benefits of individual
economic self-interest they yoked the cause of political liberalism to economic
growth.47 Second, after the Glorious Revolution, political initiative diffused out into
the market and, simultaneously and symbiotically, new interest groups buoyed by
success in new, (often Atlantic), markets began to emerge, articulating this ‘ideology
of interest’, and using reformed and more inclusive political institutions - such as the
sovereign Parliament, which became the undisputed arbiter of macro-economic
concerns.48 As a result, economic interests could be more efficiently furthered using
political means.
A comparison of the Privy Council and the Parliament’s mode of regulation helps to
clarify the workings of this new political culture. Parliament was, by design, a public
and consultative institution unlike the Privy Council, whose meetings were
understood to be secret.49 Parliament listened to far more petitions than the Privy
Council and its members would, after 1695, inform themselves about debates with the
help of printed pamphlets to a much larger extent than the councillors. The Privy
Council sometimes received counter-petitions and in Parliament, issues could often be
thrown out without reason, but Parliament provided a more open forum, which
allowed debate to be influenced by outside petitions and pamphlets.50
Historians have also seen the state’s accommodation of interest articulation as a source of political
stability see John Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675 – 1725 (London, 1967),
13
47
The emergence of this political economy of ‘interest’ can be traced to earlier in the 17th century. Its
fixation with economic self-interest need not, because of its novelty, deny its ideological character.
Primarily conceived of within the political realm, it cannot be dismissed as the mere celebration of
economic efficiency, which was itself a novel phenomenon. For the emergence of an ideology of
interest in this period see John Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the 17th Century (London,
1969), 205-258 and ‘Interest Will not Lie: A 17th Century Political Maxim’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, vol. 29. no. 4 (1968), 551–564 and Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton,
1977), 37 and more recently, Steve Pincus, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment Nor Possessive
Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American
Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 3, (1998), 705–736. Not until the Wealth of Nations were economic
interests described in terms of their pure macro-economic benefits. Evolving notions of individual
interests combined with the mercantilist theory of international relations (referred to in contemporary
pamphlets as the ‘national interest’) which assumed Machiavellian competition between nations for
scarce resources - and prevented moral obiligations from transcending national boundaries - to enlarge
the scale of the slave trade. See Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964), 262. See
also Jacob Viner, ‘The Nation State and Private Enterprise’ in Jacob Viner, Essays on the Intellectual
History of Economics, (Princeton, 1991), 45. Mercantilist domestic policy did, however, stress the
moral importance of full employment.
48
See Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work (Cambridge, Mass, 1992), 51-75.
49
See Edward Raymond Turner, The Privy Council of England in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 1603 –
1784 (Baltmore, 1927), 398
50
William Cunningham regarded autocratic political institutions as better suited to regulation. See
William Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times Vol. 1: The
Mercantile System (Of 2 Vols. Cambridge 1925, 6th ed), 19. While Privy Councillors regularly received
bribes in the 17th century and before, bribing MPs or Parliamentary officials ran the risk of incurring
increasingly severe penalties. The East India Company had secured government favour throughout the
1680s by gifting the monarch huge cash sums. In the 1690s, during Parliamentary discussions of the
future of the company’s charter, the company’s payment to the Speaker of the House of Commons
(along side other court officials) brought severe and costly reprisals for all concerned. Ekelund and
Tollison have argued that the additional cost of lobbying Parliament dissuaded interest groups from
seeking to sustain monopolies after 1688 and therefore played a part in deregulating the economy. See
46
12
Parliament’s more deliberative nature endowed attempts to regulate the national
economy with the legitimising force of consent. The changed political culture that
valued, at least at a rhetorical level, the value of consent supported the more
deliberative aspects of Parliamentary procedure as a superior means to enforce
statute.51 During this period, votes competed more successfully with pounds as a
means to secure political influence, and, as the period went on, the more backers a
proposal had (including the more signatories a petition had) the more seriously it was
taken. 5253 The Privy Council system of regulation might provide more flexible and
specific means to respond to changing economic conditions, but that conciliar
response could not equal the more binding Parliamentary judgement that benefited
from the input of consent. After 1660, and without Star Chamber Privy Council would
always struggle to enforce its order. The shift of regulatory initiative from the Privy
Council to Parliament allowed more people a say in defining the national interest.
And the more people involved, the greater the economic impact.
As the barrister, Batholomew Shower, explained, Parliament was better placed to
oversee state regulation of the economy: ‘because each subject’s vote is included in
whatsoever is there done: an Act of Parliament hath the consent of many men, both
past, present, and to come.’54 Such restrictions were, needless to say, often thwarted,
but Parliament proved more effective at enforcing these restrictive statutes because in
the context of a more deliberative political system, disadvantaged merchants could
use political rather than economic means to make their views felt, what Albert
Hischmann famously characterised as ‘voice’ rather than ‘exit’.55
Unlike the Privy Council, appealing to Parliament did not bring the appellant face-toface with government, but against a process of mediation, which involved
government. The importance of the distinction between government and the
discussion of government was widely held and applied to the role of Parliament. The
supremacy of Parliament therefore allowed a platform for groups determined to wrest
open cosy relationships between the government and particular economic interests
who owed their position to bribes. Rather than lessening in number, after 1688, as
other historians have claimed, commercial lobbies increased in number,
Robert Ekelund and Robert Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in
Historical Perspective (Texas, 1981), 149.
See also Robert McCormick and Robert Tollison, “Wealth Transfers in a Representative Democracy”:
in J M Buchanan, Robert Tollison and Gordon Tullock (eds.) , Toward A Theory of The Rent –Seeking
Society (Texas, 1980)
51
For the idea that consent made regulations easier to enforce see George Philips, Lex Parliamentaria
(Second ed., London, 1734). Despite their deliberative and consensual traditions commentators did not
associate consent with the Privy Council or with the monarchy. See John Philip Reid, The Concept of
Representation in the Age of the American Revolution, (Chicago, 1989)
, 25. See also Paul Langford, ‘Property and Virtual Representation in 18th Century England’, The
Historical Journal, vol. 31,1,(1988113: “One of the clear gains to Government in the eighteenth
century was that so much anxiety and odium which attached to the use of central power to bring about
local change was diverted from the king and his ministers to Parliamentarians in one way or another
accountable to their electors and their communities.”
52
See M R Julian, English Economic Legislation, 1660-1714 (M.Phil Thesis, London School of
Economics, 1979), 20
53
See Keirn et al, Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 15
54
Shower’s argument is in The English Reports (London, 1900-1932), vol. 89, 498 [1 Show. K.B.,
137]
55
Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)
13
sophistication, and tenacity. Parliament formally enfranchised every constituency in
the country, while the Privy Council favoured metropolitan interests. The larger scale
of Parliament in comparison to Privy Council, and the longer hours, and larger
number of people, helped to produce solutions that made a superior claim to be based
on national consent than the unilateral quality and metropolitan focus of the Privy
Council’s decision-making.
