Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (80 page)

Overseas trade may not have anchored the British economy, but it got the most attention from contemporary writers and government officials. In fact, the desire to expand England’s foreign trade figured in every decision to go to war between 1585 and 1763. The Commonwealth and restored Stuart governments had laid important foundations for growth in the Navigation Acts and the acquisition of territory in the West Indies. The former helped break the commercial domination of the Dutch; the latter made possible the lucrative sugar trade. Meanwhile, the period 1650–1730 saw another boom in the American colonial population (including the British West Indies and, from 1713, Newfoundland, but excluding slaves) from 55,000 to 538,000. That population supplied about half of Britain’s transatlantic imports and absorbed almost a quarter of its exports. In addition, the period after the Revolution of 1688–9 saw the loosening of the old trading company monopolies, such as the Royal Africa Company, and the Russia Company; the penetration of English trade into new markets; the continued rise of the new draperies; and the expansion of credit facilities with the stock market boom and financial revolution. The East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company were virtually the only chartered monopolies that survived into the Hanoverian period, the latter continuing in operation today. Against this could be placed the wartime devastation wrought by French privateers on English shipping. But the eventual harvest from the wars against France was a bumper crop for trade: above all, the commercial provisions of Utrecht, which expanded British trade in the Mediterranean, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Spanish colonies.

Overall, British trade grew in total gross value from £7.9 million in 1663–9 to £14.5 million by 1722–4. Imports rose 40 percent between 1700 and 1750, passing exports in value, for Britain’s most important trade was no longer the export of wool but the importation of sugar from the West Indies and the reexport of sugar, colonial produce, or Asian goods to Europe. Sugar was the premier commodity of the eighteenth century. Demand was insatiable, rising from £26.2 million in the late 1660s, to £42.5 million by the early 1700s, to £92.6 million by the late 1720s. Increasingly, African slaves harvested that sugar as the notorious “triangular trade” hit its stride. First, English slavers shipped metal goods and textiles to Africa where they were traded for native people, usually captives in local wars. In the second leg of the triangle, the infamous “middle passage,” those captives were then transported, under appalling conditions, to the New World at the rate of over 5,000 a year. Altogether, perhaps 1.4 million Africans were shipped by British slavers to the Americas between 1662 and 1749, one fifth dying before ever reaching land. If they survived the voyage they might be sold to plantation owners in the Spanish colonies; or in the British West Indies, for whom they harvested sugar; or in Virginia and the Carolinas, where they harvested tobacco. That sugar and tobacco were then sent to American or British ports for refining and distribution to Great Britain and Europe – the third leg of this notorious triangle of demand, greed, and cruelty. As for the slaves, wherever they ended up, they were treated like human machinery, forced to work in a sweltering climate under brutal conditions on vast plantations whose landlords were often resident in the mother country. The Herefordshire squire Ferdinando Gorges (ca. 1628–1701) is a prime example: he was known as “king of the Blacks” because he first made his wealth as a Barbados slave trader before investing it in land during the late seventeenth century. In short, much of Britain’s prosperity in the Augustan period and beyond was erected on the backs of captive Africans and at the expense of Native Americans driven slowly from what had once been their land.

Asian goods amounted to just 13 percent of England’s total import trade. They were led by imports of cottons, silks, spices, and indigo from India and, by the 1720s, tea from China. Unfortunately, the East India Company still had little but wool to offer in return, though the new draperies were somewhat more attractive than the old heavy woolens. For the most part, therefore, the English paid for Asian goods with bullion (silver and gold), some £537,000 a year by the 1720s.

