Cead 177

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England’s Mercantilism: Trading Companies,

Employment and the Politics of Trade in Global
History, 1688–1704*
Anyone who studies the strange history of the Darien Company
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/138/593/744/7476076 by guest on 19 March 2024

discovers that William Paterson was one of history’s eternal optimists.
In 1700, he had seen his grand vision of ‘New Caledonia’, a Scottish
colony in Panama intended to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, fail
in every way. Disease had ravaged the colonists, who also discovered
that Panama was unfortunately much wider than they had thought.
The colony had been vehemently opposed by the English govern-
ment, and a royal proclamation banned English colonies from assisting
the Darien Company in any way. After the failure of the company’s
first attempt at colonisation, Paterson recuperated in New York as the
second was driven back into the ocean by the neighbouring Spanish.
Yet on returning to London he wrote to William III, proposing exactly
the same colony as an ideal project not for a company, but for an im-
perial state, as part of ‘One Empire, whereof England is to be the centre
country, and London to be the centre city’.1
What did it mean for a place to be, in Paterson’s words, ‘central’?
In recent years, as part of the wider global and transnational turns,
historians have focused increasingly on the practicalities of a mer-
cantile ‘centre city’. Transnational mercantile networks are frequently
associated with a single, urban centre that was in some sense polit-
ical, and successive global historians have outlined how such a city
operated as a focal point of global interaction. It might contain bodies
that adjudicated disputes between merchants and guaranteed legal
contracts. It was a place in which merchants interacted with elite polit-
ical authority, in ways that shaped the wider global network.2 Merchants
* The author would like to thank Dr Perry Gauci, Dr William O’Reilly and Dr Andrew
Thompson for reading drafts of this article, as well as Dr Amy Erickson, Professor Craig Muldrew
and Professor John Styles for their advice on the broader project of which this forms part. He
would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at the EHR for their comments, which
were extremely valuable.
1. William Paterson, ‘A Proposal to Plant a Colony in Darien, to Protect the Indians against
Spain’, in The Writings of William Paterson, ed. Saxe Bannister (2 vols, 1858; repr. New York,
1968), i, p. 157. For the intellectual origins of the Darien venture, see D. Armitage, ‘The Scottish
Vision Of Empire: The Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture’, in J. Robertson, ed., A Union
of Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 113. For a detailed
account of the Darien colony, including the transcripts of several diaries, see J.S. Barbour, A
History of William Paterson and the Darien Company (Edinburgh, 1907).
2. S.D. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of
Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA, 2014), ch. 7; F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of
EHR, CXXXVIII. 593 (August 2023)

E N G L A N D ' S M E RC A N T I L I S M 745
in turn brought new global interactions to the city, which influenced
pre-existing social understandings of material culture, gender and
race.3 Recently, historians have also broken down the historiograph-
ical distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘interests’, and explored how
the global knowledge, and indeed ignorance or non-knowledge, that
reached imperial centres was mediated by transnational actors.4 Like
any centre city, London both received and produced global knowledge,
working, in the words of one recent study, ‘with a specific density of
interactive processes [to] spawn a distinct culture of creativity’.5 Such

explorations, however, have been primarily aimed at the centre city.
The ‘centre country’ is often absent. While it is widely recognised
that ‘imperial, mercantilist, and other barriers shaped and limited its
[globalisation’s] extent’, the focus remains on the global ‘sellers and
buyers’ who expressed their agency in spite of these constraints.6 The
result has been that while our understanding of London as a global city
has become full and deep, England itself is pictured primarily as elite
and regressive.
When historians do seek to bring England into discussions of global
knowledge and state action in the early modern period, the traditional
route is through the concept of mercantilism. Though the word itself
dates back to Adam Smith’s ‘mercantile system’ and has a complicated
history tied partly to the historical school of economics, it was taken up
prominently by economic historians in the early twentieth century, who
described mercantilism above all as the attempted control of commerce
Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
(New Haven, CT, 2012). As Trivellato shows, political economy and international agreements
both shaped and were shaped by transnational communities: Familiarity of Strangers, pp. 127–
31. See P.D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984); S. Mentz, The
English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660–1740 (Copenhagen,
2005).
3. E.G.E. Hart and C. Matson, ‘Situating Merchants in Late Eighteenth-Century British
Atlantic Port Cities’, Early American Studies, xv (2017), pp. 660–82; A. Clulow, ‘“Splendour
and Magnificence”: Diplomacy and Sumptuary Codes in Early Modern Batavia’, in G. Riello
and U. Rublack, eds, The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800
(Cambridge, 2019), pp. 299–324.
4. A. Brendecke, The Empirical Empire (Berlin, 2016), pp. 281–9; C. Zwierlein, Imperial
Unknowns: The French and British in the Mediterranean, 1650–1750 (Cambridge, 2016).
5. J. Feichtinger, ‘Introduction: Interaction, Circulation and the Transgression of Cultural
Difference in the History of Knowledge-Making’, in J. Feichtinger, A. Bhatti and C. Hülmbauer,
eds, ‘How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making: Interaction, Circulation and the
Transgression of Cultural Difference’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, liii (2020), p. 3.
6. R.S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the
Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 15–16, and ch. 2; See also G. Riello, Cotton:
The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013), esp. pp. 120–24. The need to con-
sider the fundamental effects of political economy has recently been emphasised by Riello himself,
in the context of the new history of capitalism: G. Riello and T. Burnard, ‘Slavery and the New
History of Capitalism’, Journal of Global History, xv (2020), pp. 225–44. On the importance of
states in global history, see J.L. Brooke and J.C. Strauss, ‘Conclusion’, in J.L. Brooke, J.C. Strauss
and G. Anderson, eds, State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood (Cambridge,
2018), pp. 345–60..

746 E N G L A N D ' S M E RC A N T I L I S M
by a unified state, which they associated with theories of the balance
of trade.7 This was then strongly challenged by D.C. Coleman, who
pointed out the regular, vehement disagreements between supposed
mercantilists, while arguing that if mercantilism meant merely ‘state
trade policy’, the term was so vague as to be virtually meaningless.8 At
the same time, C.H. Wilson and Joyce Oldham Appleby sought to re-
frame mercantilism as a moral rather than an economic position, driven
by concerns about the domestic impact of increasing global trade. They
described mercantilism as a focus on wages, employment and national

economic well-being, framed as a ‘morally satisfying way of dealing
with new and often frightening economic forces’.9 In doing so, they
placed employment at the heart of the social purpose of English pol-
itical economy, moving away from the more top-down approach of
earlier historians of employment and mercantilism.10 However, this
idea of mercantilism as a national response to increasing global change
has never truly established itself in scholarship.
Instead, new responses to Coleman’s original criticism have narrowed
views of the kinds of knowledge present in mercantilist decision-making.
These new approaches can be defined, broadly, as mercantilism-as-
philosophy and mercantilism-as-process. Mercantilism-as-philosophy,
best demonstrated by Steven Pincus’s ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’, seeks
7. E.F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, ed. M. Shapiro (London, 1935); and, for a summary of the
term’s history, see D.C. Coleman, ‘Eli Heckscher and the Idea of Mercantilism’, Scandinavian
Economic History Review, v (1957), pp. 4–25. See also J. Viner, ‘Power Versus Plenty as Objectives
of Foreign Policy’, in J. Viner, Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. D.A. Irwin
(Princeton, NJ, 1991). Viner saw the key challenge in understanding mercantilism as grasping
the relationship between ideas and action, the same issue that emerged in response to Steven
Pincus’s ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’. S.D. Amussen, ‘Political Economy and Imperial Practice’,
William and Mary Quarterly, lxix (2012), pp. 47–50; S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism:
Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries’, William and Mary Quarterly, lxix (2012), pp. 3–34.
8. See D.C. Coleman, ‘Mercantilism Revisited’, Historical Journal, xxiii (1980), pp. 773–91;
D.C. Coleman, ‘Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’, Economic History
Review, viii (1956), pp. 280–95; D.C. Coleman, Revisions in Mercantilism (London, 1969). For an
earlier criticism of ‘mercantilism’, see A.V. Judges, ‘The Idea of a Mercantile State’, Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., xxi (1939), pp. 41–69.
9. Or as C.H. Wilson put it: ‘If they [mercantilists] sin, it is not in being heartless or materi-
alist, but in being a bit dull’. Wilson also pointed out that historians had had difficulty defining
mercantilism in part because it sat ill with the historicist, liberal tradition in English history,
which struggled when confronted by writers who were themselves merchants describing the moral
value of hard work, rather than idealistic thinkers. J.O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology
in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 276; C.H. Wilson, ‘The Other Face of
Mercantilism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., ix (1959), pp. 81–6, quotation
at 84.
10. E. Furniss, The Position of the Labourer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labour
Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (New York, 1920). Arguably, the forerunner to this argu-
ment was William Cunningham and Ellen McArthur’s original framing of ‘parliamentary Colbertism’,
which was actually more complex than is often assumed. McArthur had previously written on women
petitioners in the seventeenth century. See W. Cunningham, The Growth of Industry and Commerce:
Modern Times, I: The Mercantile System (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 403–19; E.A. McArthur, ‘Women
Petitioners and the Long Parliament’, English Historical Review, xxiv (1909), pp. 698–709.

to find coherent economic philosophies and partisan debates among
the leading writers and pamphleteers of the time. Pincus links these to
the partisan politics of the late Stuart period, with Tory writers such as
Josiah Child arguing that wealth came from land and emphasising the
importance of the balance of trade, while Whigs focused on loosely
defined ‘free trade’ and manufacture.11 Others have sought to unify
these two strands behind balance-of-trade theory, or have emphasised
distinct theoretical understandings of the economy, such as William
Petty’s understanding of political arithmetic.12 In this approach, mer-

cantilism is not a product of knowledge, global or otherwise, but of
the top-down philosophies of a relatively small number of authors.
The benefit of this approach is that it allows us to track different
understandings of political economy across time and space.13 However,
as well as presenting the historian with the huge challenge of trying
satisfactorily to link philosophical intention to political action, this in
effect takes the debate back to the idea of ‘mercantilists’ as an elite
group unified by a common economic understanding, or at least, a
defined set of understandings.14
In contrast, mercantilism-as-process largely sidesteps the issue of in-
tention by defining mercantilism by implication as a process that built
relationships between mercantile elites and state actors, often across
geographic distance. This is closely linked to earlier studies of the pol-
itical communication across the Atlantic that ‘made England’s Atlantic
work’.15 Gabriel Glickman has recently used this same broad framing
to describe the importance of colonial politics in the formation of
the English state.16 In the context of trading companies, mercantilism
becomes, in the words of Philip Stern, the cumulative effect of several
decades of ‘private and public pleading, lobbying, treating and coali-
tion building by companies and their agents to draw the state into
11. Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’, esp. pp. 28–34.