These commercial lobbyists made their views felt via petitions (and sometime by
appearing before Parliament in person). Petitions provide the best example of a
constitutional means to connect the ‘freedom’ of a political society and its economic
growth. Petitions (as celebrated in the Bill of Rights) and instructions to each of the
Privy Council and Parliament, institutions did not always represent the interests they
claimed to, but they derived, on the whole, from non-governmental sources. But their
use became, alongside Parliamentary statutes, a celebrated aspect of the English
political system and civil liberty.56 One Whig Grandee, John Somers, viewed
petitioning as the best expression of the people’s appreciation of government’s power
as a derivation of their consent: John Somers’ Jura Populi Anglicani pamphlet
justifying the right to petition added:
‘Wherever therefore any Government is established there the natural Right which People had to
secure what was their own, must be so far at least continued, as to allow them a liberty to Petition for
what they think their right, because this is a Priviledge which they could not give up, when they
enter’d into Society.’57
Parliament became the more important venue for appeals to influence the state’s
decisions about the nation’s economy. Before the 1690s, the Court and (to a lesser
extent) the Privy Council, with its executive powers, had provided a forum for
petitioning about economic matters. In 1660, 77% of all petitions to do with the
economy were addressed to the King.58 In 1696, that number had fallen to 12%.
Parliament, and especially the House of Commons became the majority recipient of
petitions to do with economic matters. In 1660, the House of Commons received just
6% of such petitions. By 1713 its share had risen to 92%.
A rising number of these petitions concerned economic matters. At a time when the
total numbers of petitions to the House of Commons increased from 60 in 1660 to 118
in 1713, the percentage of those petitions concerning economic matters increased
from 8 per cent in 1660 to 55% in 1713. We see a rise in the number, ambitions, and
effectiveness of lobbying groups in this period. In 1660, 1 per cent of petitions to
Parliament came from commercial interest groups. By 1696, this proportion had
increased to 18% and increased again to 35% in 1713. In 1660, about a quarter of all
petitions to do with the economy came from commercial lobbies. By 1713, this figure
56
In my analysis of the Privy Council, I have self-consciously limited myself to petitions, there are
other instruments of assertion: letters, ‘informations’, requests, and propositions with distinct purposes.
We have a series of studies on the form and significance of petitions (but not for this precise period and
not for commerce, though see David Zaret ‘Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the
English Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 101, no. 6, (1996)), but we don’t have a
study of their incidence over this period.
57
[John Somers?], Jura Populi Anglicani: or, the subjects right of petitioning set forth.. Occasioned by
the case of the Kentish petitioners… (London, 1701), 33
58
I compiled these lists of economic petitions from Journals of the House of Commons, (London,
1803) and the Journals of the House of Lords, (London, 1770)
14
exceeded 70%. Atlantic merchants dominated the crusades against several restrictive
overseas monopoly companies. Used to deregulated markets, these merchants used
their wealth, and the politically decentralised British Atlantic polity to help wrest
open these monopolies.59
The less unilateral, more inclusive style of regulation that Parliament exhibited
influenced patterns of economic legislation. The regulatory primacy of Parliament
enfranchised provincial interest groups, which led to a rising proportion of regulatory
enactments with local origins and affects. 93% of the proclamations in this period
made stipulations about the national economy, whereas only 62% of statutes did.
Statute began to account for more national enactments after 1689 improving its share
from 43 to 91%. The success rate of local initiatives improved from 29% to 46%.
Among these regional interests, attempts to develop local economic infrastructure
predominated. Statute proved to be a more popular means to develop infrastructure
such as roads, highways, and the reclamation of marshland. Nearly a third (29%) of
all statutes in this period attempted these kinds of projects in comparison to just 6% of
Royal Proclamations. Again, statutory enactments that sought to use Parliament’s
prestige to back infrastructural projects increased from 7% to 24%. While those to do
with engineering projects improved from 21 to 45%. Infrastructural projects
experienced an overall improvement of 22% to 44%. Those to establish new projects
improved from 14% to 48%. These successes speak to the ways in which local
lobbying concerns had to improve their lobbying acumen and to the manner in which
Parliament provided a superior means to represent local interests.
Such schemes had, with less frequency, been handled by the king, by the Privy
Council, by local institutions (each local Commission of Sewers), and by the
Parliaments of the 1660s, 70s, and 80s. It was not until after 1688, that schemes to
navigate the nation’s rivers and improve the nation’s roads began to appear in large
numbers. Parliamentary statutes provided the best means to manage and enforce these
schemes without incurring the kinds of local opposition that had inhibited them before
1688. The regulatory primacy of Parliament seems to have particularly encouraged
provincial river navigations, whose proponents may not have been in a position to
deliberate with Privy Councillors. One commentator surmised that “the Parliament
seems well disposed” to river navigation.60
Fifteen statutes aiding river navigations, improvements to harbours, and the formation
of turnpike trusts to develop the nation’s road network appeared between 1660 and
1689. Between 1690 and 1719, that number almost quadrupled to 59. Navigation
schemes were not without their opponents. In the period after 1688, however, the
success rate of such schemes improved. Attempts to legislate river navigation and
highway construction enjoyed a success rate that improved from 22% to 42% across
the two periods. In 1660, the kingdom boasted 685 miles of navigable rivers. By the
1720s, according to Defoe, that figure had risen to 1160 miles.61 The scheme’s
59
For a fuller discussion of the Atlantic dimensions of these debates see William Pettigrew, Free to
Enslave. Gilbert Heathcote and Edmund Harrison also lobbied against the Royal African Company and
the Russian Company. Samuel Shepherd, John Cary, Robert Atwood, John Lloyd, Nathaniel Gould,
and Joseph Martin also lobbied against the Russia Company
60
See S Willan River Navigation in England, 1600-1750 (London, 1964), 30
61
Willan, 133
15
backers in Parliament based their case on the need for cheaper carriage of goods.
River transportation proved far less expensive than road transportation, especially for
heavy cargoes such as coal and iron. Houghton argued that by 1700, it was possible to
carry goods 300 miles by river for 10p what would cost 3 shillings by road.62
Statutes to build roads increased in number and as a percentage of all statutes from 7
(or 6% in the first period) to 38 (or 13%) in the second period. Legislative proposals
relating to highways showed a particularly impressive improvement in success rate:
from 26% to 62% across the two periods. Statute’s tried-and-tested ability to
countenance national monopolies after the Glorious Revolution assisted the formation
of independent turnpike trusts who could, after a 1691 statute, levy rates to support
road repair.63 By 1706 statutes enabled turnpike trusts to levy tolls to maintain the
roads that replaced the parish levies that had singularly failed to support and develop
Britain’s network of roads.64 They demonstrate how Parliament bestowed powers of
local administration and finance in response to the courting of local interests, in a way
that would have been inconceivable and unenforceable via the Privy Council.65 Their
enactments helped to lower the cost of the transportation of goods throughout the
national economy. One observer stated that the establishment of turnpikes in the early
18th century had lowered the cost of carriage by 30%.66 Road transportation became
more efficient. Fewer animals were now required to pull larger weights.67 The shift
from Privy Council to Parliamentary regulation of the economy encouraged local
interests to lobby the legislature to acquire state authority to develop their respective
local economies.
