At all times within the historic period trade and industry have reacted profoundly on social life; and as we near the modern period in our own history the connection becomes more and more decisively determinant. In the oldest culture-history at all known to us, as we have seen, the commercial factor affects everything else; and at no time in European annals do we fail to note some special scene or area in which trade furnishes to politicians special problems. Thus the culture-history of Italy, as we have also seen, is in past epochs inseparably bound up with her commercial history. But as regards the north of Europe, it is in the modern period that we begin specially to recognise trade as playing a leading part in politics, national and international. The Mediterranean tradition is first seen powerfully at work in the history of the Hansa towns: then comes the great development of Flanders, then that of Holland, then that of England, which gained so much from the influx of Flemish and Dutch Protestant refugees in the reign of Philip II, but which was checked in its commercial growth, under Elizabeth and James alike, by their policy of granting monopolies to favourites.
Sir Josiah Child puts "the latter end of Elizabeth's reign" as the time when England began to be "anything in trade" (New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. p. 73). Cp. Prof. Busch on English trade under Henry VII, England unter den Tudors, i, 71-85, with Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 328, where it is stated that in the latter part of the sixteenth century there were 3,000 merchants engaged in the sea trade. This seems extremely doubtful when we note that the whole foreign trade of London was stated in Parliament in 1604 to be in the hands of some 200 citizens (Journals of the House of Commons, May 21, 1604), and the total customs of London amounted to £110,000 a year, as against £17,000 from all the rest of the kingdom. As Hume notes (ch. 45, note), a remonstrance from the Trinity House in 1602 declared that since 1588 the shipping and number of seamen in England had decayed about a third. (Cit. from Anglesey's Happy Future State of England, p. 128.) This again, however, seems doubtful.
Broadly put, the fact appears to be that after a considerable development of woollen manufacture in the towns during the Wars of the Roses (above, p. 393), when sheep-rearing must have been precarious and wool would be imported, there was a general return to pasturage under the Tudor peace, the towns falling away, with their manufactures. Attempts were made under Henry VIII and Edward VI to develop the English mining industries by means of German workmen and overseers, but apparently with no great success (Ehrenberg, Hamburg und England im Zeit. der Kön. Elisabeth, 1896, pp. 4-6). It was after the persecution of Protestants in the Netherlands under Charles V had driven many tradesmen to England for refuge that manufacturing industry notably revived; and in 1564-65 we find the year's exports of England reckoned at £68,190 for wool and £896,079 for cloths and other woollen wares; the whole of the rest of the export trade amounting only to £133,665 (Brit. Mus. Lansdowne MS. 10, fol. 121-22, cited by Ehrenberg, p. 8; cp. Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, ii, 82-83; Gibbins, Industrial Hist. of England, 3rd. ed. pp. 132-33.) After the fall of Antwerp, again, much of the commerce of that city fell to the share of England, some of her commercial and artisan population following it (Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1872, xii, 1-2).
In the same period the commercial life of north Germany, which had hitherto been far more widely developed than that of England (Ehrenberg, pp. 1-11), was thrown back on the one hand by the opening of the new ocean route to the East Indies, which upset the trans-European trade from the Mediterranean, and on the other by the new strifes between the princes and the cities (id. pp. 34-49); and here again English trade came to the front.
The "Merchant Adventurers," ready enough to accept monopolies for their own incorporations, were free-traders as against other monopolists;[1207] and not till all such abuses were abolished could England compete with Holland. And though they were never legally annulled even under the Commonwealth, "as men paid no regard to the prerogative whence the charters of those companies were derived, the monopoly was gradually invaded, and commerce increased by the increase of liberty."[1208] France at times promised to rival both Holland and England; but she at length definitely fell behind England in the race, as Flanders fell behind Holland, by reason of political misdirection. In the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, all the northern States had their eyes fastened on the shining example of Holland;[1209] and commerce, which as an occasion of warfare had since the rise of Christianity been superseded by religion, begins to give the cue for animosities of peoples, rulers, and classes. The last great religious war—if we except the strifes of Russia and Turkey, which are quasi-religious—was the Thirty Years' War. Its very atrocity doubtless went far to discredit the religious motive,[1210] and it ranks as the worst war of the modern world. Commerce, however, for centuries supplied new motives for war to men whose ideas of economics were still at the theological stage.[1211] The eternal principle of strife, of human attraction and repulsion, plays through the phenomena of commerce as through those of creed. The profoundly insane lust for gold and silver, which had so largely determined the history of the Roman Empire, definitely shaped that of Spain; and Spain's example fired the northern nations with whom she came in contact.