12. J. Barth, ‘Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial
Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, William and Mary Quarterly, lxxiii
(2016), pp. 257–90. For populationism, see T. McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of
Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009); A. Swingen, ‘Labor: Employment, Colonial Servitude, and
Slavery in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic’, in P.J. Stern and C. Wennerlind, eds, Mercantilism
Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford, 2013), pp. 46–73.
13. The best example of this is Sophus Reinert’s Translating Empire, which is particularly rele-
vant to this article for its focus on John Cary’s Essay on the State of England: S. Reinert, Translating
Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011).
14. See S. Sowerby, ‘Pantomime History’, Parliamentary History, xxx (2011), pp. 256–8.
15. N. Zahedieh, ‘Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and the Atlantic Trade in
the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., ix (1999), pp.
143–58; A.G. Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790
(Cambridge, MA, 1992). T. Burnard’s response to Pincus deliberately invoked both interpretations:
‘Making a Whig Empire Work: Transnational Politics and the Imperial Economy in Britain and
British America’, William and Mary Quarterly, lxix (2012), pp. 51–6.
16. G. Glickman, Making the Imperial Nation: Colonization, Politics, and English Identity,
1660–1700 (New Haven, CT, 2023).

service’. In this process, the agents of mercantilism become limited
17
to those who benefit from and exploit new global interactions—pros-

perous trading companies and intrepid settlers—and mercantilism
becomes a consequence of globalisation, rather than a moral response
to it. As Craig Muldrew has established, mercantilism-as-process
is much closer to Adam Smith’s original criticism of the ‘mercantile
system’, in which its defining feature was the influence of elite mercan-
tile and manufacturing interests over the state. It is also closely linked
to the other major theory of state development in the long eighteenth

century: the fiscal-military state.18
This article seeks to understand mercantilism not as an elite philosophy,
but as a process of interaction between private interests that stretched be-
yond London across England and the wider world, in which contribution
to the public interest was asserted primarily by the capacity of a trade
to support domestic employment in an increasingly global economy. A
detailed study of the debate over the role of trading companies in English
commerce demonstrates that global knowledge was not confined to
England’s port cities, company headquarters and overseas colonies. In
other words, the process of mercantilism was far more national than many
recent discussions would suggest. The period following the Glorious
Revolution saw a fundamental reduction in the role of the trading
companies in English overseas commerce. Some, such as the Company
of Merchant Adventurers, commonly known as the Hamburg Company,
lost their monopolies entirely, while others became ‘regulated’ companies
with low barriers to admission. The East India Company (EIC) managed
to survive only by later merging with the rival New East India Company
(NEIC), established in this period. This change marked a transition from
‘corporate’ mercantilism conducted through overseas trading companies to
‘national’ mercantilism achieved through parliamentary legislation.19 Some
historians have discussed the intersection between overseas merchants and
17. P.J. Stern, ‘Companies: Monopoly, Sovereignty, and the East Indies’, in Stern and
Wennerlind, eds, Mercantilism Reimagined, pp. 177–95; for an early framing of this theory, see
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London,
1993), pp. 73–4.
18. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London,
1989); P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of
Public Credit (London, 1967). For the role of trust in strengthening credit, see C. Muldrew, ‘Trust,
Capitalism and Contract in English Economic History: 1500–1750’, Social Sciences in China,
xxxvi (2015), pp. 130–43.
19. The Russia Company debate was examined in detail by J.M. Price, whose work was
the first to attempt to categorise the London trading parties by merchant networks. It is also
briefly referenced by M.P. Romaniello, in a separate context. The earlier history of the Merchant
Adventurers is described by D. Ormrod, though he does not discuss the later debates in detail.
The history of the joint-stock companies was first charted by W.R. Scott almost a decade ago;
more recently, the wider political context of the rivalry between the three East India companies,
Darien, New and ‘old’, is described in P. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the
Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011). J.M. Price, ‘The Tobacco
Adventure to Russia; Enterprise, Politics and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market

an increasingly aware wider public. This article places the interaction be-
20
tween different types of global knowledge at the centre of England’s mer-

cantilism. It is divided into three sections. First, it considers the political
power of overseas merchants and the fiscal-military state. It then describes
the wider process of interaction in London in which different types of sub-
jective global knowledge intermixed and shaped decision-making, which
I term the ‘open archive’. Finally, it investigates the significance of the
relationship between manufacturers and Parliament in the evolution of
mercantilist policy towards trading companies, particularly as it related to

textile manufacturing, then England’s dominant source of manufacturing
employment.21
In adjudicating between different groups who acted as sources of
global knowledge, providing employment in England was held to be
the primary moral purpose of England’s economy.22 Two factors made
this possible. The first was that 1688 and the politics that followed it
established Parliament as the centre of economic decision-making. The
second was that, as historians are now so well aware, manufacturers
who themselves might never have left England’s shores were increas-
ingly confronted by the wider world, through new raw materials and
manufactured goods.23 Driven by their fear and opportunism, their
global knowledge reached London through petitions and pamphlets,
parliamentary speeches and private correspondence, and there formed
part of the open archive on which England’s political economy was
based. In response, merchants sought to advance their private interests
by asserting the contribution made by their trade to national em-
ployment. This was not a rigid political philosophy, and London
for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676–1722’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
(Philadelphia, PA, 1961), pp. 1–120; M.P. Romaniello, Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in
18th-Century Eurasia (Cambridge, 2019); D. Ormrod, Rise of Commercial Empires: England and
the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 87.
20. P. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720
(Oxford, 2001); W. Pettigrew, ‘Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic
Slave Trade, 1688–1714’, William and Mary Quarterly, lxiv (2007), p. 14. See also W.A. Pettigrew
and G. van Cleve, ‘Parting Companies: The Glorious Revolution, Company Power, and Imperial
Mercantilism’, Historical Journal, lvii (2014), pp. 617–38.
21. For the scale of employment in the textile industry and the importance of exports, see
C. Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient Distaff ” and “Whirling Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of
Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England, 1550–1770’, Economic
History Review, lxv (2012), pp. 498–526. For the complexities of estimating domestic employment,
see S.A. Keibek and L. Shaw-Taylor, ‘Early Modern Rural By-employments: A Re-examination of
the Probate Inventory Evidence’, Agricultural History Review, lxi (2013), pp. 244–81.
22. For the role of employment in English political economy, see C. Muldrew, ‘Politics and
Economics of Markets’, in R. Scazzieri and I. Cardinale, eds, The Palgrave Handbook of Political
Economy (London, 2018), pp. 91–132.
23. In this context, what Jan de Vries calls the ‘soft’ globalisation of global interactions and
exchanges across distance and borders was as important in shaping perceptions as ‘harder’, eco-
nomic definitions of globalisation. See J. de Vries, ‘The Limits of Globalisation in the Early
Modern World’, Economic History Review, lxiii (2010), pp. 710–33; K. O’Rourke and J.G.
Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Review of Economic History, vi (2002),
pp. 23–50.

was crowded with competing interests, all claiming global know-
ledge. However, within England, a broad understanding persisted that
supporting manufacturers who were seen as providing widespread em-
ployment was the right moral response to changing times, a sensibility
that was so effectively identified by mid-twentieth-century economic
historians and has been more recently explored by Craig Muldrew.24
This gave a particular weight to those who employed, or, as they often
put it, ‘sustained’, England’s people. Global history has given us a new
appreciation of why that response was so powerful, and how it shaped

England’s political economy. In Paterson’s words, while London was
the ‘centre city’, England remained the ‘centre country’.
Ever-developing global networks of commerce linked to London threw

up so many opportunities for profit that few merchants could afford to be
led by one economic or political philosophy regarding trading companies.
A brief analysis of the merchants associated with one of London’s leading
figures, Gilbert Heathcote, demonstrates this point. As well as being an
early supporter of Paterson and the Bank of England, Heathcote was
a leading member of the group who sought to break the EIC’s mon-
opoly on trade with India through the NEIC, an effort he was able to
make thanks to his extensive trading network across the Atlantic and
Baltic, which he ran with the support of his brothers.25 In 1696, a number
of trading companies petitioned against Paterson’s Darien Company,
including the NEIC and the Hamburg Company.26 Many members of
the Hamburg Company, including its future governor Francis Stratford,
were close allies of leading NEIC merchants and their petition echoed
the NEIC’s in claiming that English citizens ought to be prohibited from
participating in the venture. This did not stop Francis Stratford from
then joining the Darien Company later in the year, serving with his
nephew as its cashier in Hamburg.27 As a leading trader in Baltic naval
stores, Heathcote worked closely with William Gore, a Tory supporter of
the EIC.28 The political Whig Heathcote then allied with both Stratford
24. Coleman, ‘Labour in the English Economy’; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology,
pp. 270–78.
25. For a detailed introduction to Heathcote’s career, see N. Zahedieh, The Capital and the
Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (London, 2012), pp. 130–33.
26. Paterson was, of course, well known to Heathcote and others as the frontman for the original
Bank of England. See London, Parliamentary Archives [hereafter PA], HL/PO/JO/10/1/476/955.
27. Stratford spent much of his time in Hamburg despairing at the incompetence of the
Company in general, and his fellow agents in Hamburg in particular. See Edinburgh, National
Library of Scotland, MS.1419, Darien Company letter book to the Board of Trade; A Defence
of the Scots Abdicating Darien Including an Answer to the Defence of the Scots Settlement there
(London, 1700).
28. Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies, p. 123; J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William II:
Its State and Direction (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 206–9.