The rise of Parliament also assisted the development of Britain’s overseas trade
economy. While 41% of the Royal Proclamations in this period explicitly sought to
prohibit some aspect of trade, just 8% of statutes had the same ambition. Prohibitions
had represented nearly a third (29%) of all attempts at regulation between 1660 and
1688, they accounted for just 7% from 1689 to 1714. With regards to statutes
concerning overseas trade, prohibitions accounted for 14% in the second period, a
drop from 36% in the former period. Measures relating to overseas trade showed an
increased success rate of from 25 to 40%. With those measures attempted to prohibit
overseas trade experiencing a deteriorating success rate from 41% to 22%. Economic
proposals to use statute to prohibit trade (whether overseas or domestic) witnessed a
reduction in their success rate: from 77% before the Glorious Revolution to 22%
afterwards. Instead, Parliament supported statutory attempts to ‘encourage’ trade
(24%). These ‘encouraging’ statutes often lent statutory force to deregulate markets
that had previously been tightly regulated.
This changing pattern of legislation greatly altered the structure and output of the
British economy. After 1689 Parliament authorised free export of cloth ending a
62
Willian, 119
See 3 William and Mary c. 12
64
See 6 Anne c. 4
65
For the belief that fen drainage in the 18th Century was made easier by having to appeal to Parliament
rather than the Privy Council see Paul Langford, ‘Property and Virtual Representation in 18th Century
England’, The Historical Journal, vol. 31,1,(1988), 83-115
66
Quoted in William Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England, 1663-1840, (Cambridge, 1972),
180. See also Daniel Bogart, ‘Turnpike Trusts and the Transportation Revolution in Eighteenth Century
England’, Explorations in Economic History, 42, (October, 2005), 479-508
67
Albert, 181
63
16
centuries long prohibition.68 Advocates of this policy argued that this statute would
assist national economic growth. Edward Ward stated in the House of Lords that:
“This general freedom for all persons to export freely will greatly advantage the
kingdom.” The long-established Merchant Adventurers Company had its monopoly
over cloth trading formally deregulated. Parliament worked to ensure that this
deregulation sustained. In 1700, Parliament freed cloth exports from customs duties,
the Aulnage, entirely.69 Parliament also liberated the internal trade of hides in 1689.70
Further pressure groups lobbied for the deregulation of the production and exporting
of copper, and mundic metals.71 Similarly in 1694, Parliament permitted the free
export of English iron and copper to any country except France. This, again,
overturned a tendency for preventing the export of English iron that had been
supported by Parliamentary statute since the middle ages.72 Other trades followed suit.
In 1689, a Parliamentary statute removed the customs duty on corn exports. 73 This
policy hugely increased the nation’s production of wheat and other grains by
enlarging the scale of both markets.74 Parliament also deregulated the production and
trades of brandy, aqua vitae, spirits and bacon75 and salt manufacturing.76 Statutes
also created free markets at billingsgate77 and prohibited frauds in the buying and
selling of cattle at Smithfield.78 Such was the enthusiasm with which MPs
countenanced the deregulation of multiple markets that a pamphleteer in 1694 could
speak of ‘the present vogue of free trade’.79
Much of this initiative derived from interest group activity, as with the rising
incidence of infrastructure projects. Joint-stock monopoly companies were also
victimised by commercial lobbyists. These companies had been protected assiduously
by royal proclamation. 80 A pamphlet described how a petition detailing how the
African Company’s monopoly restricted the Suffolk woollen trade was submitted to
‘the King and Council’ in the 1680s, ‘but the Duke of York being president of this
Company, no redress could be had.’81 A longstanding opponent of the African
Company, Edward Littleton, explained that the company benefited, prior to 1688,
from the support of ‘some great Men … with whom we were not able to contend.’82
One of these great men was James, then Duke of York, who was the company’s
Governor and its most assiduous political supporter. In this way, the shift from a
68
1 Williamm and Mary, c. 23
11 William III c. 20
70
See L A Clarkson, ‘English Economic Policy in the 16th and 17th Centuries: The Case of the Leather
Industry, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXXVIII (1965) no. 98, 158. For the
liberation of the domestic trade in hides see Cherry, Free Trade Movement in Parliament. For the 1689
quote see Journals of the House of Commons (London, 1803, hereafter CJ), vol. 10, 52.
71
see Cherry, 112. See also Statutes of the Realm, (London, 1820), vol. 6, 481
72
See 5 and 6 William and Mary c. 17
73
For an eloquent, compelling, but simplified account see Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution,
1603 – 1714 (Second ed. London, 1980). See also CJ, vol. 10, 103 and Cherry, 113
74
See Donald Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws, 1660 – 1846, (New York, 1961), 15
75
See Journals of the House of Lords (London, 1770), vol. 15, 351
76
Statutes, 10, 144
77
Statutes, 7, 513-14
78
Statutes, 10, 291
79
[Anon] The Interest of England Considered in an essay Upon Wool, (London, 1694)
80
PC/64 June 17, 1674, fol. 245 regarding the Merchant Adventurers and 4 November 1674, fol. 299
regarding the Governor and Company of the New Rover Water
81
Roger Coke, Reflections upon the East-Indy and Royal African Companies with Animadversions,
Concerning the Naturalization of Foreigners, (1695), 10
82
Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (1689), 6
69
17
conciliar to legislative arbitration of economic affairs greatly aided those who sought
to deregulate overseas trading monopolies.
The Glorious Revolution undermined the royal prerogative to the extent that
merchants who, before 1688, traded in markets monopolised by monarchicallysponsored charter companies, could successfully argue in court that those charters had
been undermined by the flight of James II and that, therefore, they ought to receive
compensation for the seizure of their trading goods. The outcome of court cases such
as that against the Royal African Company, Nightingale vs. Brydges compelled the
directors of joint stock monopoly companies to appeal to Parliament for statutory
support for their charters.83 The glorious revolution forced monopoly companies to
justify their trading record before a Parliamentary audience that had understood the
growth implications of deregulation. Opponents of monopoly introduced the idea that
a trade could grow if more traders permitted to trade. Those that did not pass the test
had their charters relaxed to allow more traders to participate, without jeopardising
the future of their respective trades by complete deregulation. The Privy Council
scarcely ever countenanced such deregulation. Arguments in favour of free trade to a
large extent derived from constitutional arguments associated with the rise of
Parliament with the fall of arbitrary restrictions on the economy.
