Navigation Acts: Information from Answers.com

Navigation Acts were intended to protect English (later British) commerce from foreign competition. This assumed that the volume of world trade was finite and that any gain by one country could only be at the expense of another. The great Act of 1651 was aimed at the Dutch carrying trade. It required that all imports should be carried in ships either owned by English subjects or owned by the nationals of the country from which the goods came. The Navigation Acts were abolished in 1849, a final step towards making Britain a free trade economy.

Navigation Acts had their origin in Britain's regulation of its coastal trade, which was extended to the British colonies as they developed. Parliament enacted the first Navigation Act in 1660, although this legislation had its roots in earlier policy. By the close of the seventeenth century, Parliament had put other Navigation Acts in place and had installed colonial officials to enforce them through a system of admiralty courts, which had jurisdiction in cases involving trade law. The purpose of the Navigation Acts was two fold: to protect British shipping against competition from the Dutch and other foreign powers, and to grant British merchants a monopoly on colonial commodities such as Tobacco and Sugar. The Navigation Acts came about in the context of Mercantilism, the dominant economic system of the time among the European powers. According to mercantilist thought, a nation could measure its wealth in bullion, or its accumulated supply of gold. According to conventional wisdom, because there existed a finite supply of gold in the world, there also existed a finite supply of wealth. An imperial power acquired colonies for the purpose of expanding its wealth—preferably through the discovery of gold, but also through the production of natural resources, which colonists would ship to the mother country, where manufacturers would process these raw materials into wealth-producing finished products. According to the mercantilist economic model, therefore, a system of open trade could only result in the loss of wealth. To retain material wealth in the imperial realm, a trading power had to utilize its colonies' resources within a closed-trade system, such as the one that the Navigation Acts implemented.

Under these acts, British colonies in Asia, Africa, and America could import and export goods only in English vessels, and three-fourths of each crew was to be English. Other clauses stipulated that England could import products from its colonies in Asia, Africa, or America on English vessels and that goods from foreign countries could arrive in England only on English vessels or on the vessels of the country from which the goods originated. In effect, the Navigation Acts gave English subjects (defined as anyone living within the British realm) and English ships a legal monopoly of all trade between various colonial ports and between these ports and England. Even the trade between colonial ports and foreign countries was limited to English vessels. Thus, foreign vessels were excluded entirely from colonial ports and could trade only at ports in the British Isles.

Another field of legislation related to commodities. The Navigation Acts "enumerated" certain colonial products, which could be exported from the place of production only to another British colony or to England. At first the list included tobacco, sugar, Indigo, Cotton, Wool, ginger, and fustic and other dyewoods. Later, Parliament extended the list to include Naval Stores, Hemp, Rice, Molasses, Beaver skins, Furs, Copper ore, Iron, and Lumber. In addition, the colonies could import Asian goods and European manufactures only from England—although an exception was made in the case of Salt or wine from the Azores or the Madeira Islands and food products from Ireland or Scotland. Parliament implemented a system of bonds to enforce the trade of enumerated commodities under the Navigation Acts. These bonds required the master of the vessel to comply with the provisions of the acts. Such arrangements operated so as to give American shipowners a practical monopoly of the trade between the continental and West Indian colonies. Residents of Great Britain in turn had a general monopoly of the carrying of the heavy enumerated goods from the colonies to the British Isles.

Colonists were largely limited to buying British manufactures. This was not necessarily a disadvantage, because an elaborate system of export bounties was provided so that British goods were actually cheaper in the colonies than similar foreign goods. These bounties averaged more than £38,000 per year for the ten years preceding the Revolution. From 1757 to 1770 the bounties on British linens exported to the colonies totaled £346,232 according to British treasury reports. In addition to bounties, there was a series of rebates, or drawbacks, of duties on European goods exported to the colonies. These, too, ran into formidable sums. Those to the West Indies alone amounted to £34,000 in 1774. The average payments from the British treasury in bounties and drawbacks on exports to the colonies in 1764 amounted to about £250,000 sterling per year.

Closely related to the Navigation Acts was another series of measures called the Trade Acts, which are usually confused with the Navigation Acts proper. Most of these were enacted after 1700, and they gradually developed into a complicated system of trade control and encouragement. The general plan was to make the entire British Empire prosperous and the trade of one section complementary to that of other sections. The Trade Acts employed a variety of measures to encourage the colonial production of goods desired in Britain. These laws gave colonial tobacco a complete monopoly of the home market by prohibiting its growth in England and imposing heavy import duties on the competing Spanish tobacco. The Trade Acts encouraged production of other colonial goods through tariff duties, which discriminated sharply in favor of the colonial product and against the competing foreign product. The legislation also granted rebates for some colonial commodities for which production exceeded British demand. Rebates facilitated the flow of these items through British markets to their foreign destinations. In other cases, regulations permitted exports of surplus colonial products, such as rice, directly to foreign colonies and to southern Europe without passing through England. In still other cases, Parliament allowed direct cash bounties on such colonial products as hemp, indigo, lumber, and Silk upon their arrival in England. These alone totaled more than £82,000 from 1771 to 1775. Naval stores also received liberal bounties, totaling £1,438,762 from 1706 to 1774, and at the time of the Revolution were averaging £25,000 annually.

