Free Passage” for the “King's True Liegemen”
The Meaning of Free Trade in a Corporate Age, 1555–1624
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10067733 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D C Pennington (0000-0002-8256-789X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 282-300 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/jbr.2023.114 |
| OpenAlex | W4391893466 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 29 |
Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. It traces the origins of these ideas to protests in the sixteenth century and shows how a broad coalition of interests drew upon ideas of property rights and the ancient constitution to challenge the new companies. So compelling were free trade arguments that they became a commonplace in the economic debates of an emerging public sphere. A reconsideration of the free trade campaign that is attentive to interactions and negotiations between the Privy Council, Parliament, and the public highlights the ability of the early modern state before the 1630s to readjust the political economy of the commonwealth
Epistemology · Genealogy · Meaning (existential · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Philosophy
Merchants and revolution
Commercial crisis and change in England, 1600-1642
Institutions and European Trade
The Rise of Europe
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
The Company-State
But a New Button to an Old Coat’
Constitutions and Commitment
Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
The Eastland Trade and the Common Weal in the Seventeenth Century
A History of the Levant Company
Outsourcing Empire
His neighbours land mark'
Alderman Cockayne's Project and the Cloth Trade
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |