Irish Colonial Trade in the Eighteenth Century

HE above quotation well expresses the prevailing orthodoxies of mercantile legislation and thought in the Old Empire. Although its unknown author was apparently an Irishman writing to urge the relaxation of certain restrictions on Irish trade, few Englishmen would have dissented from his statement of principles, nor would many colonials have disagreed. Before I763 arguments about trade regulations arose primarily over how to evaluate the balance of metropolitan and imperial interests, not over the value of the mercantilist system itself. In the past sixty years much has been written about the effects of British regulations upon the American colonies. George L. Beer maintained that the colonies suffered relatively little from British restrictions, partly because some of the trade laws benefited the colonial interests and partly because of widespread evasion. Lawrence A. Harper disagreed and, discounting the importance of illicit trade, maintained that the Navigation Acts definitely hampered the colonies. More recently Oliver M. Dickerson has argued that British trade laws prior to I764 did more to benefit than to harm the colonies. Yet despite disagreements scholars of colonial history all recognize that the economic policies of the Old Empire were neither totally iniquitous in design nor universally harmful in operation

British Empire · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Irish · Legislation · Mercantilism · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy

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