The great onslaughts of commercial lobbies against the London overseas trading
companies accounted for nearly a third of all mercantile petitions in this period.84
Such companies had been protected by Privy Council orders that supported their royal
charters. Prior to 1688, Parliament preferred to shunt discussion about the future of
monopoly companies back to the Privy Council or to the courts (as with the Bermuda
Company, whose monopoly ended in 1684 after a quo warranto hearing85). But after
1688, Parliament reached a conclusion about the futures of each of the monopoly
companies. In reference to the East India, Royal African, White Paper, and Russia
Companies, Parliament legislated compromise arrangements that sustained the
monopoly company’s charters but either over certain sectors of the market - as in the
case of the White Paper Company - 86 or legalised independent trading either by
amalgamating two companies as in the East India example or charging independent
involvement in the trade, as in the African and Russian examples.87 These partial
deregulations assisted the development of each trade. Such compromise agreements
perfectly express the different political styles and outcomes of Parliamentary
deliberation and Privy Conciliar discussion.
Interest groups not only worked to enact statutes to assist the development of the
overseas economy. More people appealed to Parliament at a time when Parliament
legislated slightly less on economic issues. This was because many commercial
83
Alexander Renton, ed., The English Reports (London, 1900-1932), vol. 89, 496-502 [1 Show. K.B.
135-145].
84
Gauci, Politics of Trade, 218
85
See Richard Dunn, ‘The Downfall of the Bermuda Company: A Restoration Farce’, William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. Vol. 20, No. 4 (Oct 1963)
86
See William Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock
Companies to 1720, (3 vols. Cambridge, 1919), vol 3, 66 where Scott cites this: “as possibly the
earliest case of Parliamentary control of the capitalisation of a company.”
87
For the Russia Company see Jacob M. Price, ‘The Tobacco Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics,
and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676 – 1722’, in
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 51, part 1, (1961)
18
interest groups began to lobby against statutory proposals to restrict the economy to
ensure deregulation. The commercial interest group’s counter petition became an
important macro-economic lever. In 1660, less than 1 per cent of Parliamentary
petitions could be classified as counter petitions. By 1696 this had increased to 10 per
cent and increased again to 24% in 1713. The trend is even more striking for petitions
relating to economic matters: in 1660, 1 per cent of petitions to do with economic
matters were counter petitions. In 1696, the figure was 20 per cent; in 1705 it became
33% and in 1713 it reached 65%. As soon as the primacy of Parliament as regulator of
the national economy became fixed, the logical implications of that arrangement also
became apparent: if a statute to regulate the economy failed in the legislature, then a
legislative vacuum would assist deregulation. This deregulation could be sustained
with the help of another, more famous example of legislative inertia: the expiration of
the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695. A counter petitioning campaign based on the anti
monopoly refrain prevented the licensing statute from being replaced in 1695.88 The
expiration of this legislation allowed Parliamentary deliberation to enter the extralegislative public sphere. Counter-petitioning lobbyists mounted campaigns to defeat
regulatory statutes but encouraged Parliamentary deliberation to legitimise the
legislative vacuum by referring to points scored in Parliamentary debates in
pamphlets. The deregulation of Britain’s transatlantic slave trade was, therefore,
helped by a widening notion of representation in this period. By 1700, Parliament
could not claim to monopolise the state’s access to national means of representation.
The increased use of petitioning provided an alternative representation of the public
sphere.89 Extra-Parliamentary means of representation began to flourish further after
the expiration of the Licensing Act. Lobbyists who sought to maintain a legislative
vacuum to preserve a deregulated market, used Parliament to engineer non-statutory
Parliamentary rulings to legitimate their markets in the absence of a statute. Lobbyists
had to employ the means to influence both public opinion and its representatives in
Parliament to ensure the success of their proposal. Extra-Parliamentary public opinion
was not, on its own sufficient. This public opinion had to be subjected to the
legitimating gaze of formal Parliamentary consideration before a legislative vacuum
could be tolerated.90 The improved powers of Parliament made the potential
consequences of legislative failure greater because other branches of the constitution
such as the monarchy and Privy Council could no longer be relied upon to resolve
issues. This proved to have a profound effect on the evolution of Britain’s economy.
With the important exception of the deregulating French Commerce bill in 1713 the
large counter-petitioning campaigns opposed attempts to monopolise overseas trade,
as with the Hamburg Company in December 1696 and the Royal African Company in
November 1696 and again in January 1709. Large counter-petitioning campaigns also
helped to discredit movements to limit the export of wool in December 1696 and
November 1699, and the import of foreign lace in February 1699. In all cases,
however, the weight of petitioning support proved critical to the defeat of the
See R Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act of 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library,
Series 5, no 33, (1978), 301
89
See Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2005),
127 and Rosemary Sweet, ‘Local Identities and a National Parliament, c. 1688 – 1835’, in Julian
Hoppit, ed., Parliaments, Nations, and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660 – 1850 (Manchester,
2003), 50-51
90
See also Tim Keirn, ‘Parliament, Legislation and the Regulation of English Textile Industries, 16891714’ in Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 16
88
19
measure.91The lobbying campaign against the Royal African Company to deregulate
the slave trade provides the best example. The ‘Africa trade’ dispute produced more
petitions and more pamphlets than any other economic issue before Parliament in this
period.92
To liberalise the slave trade, the African Company’s opponents, the ‘separate traders
to Africa’ used the breadth of their support to block the company’s attempts to
achieve a statutory confirmation for their charter. One pro-company pamphleteer
pointed out, prior to the 1698 Act, that separate traders preferred obstructing African
company bills to authoring their own:
Ever since the Parliament voted that it was the undoubted Right of all the subjects of England to
Trade to Foreign Parts – none of those Free Traders have ever brought to the Parliament a Bill to
settle this Trade, but still opposed what was offered by the Company ... because those free traders
… had just cause to believe that under such a Regulation, whatsoever it should be, they must pay
towards what by the Parliament should be thought necessary for the general interest of that trade
whereas if they continue that heavy load upon the African Company only by opposing this bill, they
should then enjoy their trade without that expence. 93
The company’s opponents initiated proceedings in Parliament in only three out of 16
sessions.94 When anti-African Company proposals appeared, in the 1690s, the
company’s opponents seldom advocated statutory alternatives to the company’s
monopoly using such vague terms as ‘advantageous regulation’ and ‘a better, more
beneficial, and equal establishment’ and ‘liberty, and freedom to trade’.95 Later,
separate trader petitions became explicitly anti-regulatory. In 1709 this had evolved to
‘may be continued free and open to all the subjects of Great Britain’.