and the governor of the regulated Eastland Company, Nathaniel Tenche,
to campaign against the Russia Company.29 Tenche himself was another
prominent supporter of the old EIC.30 The merchants of late Stuart
London were interested in profit, not economic theory. Their ‘partisan’
position on any given trade depended largely on whether they had been
established in that trade immediately before 1688 or were seeking to ex-
pand into it, or in the case of the NEIC return to it, in its aftermath.31
On the other side of the coin, what immediately stands out when
reading the economic tracts of such merchants is how much they

agreed. The general English consensus regarding the purpose of
trading companies in the 1690s was best described by Josiah Child,
the dominant figure in the EIC under James II, whose writings Steven
Pincus describes as the epitome of ‘Tory’ zero-sum mercantilism.32 ‘No
Company whatsoever’, he wrote, ‘whether they Trade in Joint-Stocks or
under Regulations, can be for Publick Good, except it may be easie for
all, or any of His Majesties Subjects to be admitted into all, or any of
the said Companies, at any time for a very inconsiderable Fine’.33 These
words were quoted directly by John Pollexfen, a Whig member of the
Board of Trade and ardent critic of Child and the EIC, as coming from
a man ‘whose knowledge, judgment, and Experience in Trade cannot
be doubted’.34 Child argued that the EIC, being a joint-stock company,
met these criteria, as it allowed the Company to maintain its forts in
India, while anyone could in theory buy Company stock. Yet Child’s
Discourse on Trade was so bland that quoting it to undermine EIC
arguments became a standard trope of anti-EIC pamphlets.35
29. For the details of the coalition of merchants seeking to ‘break open’ the old Russia
Company, see Price, ‘Tobacco Adventure’, p. 31.
30. Nathaniel Tenche, A Modest and Just Apology for, or Defence of the Present East-India-
Company against the Accusations of their Adversaries: Wherein the Crimes Alledged against them,
are Fairly Examined (London, 1690). As well as being one of the EIC’s main contributors to
pamphlet culture and holding shares in the Company, Tenche was active in the London EIC
auctions, trading four barrels of indigo for resale in 1692: London, British Library [hereafter BL],
IOR/L/AG/1/1/9, EIC Ledger H, July 1682–June 1694; MS Eur D300, George White, A Letter to
Mr Nathaniel Tenche, in Answer to a Paper Publish’ d by him, entituled, Animadversions.
31. This underlies Price’s model of the City being divided between an ‘old gang’ consisting of
the long-established Russia, Royal Africa and East India companies, a ‘new gang’, many of whom
were Whigs active in the Bank of England, and a third, loose grouping of Atlantic merchants.
Because merchants often traded in multiple areas, however, there was no hard and fast division;
many of those who invested in the Bank of England, such as Tenche, were linked to the EIC,
while others, such as Heathcote, traded in the Atlantic. See Price, ‘Tobacco Contract’, p. 31; see
also Gauci, Politics of Trade, p. 45; G.S. de Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the
First Age of Party (Oxford, 1985), p. 17.
32. Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’, pp. 17–19.
33. Josiah Child, A New Discourse on Trade (London, 1693).
34. John Pollexfen, A Discourse on Trade, Coyn and Paper Credit (London, 1697), p. 137; see
also John Pollexfen, England and East-India Inconsistent in their Manufactures: Being an Answer
to a Treatise Intituled, An Essay on the East-India Trade by the Author of The Essay of Wayes and
Means (London, 1697).
35. A Letter, Written to a Member of Parliament, Concerning the East-India Trade (London,
1693); A Discourse Concerning the East-India Trade Wherein is Shewed by Arguments Taken from a

The common attack on Child’s EIC was not that its economic phil-
osophy was incorrect, but that its behaviour was hypocritical.36 For the
EIC’s critics, its fault, whether in restricting access to the India trade for
other merchants, importing Indian textiles or declaring war on Mughal
India, lay in prioritising its own interests above those of England.37 A
sense that the Company betrayed ‘England’s interest’ also explains the
parliamentary trial in 1694–5 of MPs and EIC merchants for bribery,
which saw four men, including Sir Thomas Cooke, the EIC’s deputy
governor, briefly imprisoned in the Tower. As Philip Stern rightly

points out, there was nothing that exceptional about the Company
handing out stock to MPs in exchange for votes.38 Yet the spectre of
national institutions being undermined by foreign-derived wealth
was a powerful weapon in the hands of the Company’s opponents—
helped by the ‘revelation’ that James II held a considerable amount
of Company stock.39 In 1692, as the corruption scandal raged, Child
wrote An Essay on Wool and Woollen Manufacture. This proposed that
all trading companies’ monopolies become dependent on each com-
pany exporting a fixed amount of English woollen cloth per year, to
be determined by a parliamentary committee.40 His logic did actually
begin with the importance of land; specifically, a calculation of the
total amount of cloth England ought to export based on the number of
sheep that could conceivably graze in English pastures. Child’s purpose,
however, was not so much to promote an economic policy—though the
idea would soon be applied to the EIC during the renegotiation of its
charter. Rather, by emphasising the ‘Card-makers, Breakers, Combers,
Carders, Spinners, and Weavers’ that such a measure would support,
he was asserting his own moral credibility and patriotism.41 Such noble
sentiments did not stop Child’s EIC pursuing a policy of importing
Treatise Written by Sir Josiah Child, Reprinted this Present Year 1693 (London, 1693); John Blanch,
The Interest of England Considered in an Essay upon Wool Manufactures and the Improvement of
Trade, with some Remarks upon the Conceptions of Sir Josiah Child (London, 1694).
36. For the wider political context of the clash between ‘public’ and ‘private’ interests, see
J.A.W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto, ON, 1969).
37. A Brief Account of the Great Oppressions and Injuries which the Managers of the East-India
Company Have Acted on the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of their Fellow-subjects as also of their
Unjust Dealings (London, 1965); A Discourse Concerning the East-India Trade Wherein is Shewed.
38. A Collection of the Debates and Proceedings in Parliament in 1694 and 1695 upon the Inquiry
into the Late Briberies and Corrupt Practices (London, 1695); Stern, Company State, pp. 155–7. For
the history of British companies and ‘bribery’, particularly of the monarch, see B. Weiser, Charles
II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003).
39. As Stern points out, this was not particularly noteworthy either, but it does seem to have
had a considerable effect. See Stern, Company State, p. 153; The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, V:
The Reign of William II, 1689–1691, ed. M. Knights (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 121.
40. Josiah Child, An Essay on Wool and Wollen Manufacture for the Improvement of Trade, to
the Benefit of Landlords, Feeders of Sheep, Clothiers, and Merchands, in a Letter to a Member of
Parliament (London, 1693).
41. It also served as an excellent opportunity to shift the focus of criticism to those companies
made up primarily of his opponents on the grounds that they were not exporting enough cloth,
something that was not lost on the opponents themselves—partly as he had attempted the same
attack in his Discourse on Trade. Writing in 1694, John Branch compared Child to a lapwing, who

vast numbers of Indian fabrics at minimal profit, in an ultimately un-
successful attempt to capture as much of the domestic textile market
as possible.42
A further weakness in the mercantilism-as-philosophy approach is
that the state too had its own practical interests in the acquisition of
capital, credit and particular overseas materials, all of which influenced
political economy. This brings us to the significance of the so-called
fiscal-military state. In this framework, the Crown’s own ‘interest’ in
the mercantile process combined domestic dynastic security with the

need for credit and resources to support state action, particularly after
England’s entry into the Nine Years War.43 Appealing to this specific
interest formed part of mercantile relations with the state. In 1697,
when many of the NEIC merchants, including Heathcote and the
Hamburg Company’s Francis Stratford, were attempting to open up
the Russia Company, they led by emphasising the importance of its
access to naval stores—the hemp, masts, pitch and tar that the state
sought in ever increasing amounts.44 Similarly, the renewal of the EIC’s
charter in 1692 required it to sell to the Ordnance 500 tons of salt-
petre.45 Many of the same merchants who played prominent roles in the
trading company debates were also founders of the Bank of England,
and companies sought privileges in part by providing financial support.
The so-called Two Million Act, which established the NEIC in return
for a £2 million loan to the state, was the most striking example of this
process.46
However, the impact of the fiscal-military state was limited by the
fact that ultimate control over most economic decision-making lay
with Parliament, rather than the Crown. When the Board of Trade
was established in 1696, it maintained oversight of the North American
colonies, but not trading companies’ monopolies themselves. Tory and
Country Whig proposals for a new Council of Trade, to be appointed
by Parliament and with part-control over the fleet, were only defeated
by the insertion of a clause requiring members to swear allegiance to
William personally.47 One of the great transformations introduced
makes a hue and cry when a predator is far away from her nest, and falls quiet when it comes
close. Child, Discourse on Trade; Child, Essay on Wool; Branch, Interest of England Considered.
42. J. Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, no. 168 (2000),
pp. 137–40.
43. See N. Zahedieh, ‘Regulation, Rent-Seeking, and the Glorious Revolution in the English
Atlantic Economy’, Economic History Review, lxiii (2010), pp. 865–90; N. Zahedieh, ‘Colonies,
Copper, and the Market for Inventive Activity in England and Wales, 1680–1730’, Economic
History Review, lxvi (2013), pp. 805–25.
44. Kew, The National Archives [hereafter TNA], CO 391/10, Minutes of the Board of Trade,
26 Nov. 1697.
45. Stern, Company State, p. 149.
46. See Stern, Company State, p. 163. For the relationship between the Bank and the NEIC, see
Price, Tobacco Contract, pp. 25–31.
47. See R.M. Lees, ‘Parliament and the Proposal for a Council of Trade, 1695–6’, English
Historical Review, liv (1939), p. 54.

after 1688 was annual meetings of Parliament, which greatly aided
petitioning campaigns such as those mounted by different economic
interests.48 In contrast to many European countries, decision-making
authority in England was centralised in one single parliament, rather
than spread across provincial political centres.49 The Darien Company’s
failure proves that Scotland’s freedom of action in global commerce was
in practice hugely limited even before the Union of 1707. Notably, one
of the main reasons why many London merchants opposed the Darien
Company was a fear of smuggling across the border undermining

