Navigation Acts: Dutch Fluyts, the Staple Act and the Burning of the Gaspee

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Under mercantilism, England saw global wealth as a fixed pie measured in gold and silver. After the Eighty Years War, the Dutch Republic dominated trade with flat bottomed fluyt cargo ships run by small crews, cheap credit from the Bank of Amsterdam, and the vast Amsterdam entrepot warehouses, and English planters in Virginia and Barbados preferred Dutch buyers. Oliver Cromwell's government passed the 1651 Navigation Act barring foreign ships from carrying goods from Asia, Africa or America into England or its colonies, after England refused a Dutch free trade proposal, and the first Anglo-Dutch war followed. Under Charles II, the 1660 act required 75 percent English crews and created enumerated goods such as sugar, tobacco, cotton and indigo that could be sold only within the empire.

The Staple Act of 1663 forced European goods bound for America to pass through English ports first, and the East India Company used loans and bribes to slip in a clause legalizing bullion exports. Colonists answered with false manifests, hidden coves and molasses under salted fish, so the Plantation Trade Act of 1696 brought ship registration, governor oaths, broad search powers and juryless admiralty courts. After salutary neglect ended with the 1764 Sugar Act, Rhode Islanders boarded and burned HMS Gaspee in 1772. Economic historians estimate the acts cost colonists only about four pounds per 1,000 pounds of income, yet they fell hardest on politically powerful urban merchants. The acts were repealed in 1849 along with the turn toward free trade.

• New York governor Benjamin Fletcher commissioned privateers he knew would turn pirate in the Indian Ocean.
• The Wool Act of 1699 barred Ireland from exporting wool anywhere but England, collapsing Irish textile markets.
• Irish Volunteers later marched under the slogan free trade or a speedy revolution.
• Admiralty court judges were often rewarded with a share of seized cargo.
• Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts let cheap food reach British factory workers.