The Africa trade dispute emerged in each Parliamentary session as the result of a
petition, usually from the African Company itself.96 Such petitions proved critical to
initiate discussion. Subsequent petitioning increased, however, the chances of
legislative failure. Far more numerous cultivated counter-petitions from the separate
traders often ensured the defeat of African Company measures or stalled
Parliamentary attempts to legislate compromise measures such as regulated
companies.97 Spontaneous and sincere reactions to legislative progress either in
support or in opposition also introduced new concerns and pitfalls for Parliamentary
91
See Gauci, Politics of Trade, 249 Gauci describes how a critical speech against the bill came from a
turn-coat, Sir Thomas Hanmer. See also in relation to the Hamborough Company, Cherry, 116. For the
French commerce bill of 1713 see also D C Coleman, ‘Politics and Economics in the Age of Anne; the
Case of the Anglo-French Trade Treaty of 1713’ in D C Coleman and A H John (eds.), Trade,
Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1976)
92
Another issue of comparable dimensions was that surrounding the leather trade which saw the
presentation of over 150 petitions from over 100 different locations between 1697 and 1699 in their
two-year-long campaign to have the leather duties repealed see Brewer, Sinews of Power, 233
93
Considerations Relating to the African Bill (1698), 3. This was a reference to Gilbert Heathcote’s
resolution of 1694 in relation to the East India trade (see Commons Journals, vol. 11, 8 January 1693-4,
50)
94
These were 1710, 1712, and 1713
95
Commons Journals, vol. 10, ‘Petition of Merchants and Planters trading to and interested in the
Island of Barbadoes’ to the House of Commons 22 April 1690, 383 and ‘Petition of Clothiers of
Suffolk and Essex’ to the House of Commons 21 April 1690, 382
96
Exceptions include: 1691, 98, 1709, 1712, 1713
97
This occurred in 1690, 93/94, 94/95, 1707/8, and 1708/9
20
drafting committees and therefore made legislation more difficult.98 This was
especially true for the Africa trade dispute because it affected so many interest groups.
Colonial planters, merchants, manufactures in the woollen trade, the iron, navigation,
and firearms industries from the metropolis and throughout the provinces all
responded to business as it progressed in the House. Authoring legislation that could
satisfy all of these concerns proved challenging. The African Company ultimately
proved unable to cultivate sufficient petitions to catalyse its own legislative proposals.
Petitioning then, although critical to the commencement of the legislative process in
the case of the Africa trade debates, usually served to directly defeat or complicate
proceedings.
Encouraging Parliamentary deliberation but discouraging statutory resolution became
the separate traders’ lobbying motto. The separate traders cultivated extraParliamentary opinion with pamphlets. They steered a middle course in Parliament
that aimed to achieve non-statutory Parliamentary rulings that would modify public
opinion in favour of open trade and ensure that the legislative vacuum was tolerated.
These rulings accrued more public significance the more interest in Parliament
increased after 1688. The rulings were meaningful because of the ritualised nature of
Parliamentary deliberation. Once a legislative proposal had reached a certain stage, it
gathered legitimacy even if the proposal ultimately failed.
Non-statutory Parliamentary rulings in favour of an open slave trade appeared in
several forms. First, Charles Davenant noted how the Board of Trade’s report to
Parliament about the slave trade in early 1709 offered much needed legitimacy to the
separate traders’ cause. Davenant noted how such legitimacy proved influential with
public opinion and helped, in turn, to influence the political process, ‘for the Separate
Traders have taken occasion, from thence to print certain paragraphs of there [sic]
own base allegations by way of Extracts out of the said report, as vouchers to gain
Credit to the very same allegations again without doors.’ 99 A separate trader pamphlet
acknowledged how the Board’s report reflected a deliberate separate trader lobbying
strategy, ‘the Report is drawn up with such Exactness and Impartiality, that
whensoever the Parliament will please to call for it, I dare take upon me to say, it will
justify my present Undertaking, and verify the most, if not all the Suggestions and
Allegations here laid down, and give Such a Light and Insight into the whole Matter,
that the Publick will be kept no longer in the dark about it.’100
The various stages that each legislative proposal reached provide a second category of
non-statutory Parliamentary rulings: from points scored in debate, to votes and
resolutions, and to bills. Pamphleteers referred to the perceived outcome of
Parliamentary debates or to testimony deemed trustworthy because of submission in
the House. One separate trader disputed the utility of the company’s African forts not
through any investigation or reasoning on the part of the author but ‘because it hath
often been made appear at the Bar, that most of the Negroes brought from Africa are
98
This seems to have occurred in 1709/10 and 1710/11
Charles Davenant’s responses to the Board of Trade’s 1708 report are contained in [Davenant],
‘Some General Observations and Particular remarks on the Report made by the Lords Commissioners
for Trade and Plantations the 3rd February, 1708 Touching the Contents of the Royal African
Company’s Peticion Referred to them by her Majesty’ in T70/175, f. 87-96
100
Considerations upon the Trade to Guinea, (London 1708), 26
99
21
loaden where we have no settlements.’101 Pamphleteers relayed the perceived
outcome of Parliamentary debates to undermine their opponents. The same was true
of the Parliamentary votes. These votes effected how the economy functioned. A
separate trader pamphlet described how a vote in favour of a regulated company bill
led to expansion in the trade ‘…since the vote of the honourable House of commons
about eight years ago, that the trade thither was best to be managed by a regulated
company, there has been a greater trade driven thither, notwithstanding all the
difficulties at home, and hazards of war, than ever was carried on in times of
peace.’102
Parliamentary resolutions, unlike – at this stage – the content of the debates
themselves (outside partisan pamphlets) were often printed which made them more
influential outside the chamber. Parliamentary resolution conferred pseudo-statutory
legitimacy for Parliamentary proposals in the absence of a statute. A petition from
Exeter cited how a resolution in favour of deregulation in a previous session had ‘so
far encouraged the petitioners, that it gave a new life to their trade, and some
thousands of pieces ... made more than usual, and the price advanced from eleven
shillings and six-pence per piece to fifteen shillings and six-pence per piece.’103
Parliamentary resolutions confirmed, especially when originating from the committee
of the whole House, that there existed broad Parliamentary approval for the proposed
scheme. One pamphlet complained how the company’s assumption that the law of the
African trade revert to its 1672 charter after the expiration of the 1698 Act proceeded
‘without any regard to the many resolutions of this honourable House repeated last
session, viz. that the African trade ought to be free and open to all her majesty’s
subjects’ and went on to describe how ‘Tis true the bill for the National Trade did not
pass last year, but even the adversaries thereto did agree, ‘twas not because they were
against an open Trade, but that some clauses in that bill were excepted against.’104
This pamphleteer noted how in the post 1688 political world, a non-statutory
Parliamentary ruling commanded more public authority than a charter derived from
royal prerogative.