The English people increasingly wanted and could afford what their empire and trading partners had to offer. As population growth slowed down and the labor market shrank, wages rose, providing more disposable income for ordinary men and women. Large landowners, professionals, merchants, and monied men were doing well enough to demand luxury items. They wanted madeira and port wine from Portugal; figs, raisins, and oranges from Spain; silks and olive oil from Italy; sugar, tobacco, furs, and salt-fish from America; coffee from the Middle East; and, as we have just seen, the many goods of India and China.
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The continent wanted these things too; British merchants, British sea captains, and British ports exploited this desire, dominating the reexport trade, which rose 76 percent between 1700 and 1750. Since the Navigation Acts stipulated that every commodity sent to or from a British colony or possession had to ship in an English (after 1707 a British) vessel, captained by an Englishman with a mostly English crew, the English merchant marine expanded to meet the demand. It rose from 115,000 ships in 1629 to 323,000 in 1702, becoming the largest in the world. Since the same legislation required that most of this trade (including all bulk items, like sugar) had to pass through an English (from 1707 British) port, the yields to the king from Customs grew, as did the wealth of his merchant subjects. Most of this trade flowed to Britain and the continent through London: in 1722–4 the metropolis handled 80 percent of England’s imports, 67 percent of its exports, and 87 percent of its reexports. But the trade boom also enriched western ports like Bristol, Liverpool, and, in Scotland, Glasgow. Cities with naval bases and dockyards, like Plymouth and Portsmouth, also grew with the wars. Britain had become the great crossroads of the world’s trade.

Later in the century, the British economy would make another leap by becoming the first to industrialize. Even by 1714 English industry had taken the first tentative steps toward greater use of machines and mass production, stimulated by the wars and demand born of prosperity. By 1688 Englishmen and women purchased 3 million hats a year and 10 million pairs of stockings to go in 12 million pairs of shoes. These products could still be manufactured by hand, to order, in small shops, but shipbuilding on the coasts, coal-mining in Durham and the Midlands, tin-mining in Cornwall, and iron-mining in Yorkshire all required many workers in one place. More specifically, in 1711 the various royal dockyards on the Thames and south coast employed over 6,500 people. Between 1709 and 1713 Abraham Darby (1678–1717) perfected a method for smelting iron using coke (pre-heated coal) instead of charcoal. The significance of this process for the coal-rich, but increasingly timber-poor British Isles should be obvious. His family’s blast furnace in Shropshire would become the center of a thriving iron industry, with workers eventually brought in from as far away as Bristol. In 1724 John Lombe’s silk mill at Derby employed 300 women and children working two 12-hour shifts – the first real textile factory, accompanied by the exploitation of labor that went with it. The cities that would spearhead the industrial revolution – Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield – were already notable centers for the production of metal goods in 1714. By the early eighteenth century, Sheffield scissorsmiths, filesmiths, and razormakers were catering to markets in London, Virginia, Jamaica, and elsewhere. Immigrants, many of them war refugees attracted by religious toleration and free trade, were important innovators: French Huguenots and other Protestants driven from the continent by Louis XIV spurred the English porcelain, clock, silk, and paper industries. But most manufacturing still relied either on the small craftsman working with apprentices and family members in his shop; or, in the textile industry especially, the “putting-out” system, whereby a cotton factor, say, would distribute raw materials to individual housewives over a wide geographic area for spinning and weaving. Some historians have begun referring to the “industrious revolution,” in order to emphasize the many female hands that powered this household-based production, in contrast to the machinery-driven, factory production of the future.

Such a traditional, decentralized system of manufacture depended, paradoxically, on an increasingly sophisticated system of distribution and communication. A growing service economy facilitated the movement of goods and services throughout England, making possible specialized centers such as Sheffield. A more integrated national transportation grid emerged, often with Parliament’s active encouragement. Parliamentary statutes authorized the dredging of rivers, the building of canals, and the establishment of turnpikes. Bulky items like grain and coal were shipped down the many navigable rivers or along the coasts. But cattle, always shipped to market on the hoof, needed roads. Turnpikes were toll-roads which could be much better maintained over long distances than the patchwork of back-roads maintained by parish authorities. By the mid-1650s there were regular stage services between London and Exeter to the west, Chester to the north-west, and York and Newcastle to the north. Important routes would begin, end, and cross other routes at large inns. These provided not only accommodation but food, drink, entertainment, postal services, stabling, and a place where businessmen, such as drovers who brought cattle to market or corn factors who transported grain, could make deals. Wares could also be displayed and deals made at fairs and in the great market towns. But after 1660 fairs and markets grew less necessary as the transportation network improved and as craftsmen increasingly sold their goods in established shops with a ready stock. According to one estimate, the number of market towns fell from about 800 in 1690 to just under 600 by 1720. Finally, the more remote parts of the countryside also relied on less substantial traders – peddlers, hawkers, chapmen, and tinkers – to distribute books, metalware, ribbons, and other small manufactured goods. These individuals could not afford accommodation so grand as an inn, often taking shelter in a farmer’s barn or hayloft.

