False Economy - Alan Beattie [87]
But the logic of mercantilism went beyond merely encouraging English shipping and trade, ultimately to arrive at an absurd conclusion. The wealth of England, as we saw in the chapter on water, had largely been built on wool. As the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden wrote: "Tho' Jason's fleece was fam'd of old, / The British wool is growing gold." But wool would not last forever. In the seventeenth century, the East India Company, a trading concern that would later run India as a contracted-out British imperial possession, first tried and failed to break the Dutch stranglehold on pepper imports from East Asia. It then turned what started as a sideline into one of its main operations—the import of cotton cloth, generally known as "calico," from India. Unsurprisingly, once people got a feel for cool, smooth cotton rather than hot and itchy woolens—think first of underwear—they went mad for it. Calico from India and linens from elsewhere, such as continental Europe, became fashionable.
Comfort and style were also cheap: clothes made of Indian calicoes were a third or a sixth the price of wool. In 1620, the East India Company imported 50,000 pieces of calico in total; by 1690, they were bringing in 265,000 neckcloths alone from just one of their three main producing areas, Madras.
Indian silk cloth also began to threaten the livelihoods of the weavers who imported silk thread to work themselves. The most visible were the Huguenots, French Protestants escaping religious persecution, who had become one of the East End of London's many successive waves of immigrants. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, there were around a hundred thousand of them in Spitalfields, an East End neighborhood today being swallowed up by London's financial district.
Big Wool and the silk weavers swung into action, and the last three decades of the seventeenth century witnessed a furious campaign of petitions to Parliament, endless polemical pamphlets, and, increasingly, mass demonstrations. The East India Company fought back with its own torrent of propaganda. And each insisted vehemently that they alone had the national interest on their side. A tract of 1696, poetically titled "An English Winding Sheet for Indian Manufacturers," complained of the calico trade: "In the end it must produce (except to the patentees) empty houses, empty purses, empty towns, a small, poor, weak and slender people, and what can we imagine the value of our land?"
The last point was a key one. The woolen industry has many of the attributes useful for getting trade protection: a substantial but often geographically concentrated and well-organized set of workers, with few immediate opportunities for employment elsewhere. But its lobbying power was improved by connections to a group who had more political clout: the better-ofF types who owned the land on which sheep grazed and who had lent money to the weavers. Local gentry and weavers were often bound together by links of debt, employment, and, sometimes, marriage. Younger sons of local gentry were often apprenticed to master craftsmen. If the wool industry went down, landowners would get hurt along with it.
The counter-lobby, meanwhile, had to overcome awkward charges of self-serving hypocrisy. The East India Company must have struggled to keep a straight face when arguing that what was good for the Company was good for the country. Sir Josiah Child, a politically well-connected