362
JohnJ.
McCusker
cerns of businessmen. Central to that difference, as far as the North
Americans were concerned, was the government's attitude toward the
colonists' own economic behavior. As long as what the colonists did
increased the taxable trade of the Empire, mercantilists were content.
When what the colonists were doing somehow competed with metropoli-
tan businessmen, capitalists were not happy.'
8
English business groups,
increasingly adept at pulling the levers of political power, pushed Parlia-
ment to deal harshly with tax-dodgers in the colonies.
39
They brushed
aside colonial constitutional objections as mere words.
So
far from mercan-
tilist doctrine had Westminster and Whitehall strayed by the 1760s and
1770s that plans were even discussed in government circles to circum-
scribe the commercial activity of the colonists, perhaps to restrict them
each to the carrying trade of their own colonies.
40
The potential for a
colonial empire more strictly divided into colonial providers of raw materi-
als and metropolitan producers of finished manufactures, whatever the
immediate implications for central government finance, seemed altogether
appropriate to those who shared such thinking. Thence came a rebellion, a
rebellion that, just like such thinking, had nothing to do with the Acts of
Trade and nothing to do with mercantilism.
'
B
See, in this regard, Bernard Donoughue's explanation as to why the merchants of Great Britain
withdrew their support of the colonists' cause on the eve of the American Revolution (British Politics
and the American Revolution: The
Path
to
War,
1773-75 {London,
1964],
150-6).
» Should one be at all tempted to think that the Stamp Act of 1765 was solely a revenue measure, he or
she should read about the fiercely repressive way in which the British government applied essentially
the same law in Ireland, Great Britain's oldest colony. For the law, see the Act of
13
and 14 George III,
c. 6, in [Ireland (Eire), Laws and Statutes],
The
Statutes
at
Large,
Passed in
the
Parliaments
Held in Ireland
from . . . 1310 . . . to 1800, 20 vols. (Dublin, 1786—1801), X, 366—79. For its execution, see
M[ary] Pollard, Dublin's Trade in
Books,
1550-1800 (Oxford, 1989), 22-30.
<f Precisely these restrictions were imposed as part of the punitive measures that Parliament passed in
the spring of 1775 (15 George III, c. 10; 15 George III, c. 18). They were said to be temporary and
coercive in nature, but that did not prevent John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the
Admiralty, from arguing during the debate over the second bill's passage that it should be made "a
perpetual law of commercial regulation, operating to extend our trade, to increase our seamen, and
to strengthen our naval power." [Great Britain, Parliament], The Parliamentary History of England
from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, edited by William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London, 1806-20),
XVIII, 448. The "our" in Lord Sandwich's pronouncement had none of the inclusive sense common
to the Acts of Trade.
Compare the nearly contemporary comment by Charles Whitworth, State of
the
Trade of Great
Britain
in
Its
Imports
and
Exports Progressively from
the
Year
1697
{to
1773)
....
(London, 1776), lv,
on the reason for the establishment of the colony of Georgia: "... to turn the industry of this new
people from the timber and provision trade, which the other colonies had prosecuted too largely,
into channels more advantageous to the public." The "other colonies," had been engaging in trade
"too largely," which he deemed was not "advantageous to the public"!
Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the
American
Revolution, x, calls all the post-1764 laws and
regulations an "anti-trade policy" - and they were.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008