English Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century

Rejecting the Dutch Model

Seiichiro Ito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000227192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

In the seventeenth century, England saw Holland as an economic power to learn from and compete with. English Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century: Rejecting the Dutch Model analyses English economic discourse during this period, and explores the ways in which England's economy was shaped by the example of its Dutch rival.

Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, the chapters explore four key areas of controversy in order to illuminate the development of English economic thought at this time. These areas include: the herring industry; the setting of interest rates; banking and funds; and land registration and credit. The links between each of these debates are highlighted, and attention is also given to the broader issues of international trade, social reform and credit.

This book is of strong interest to advanced students and researchers of the history of economic thought, economic history and intellectual history.

1
Herring fishing

As we saw in the introductory section, it has been common knowledge among historians that the United Provinces, particularly Holland, held hegemony in the seventeenth century in both European and global trade. However, how did the English people living in the seventeenth century view the success of the Dutch economy? How did they analyse the situation of England and Holland in the ongoing power shift among the European countries? More specifically, how did the English envy the Dutch and ponder ways to emulate their tough rival? The English pamphlet – or manuscript – writers explored measures to improve their trade and catch up to the Dutch. With the intention to learn from Holland, numerous lists of Dutch advantages were presented in diverse forms by various types of writers. One list or, often, plural lists were provided by one writer. In the mid-century, as we will see in subsequent chapters, the Hartlibian reformers proposed projects chosen from their lists of measures for social improvement. Those Hartlibian lists consisted of ideas that were supposed to improve society and trade.¹ All of those ideas found their ideal models in Dutch society. Almost all aspects of a society were on the agenda. Banking and the registration of estates, which I examine in Chapters 3 and 4, were two of the topics discussed ardently by the Hartlibians. The concept of such lists may have come from Francis Bacon’s desiderata, the list of wanted knowledge that the human had lost.² However, throughout the century, merchants and fishers who were neither familiar with academic knowledge nor committed to such Baconian programmes also continued to produce lists of Dutch advantages, and they insisted that the English should imitate some of them. Among these advantages, fishing trade and low interest rates garnered the most concern. The lowness of the interest rates in Holland was, as we will see in Chapter 2, the central issue in the controversy launched in 1668 by Josiah Child. In addition, during the first half of the century, fishery was the issue in which English economic writers were most interested.³ How to make the English fishing trade thrive was a topic discussed by many writers in their pamphlets and manuscripts. In this chapter, I focus on this discussion.

Craig Muldrew in his 2011 book revealed that early modern English people consumed an unexpectedly large amount of meat, and such consumption drove the industriousness of the labourers. However, Muldrew only briefly touches on fish as the food of labourers, remarking that fish was ‘mostly absent from any diet or sources mentioning labourers’ food’.⁴ Nevertheless, even if true, as far as was perceived from the literature at the time, fishing-related businesses were among the favourite topics for economic writers of seventeenth-century England.⁵ They all insisted that fishery was the key trade that would not only resolve the difficulties that they were currently facing, such as the poor’s idleness and national security, but also develop the essential engine to improve English trade as a whole. Therefore, fishing was the issue that was most deeply committed to the English economy’s future and should be discussed.

It was a consciously successive debate. The participants in those discussions were usually aware of their forerunning printed and handwritten literature on which their discourses were based, and they consulted them indeed. The bibliographies were often offered, and the origins of the information were clarified, even though they were not necessarily always correct and were sometimes plagiarised. For example, a pamphlet written at the end of the century – that is, during the closing stage of the debate – provides a comprehensive list of books written on fishery, including Tobias Gentleman’s Englands way to win wealth (1614); E. S.’s Britaines busse (1615); Sir Walter Raleigh’s Observations, touching trade & commerce with the Hollander, and other nations (1618) (the true author is John Keymer); Gerard Malynes’s Lex mercatoria, chapter 47 ‘The fishing trade’ (1636 [1622]); John Smith’s The trade & fishing of Great-Britain displayed (1661); The royal trade of fishing (1662); John Keymor’s [i.e., Keymer’s] Observation made upon the Dutch fishing about the year 1601 (1664); The royal fishing revived (1670); Sir Roger L’Estrange’s A discourse of the fishery (1674); and John Collins’s Salt and fishery (1682).⁶ However, other, numberless pieces, including manuscripts, were not on this list. All of the listed pamphlets and writings referred to the sources of information that they gathered from previous generations.