England’s corporate and national economic systems.50 Most remarkably
of all, the EIC’s charter renewal of 1693 came with the commitment
to export £100,000 in the ‘goods and merchandizes, of the growth,
product and manufacture of this Kingdom’.51
This is not to say that MPs were always neutral arbiters of the public
interest. Attachment to a particular regime governed many political
figures, while others were prominent merchants themselves. Certainly,
the Glorious Revolution was in part a reaction to James II’s efforts
to reduce the independence of Parliament, and he made a conscious
effort to support new, closed structures of international trade, most
famously in the Royal Africa Company (RAC). His close relationship
with Sir Josiah Child and the EIC, meanwhile, was the origin of the
EIC/NEIC split.52 Yet, as W.R. Scott pointed out nearly a hundred
years ago, the members of the NEIC were not ideologically opposed
to monopoly companies, merely to political involvement with James’s
reign.53 Many merchants, of course, were members of Parliament
themselves. Other MPs were frequently bribed, though payments by
companies were made illegal after the scandal over the renewal of the
48. J. Innes and J. Hoppit, ‘Introduction’, in J. Hoppit, ed., Failed Legislation, 1660–1800:
Extracted from the Commons and Lords Journals (London, 1997), pp. 21–2.
49. For the importance of single political centres, see R. Grafe, ‘The Spanish Reigns and the
“Failures” of Mercantilism’, in Stern and Wennerlind, eds, Mercantilism Reimagined, pp. 97–116.
E.F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, ed. M. Shapiro (London, 1935).
50. Fears that smuggling would undermine England’s mercantilist structure extended be-
yond the Darien Company. On 23 November 1697, John Locke ‘communicated’ a letter to the
Commissioners that had been sent to the Governor of the Eastland Company, describing how
English wool smuggled across the border to Scotland was then transported to the Baltic to be
sold. This then fed into a report written by the Commissioners on the wool trade—a report that
had been requested by Parliament after local petitions first exposed smuggling from the north
of England into Scotland. See TNA, CO 391/10, minutes of the Board of Trade, 23 Nov. 1697;
PA, HC/CL/JO/1/99, manuscript Journal of the House of Commons, 9 Jan. 1697. One petition,
from the clothiers of Ripon, is explicit in describing a trade route through Scotland to Russia. PA,
HC/CL/JO/1/99, House of Commons Journal, 28 Jan. 1697. See also L. Davison, ed., Stilling the
Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud,
1992), p. 4.
51. A Charter of Regulations Granted to the East-India Company by Their Sacred Majesties King
William and Queen Mary, under the Great Seal of England, Dated the 11th of November, 1693, in
the 5th Year of Their Majesties Reign (London, 1693).
52. See Scott, Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, p. 322.
53. Ibid.

EIC’s charter. Even among the honest, local economic interests often
54
drove their attitudes to trading companies, particularly among the in-

fluential ‘Country’ parliamentary faction.
Yet the shift in power from Whitehall to Westminster did profoundly
strengthen the extent to which mercantilist decision-making reflected
the perceived interests of the wider nation. The fiscal-military interest
and the interest of the perceived national economy overlapped but were
not synonymous. Fiscal-military aims still had to be accomplished in
such a way as to support national employment. When the merchants

seeking to break open the Russia Company petitioned Parliament, the
would-be interlopers emphasised that any enlarged trade with Russia,
because of the cold weather there, would lead to more woollen cloth
exports.55 Virginia planters took this one step further, and argued that
if they were given control over tobacco exports to Russia instead, the
extra slaves needed in America to produce the tobacco that Russia
desired would ‘consume yearly above Twenty thousand pounds sterling
in Goods carry’d from England’, particularly clothing, thereby providing
employment to the poor.56 The English state’s representatives overseas
were well aware of factors beyond the state’s narrow interests. While
advocating investment in North America, rather than an expanded
trade with north-east Europe, as a solution to the problem of England’s
naval stores supply, the Governor of New England, Lord Bellomont,
mentioned everything from bullionism, to reducing the influence of
‘forreign princes’, to the potential for New England to serve as an ex-
port market for English cloth. For Bellomont, the pre-eminence of
English employment in such calculations was self-evident. ‘I take it for
granted you will agree with me’, he wrote, ‘that it will be much the best
way to manufacture tar into pitch in England, because of the advantage
of employing hands to work in England’.57
It was in fact John Brewer himself, in the book that gave us the term
‘fiscal-military state’, who identified the role of Parliament in driving
wider English engagement in political economy, using a campaign by
English leather manufacturers as his example.58 Brewer made the im-
portant link between the increasing demands for state action and the
state’s increased need for revenue. As the burden of the state on society
grew, the state both gained more levers with which to influence the
economy and was felt to be increasingly present in producers’ everyday
54. A Collection of the Debates and Proceedings in Parliament in 1694 and 1695 upon the Inquiry
into the Late Briberies and Corrupt Practices (London, 1695); Stern, Company State, pp. 155–7.
55. Price, ‘Tobacco Adventure’, p. 25; Reasons for Enlarging and Regulating the Trade to Russia
(London, 1695).
56. Further Reasons for Inlarging the Trade to Russia (London, 1697).
57. Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, XVIII: 1700 (1910), pp. 354–
80, available via British History Online (Institute of Historical Research, 2003–), at https://www.
british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol18/pp354-380 (accessed 5
Sept. 2023).
58. Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. 190–96.

lives. Recent studies of the fiscal-military state have sought to uni-
59
versalise the fiscal-military state concept, rather than explore the local
specifics of what Brewer argues lies ‘at the heart of eighteenth-century
British history’: the relationship between the expanding state and the pri-
vate interests that sought simultaneously to contain and exploit it.60 In
creating a generally applicable theory, historians have focused primarily
on the state infrastructure that accompanied the increased need for rev-
enue.61 The change they highlight is hugely meaningful. In England, the
late Stuart period saw the beginnings of an expansion of the ‘administra-

tive’ state, both formal and informal. There were also some concurrent
efforts to improve the capacity of the English state to make decisions
regarding the global economy, notably in the Board of Trade, which al-
most immediately began working from trade statistics derived from the
customs bureaucracy, though these were frequently contested and had
limited impact.62 Yet 1688 ultimately consolidated Parliament’s control
of overseas trade, and the Board of Trade never developed a monopoly
on global information to rival the archives of its Spanish or French
contemporaries.63 Perhaps, if one of the more comprehensive ‘Boards of
Trade’ suggested at the time had emerged, England’s mercantilism would
have developed differently, yet many of these schemes gave specific repre-
sentation to provincial English manufacturing interests and highlighted
the importance of supporting domestic employment.64 Indeed, the
‘Council of Trade’ proposal offered by the Tories and Country Whigs
to Parliament stated that part of its intention was to promote ‘the better
employing and setting to work the poor of this Kingdom’.65
II
The dominance of Parliament rather than the Board of Trade prevented

the country’s global knowledge interaction from residing in a small
59. Brewer, Sinews of Power, esp. pt 5.

60. Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 233.
61. See P. Mathias and P. O’Brien, Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810: A Comparison of
the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments (Rome, 1976); A.
Graham and P. Walsh, ‘Introduction’, in A. Graham and P. Walsh, eds, The British Fiscal-Military
States, 1660–c.1783 (London, 2016); H.V. Bowen, ‘Introduction’, and S. Conway, R. Harding and
H. Paul, ‘Eighteenth-Century Britain, the Quintessential Contractor State?”, in H.V. Bowen et al.,
‘Forum: The Contractor State, c.1650–1815’, International Journal of Maritime History, xxv (2013),
pp. 239–74.
62. For the limited impact of trade statistics in a later period, see Gauci, Politics of Trade,
pp. 234–70.
63. J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New
Haven, CT, 2006); see also J. Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State
Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, MI, 2009).
64. See William Paterson, ‘Proposals for Constituting a Council of Trade’, in Writings of
William Paterson, ed. Bannister, i, p. 15.
65. Charles Davenant, Memorial Concerning a Council of Trade (1696), cited in Lees,
‘Parliament and the Proposal for a Council of Trade’, p. 62; Journal of the House of Commons, XI:
1693–1697 (1803), 25 Jan. 1695–6.

number of buildings and archives, and allowed the process to take
place across an easy-to-access ‘open archive’ of knowledge located in
pamphlets, coffee houses, public streets and government institutions.66
The nature of London’s public spaces, and particularly its coffee houses,
has been extensively examined and re-examined by historians in recent
decades. Much of this effort has gone into setting them in their social
and political context, often to counteract Jürgen Habermas’s under-
standing of the ‘public sphere’.67 Trading rumours and overseas news
were a coffee-house gossip’s stock-in-trade. The coffee house created a

pool of rumours that could be manipulated. ‘The common discourse
of the coffee house’ was even used as a defence against threats of pros-
ecution for libel by the EIC, after a pamphlet was published suggesting
it had subsidised Indian Ocean piracy.68 However, the coffee house
was also a centre of active mercantilist campaigning. This aspect of
the coffee house is difficult for historians to access.69 The best example
available to us comes from a pamphlet by Nathaniel Tenche, written to
defend the EIC from its rivals. He describes:
A campaign [against the EIC] notoriously evident to all, who either give
themselves the trouble of listening to those Calumnies, dayly inculcated
in all noted Coffee-Houses against them, or to the reading of those Prints
exposed publicly, and delivered gratis in the said Coffee Houses, to all such
as will accept them.70
The coffee house was an actively contested space. When campaigning,
companies and groups either published themselves or hired authors,
who published anonymously or under their own names. The power of
such pamphlets is demonstrated by the keenness with which companies
monitored and replied to their opponents. Pamphlets with titles such
as A Reply to a Paper, Entituled, An Answer to the Reasons Offered by the
Hamburgh Company were common.71
66. Clubs and lobbying organisations, which also formed a significant part of this process, are
here taken to be associations of participating interests, though the lines between these definitions
are clearly blurred. See P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an
Associational World (Oxford, 2000), pp. 9–12, 53–4; Olson, Making the Empire Work, pp. 52–4.
67. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, tr. T. Burger and
F. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 57–67; M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in
Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2006), pp. 109–10; M. Knights,
‘How Rational Was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’ and S. Pincus, ‘The State and Civil Society
in Early Modern England: Capitalism, Causation and Habermas’ Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in
P. Lake and S. Pincus, eds, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: Public
Persons and Popular Spirits (Manchester, 2012), pp. 252–67 and 213–31 respectively.
68. Cited in Stern, Company State, p. 149.
69. For the relationship between print culture, reading and coffee houses in a slightly later
period, see M. Ellis, ‘Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, The Library,
x (2009), pp. 3–40.
70. Tenche, A Modest and Just Apology.
71. A Reply to a Paper, Entituled, An Answer to the Reasons Offered by the Hamburgh Company
(London?, 1694); other examples include A Reply to An Answer From a Friend, to the Apology for
the English Nation (London, 1692); A Reply to a Paper, Intituled, Reasons against the Prohibiting

