False Economy - Alan Beattie [88]
But the company was itself a monopoly, having exclusive rights to trade with the East Indies (South and East Asia), and owned by a limited number of "joint-stock" investors. Indian calicoes imported by the East India Company may have been cheaper than British wool or cloth from Turkey, but they also enjoyed freedom from competing English importers in Asia. As John Cary, a mercantilist writer, argued: "The proposition that trade should be free, I allow, if it is thereby meant that trade should not be monopolised by Joint Stocks." An association of linen drapers who dealt in Indian calicoes also pushed for free trade, and was less vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy (if not thinly disguised self-interest) but it was the East India Company that took the lead in lobbying.
Parliament at this time was dominated by the landed gentry, but some were amenable to persuasion, and Sir Josiah spread money liberally around the more malleable members. The East India Company's accounts for 1691 showed a remarkable special item of £11,372 for "secret service," a euphemism for the greasing of palms.
Thus a pattern emerged that would be repeated hundreds of times in trade disputes down the centuries. Two groups of producers, one with an interest in cheap imports and one in defense of domestic production, both argued for their particular interests and claimed that theirs was identical with that of the nation as a whole. For the wool and silk weavers, think today's South Carolina textile producers, or European sugar farmers, or the Caribbean banana growers. For the linen drapers and the East India Company, think Wal-Mart, or the Brazilian ethanol industry, or the U.S. fruit companies Del Monte and Chiquita. The voices of the consumers who had to don woolen underwear (and today's equivalents who have to buy overpriced bras, sugar, and bananas), if indeed they were raised, were barely heard.
Workers and landowners with their livelihoods at stake have a way of making sure they get attention. The composition of the protectionist alliance met two of the conditions that make trade lobbies effective: it was concentrated enough to campaign well, but broad enough to plausibly claim widespread support. Their first big victory was a resolution by Parliament in 1678 commanding all English people to wear only woolen apparel during winter, defined as the period between All Saints' Day (November 1) and the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25). And if it was hard to force the living to wear wool, the dead would complain less: all corpses for burial, Parliament said, must henceforth be wrapped in woolen cloth.
The East India Company, which had close links to the crown, lost one of its most important champions when King James II, the last of the Stuart house of monarchs, was deposed in 1688. Sir Josiah was a Tory, a party that had emerged out of the supporters of the monarchy, and the Company was widely regarded as a Tory stronghold. So when the opposing Whig Party won power in Parliament in 1695, its enemies were both economic and political. Petitions from around the country poured into Parliament: the silk weavers of Canterbury, the wool weavers of Norwich (who claimed that 100,000 people depended on their industry), the yarn makers of Cambridge. A bill of 1696 that would have prohibited "all wrought silks, Bengalis, dyed, printed or stained calicoes of the product of India or Persia or any place within the charter of the East India Company which shall be imported into this kingdom" did well in the House of Commons but died in the upper House of Lords, dominated as it was by Tory magnates.