The New Economic History and the Burdens of the Navigation Acts

IN a recent article, Gary Walton attempted to discover and then analyse basic defects of three different measures of burden of Navigation Acts. Like Sir Francis Bacon, he sought a vantage point from which to survey the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in vale below.2 The resulting evaluation unfortunately contributed more confusion than enlightenment to an already overcast landscape. In assessing work of Lawrence Harper,3 Walton makes two mistakes. The first is to confuse merits of Harper's techniques with merits of his conclusions. By no stretch of generosity can Harper's measurement techniques be labelled anything but nonsensical.4 Walton provides no evidence to contradict this view. He nevertheless suggests that only reason for preferring measurements of Thomas over those of Harper is because former are smaller than latter.5 If a measure is nonsensical, its magnitude is irrelevant. To discredit Harper's estimation procedure is of course not to prove that his final conclusions are incorrect. It does prove that measures in question cannot be used as supporting evidence for any given hypothesis. The second mistake of Walton is his assertion that Jonathan Hughes has eloquently and persuasively defended Harper's conclusions.6 Three rather different questions were examined by Harper: (i) Did entrepot provisions of Navigation Acts place a heavy burden upon colonists? (2) Was overall impact of British mercantilism detrimental to colonial development? (3) To what extent were real economic burdens a contributing cause to American Revolution? What Hughes Dointed out7 was that Robert Thomas's original articles

Assertion · Confusion · Economics · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Generosity · Law and economics · Laziness · Mercantilism · Mistake · Point (geometry) · Political science · Positive economics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Statistician · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology

• The Navigation Acts revisited

  L Sawers•The Economic History Review•1992

  Add to list

• Mercantilism and the American Revolution

  Open Access•Lawrence A Harper•Canadian Historical Review•1942

  Add to list