Importantly, in the debate over trading companies, pamphlets and
coffee houses were part of the same system of knowledge interaction
and production as Parliament and Whitehall. Petitions to Parliament
were frequently reprinted as pamphlets to increase their impact, as
were extracts from the House of Commons Journal and, in exceptional
circumstances, correspondence between a trading company and the
Board of Trade or Privy Council.72 Pamphlets printed for consump-
tion in the coffee houses of London identified themselves as responses
to specific parliamentary petitions.73 The most common framing for

longer, more comprehensive tracts was to describe a pamphlet as a
letter to a concerned MP, who had solicited the author’s opinion on
a particular subject.74 The ‘Reply to a Member of Parliament’ framing
allowed the author to assert both the topicality and impartiality of
his views.75 The ‘calumnies’ Tenche described emanating from the
men who would later form the NEIC came from the same men who
petitioned Parliament and spoke quietly with members of the Board of
Trade. The arguments voiced inside and outside the chamber regarding
trading companies were frequently identical, if only because many
of the merchants involved were also themselves MPs.76 In 1693, John
Sandford argued in Parliament that free trade in cloth would ‘give our
woollen trade to foreigners’, a standard line from Hamburg Company
pamphlets of the time.77 The Hamburg Company happened to employ
him as its treasurer.78
Within England, pamphlets, speeches, published records of par-
liamentary debate, private consultations with senior merchants, gov-
ernment reports, rumours and petitions came together in London to
create the open archive of global knowledge that became the basis of
the Wearing East-India and Persian Wrought Silks (London, 1700); To the Commons of Great
Britain in Parliament Assembled, the Clothiers Answer to the Card-makers Reply (London, 1711).
72. The Norwich and Norfolk Weavers Answer to the Petition and Case of the Wool-combers
(London, 1701); A Collection of the Debates and Proceedings in Parliament in 1694 and 1695 upon
the Inquiry into the Late Briberies and Corrupt Practices (London, 1695); The Original Papers and
Letters, Relating to the Scots Company (London, 1700); A Journal of Several Remarkable Passages,
before the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1693).
73. See, for example, An Answer to the Most Material Objections Made by the Linnen-drapers
(London, 1699); Reasons Humbly Offered for Supporting the Company of Mercht. Adventurers of
England (London?, 1695).
74. See, for example, England’s Advocate, Europe’s Monitor (London, 1699); Josiah Child, An
Essay on Wool and Wollen Manufacture for the Improvement of Trade (London, 1692); Andrew
Fletcher, Overtures Offered to the Parliament (Edinburgh, 1700).
75. Norwich and Norfolk Weavers Answer; Original Papers and Letters, Relating to the Scots; A
Journal of Several Remarkable Passages, before the Honourable House of Commons.
76. See Price, ‘Tobacco Contract’, p. 25.
77. Reasons Humbly Offered for Preventing the Exportation of Wool, and for Encouraging Free
Trade in English Woollen Manufacture to Flanders (London, 1700); Reasons Humbly Offered by
the Governour, Assistants, and Fellowship of Eastland-Merchants against the Giving of a General
Liberty (London, 1689).
78. Parliamentary Diary of Narcissus Luttrell, 1691–1693, ed H. Horwitz (Oxford, 1972),
p. 504 (17 Feb. 1693).

mercantilist decision-making about the future of trading companies.
The late Stuart era was characterised by remarkably low levels of censor-
ship, associated with the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695.79 After
their dissemination, pamphlets and petitions lived on in parliamentary
journals, coffee-house libraries and private collections.80 As a source of
knowledge, the open archive of England’s mercantilism encompassed
perspectives far beyond what historians have traditionally considered
the confines of state decision-making.81 London’s position at the centre
of England’s global trade undoubtedly allowed those who either lived

or derived their wealth directly from overseas to contribute to this pro-
cess, as has been shown by Alison Olson and Nuala Zahedieh.82 Even
rumours of private lobbying could quickly cross the Atlantic. Writing
from New England, Lord Bellomont complained that ‘A person in this
town [Boston] tells me he has advice from England that the Eastland
Marchands began to be alarmed at the talk that has been of late in
London of furnishing naval stores from these plantations, and that it
was believed they would oppose that design as much as in them lay’.83
However, any interest that attempted to contribute to England’s know-
ledge of global trade was stepping into competition not only with
other interests and merchants based in London, but also with local
English manufacturers, who, through petitions, pamphlets and private
networks, had an easy route into London’s open archive.
We cannot know for certain how pamphlets and petitions were read
or why they were kept, but the very fact that pamphlets have survived
in the private papers of MPs is testament to how they were, in some
cases, long-lasting sources of knowledge. The papers of Edward Clarke,
friend of John Locke and MP for Taunton between 1690 and 1710,
give us a clear indication of how the open archive worked in practice.
Clarke had a reputation as a diligent constituency MP, in part because
Taunton was a competitive seat that he had won from his local Tory
rivals, the Sandford family.84 In his papers, we find handwritten copies
79. See T. Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007),
p. 222; D. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population,
1660–1760 (London, 1995), p. 39.
80. See Ellis, ‘Coffee-House Libraries’. On the longevity of particularly longer tracts of polit-
ical economy, see J. Hoppit, ‘The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–
1760’, Historical Journal, xlix (2006), pp. 79–110.
81. For a wider discussion of ‘universal’ or ‘international’ archives, particularly in the twen-
tieth century, see E. Rothschild, ‘The Archives of Universal History’, Journal of World History,
xix (2008), pp. 375–401. For the importance of archives in early modern state formation, see A.
Walsham, K. Peters and L. Corens, ‘Archives and Information in the Early Modern World’, in
L. Corens, K. Peters and A. Walsham, eds, Archives and Information in the Early Modern World
(Oxford, 2018), pp. 1–26.
82. Olson, Making the Empire Work, pp. 52–4; Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies, pp. 113–26.
83. Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, 1700, pp. 354–80.
84. The same Sandford, in fact, who was a Hamburg merchant and treasurer to the
Company. M. Knights, ‘Clarke, Edward I (1650–1710)’, in D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks and S.
Handley, eds, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715 (5 vols, Cambridge,
2002), available online via The History of Parliament (History of Parliament Trust, 1964–),

of petitions from the town on overseas trade. As well as those from his
constituency, Clarke kept, and from the state of the papers referred
to, petitions and pamphlets on everything trade-related, including
the EIC’s silk imports, the trade between England, Italy and Holland
in silks, and wool imports from Ireland. A local petition against
a tariff on soap survives above a pamphlet describing the tariff as a
useful source of revenue.85 Crucially, we also find here evidence that
the companies assumed that they were engaging in one process of de-
bate and decision-making, centred on London. In 1697, the Hamburg

Company wrote to Clarke, noting that it had ‘had perusal of a petition
of a strange nature’, delivered to the House from the merchants and
manufacturers of Exeter, against the Company. The Company’s letter,
after explaining how foreign merchants caused English manufacturers
to be ‘dayly reduced to the extremity of poverty’, included what appears
to be a handwritten draft of one of the Company’s pamphlets, entitled
‘an answer to the reasons printed by those who style themselves the free
traders of England’.86
Dense networks of communication and commerce linking
Parliament, manufacturers and merchants informed England’s under-
standing of global trade. Petitioning campaigns in particular relied on
established communications between London and provincial centres,
and on local client networks within provincial economies. The most
important link was between a town’s MP and its prominent merchants
and manufacturers. In 1695, a group of senior Bristol merchants
wrote to their two MPs, concerned that the proposed Board of Trade
would unfairly prioritise London and its trading companies over the
south-western ports. Commencing on 16 December, the MPs and
merchants exchanged at least seven letters in twelve days, according
to the records of John Cary, the prominent merchant, writer and
workhouse founder in the city.87 On 28 December the merchants
sent their MP a petition, which they encouraged him not only to
present to the Commons but also to show to other MPs, to see if their
own constituencies would be interested in petitioning in support.88
They had previously encouraged their MPs to ‘endeavour to get the
members of Bridgewater and those other western ports to join with
at https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/clarke-edward-i-1650-
1710 (accessed 6 Sept. 2023).
85. Taunton, Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/SF/12/1, fo. 6.
86. Ibid., fo. 26. Given that Clarke’s Tory rival, John Sandford, was the Merchant Adventurers’
treasurer, one wonders why the Company bothered approaching him at all. The answer is prob-
ably that he had been appointed, as MP for Taunton, to one of the various committees established
over the course of the period to consider the case of the Hamburg Company.
87. BL, Add. MS 5540, miscellaneous letters and papers belonging to John Cary, a merchant
of Bristol, 1653–1711. These letters were first cited, and transcribed, in Lees, ‘Parliament and the
Proposal for a Council of Trade’, pp. 57–61.
88. BL, Add. MS 5540, fo. 90, 28 Dec. 1695.

E N G L A N D ' S M E RC A N T I L I S M761
you, who are on the same footing as us’. The number of signatories
89
to such petitions varied. The Bristol petition listed only a number of

senior merchants, while one surviving petition from Leeds, asking
for a chartered company to regulate the wool trade, was signed by
177 men, ranging from the easily legible signatures of the city’s most
prominent cloth merchants and the mayor, to unknown, ill-formed
scrawls and a number of names that appear to have been written by
one hand to bulk out the numbers. The petition bemoaned the de-
cline in the kersey trade caused by newer, cheaper cloths, to the loss

of ‘some thousands of families’ who had been ‘maintained’ by kersey
manufacture.90
III
The significance of Parliament and the wider English communities

that informed its understanding of global trade forced England’s over-
seas trading companies to find wider, ‘English’ justifications for their
actions. Consequently, London’s mercantile elite set about building
networks of local employers who could petition on their behalf and
thereby change the composition of London’s open archive. The ‘new’
merchants linked to the Eastland, New East India and Hamburg
companies seem to have cultivated a particularly close relationship with
the clothiers of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. The origins of this rela-
tionship were economic, as the West Country traditionally produced
heavier broadcloths exported via London by the regulated European
companies.91 In 1698, the clothiers of Wiltshire are recorded in the
House of Commons Journal as lamenting that ‘the Cloathing-Trade is
fallen under so great Discouragements, that they cannot employ their
numerous Dependents’, and asking that ‘the Hamborough Company
may be supported in their Trade; and both that and the Russia
Company may be enlarged’.92 The fact that the petition mentioned
both companies would suggest that it was written in co-operation
with those merchants, led by Francis Stratford, who were seeking both
reforms.93 The clothiers of Gloucestershire, who petitioned three times
in support of the Hamburg Company and once, in co-ordination with
those of Wiltshire, in support of the Russia Company, were among the
few directly to support ending the EIC’s monopoly, in support of their
89. Ibid., p. 87, 21 Dec. 1695.