In this chapter, I trace these works on the fishing business written over the course of a century. My interest is in the exchange and succession of the ideas concerning the economy in early modern England, which appears in the century-long series of discourses. I attempt to reveal how English writers in the seventeenth century saw their trade situation when faced with the height of Holland’s prosperity. They all shared the understanding that the reason for the success of Dutch trade was fishing, particularly herring. They also presented a detailed analysis of the Dutch economy and society. In the first half of the century, their major concerns tended to centre more on technical matters than on social and economic matters. However, by the mid-century, the pamphleteers came to share a fixed set of the features to be learned from the Dutch model, such as the foreign exchange market, high product quality, the management of trade, low customs, encouraging inventions, low interest rates, banking, gavelkind and the estate registration system. Regarding the Navigation Act of 1651, although some were for and some were against, both sides shared the same images of Holland. Those lists were almost the same as the one that Josiah Child presented at the starting point of the controversy over interest rates, which launched shortly after the second Anglo-Dutch war ended. Furthermore, starting in around 1670, the styles of discussions, typically that of Coke, changed and became more analytical and systematic. Next, I describe how that long discussion began.

1. Navy or fishery

Although fishery had been a national concern in the Low Countries since the twelfth century,⁷ not until the seventeenth century did England see the same business appear as ‘a nursery for English seafarers and even a hallmark for the national identity’.⁸ During the reign of Elizabeth I, fishing and shipping were on the agenda as far as they were considered issues of the ‘maintenance of the navy and the protection of national honor in international competition’.⁹ William Cecil’s attempt to introduce ‘political Lent’, which intended to increase fish days, was part of that policy, although it eventually failed.¹⁰ The Habsburg Netherlands had already struggled for naval supremacy in the North Sea to defend its herring fleet,¹¹ and the Elizabethan government was certainly conscious of such an international competition in the fishing industry. However, only in the ending decades of the sixteenth century were the Dutch ‘ranked among England’s foremost rivals in the European fisheries’,¹² and this topic was brought to the place of open discussions on paper.

According to an eighteenth-century historian, John William De Caux, herring fishing in England started along the Eastern Coast, and ‘[t]he history of the herring fishery is interwoven inextricably with the history of Great Yarmouth’. The prosperity of Great Yarmouth from the time of Edward the Confessor, whose reign started in 1041, derived from its herring fishery and Free Fair. In particular, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the neighbour countries’ protectionist policy of herring fishing increased the importance of the Free Fair of Great Yarmouth, where fishers and merchants gathered from all parts of England and the Continent to sell and buy fish. However, following the ‘truly marvellous’ progress of Dutch fishing during the ending decades of the sixteenth century, which resulted from their newly invented method of curing herring, herring fishery off the East Coast of England and the Free Fair at Great Yarmouth ‘rapidly declined’ in the seventeenth century. In addition, in the seventeenth century, the protection policy of the Stuart government and the regulation policy of the corporation ‘well nigh ruined the herring fair’ of Great Yarmouth.¹³

Throughout the 1570s, fishing was just an issue that accompanied the discussions of the navy or, sometimes, was only a tiny part of imperial discussions. In 1570, John Montgomery wrote the manuscript ‘A treatice concerning the mayntenance of the nauie’ and dedicated it to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leceister, who it was said might have married Queen Elizabeth and, even if not realised, remained her favourite until his death in 1588.¹⁴ Montgomery insisted that because England was environed by the sea and had good ports that should be defended, it needed its ‘well appointed navie’.¹⁵ He recalled that the kings who well prepared their navy, such as Edgar and Richard II, evaded the invasion of the Danes and the French, respectively.¹⁶ The navy needed ships and mariners. Mariners were provided by fishing. Montgomery’s description of the fishing business both anticipated future narratives and represented his time. Fishing was beneficial to the country’s economy and defence; or in his words, ‘we might not onely by meyntenance of fishinge encrease our maryners but also make the said Townes welthie and stronge of men and further proffit ye [w]holle common welthe’.¹⁷ Here the Dutch management of their fishery had already been considered a model that the English should follow:

The dutchemen or ffleminge maye be to vs an example herein whose paynfull and dilligent exercises in that occupation of ffishinge dothe excel and condemne vs for or necligence [sic] for they going to the seas withe theire Boates, Busses and suche like vessells, sildome [sic] leave of[f] fishing till they haue gotten plenty whiche being caryed home or to some othar place whether they maye goe most spedely the sell parte while it is ffreshe and newe the residue they salte & pack vpp to be soulde at leisure eyther in theire owne country or ells in othar landes when they thinke to finde the best market by which there soe doing they obteyne the commoditie aforenamed that we sett shippe and lose.¹⁸

However, when the European power balance was in the middle of shifting, Spain could not miss Montgomery’s concern. Noting that Spaniards come once or twice a year to the Irish seas to fish and ‘they take greate store and cary it home’, he demanded to know why the English, who live closer to Ireland than did the Spaniards, did not do the same. Montgomery himself replied, ‘I cannot but prayse the Spaniardes for theire dilligence and disprayse our selues for our necligence w^ch as it is worthie disprayse and repro[a]ch’.¹⁹ Just as the Dutch industri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Herring fishing
• 2 Interest rates
• 3 Banking and funds
• 4 Land registration and credit
• Postscript
• References
• Index