Prof. Thorold Rogers is responsible for the strange proposition (Economic Interpretation of History, p. 186; Industrial and Commercial History of England, p. 321) that the chief source of the silver supply of Europe, before the discovery of the New World, was England. He offers nothing but his own conviction in proof of his statement, to which he adds the explanation that the silver in question was extracted from sulphuret of lead. It seems well to point out that there is not a shadow of foundation for the main assertion. That the argentiferous lead mines were worked seems clear; but that they could produce the main European supply without the fact being historically noted is incredible. On the other hand, silver mines were found in Germany in the tenth century and later, and there is reason to attribute to their output a gradual rise of prices before the fifteenth century (Anderson's History of Commerce, i, 67). In any case, there is no reason to doubt the statement of the historians of the precious metals, that what silver was produced in Europe in the Middle Ages was mostly mined in Spain and Germany. See Del Mar, History of the Precious Metals, 1880, pp. 38-43 and refs.; also Ehrenberg, Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth, 1896, pp. 4, 9; Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, Cap. 276, end; and Kohlrausch, History of Germany, Eng. tr. 1844, p. 261.
The direct search for gold as plunder developed into the pursuit of it as price; and wealthier States than Spain were raised by the more roundabout method which Spain disdained.
This was soon recognised by Spanish economists, who probably followed the French physiocrats, as represented in the excellent chapters of Montesquieu on money (cited above, p. 363). See the passage from Bernard of Ulloa (1753) cited by Blanqui, Hist. de l'écon. polit., 2e édit. ii, 28. Cp. Samber, Memoirs of the Dutch Trade, Eng. tr. 1719, pref. Apart from the habits set up by imperialism, the Spaniards were in part anti-industrial because industry was so closely associated with the Moriscoes (Major Hume, Spain, p. 195); and the innumerable Church holidays counted for much. Yet in the first half of the sixteenth century Spain had a great development of town industrial life (Armstrong, Introd. to same vol. pp. 83-84). This is partly attributable to the new colonial trade; but probably more to the connection with Flanders. Cp. Grattan, The Netherlands, pp. 66, 88. About 1670, however, manufacture for export had entirely ceased; the trade of Madrid, such as it was, was mainly in the hands of Frenchmen; the Church and the bureaucracy alone flourished; and although discharged soldiers swarmed in the cities, what harvests there were had to be reaped by the hands of French labourers who came each season for the purpose. Hume, as cited, p. 285. This usage subsisted nearly a century later (Tucker, Essay on Trade, ed. 1756, p. 25)
Holland in the seventeenth century presented to the European world, as we have seen, the new and striking spectacle of a dense population thriving on a soil which could not possibly be made to feed them. "Trade" became the watchword of French statesmanship; and Colbert pressed it against a froward nobility;[1212] while in England a generation later it had acquired the deeper rooting that goes with the voluntary activity and self-seeking of a numerous class; and already the gentry freely devoted their younger sons to the pursuits which those of France contemned.[1213]
The turn seems to have been taken in the most natural way, after Parliament was able to force on James I a stoppage of the practice of granting monopolies. At his accession, the King had sought popularity by calling in and scrutinising the many monopolies granted by Elizabeth, which constituted the main grievance of the time.[1214] Soon, however, he conformed to the old usage, which had in some measure the support of Bacon;[1215] and in 1621 it was declared that he had multiplied monopolies twentyfold.[1216] The most careful historian of the period reports that though they were continually being abused,[1217] they were granted on no corrupt motives, but in sheer mistaken zeal for the spread of commerce.[1218] It would be more plausible to say that when interests either of purse or of patronage lay in a certain direction, those concerned were very easily satisfied that the interests of commerce pointed the same way. At length, after much dispute, the Lords passed, in 1624,[1219] a Monopoly Bill previously passed by the Commons in 1621;[1220] and though some of the chief monopolies were left standing, either as involving patents for inventions or as being vested in corporations,[1221] mere private trade monopolies were for the future prevented.