90. Leeds University Archives, MS 202, Leeds Petition, 1692–3.
91. The Clothiers’ Complaint (London, 1692); see also J. de Lacy Mann, The Cloth Industry in
the West of England (Oxford, 1971), pp. 20–25.
92. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/95, House of Commons Journal, 1 Dec. 1692; HC/CL/JO/1/96, 23 Jan.
1694; HC/CL/JO/1/99, 15 Feb. 1697; HC/CL/JO/1/101, 14 Mar. 1698.
93. Francis Stratford would later stand against the incumbent governor of the Russia Company,
Sir Benjamin Ayloffe, to be governor after the enlargement, though he was unsuccessful. See
London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/B/195/MS11741/001, Minutes of the Russia Company.

allies in both the Hamburg Company and the NEIC.94 In a petition to
Queen Mary in 1693, they lamented that the obstructions of the trade
to Turkey and the Straits caused by conflict meant that they had ‘not
Stock enough besides to Imploy the poor Spinners, Weavers, and other
Workmen, [who] daily Cry at their Doors for Work’, and arguing that
increasing exports via the Indian ocean could offset the issue.95
Both companies and their opponents used informal networks
linking mercantile and manufacturing communities as vehicles for
demonstrating the English value of a merchant’s self-interested pos-

ition. The potential impact of petitions in this respect is perhaps
best demonstrated by the multiple examples of false petitioning. In
1700, a petition from Exeter caused Parliament to review the status
of the Hamburg Company again, despite the Company’s monopoly
having been in abeyance for the last five years. Exeter had traditionally
opposed the Company, and it was not long before counter-petitions
emerged from Devon claiming that the petition had been ‘clandestinely
obtained’ by the Hamburg Company itself.96 Campaigners against the
Hamburg Company were able to generate an extraordinary thirteen
petitions in three weeks. Of the thirteen petitions against the Company,
eleven are recorded in the House of Commons Journal as using a vari-
ation of the same phrase: that a freer trade allowed English cloth to
‘diffuse itself through the markets of Europe’.97 In 1700, a group of
Leeds merchants and clothiers, led again by the mayor, wrote to the
MP for Scarborough. They had been informed by the merchant Francis
Stratford, then both an MP and governor of the Hamburg Company,
that there had been a counter-petition submitted by other merchants
in Leeds against the Company, headed by the same mayor, and they
claimed that the mayor’s second signature had been obtained by ‘in-
direct means’. The first group protested their innocence and pointed
out that the mayor had in fact written to the MP himself, privately, in
support of the Company.98
Prosperous local merchants, wealthy clothiers and local companies
and municipal institutions formed the basis of provincial petitions
regarding overseas trading companies. The pamphlets and petitions
presented by manufacturers remained expressions of private interest.
Provincial attitudes to trading companies were largely determined by
whether an area was seeing growth in new industries targeted partly
at increasingly accessible overseas markets or was a long-standing
manufacturing centre. In areas where both were true, such as West
Yorkshire, local towns became hotbeds of mercantile infighting,
94. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/100, House of Commons Journal, 15 Feb. 1697.

95. See A Journal of Several Remarkable Passages … Relating to the East-India Trade (London,
1693), p. 14.
96. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/104, House of Commons Journal, 20 Jan. 1700.
97. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/104, House of Commons Journal, 15 Jan.–22 Feb. 1700.
98. Leeds, West Yorkshire Archive Services, TN/LA/3/7, Petition to Lord Irwin.

complete with petitions, counter-petitions and contests over local com-
pany traditions. Such battles were defined by the relationship between
private interests and the nation’s perceived economic health. Julian
Hoppit has rightly associated increasing numbers of petitions with the
rising number of prosperous traders who emerged over the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and dominated many local towns.99 As has
long been established, this ‘middling sort’ combined constant finan-
cial insecurity with an emerging group morality that emphasised the
virtues of being a kind and diligent employer. It also rewarded hard

work among employees, condemned vagrancy and delinquency and
looked to the state to reduce the risks they faced.100
In this, wider English conceptualisations of employment were dis-
tinct from the populationism of William Petty and other elite writers,
who often viewed people as a resource to be manipulated, rather than
as individuals who required employment for support.101 The merchant
John Cary was so possessed of the importance of workhouses that he
published an account of his work with the Corporation of Bristol in 1700,
with a foreword addressing the text to both Houses of Parliament.102
The workhouse’s occupants, he wrote, had been ‘brought up to delight
in Labour’ so successfully that Bristol was now ‘free from beggars [and]
old people are comfortably provided for’. Cary founded the work-
house as a trial case in partnership with the Board of Trade, which later
commissioned a review into the poor law.103 However, manufacturers
also knew that good employees could be left unemployed through no
fault of their own, and, for many clothiers in particular, overseas trade
became the scapegoat for economic hardship. Petitions regularly linked
government policy on global trade to the number of people relying
on poor relief, in ways that were often gendered.104 In petitions and
pamphlets in support of textile manufacturing, female spinners and
weavers were highlighted at least on a par with their actual economic
99. J. Hoppit, Britain’s Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800
(Cambridge, 2017), pp. 7, 102–6. Hoppit emphasises the importance of the local origins of most
English economic policy, though he places less emphasis on active London-centred campaigning.
See also P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London, 1989); Gauci, Politics of Trade,
pp. 95–106.
100. M. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780
(Berkeley, CA, 1996), esp. ch. 8 and Conclusion. For more recent examples, see J.R. Edwards, ‘A
Business Education for “the Middling Sort of People” in Mercantilist Britain’, British Accounting
Review, xli (2009), pp. 240–55. For a contrasting approach centring on textile producers in
Yorkshire in Yorkshire, see J. Smail, The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire,
1660–1780 (London, 1994). For the historiography of the middling sort, see P. Gauci, ‘Finding
the Middle-Ground: The Middling Sort in the Eighteenth Century’, History Compass, iv, (2006),
pp. 228–34.
101. See T. McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford,
2009).
102. John Cary, An Account of the Proceedings of the Corporation of Bristol (London, 1700).
103. TNA, CO 391/10, Minutes of the Board of Trade, Aug.–Sept. 1697.
104. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/98, House of Commons Journal, 1 Dec. 1695; HC/CL/JO/1/100, 15
Feb. 1697.

significance. Petitions and pamphlets tended to describe the people
105
they ‘supported’ either by the name of the occupation, or as ‘families’.

Politically, prosperous merchant advocates of workhouses and co-
lonial administrators were regularly attacked for failing to understand
the central role of manufacturers in providing employment and ultim-
ately prosperity to English citizens. In debates over textiles in particular,
generating manufacturing employment through global trade was held
up as the solution to the employment of the poor. As one pamphlet put
it, the silk trades of Canterbury and Norwich ‘did employ more numbers

of people than any Country or Corporation Workhouse, through
great charge to the publick can possibly do’.106 Charles Davenant, who
(among many roles) was both an administrator of the tax system and a
prominent supporter of the EIC, came in for particular criticism when
he attempted to defend their practice of importing Indian textiles.
His lack of understanding of ‘the most common rudiments of trade’,
according to one response, was ‘a fault too usual among men of letters
and theory in merchantine affairs. Reading without practice never
makes a merchant’.107 In a time when religion remained one of the
dominant indicators of party, both Whig and Tory could come in for
criticism. The pamphlet Dum Spiro Spero put this clearly in a retelling
of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finding the English wool in-
dustry lying down by the side of the road, first the Levite, ‘of a Romish
persuasion’, laments the villainous practices of the robbers but passes on
the other side. Then another ‘from Geneva’, ‘to satisfie himself, in not
relieving of him … in all likelihood he might attribute his misfortunes
to his own idleness or intemperance that brought him to this helpless
Condition, and wish that better Care was taken in England to provide
Work-Houses and Houses of Correction for such idle People, after the
Example of Holland’. There was, the pamphleteer wrote, ‘a little resem-
blance’ between such figures and the Board of Trade. The Samaritan,
however, would seek to use the state to assist the English woollen in-
dustry, in this case by restoring the Hamburg Company.108
Against these profoundly human appeals, genuine arguments for
consumption failed to resonate, partly as a result of the economic
realities of English textile manufacturing. As Paul Slack has observed
in this journal, there was some awareness of the value of consump-
tion, particularly in the mid-seventeenth century, a point that was
105. For the role of women spinners, see C. Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient Distaff ” and “Whirling
Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National
Economy in England, 1550–1770’, Economic History Review, lxv (2012), pp. 498–526.
106. An English Winding Sheet for the East India Manufacturors (London, 1700). Cary in fact
supported the Calico Acts, although his contribution to their passage was marginal.
107. An Answer to a Late Tract, Entituled, An Essay on the East-India Trade (London, 1697).
108. Dum Spiro Spero (London, 1700). Like a number of other pamphlets, Dum Spiro
Spero complained about bullion exports, but only in the context of their impact on woollen
manufacturing.

also made by Appleby. In particular, this emerged as a response to
109
criticism of the EIC.110 It was also closely aligned to the debate over
‘high living’, and largely followed the view that England’s great rivals
and competitors were the Dutch, rather than the French, which left
it somewhat hobbled by 1688. Discussion of this theme did continue
through the period, although its impact on company debate was
largely limited to the EIC.111 Some writers even galloped all the way to
Adam Smith, with the preface to Dudley North’s Discourse on Trade
declaiming that ‘the whole world as to Trade, is but as one nation or

people’ and that any reduction of it harmed all.112 Yet, with one ex-
ception, this discourse never truly broke through to significance. Part
of its weakness lay in lacking the ‘other half ’ of Smith’s criticism of
the mercantile system: the manufacturer who, thanks to accumulated
profit, was able to persuade the state to act in his interests against those
of his employees, either through encouraging specific kinds of compe-
tition from abroad that reduced their pay, or by limiting their access
to cheaper products.113 Adam Smith’s ‘mercantile system’ extended the
meaning of the word ‘monopoly’ to the rent-seeking actions of great
manufacturers in using state economic policy to capture the national
market, and the profits of overseas trade to enrich themselves at the
expense of their workers.114 If we take textiles as our example, this
would have been more of a viable point in the more urbanised silk
industry, and the EIC did attempt to argue that restrictions on Indian
textile imports would only ‘inrich a few Master Silk Weavers and their
Factors’.115 Yet in the main, though some great clothier families such as
the Methuens did achieve considerable power in the period, the ‘great
manufacturer’ rarely features in debates of the time. The vast scale
of employment in textile manufacturing before widespread mechan-
isation even allowed pamphleteers on occasion to refer to clothiers
only by implication, and instead to produce elaborate calculations
of how many people a particular amount of wool ‘sustained’ in its
109. P. Slack, ‘The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth
Century’, English Historical Review, cxxii (2007), pp. 609–31; Appleby, Economic Thought, pp.
167–73.
110. The two authors Slack explores in most depth, John Houghton and Nicholas Barbon,
are both examples of this. John Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, or, A Dialogue between
Content and Complaint (London, 1677); Nicholas Barbon, An Apology for the Builder, or, A
Discourse Shewing the Cause and Effects of the Increase of Building (London, 1689).
111. See I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 19–35.
112. Dudley North, A Discourse on Trade (London, 1691), p. 6.
113. For the importance of poor spinners to Smith’s argument, see C. Muldrew, ‘Afterword:
Mercantilism to Macroeconomics’, in Stern and Wennerlind, eds, Mercantilism Reimagined, pp.
374–6.
114. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Cambell. A.S. Skinner and W.B. Todd
(Oxford, 1979), pp. 418–19, 643–4.
115. Some Reflections on a Pamphlet Intituled, England and East-India Inconsistent in their
Manufactures (London, 1696).