The open trade bills themselves offered futher evidence of Parliamentary support and
provided some of the information about how the trade might function without a
statute. Pamphleteers deemed previous bills to be binding of future Parliamentary
deliberations, ‘Who but this company would come to Parliament, to ask an exclusive
trade, when but 7 or 8 months before the House passed a bill for a free and open
trade?’105 The separate traders also used their bills on the African coast to convince
101
An Answer to a Paper Called Short Remarks on the African Trade, (1711)
Reasons Humbly Offered by the Merchants and Traders to Guiney and the West-Indies, against the
Bill for Settling the Trade to Africa (1698)
103
Commons Journals, vol. 10, ‘Petition of Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Councilmen of the City of
Exon and also of the merchants, serge-makers, fullers, and other trading people, employed in and about
the woolen manufactury within the said city and county of the same and parts adjacent’, 9 December
1691, 579
104
The belief that anti-company legislation failed for reasons other than a lack of support was
commonplace. See also The Present Case of the African trade Truly Stated, with Reasons for the Bill
for Establishing the Same Now Depending (1713), 1 and The Case of the National Traders to Africa,
(1714), 1 see also The Anatomy of the African Company's Scheme for Carrying on That Trade in a
Joint-Stock Exclusive, … (1713), 2
105
The Anatomy of the African Company's Scheme for Carrying on That Trade in a Joint-Stock
Exclusive, … (1713), 2
102
22
African traders not to deal with the company, ‘We believe ye Separate Traders’
captains and officers may impose on you and ye rest of our servants by magnifying
the pretended advantages they gained this Parliament, but we must observe to you,
that tho’ they had prevailed to far as to have ye liberty of offering a bill to the House
in order to lay open the trade to Africa, the House did not think fit to pass that bill but
adjourned ir from day to day until ye session was ended.’106 Countless other
resolutions of this kind proved formative for other industries and trades. A resolution
obliged traders to sell their goods by ‘inch of candle’.107
Comparing the African Company’s fortunes after the expiration of the 1698 statute in
1712 with those of the Hudson’s Bay Company after the expiration of its statute in
1697 confirms the importance of extra-Parliamentary support to sustain a legislative
vacuum in favour of open trade. For unlike in 1712, legislative inertia in the context
of the Hudson’s Bay Company favoured monopoly. Political interests opposed to the
Hudson’s Bay Company were far less broadly based than those against the Royal
African Company, and they made less of an attempt to win over public opinion to
discredit the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly.108
The separate traders’ political victory dramatically affected the volume of Britain’s
slave trade. The peacetime capacity of the trade when the Royal African Company’s
monopoly came closest to being enforceable during James II’s reign in 1686 reached
37 voyages. By 1730, the open trade in slaves achieved 120 voyages. The resulting
expansion of the slave trade as a result of the demise of the Royal African Company
led, of course, to expansion in the sugar and tobacco industries which the British
government taxed. One contemporary disputant in the Africa trade debate believed
that each slave contributed between an extra 30 and 40 shillings per annum to the fisc.
If the demise of the African Company increased the volume of the slave trade by 59
per cent (a conservative estimate), this represented more than £30,000 more customs
revenue for the state per year and nearly £3,000,000 worth between 1730 and 1807.109
The expanded slave trade also increased iron and wool production as demand in
Africa increased.110 This enlargement represented a small piece of the overall growth
of overseas trade as a result of lobbying campaigns to deregulate access to overseas
trading markets.
Overseas trade was, to contemporaries and to many historians, the most important
engine of British economic growth during this period. Daniel Defoe spoke for many
others when he saw the discovery of and more efficient manipulation of overseas
markets as the surest method to improvements in trade.111 The figures are impressive.
106
T70/52, Royal African Company to Sir Dalby Thomas, 5 May 1709, f. 223 and Royal African
Company to William Hickes, 5 May 1709, f. 226
107
Cherry, 114
108
In other cases, it was clear that the lapsing of an Act in this period – and the Licensing Act in 1695
is a famous example – was a deliberate victory for those interests who benefited. For the Hudson’s Bay
Company see E.E. Rich, The Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670 – 1870 (London, 1958), vol. 1, 363
109
See Some Considerations Humbly Offered to Demonstrate How Prejudicial It Would be to the
English Plantations, Revenues of the Crown, the Navigation and General Good of This Kingdom, that
the Sole Trade for Negroes Should Be Granted to a Company with a Joynt-Stock Exclusive to All
Others [1698?], 2
110
See Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International
Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, 2002)
111
See also Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 17
23
The value of overseas trade almost doubled from £7.9 million in the 1660s to £14.5
million by the 1720s. Imports increased by a third, and exports by more than half, in
the period 1663 to 1701. The majority of this increase derived from increases in
domestic exports after 1700. 112 Most of this increase came from England’s traditional
export good, cloth, although iron and corn greatly contributed. Demand for British
goods and especially manufacturing increased with the expansion of her colonies.
There was, however, nothing intrinsic and natural about Parliament’s encouragement
of deregulation. Parliament did not move solely in the direction of deregulation,
however, as some scholars have alleged.113 Interest groups also sought to protect their
economic interests via regulation. This was especially true for manufacturing. The
number of statutes seeking to encourage (or protect) manufacturing increased from
10% to 47% over the same period. The success rate of measures to encourage
manufacturing improved from 11% to 24%. These protectionist acts proved as
formative for the structures of national economic growth as those that deregulated the
economy.114 Parliament nurtured Britain’s young linen and silk industries with
statutes designed to price foreign competition out of Britain’s domestic market.
Legislation in 1689 prohibited the importation of silk from turkey, Persia, India and
china.115 In 1690 a statute laid a 20 % duty on Indian calicoes with a rebate on reexport. In 1699, a statute added a further 15% on eastern silks. Statutes such as ‘For
the more effectual employing the Poor by encouraging the Manufactures of this
Kingdom’ proved a massive stimulus to Britain’s burgeoning cotton and textile
industries. A 1702 Act assisted Britain’s cotton industry by heralding the beginning of
the end of cheap competition from Asian imports.116 Also, tariffs on imported iron
helped to develop Britain’s iron industry. The number of blast furnaces in England
nearly doubled during this period.117 Protectionist legislation helped to develop this
industry as well as the silk, paper, linen, and woollen industries.118 Statutory tariffs on
foreign tobacco and sugar helped to stimulate the growth of British America’s staples,
which played a critical part in developing the colonial population, which, in turn,
stimulated demand for the products of Britain’s protected manufacturing industries.119
This regulatory structure, of course, did not operate independently from the
government’s foreign policy initiatives. Customs legislation demonstrates to what
extent the reformed Parliament could impersonate the Privy Council’s efficiency and
governmental aspect. Customs bills derived from the executive Treasury department
and sped through legislative resolutions in its own Commons Committee on Ways and
112
D C Coleman, The Economy of England, 1450- 1750, (Oxford, 1977), 133, 134
See especially Cherry, Free Trade Movement in Parliament
114
For a supporter of the protection of new manufacturing see William Petyt who urged the
government to encourage and superintend new manufacturing in Britannia Languens, (London, 1689),
125
115
For the protests see Statutes, vol. 10, 359
116
See O’Brien et.al, Political Components of the Industrial Revolution, 414
117
See M W Flinn, ‘The Growth of the English Iron Industry, 1660 – 1760’ Economic History Review,
New Series, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1958), 146: The increases of blast furnaces in this period were as follows:
Kirby, Leighton, Cwn Avon, Caerphilly, Allensford Mill (Durham), Blakeney, Flaxley, Mearheath
(8)1689 – 1716: Bank Upper, Bank Lower, Melbourne, Treforest, Neath, Ynyscedwyn, Cynseu,
Blackbarrow, Leighton, Elmbridge, Lamberhurst, Whitehill, Doddington, Vale Royal (14)
118
A substantial tariff kept the price of foreign imports up to protect and nurture the domestic industry.
