The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [80]
Fate has but little distinction set
Between a Counter and a Coronet.
The growth of the amount of money in circulation came principally from increased trade. During the Republic, the great Navigation Acts of 1651 had paved the way for England’s mercantile expansion. They were later described by Adam Smith as ‘perhaps the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England’. The acts made all colonies, whether privately established or chartered by the Crown, subordinate to Parliament. All trade with them was to be in English ships. The aim was to deny foreign fleets, and in particular that of the Dutch, the benefits of trade with the needy foreign markets.
A general view of the City of London in the middle of the eighteenth century. The view is up-river: the square shape of the Tower can be seen on the extreme right.
The immediate effect was to double the tonnage of English shipping by the end of the century and to quadruple the amount of import and export trade, of which fully 15 per cent was with the colonies. The hegemony of the Dutch over international trade was broken in a series of wars between 1652 and 1674, after they had refused an English offer of political union.
The English now began to reap the full benefit of importing and re-exporting tobacco, cod, sugar and furs to the rest of Europe. Thanks to the Navigation Acts, the old trading companies that had held monopolies in international trade were no longer necessary. Trading and the associated institutions became increasingly centred in London, the country’s chief port, with growing docklands and warehouses along the Thames. Much money was to be made, as the acts allowed merchants to import cheap and sell dear. By the end of the century trade was also opened with the Baltic, Africa, Russia and Newfoundland. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was ouMraded and then annexed, to be renamed New York. From the East Indies came spices, coffee and tea. From the West Indies came sugar, rum and molasses, and from America, tobacco.
As the flood of goods increased, men became more aware of the need for regulatory legislation. Since Descartes’ Discourse on Method in 1637, ‘mechanical’ had become a catchword. Everything seemed amenable to mechanical application. The analogies came to be used in reference to government and the functioning of society. No longer was the community an organism, to be directed by its head. The idea grew of a society of various different parts acting in concert, of a machine whose function could be improved. Scientific laws that caused the universe to work should work among men too. The collection of information recommended by the physicists gave rise to the appointment of Charles Davenant as statistician to the new Board of Trade. The Civil Service was growing by leaps and bounds. The postal service was inaugurated.
Although rational methods were felt to be applicable to social problems, the new thinking did not extend into academic life. The two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, remained suffocated by Bishop Laud’s ultra-conservative rulings of the mid-seventeenth century. Teaching was still firmly medieval. Dialectics reigned supreme and the BA degree consisted of studies in grammar, rhetoric, ethics and politics, much as it had two hundred years earlier.
Innovation came mainly from the newly successful merchants. One of these, Sir Dudley North, had borrowed the money to join the Levant Company, had gone to Turkey at the age of nineteen, and by thirty was the biggest merchant in the area, exchanging English wool and metal in Constantinople for spices, wine, cotton and currants. In 1692, already a Commissioner of Customs and an MP, he wrote extensively on trade. ‘The value of gold is defined, as is all, by supply and demand,’ he said. ‘Riches come from productivity not from control…. The market finds its best level