transformation into finished cloth.116 The dominance and diffuse
nature of the woollen textile industry, with its reliance on putting-out
work and vast geographical and material diversity, meant that the idea
of a small number of manufacturers working against the interests of
their own employees by supporting protectionist measures was not
significant in economic debate.117
The close association of the companies with royal authority
throughout the seventeenth century did create intersections between
economic policy and constitutional politics. In the context of com-

pany policy, the most relevant term was ‘free trade’. In some economic
histories, the meaning of free trade becomes confused, since it is un-
clear whether the historian is referring to free trade as it was meant at
the time, or free trade as we now understand it.118 Anti-company rhet-
oric had a long history, dating back to the first petitioning campaigns
against royal monopolies in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The
specific ‘free trade’ movement of the 1690s had its origins in the civil
war. For radical groups such as the Levellers, as for the campaigners of
the late Stuart period, the ‘freedom’ in free trade referred to the pol-
itical freedom of English merchants to trade wherever they wanted.
It did not refer to the goods they traded. Englishmen, wrote William
Walwyn, had an ‘ancient and continuall claime of right unto a general
freedome of trade’, which the monarch, by establishing trading
companies, had denied them. Walwyn himself argued that one of the
benefits of free trade was that by increasing the number of English
merchants abroad, the nation could police its exports more effect-
ively, and thus prevent the export of English wool.119 This argument
continued to be made through the Commonwealth and Restoration,
fuelled in part by bitterness in England’s provincial towns and ports at
London’s pre-eminence.120
Although the EIC was at the heart of the related legal battle over
the rights of Englishmen to engage in trade, in the longue durée of
the ‘free trade’ movement the great bastion of monopolist priv-
ilege was the Hamburg Company, traditionally the primary driver of
116. See Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient Distaff ” and “Whirling Spindle”’; A Short Survey of the Loss
which is Computed to be Sustained in England by the Exportation of Our Clothing-wool (s.l., 1702);
Dum Spiro Spero.
117. For a detailed guide to the structures of the old English textile industry, see Mann, Cloth
Industry in the West of England.
118. This is particularly an issue when historians are seeking to contrast the ‘era of free trade’,
beginning anywhere from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, with the ‘mercan-
tilist’ era that came before. See A. Howe, ‘Restoring Free Trade: The British Experience, 1776–
1873’, in D. Winch and P.K. O’Brien, eds, The Political Economy of British Historical Experience,
1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002); Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 104.
119. William Walwyn, ‘W Walwins Conceptions; for a Free Trade, Presented to the Committee
of the Council of State for Trade and Foreign Affairs, May 1652’, in The Writings of William
Walwyn, ed. J.R. McMichael and B. Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), pp. 446–52.
120. See Cooper, Land, Men and Beliefs, p. 224.

England’s cloth exports. In this context, it is unsurprising that the
121
Hamburg Company was the first to have its monopoly suspended after
1688. ‘A free trade, a free trade!’ the pro-Company pamphlet Britania
Expirans bitterly remarked, ‘lily bulero, a free trade!’122 Yet as the cries
of ‘lily bulero’ faded, the company debate became dominated by eco-
nomic interests, rather than partisan positions, and the Hamburg
Company fought for its charter throughout the period with some
success. East Anglian and Gloucestershire clothiers, many the chil-
dren of Parliamentarians and represented in Parliament by James II’s

most vehement enemies, were some of the strongest opponents of the
‘free trade’ movement.123 The companies argued that only they could
manage the trade to support English employment, while ‘free traders’
argued that this would achieved by national tariffs and product bans.124
The Hamburg Company also argued that without it the trade would be
taken over by foreign merchants, usually Dutch. ‘If so much of British
woollen manufacture falls into the hands of foreigners’, the Company
asked in a pamphlet of 1694, ‘What room will there be left for the
sons of English Gentlemen?’125 Their opponents among the ‘free trade’
movement argued that the focus should instead be on widespread em-
ployment in manufacturing as a whole.
What emerged in the 1690s was an economic debate between ‘cor-
porate’ and ‘national’ forms of mercantilism, shaped by increasing
overseas trade and changing patterns of consumption—in the case of
textiles, the rising demand for lighter fabrics ahead of heavier broad-
cloth.126 These changing patterns would have felt new, exciting and
121. See Pettigrew and van Cleve, ‘Parting Companies’, p. 618; for the history of the Merchant
Adventurers in the seventeenth century, in which their position both in Europe and at home was
steadily eroded, see Ormrod, Rise of Commercial Empires, pp. 121–41.
122. Britania Expirans (London, 1699).
123. The most famous example of this is Sir John Guise, who became the Hamburg
Company’s champion in the Commons after returning from exile with William of Orange. See
A. Hanham, ‘Guise, Sir John (c.1654–95)’, in Hayton, Cruickshanks and Handley, eds, History
of Parliament: House of Commons, 1690–1715, available via History of Parliament at https://www.
historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/guise-sir-john-1654-95 (accessed 6
Sept. 2023). For another example of clothiers’ political links, see J. de L. Mann, ‘A Wiltshire
Family of Clothiers: George and Hester Wansey, 1683–1714’, Economic History Review, new ser.,
ix (1956), pp. 241–53.
124. See Reasons Humbly Offered against the Continuation of a General Liberty for Exporting
the Woollen Manufactures of this Kingdom by Foreigners (London, 1692); Reasons Humbly Offered
for Encouraging His Majesties Natural Born Subjects (S.l., 1695).
125. Reasons Humbly Offered against the Continuation of a General Liberty for Exporting
the Woollen Manufactures of this Kingdom by Foreigners, into the Privileges of the Merchants
Adventurers of England (London, 1692). They also argued that foreign merchants were likely to
give longer periods of credit. See The Cloathiers Reason for Establishing the Company of Merchant
Adventurers of England (London, 1690).
126. This transition, which has long been highlighted by English economic historians, was
in part driven by the arrival of lighter fabrics from India, although it had as much to do with
the dynamics of Anglo-Dutch trade. See B. Lemire, ‘Revising the Historical Narrative, India,
Europe and the Cotton Trade, c.1300–1800’, in G. Riello and P. Parthasarathi, eds, The Spinning
World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford, 2011), p. 207; C.H. Wilson,

disorienting, which partly explains why those considering political
economy at this time gave far more attention to overseas commerce
than it warranted, as Julian Hoppit has observed.127 The role of global
trade and consumer taste in driving a shift from companies to national
structures has been noted for a much later period by Maxine Berg.128
The company debate of the 1690s shows that this was a feature of
English political economy much earlier. As more and more interests
became impacted, or at least, believed they had become impacted, by
global trade, they turned to the state either to help them exploit new

opportunities or to protect their established interests. The Hamburg
Company never regained its monopoly.
The case of the RAC is the clearest example of how increasing glo-
balisation had created new private interests that were linked to local
communities and able to appeal to both the English state’s political
objectives and the morality of England’s mercantilism. The petitioning
campaigns both for and against the RAC demonstrate the astonishing
diversity of interests which came to London determined to influence
the fate of the Company. Clothworkers from Berkshire, Wiltshire,
Southwark and Norwich argued that the RAC was restricting the sale
of redwood, crucial in dyeing, by selling by private contract. The ex-
tremely similar wording of the pamphlets, and the fact that they
were submitted within three days of each other, suggests they were
co-ordinated as part of one campaign.129 Clothworkers of Shrewsbury
and Kidderminster claimed that interlopers against the RAC had made
them unemployed, just as those of Exeter argued that free trade had
‘employed and maintained many Thousand Families’.130 Free merchants
trading with ‘South Barbary’ trumpeted their role importing bullion
and copper, and exporting woollen manufactures.131 Merchants trading
with Virginia and Maryland claimed that a free trade would give
them enough slaves to increase tobacco production, thus supporting
English shipping, undermining the Dutch and providing the state
with greater customs revenue.132 A group of Bristol merchants claimed
the Company’s continuing monopoly would limit their trade in ivory,
‘Cloth Production and International Competition in the Seventeenth Century’, Economic History
Review, xiii (1960), pp. 209–21; J. De Vries and A.M. van de Woude, The First Modern Economy,
Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 2011), p. 286.
127. Hoppit, ‘Context and Contours’.
128. M. Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the
Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 182 (2004), pp. 137–41.
129. The Wiltshire and Southwark petitions are recorded in the Journal as merely being ‘the
like petition’. Journal of the House of Commons, 1693–1697, pp. 281–6 (25 and 28 Mar. 1695).
130. Ibid., pp. 639–41 (29 Dec. 1696). For a detailed account of the petitioning campaigns
relating to the Royal Africa Company, see W. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African
Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Williamsburg, VA, 2013),
Appendix 5.
131. Journal of the House of Commons, 1693–1697, pp. 617–19 (8 Dec. 1696).
132. Ibid., pp. 184–5 (10 Dec. 1694), 474–6 (28 Feb. 1696).