See Flinn, fn 1,152, 153. For tariffs on imported silk see O’Brien et al, Political Components, 412
119
See Ralph Davis, English Overseas Trade 1500 – 1700 (London 1973)
113
24
Means.120 Revenue bills rarely failed in Queen Anne’s reign.121 These enactments
therefore engineered growth because of the rising importance and efficacy of the
executive branch of the constitution when working in tandem with the reformed
legislative branch. The Privy-Council-Parliament regulatory mechanisms prior to
1688 did not lead to the protection of developing industries. Tariffs on overseas trade
could not be drawn up via Privy Council. Such enactments had been at the
legislature’s pleasure since at least the mid 17th century. Duties on import trades
quadrupled between 1690 and 1704.122 These helped to stimulate investment in
industry as well as financing Britain’s war against Louis XIV.
The improved prestige and power of statute after 1688 could also be brought to bear
on overseas trading monopolies as well as protectionist tariffs. Although
Parliamentary enactments to endorse monopolies declined slightly (3 to 2%) as a
proportion of total enactments of the economy, the period after 1689 witnessed the
emergence of a statute not before seen: the statute to monopolise overseas trade,
typically via an overseas trading monopoly. There were 4 of these statutes between
1689 and 1714 (two supporting the monopoly of the East India Company and two
supporting that of the South Sea Company). The Hudson’s Bay Company received
temporary statutory support in 1698.123 The Royal Lustring and South Sea Companies
began life as statutory creations after 1688, the first as part of the state’s desire to
develop and protect the nation’s fledgling silk manufacturing industry, the second a
means to transfer massive public debts into a consolidated trading stock. The
protection that statutory support for the Royal Lustring Company’s monopoly
provided assisted a 20 fold increase in the scale of Britain’s silk industry between
1660 and 1713, most of it achieved after the company’s foundation in 1692.124 Far
from precipitating the end of the monopoly company as some have argued, the period
after 1688 produced a boom in company foundations. Of the companies that existed in
1695, 85 % had arisen after 1688.125
The history of the East India Company’s monopoly shows how Parliament’s
representative and governing remits could operate in concert. Parliamentary
consideration temporarily liberated the trade, bringing into the company’s
management an energetic new group of traders. Because of a successful lobbying
campaign against it, the East India Company became split into Old and New
Companies. The difference that the incorporation of ‘New’ elements had on the
existing company can be appreciated by examining the difference in size of the
governmental loans each company proposed as a means to sustain their respective
charters.126 The bidding war between the two factions saw the Old Company propose
a £700,000 loan at 4%. The New Company, which represented a rising class of traders
120
Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 10
Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 20 fn 12
122
Ralph Davis, ‘The Rise of Protection in England, 1689-1786’, Economic History Review, New
Series, Vol 19, no 2 (1966), 306-317
123
For the Hudson’s Bay Company see E.E. Rich, The Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670 – 1870 (London,
1958), vol. 1, 363
124
See Gerald B Hertz, ‘The English Silk Industry in the 18th Century’, The English Historical Review,
Vol. 24, no 96 (October 1909), 710- 727
125
See Hecksher, Mercantilism, 412
126
As a result of the Parliamentary dispute about the future of the East India Company, the company
could not mount a successful campaign against the domestic textiles interests who wished to restrict the
imports of Indian textiles.
121
25
with massive capital reserves, proposed to lend the government £2 million at 8%. The
New Company won out, but the Old Company managed to sustain itself and
contributed £315,000 (with the New Company again providing the lion’s share of
£1,662,000) to a further government loan before an amalgamation in 1709.
Because the 18th century East India Company incorporated its most impressive
competitors, its trading figures and its dividend rate began to stabilise and then
improve with a record dividend payment of 13% in 1713.127 It began to reform its
business practices and improved its financial and political strength once Parliament
fully countenanced its charter from 1708. This stabilised the trade and enabled it to
proceed, as well as broadening its membership and significantly improving the
expertise and experience of its directorate. With its political controversies shelved
until the end of the century, the new, statutory East India Company contributed
massively to the economic life of the nation throughout the 18th century.128 The
company’s monopoly endured because it offered a means for the British state to raise
money and to, to some extent, regulate its relationships with the India subcontinent. It
remained highly profitable throughout the 18th century. Statutory support for the East
India Company’s monopoly provides the most important example of statutory
monopolisation of the overseas economy that produced significant effects on the
growth of Britain’s national economy. Parliament engineered economic growth via
regulatory statutes. Parliament, therefore, continued to govern the economy statute as
the Privy Council had done through conciliar rulings.129 But the consent attached to
statute provided regulations countenanced by Parliament with a superior means of
enforcement.
The improved success rate of legislation in this period therefore does not solely reflect
the increasing power of newly enfranchised interests within the reformed polity. 130
Instead it shows the extent to which Parliament achieved success as a tool of
127
K N Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, (Cambridge,
1978), 87
128
But see also D. W. Jones, ‘London Overseas Merchant Groups at the End of the 17th Century and
the Moves Against the East India Company’ (Oxford Dphil Thesis, 1970), 370: “Nothing could alter
the fact, however, that merchants, in a way which had not been true under the management of Sir
Josiah Child, had gained access to the East India trade.”
129
Tim Keirn has rightly stressed the significance for the British state’s regulation of the economy of
the shift from conciliar to legislative means of regulation in this period. Parliament’s ability to govern
the economy through statute enabled it to impersonate the Privy Council as an economic regulator.
This also meant that the British state could be as proactive as reactive in macro-economic matters. See
Tim Keirn, ‘The Reactive State: English Governance and Society, 1689 – 1750’ in Lee Davison, Tim
Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B Shoemaker, eds., Stilling the Grumbling Hive (Stroud, 1992), i-xli
130
According to the Hoppit calculation, fewer and fewer bills failed during this period. Between 1688
and 1714, bills had a 50 per cent chance of failing. Economic issues such as the Africa trade dispute
proved especially difficult to legislate with a 67–80 per cent failure rate. See Julian Hoppit, ed., Failed
Legislation, (London, 1997), 5 – 10. In achieving only two statutes out of 15 attempts, the Africa trade
issue manifested an 88 per cent failure rate. The connection between political reform and legislative
failure can, at the present time, only be made in relation to the Africa trade dispute. See Failed
Legislation, 21-22, ‘Despite the increasing vigour of forms of external pressure on Parliament, this was
not associated with an increase in the failure rate of legislation. Pressure from extra-Parliamentary
sources did not lead either to the introduction of an increasing proportion of measures without serious
hope of passing, or to the defeat of an increasing proportion of proposals. At most, it was associated
with the rise in numbers of certain kinds of failed initiative (especially constitutional measures). It was
also associated with an increasing tendency for certain other initiatives that were to fail, to fail at an
early stage in the Parliamentary process.’