Overall, the navigation system was mutually profitable to colonies and mother country. Resistance to the acts emerged periodically, however. In the late seventeenth century, for example, colonists complained that James II used the Navigation Acts to hamper colonial economic autonomy. Colonists also resisted British attempts to use trade law as taxation measures. Occasionally, parliamentary prohibitions discouraged colonial industries if they threatened serious competition with an important home industry. Notable examples include prohibitions of the intercolonial export of hats made in the colonies (1732; see Hat Manufacture, Colonial Restriction on) and wool grown or manufactured in the colonies (1699). In this case, the powerful Company of Felt-Makers in London became alarmed at the increasing number of hats that colonial manufacturers were distributing throughout the British colonies and in southern Europe. In response to these complaints, Parliament passed legislation that regulated apprenticeships for hatmakers and slowed the growth of this industry. In another instance, Parliament—responding to English manufacturers who feared colonial competition—forbade the establishment of new mills to produce wrought iron and steel (1750). The same legislation encouraged the production and export of pig iron and bar iron, which benefitted both the colonies and the mother country. Laws such as these produced some local complaint, although they evidently affected few people, because many ignored the more restrictive aspects of the regulations.

More common than resistance to the law was simple negligence—either by ignoring specific restrictions, as hat and iron manufacturers often did, or by Smuggling. Evidence indicates that smuggling flourished in the colonies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Parliament's delays in empowering customs agents, the distance between Britain and its colonies, and the length and complex geography of the North American coastline all made thorough enforcement of the Navigation and Trade Acts nearly impossible. As a result, foreign goods proliferated throught the colonies, and many colonial materials left North America on foreign vessels. Other evidence of smuggling included the frequent abuse of customs agents and the preponderance of bribery, forgery, and other fraud among customs agents and colonial merchants alike. Smuggling was so prevalent that, in the mid-eighteenth century, measures such as the Revenue Act (also known as the Sugar Act, 1764) and the Tea Act (1773), which reduced duties in the legitimate trade while cracking down on smugglers, sparked some of the fiercest patriot resistance.

As long as the trade and navigation laws were limited to the regulation of trade and the promotion of the total commerce of the empire, they generally found support in eighteenth-century America. The enumerated products came largely from the colonies that remained loyal. The bounties went largely to the colonies that revolted. The New England shipping industry depended greatly on the protection that the Navigation Acts ensured. Consequently, the First Continental Congress approved the navigation system in its resolutions, and Benjamin Franklin offered to have the acts reenacted by every colonial legislature in America and to guarantee them for a hundred years if Britain abandoned efforts to tax the American colonies.

Bibliography

Andrews, K. R., et al. The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1979.

Carr, Lois Green, et al., eds. Colonial Chesapeake Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Church, R. A., ed. The Coal and Iron Industries. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Kammen, Michael G. Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970.

McCusker, John J., and Kenneth Morgan, eds. The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

The Navigation laws enforced a system of economic management designed to ensure that England's colonial trade was controlled for the benefit of the mother country. There was nothing unique in this arrangement, later referred to as mercantilism, since all the major European powers operated similar systems. Unfortunately, the weak state of England during the second quarter of the seventeenth century meant that much of its colonial trade had been taken over by foreign powers, notably the Dutch. Accordingly, in 1651 the Commonwealth Parliament introduced the first Navigation Act, which required that all plantation goods imported into England be shipped in vessels owned and (three-quarters) manned by Englishmen or in vessels belonging to the country of origin. The expectation was that these restrictions would exclude the Dutch from England's colonial commerce while increasing England's wealth and naval power. The immediate result was the first Anglo-Dutch Naval War of 1652–1654.

Despite the successful exclusion of the Dutch from the carrying trade, it was quickly perceived that the act of 1651 was deficient because it still allowed colonial goods to be shipped directly to Europe in the vessels of other nations, resulting in a loss of revenue and trade to the mother country. Accordingly, a new bill was drafted in 1660 that not only banned foreign vessels from English colonial ports but declared that certain high-value commodities such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and indigo must be shipped to England before being reexported elsewhere. However, because the colonies were not only exporters of raw materials but also importers of finished goods, a third Navigation Act was deemed necessary in 1663 to ensure that foreign manufactures reached the colonies only via England, where they first could be taxed, to make them less competitive with English products, while at the same time raising revenue for the crown.

While the acts of 1660 and 1663 constituted the heart of the system of navigation laws, further measures proved necessary over time. In 1673 a fourth act was passed to bring the colonies into line regarding the enumerated duties, notably the one penny duty on a pound of tobacco and the five shilling duty on a hundredweight of white sugar, which up to this time were collected only in England. Then in 1696 a new administrative agency, the Board of Trade, was established to monitor the system more effectively. Simultaneously, special vice-admiralty courts were created to punish those breaking the acts of trade.

Until this time the colonies had been seen primarily as producers of exotic goods and consumers of British manufactures. Now a new consideration began to influence British imperial policy: the need to protect metropolitan producers from colonial competition. In 1699 the Woollen Act was passed, which banned the export of colonial woolen garments to Britain. It was followed in 1732 by the Hat Act and in 1750 by the Iron Act, both similarly aimed at prohibiting (or at least regulating) the production of finished articles in the colonies. These acts, however, were poorly enforced and largely unnecessary since colonial output was rarely of sufficient quality to challenge British manufacturers.

Opinions vary about the economic effects of the Navigation Acts. Most historians believe that the system on balance was beneficial to the colonies: the advantages of being part of an expanding British economy greatly outweighed the disadvantages of these poorly enforced trade restrictions. In any case, there were few complaints about the Navigation Acts in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. Indeed, the Americans, finding that economic independence was not necessarily as attractive as political independence, sought to negotiate partial reentry into Britain's mercantilist system after the Peace Treaty of 1783.

Bibliography

Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. Princeton, 1978.

Dickerson, Oliver M. The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution. New York, 1963.

Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada. New York, 1998.

Mc Cusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985.

Shepherd, James F., and Gary M. Walton. Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America. Cambridge, U.K., 1972.

—RICHARD MIDDLETON