which ‘hath greatly employed the Artificiers of Bristoll, and adjacent
counties’. Their complaints were echoed in the pamphlets of the time;
Roger Coke specifically highlighted that the RAC had driven the price
of ivory so high that the Dutch could manufacture pieces ‘cheaper than
the poor English could work them’.133 The RAC monopoly was not
maintained. As with the other company debates of the period, the pol-
itics of the ‘free trade’ movement had progressed in such a way as to
strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for protectionist measures at
a national level. The ivory worker, the clothier and the customs clerk

were positioned as the idealised determiners of economic policy.
If globalisation led to the rise of national, rather than corporate,
mercantilism, why was trade with India different? National influence
over the EIC increased in the 1690s, and the NEIC briefly succeeded
in breaking its monopoly. However, the two companies eventually
merged, and the revitalised EIC then dominated trade with India for
more than a century. Part of the explanation lies in the ability of the
EIC to ‘graft itself onto the state’, in Pettigrew and Van Cleve’s phrase,
through financial and material support for England’s military devel-
opment.134 However, what made the trade with India unique was that
it was primarily a source of textile imports, rather than exports.135 The
provision in the 1692 charter that the EIC export £100,000 in English
cloth annually quickly came under attack from the Levant Company,
which pointed out that the EIC, unable to sell cloth in India in suffi-
cient quantities, was offloading it in Persia instead, undermining the
Levant Company’s trade.136 This argument quickly gained traction,
since the Levant Company was something of a paragon of England’s
mercantilism; it was regulated, so anyone could join, and by exporting
finished English broadcloth and importing raw silk, it supported
English employment on both legs of its trade.137 It was in this con-
text that the advocates of consumption attempted to defend the EIC,
and advanced early arguments against protectionism.138 The EIC also
133. Roger Coke, Reflections upon the East India and Royal African Companies (London, 1695),
p. 11.
134. Pettigrew and Van Cleve, ‘Parting Companies’, p. 617.
135. See also ibid., pp. 636–7.
136. For a part of the extraordinary history of this trade, see BL, IOR/E/3/92, fos 165–74. See
also BL, MSS Eur D300, fos 21–2, ‘The Allegations of the Turky Company and Others, against the
East-India-Company. Together with an answer of the said East-India Company’.
137. The support of the Levant Company challenges simple ‘balance of trade’ understandings
of mercantilism. See John Blanch, The Naked Truth, in an Essay upon Trade with some Proposals
for Bringing the Ballance on Our Side (London, 1686); Reasons against the Prohibiting the Wearing
of East-India and Persia Wrought Silks (London?, 1700); A Reply to a Paper, Intituled, Reasons
against the Prohibiting the Wearing East-India and Persian Wrought Silks; The Profit and Loss of
the East-India-Trade, Stated (London, 1700); BL, IOR/A/2/8/1-29, A petition of the clothiers and
woollen manufacturers of Wiltshire, 1693.
138. See J. Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, no. 168
(2000), pp. 124–69; A.W. Douglas, ‘Cotton Textiles in England: The East India Company’s
Attempt to Exploit Developments in Fashion, 1660-1721’, Journal of British Studies, viii, no. 2
(1969), pp. 28–43.

actively exploited the social environment of London to drive fashions to-
wards its imports, and in doing so highlighted, and in fact exaggerated,
how fast England’s economy was changing.139 Texts in support of and
against calicoes flooded the open archive. One anti-calico poem began
with the author seeing EIC merchants standing around ‘where folks
were printed papers handing’.140
Attacks on the EIC in pamphlets and petitions were steadily
replaced by attacks on the East India trade in general for destroying
English domestic employment by importing Indian calico.141 The first

bill prohibiting calico imports was proposed in 1696, following the
recommendation of a parliamentary committee convened to examine
several petitions against the trade from East Anglia and Kent. The
committee concluded that the various petitioners had ‘entirely proved
their case’ that the trade was leading to the ‘ruin of many thousands
of manufacturers, and their families’.142 When the EIC attempted, ex-
tremely atypically, to justify its trade on the basis that it was providing
cheaper goods for the poor, the reply was immediate. ‘The cheaper
they are’, the response pamphlet declaimed, ‘the more damage they do
to our own growth and manufactures, and therefore the more necessary
and reasonable to be prohibited’.143 After further petitions, pamphlets
and eventually riots, the campaign was successful in persuading
Parliament to introduce the first Calico Act in 1700.144 There was,
in other words, no substantial pressure for a free trade to India in
English society, because increasing trade with India at all went against
the overall logic of England’s mercantilism. The EIC/NEIC debate
remained a matter for London, and London alone. What mattered
most is made clear by the official title of the first Calico Act: ‘An
act for the more effectual employing the poor, by encouraging the
Manufactures of this Kingdom’.
139. One silk weaver claimed that the EIC ‘expose these Goods to publick view, bring their
Ladies and Wives to see these Rarities of far-fetched Silks’ which are then ‘made fashion’: England’s
Danger by Indian Manufactures (London, 1701). For more on England’s long history of calico
imports and their role in driving fashion cycles, see B. Lemire, ‘Revising the Historical Narrative:
India, Europe and the Cotton Trade, c.1300–1800’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds, Spinning
World, pp. 205–26.
140. Prince Butler’s Tale: Representing The State of the Wooll-Case, or, The East-India Case
Truly Stated (London, 1699).
141. The NEIC did manage to gain some popular support through this debate thanks to the
drapers, who petitioned against the EIC for not importing enough calico, which meant the fabric
was being increasingly smuggled from Holland. Journal of the House of Commons, 1693–1697, pp.
30–31 (14 Dec. 1693).
142. Ibid., pp. 495–8 (7 Mar. 1696).
143. Eleven Queries Humbly Tender’ d, Relating to the Bill for Prohibiting the Wearing of East-
India Silks, and Printed and Dyed Calicoes (London?, 1700); An Answer to the Eleven Queries
(S.l., 1700).
144. For the wider economic impact of the Calico Acts, see P. O'Brien, T. Griffiths and P. Hunt,
‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English Cotton Textile
Industry’, Economic History Review, xliv (1991), pp. 399–423.

IV
England’s mercantilism was both a national and a global process. A

close study of the trading company debates of the 1690s reveals a world
in which the ‘centre city’ gained knowledge about the global economy
through the participation of private interests in London’s open archive
of petitions, pamphlets, private correspondence and Parliamentary de-
bate. While merchants sought the support of the state administration
by working with the fiscal-military system, contributions to the na-

tional interest were asserted primarily by drawing links between pri-
vate interests and national employment. The irony of the period is that
the centrality of national manufacturing to English political economy
was strengthened, rather than weakened, by the rise of new patterns
of global consumption driven by global trade. The increasingly global
world that we are now so familiar with as historians brought both
opportunities and challenges that caused people to look to the state for
support. Partly because of the cultural and social transformations that
global trade created, producers overestimated its actual economic im-
pact, and looked to the state to provide a response that supported both
their own interests and the national economy. Plentiful employment
was seen as crucial to the health of the nation, and, in relation to over-
seas commerce at least, the responsibility of the state.
In order to demonstrate the importance of England’s mercantilism
to global history, this article has explored the economic beliefs of the
emerging ‘middling sort’ whose petitions and writings were so signifi-
cant in the open archive. There is, however, an important broader link
between the perceived centrality of manufacturing employment as
depicted here, and the actual, growing significance of manufacturing
employment to the early modern English economy, driven by
increasing agricultural efficiency, urbanisation, overseas trade and the
various processes that made up the so-called ‘industrious revolution’.145
This relationship requires further research. Yet as a relationship it only
became significant thanks to the structures of England’s mercantilism,
which allowed producers across the country meaningfully to influence
political economy, and prized experience of the economy over empir-
ical evidence. Considering trading companies in their economic con-
text also allows us to see how atypical the debate over the EIC truly
was. The EIC’s arguments in favour of consumption were a product of
its position as an active competitor to England’s own textile industry.
Ironically, this may actually have saved its monopoly, although it came
at the price of the hugely consequential Calico Act, which was then
145. C. Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material
Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2011); Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient Distaff ” and
“Whirling Spindle”’.

strengthened in 1721.146 How England’s mercantilism evolved in the
eighteenth century is largely beyond the scope of this article. Perry
Gauci’s study of commercial interests and the French commercial treaty
of 1713 suggests that many of the same processes still applied, and em-
pirical ‘evidence’ was inaccurate, contested and peripheral.147
In 2019, Giovanni Levi wrote in his reflections on global microhistory
that, given the vital role played by international trade and competition
in global history, ‘we need to move on from the underestimation of
the role of states’.148 The trading company debates of the 1690s were

of huge significance. They established parliamentary legislation, rather
than trading companies, as the vehicle by which the state interacted
with the global economy and outlined the contours of England’s mer-
cantilist decision-making. In an environment in which credibility was
given to those who could claim to support the employment of others,
manufacturers who might never have left England’s shores had, or at
least believed they had, global knowledge. In forming England’s mer-
cantilism in this period, the views of local actors played an outsized role
in shaping how the state interacted with the global economy. The beliefs
of a clothier regarding how global trade was influencing his business
were prized, in public at least, above those of an established merchant
trading with India, the interests of the ivory worker over those of the
ivory trader. As global history continues to grapple with the role of state
action, studying the interaction of the local, the national and the global
in the creation of England’s mercantilism presents an opportunity for
historians to consider political economy as part of the wider, global
economy in which it was created and functioned.149 It is only through
recognising how ‘English’ England’s mercantilism was, in other words,
that it can fully become part of global history.
Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK HUGO BROMLEY
146. This second act is the much more familiar of the two, thanks largely to the work of
Daniel Defoe. See C. Wigston Smith, ‘“Callico Madams”: Servants, Consumption, and the Calico
Crisis’, Eighteenth-Century Life, xxxi, no. 2 (2007), pp. 29–55. This point was later made explicitly
in the company debates of the early eighteenth century; see Pettigrew and Van Cleve, ‘Parting
Companies’, p. 326.
147. Gauci, Politics of Trade, pp. 251–4.
148. G. Levi, ‘Frail Frontiers’, Past and Present, no. 242 (2020), p. 48.
149. See Newell, ‘Putting the “Political” Back in Political Economy’, p. 58. For a recent example
of the wider reappraisal of role of national interests in global economic history, see T. Burnard
and G. Riello, ‘Slavery and the New History of Capitalism’, pp. 225–44. See also P. O’Brien,
‘Provincialising the First Industrial Revolution’, Working Papers of the Global Economic History
Network (GEHN), no. 17/06 (2006).

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English Historical Review Vol. CXXXVIII No.

593 Advance Access publication 16 December 2023

England’s Mercantilism: Trading Companies,

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11. Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism’, esp. pp. 28–34.

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to those who benefit from and exploit new global interactions—pros-

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tween different types of global knowledge at the centre of England’s mer-

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Ever-developing global networks of commerce linked to London threw

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drove their attitudes to trading companies, particularly among the in-

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The dominance of Parliament rather than the Board of Trade prevented

59. Brewer, Sinews of Power, esp. pt 5.

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to such petitions varied. The Bristol petition listed only a number of

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The significance of Parliament and the wider English communities

89. Ibid., p. 87, 21 Dec. 1695.

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94. PA, HC/CL/JO/1/100, House of Commons Journal, 15 Feb. 1697.

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they ‘supported’ either by the name of the occupation, or as ‘families’.

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