Beginnings of the American PeopleBecker, Carl L. (Carl Lotus)
History
Beginnings of the American People
Becker, Carl L. (Carl Lotus)
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783
It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when
they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may
in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and
present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of
Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the
tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's
commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial
carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English
and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial
products--sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the
so-called "enumerated" commodities--could be shipped only to England or
to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation
into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,--with the
exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland,
of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed
to be imported into England,--unless they were first landed in England.
In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial
consumers of colonial products, a third act was passed in 1673 providing
that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to
England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In
1705 rice, molasses, and naval stores were added to the list of
enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enforced,
were laid upon rum, molasses, and sugar imported from foreign islands
into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the
supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were passed
between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the
expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along
lines that did not bring it into competition with English agriculture or
manufactures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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