If the transportation system was developing, so were the nation’s information and credit facilities. The establishment of the London penny post and regular newspapers at the end of the seventeenth century made it possible to keep track of business in far-flung parts of the British Isles and to follow the shipping news. At the same time, some of the big goldsmith-banking houses evolved into fully fledged banks. There were 25 of these in London by the 1720s. They received deposits, paid out interest, issued notes of exchange, and made loans. Since the legal rate of interest was, for much of the period, under 6 percent, money was relatively cheap, loans readily accessible, and new ventures easy to start. Thus, by 1714 the wealthy aristocrat, successful merchant, or well-off widow had some real choices in what to do with his or her money: deposit it with a bank, or invest it in government bonds, one of the great trading companies, or one of the new stock companies which proliferated from the 1690s. New companies sold stock in products and ventures as diverse as glass bottles, convex street lights, lute strings, sword blades, burgler alarms, gunpowder, mines, and fisheries. As this variety implies, the government did not regulate the new stock market at first; nor were professional standards very high. Until the first real London stock exchange was established in 1773, “jobbers” traded stocks in the informal surroundings of Jonathan’s or Garroway’s coffee-houses. There was as yet nothing to prevent a charlatan from selling stock in a company which did not exist or had no real prospect of producing a profit. The catastrophe of the South Sea Bubble was only the most notable symptom of the “Wild West” nature of this side of economic life. Of the 93 joint-stock companies in existence in 1695, only 21 were still around in 1717. Needless to say, stockjobbers and brokers had a very low reputation. Nevertheless, here more than in any other branch of the Augustan economy, a small investment could yield a big profit in very little time. But whole fortunes could be lost just as fast.

The ever-present sense of risk led to some modern solutions. The first insurance companies, enabling policy-holders to share their risk with others, appeared in London at the end of the seventeenth century. By the 1680s it was possible to purchase fire insurance; marine insurance, against shipping losses, came even earlier. Once again, new requirements led to informal, ad hoc arrangements which were institutionalized only after our period. Thus, Lloyd’s of London began life as the coffee-house where merchant investors and captains met; later in the eighteenth century it would evolve into the greatest marine insurance company in the world. Altogether, the initiatives described above were moving early Hanoverian England toward an integrated national economy which was also at the center of world trade.

The Ruling Elite and its Culture

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the landed aristocracy (the nobility and the gentry) still ruled. The British nobility (those holding the titles of duke, marquess, earl, viscount, or baron) consisted of: about 180 English peers whose titles gave them the right to sit in the House of Lords at Westminster; about 50 Scottish peers, 16 of whom were elected as representatives to the Lords; and about 150 Irish peers, all of whom sat in the upper house of the Irish Parliament. The English peerage had expanded in size under the later Stuarts, partly because successive governments used aristocratic titles to reward powerful supporters and to ensure majorities in the Lords. Despite this expansion in numbers, the titled nobility still comprised but a tiny minority of the British population, not approaching even 1 percent. In fact, because the Whig majority in the Lords was so secure, the growth rate slowed after 1714, restricting new blood from entering the peerage. Thus, there is some sense of the upper classes “closing ranks” and distancing themselves from their inferiors at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This “withdrawal of the elite” manifested itself physically in the impressive gates and high walls which they increasingly erected around their manor houses. It was also apparent in the emotional reserve and aura of self-control which they erected around their persons, having picked it up, along with a smattering of Latin, at exclusive public schools and universities. Still, the English peerage remained far more open to new men than its European counterparts. It also remained paramount in the countryside. While the days of private affinities were long gone, local government, the militia in particular, was still, in effect, at the lord lieutenant’s beck and call – as James II had found to his cost in 1688.