26
government and to what extent the sovereign Parliament could be managed to become
an effective substitute for its less deliberative, less representative, conciliar forbears.
Improvements in the efficiency of Parliamentary procedure allowed oligarchic
interests allied with government to restrict the economy, but, as we have seen,
nonetheless aid economic growth. More effective commercial lobbies also worked to
defeat regulating statutes to aid growth in the economy via legislative failure,
legislative vacuum, and, without the intervention of other constitutional means to
influence the ensuing deregulation. In this way, national economic growth depended
as much upon the retreat of other constitutional branches from the business of state
regulation of the economy as it did on the extension of Parliament’s influence.
Parliament as a regulator depended upon the weakness of its constitutional
competitors as well as its interactions with that other great shibboleth of the second
half of the 17th century, the public sphere. My analysis shows how commercial life
benefited from this sphere as much as that sphere developed as a result of the
emergence of commercial life, as Jurgen Habermas argued.131
The political reforms broadly associated with the Glorious Revolution then did not
either exclusively encourage the liberalisation of the English economy or solely foster
greater protectionism as various historians have argued.132 At times Parliament
governed via statute to restrict (or develop) the economy with monopoly companies or
other regulatory systems. At other times, Parliament provided the forum for new
interests to achieve deregulating statutes or defeat regulating statute and monopolies
and fuel economic growth through deregulation. Parliament also allowed interest
groups to protect their economic interest with regulation. The Augustan British state
therefore could be proactive as well as reactive in relation to the way in which it
regulated the burgeoning British economy.133 When markets did become deregulated,
however, they did so more as a result of the reformed political process than any
theoretical discussion of the benefits of deregulated economies (and such discussion
was, in this period, marginal). Free trade and economic growth had important political
determinants. Although contemporaries expected the state to aid the development of
the economy and believed that a ‘free state’ was best positioned to aid that influence,
they did not appreciate the precise mechanics of the connection between the reform of
Parliament and the development of the national economy. 134
Historians of Parliament have largely missed the extent to which the post-1688
Parliament began to impersonate the Privy Council to engineer economic growth with
the help of a new cadre of economically literate policy advisers and how the
131
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989)
For those who believed the Glorious Revolution fostered free trade see above and William James
Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic (London, 1900), 270-303 and Robert Ekelund and Robert
Tollison, Politicised Economies (Texas, 1997). For those who see the rise of protectionism and the
survival or ‘rent seeking’ see Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century
England, (Princeton, 1978), and Ralph Davis, ‘The Rise of Protection in England’ in Economic History
Review, vol. 19, no. 2, (1966), 306.
133
Compare with Tim Keirn, ‘The Reactive State: English Governance and Society, 1689 – 1750’ in
Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B Shoemaker, eds., Stilling the Grumbling Hive
(Stroud, 1992), xli
134
For the tendency for economic historians to allow economic phenomena to remain ‘selfinterpreting’ see Carruthers, City of Capital, 3-27. For accounts of an emergence of economic theory
that precipitated (or attempted to precipitate) economic deregulation in this period see Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, and William Letwin, The Origins of
Scientific Economics (London, 1963)
132
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deliberative process made its statutory regulations easier to enforce. Statute ought to
be considered alongside other constitutional regulatory means, rather than as part of a
zero-sum game. As the state’s means of regulating the national economy transferred
from the Privy Council to the Parliament, the state’s power over the economy changed
from the dispensing power to the power of suspension. Economists and political
scientists have also missed how the economic growth that the transfer from Privy
Council to Parliament depended upon the enfranchisement of oligarchic interest
groups, or rent-seekers, as economists label them. British economic growth in the 18th
century required the participation of mercantile interest groups in the Parliamentary
and regulatory processes. Rather than emerging within mature political systems to
hinder economic growth, as Mancur Olson argued, economic interest groups
represented, in the British case, the architects of political reform and its beneficiaries,
but their contribution also helped to create economic growth.135 Private interests
augmented the national interest, as Adam Smith preached, but via regulation as well
as deregulation. International comparisons confirm the importance of these dual
sources of growth that the British economy benefited from. In Holland, deregulation,
and in France, complete regulation, made both economies less competitive.136 The
source of Britain’s regulatory flexibility derived from Parliament, which, as we have
seen, could impersonate government, and could represent the market, better than its
continental competitors and better than its conciliar predecessors. The freedom that
Davenat, Fiennes, Temple, Parker, and Millar celebrated when connecting economic
growth to political institutions in Britain included the state’s ability to respond to
requests from representatives of the market to regulate and deregulate trade.
All of these developments can be connected to the Glorious Revolution. They show
what the nation could procure for itself in return for footing the bill for the Prince of
Orange’s war with Louis XIV. The Parliamentary process after 1688 with its
increasing regularity and its longer sessions, allowed both William and the political
nation to extract something new. For William it was the £130 million to pay for the
war.137 MPs exchanged war finance for constitutional concessions. In 1694, one
member reported how the statute to charter the Bank of England had been secured by
the King in return for granting the Triennial Act: “[O]ur affairs go on merrily with
relation to the land forces, for which the gentlemen will have the triennial bill.”138 But
what was the ensuing primacy of Parliamentary deliberations actually worth? Overall,
the transfer of national economic regulatory initiative from the Privy Council to
Parliament assisted the development of Britain’s infrastructure, especially river
navigations and roads. It helped interest groups secure protection for their
manufacturing industries, and allowed marginalized traders to deregulate trades and
open access to all. It also conferred statute’s authority onto monopolies, such as the
East India Company. How can these legislative enactments be compared with other,
presumably more profound determinants of economic growth in this period, such as
135
For an influential thesis arguing that interest groups inhibit macro-economic growth, see especially
Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities,
(New Haven, 1982) see also Paul Brace, Youssef Cohen, Virginia Gray, David Lowery, ‘How Much
do Interest Groups Influence State Economic Growth?’, The American Policiation Science Review,
Vol. 83, no 4, (December, 1989), 1297-1308
136
See also O’Brien et al, Political Components, 418
137
For the £130 million cost figure see Michael Jabbin, ‘Economic Policy and Economic development’
in Jeremy Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke, 1984)
138
See Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Age of William III (Manchester, 1977),
138
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adjustments in the international economy, the disruptions of war, demographic
changes, and most importantly, the accumulation of capital? Measuring the impact of
these changes on the economy with any precision is impossible. It is clear, however,
that these changes did not create £130 million of growth in the short term.139 But these
changes in structure altered the capacity of the British economy in ways that would, in
the long term, help the British economy to reap a return on its investment made
between 1689 and 1713. These changes also show the limitations of the prevailing
view that constitutional change resulted solely from Parliamentary control over
finance. The economic results of the primacy of Parliament as well as contemporaries
belief in Parliament’s potential to generate economic benefits confirms that a theory
of Parliament existed to not only assist with the raising of government finance, but
also to help generate economic growth, however ill distributed it may have been.
139
Indeed, for one influential view that argued how growth could have been more substantial see J U
Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, (London, 1932)
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