Acts regulating English trade and shipping.
The Navigation Laws were a series of regulations that governed England’s merchant trade and shipping during the development of its worldwide empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These acts determined the nationality of vessels and crews and specified the destinations to which certain “enumerated articles” or listed items could be shipped. High tariffs on various goods and an intricate system of bounties on favored exports were part of the system as well. Finally, growing industries in one part of the empire that directly competed with similar industries in another part of the empire were strictly prohibited.
Britain’s Navigation Laws of the 1600s were a direct threat to Dutch domination of the merchant trade and led to three wars between England and the Dutch Republic, in 1652, 1665, and 1672. Shown here are typical Dutch traders’ galleons of the period. (© North Wind Picture Archives)
While the first laws governing the merchant trade and shipping were laid down during the reign of Richard II in the fourteenth century, the Navigation Laws that shaped the development of the British empire in early modern times were enacted under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. By the middle of the seventeenth century, English businessmen and politicians alike had become alarmed by the rapid growth of the Dutch merchant trade. After winning its independence from Spain, the Dutch Republic had built a merchant fleet of more than 10,000 vessels, along with a powerful navy to protect it. Ships from the Netherlands dominated the coastal trade in much of western Europe, including France and England. Dutch trading posts had been established in India, South America, and the East and West Indies, and on the island of Manhattan in the Hudson and farther north along the river at Fort Orange. Vessels from the Netherlands had become the main carriers of goods between many European nations and their growing overseas empires. A large portion of the products traded between England and its colonies in Virginia, Maryland, and New England made their way across the Atlantic in Dutch ships.
The first Navigation Laws were enacted under Cromwell’s rule between 1649 and 1651. The acts barred all foreign ships from the English coastal trade. Foreign ships were also barred from trading with English colonies unless they had obtained a special license. Goods imported into England had to be carried on English ships or on ships directly from the country of a given product’s origins. The newly enacted Navigation Laws were a direct threat to the domination of the merchant trade by the Netherlands and led to three wars between England and the Dutch Republic, in 1652, 1665, and 1672.
During the reigns of Charles II and his brother James II, ever more stringent Navigation Laws were passed to strengthen England’s hold on trade and shipping within its own burgeoning empire. The Navigation Law of 1660 declared that, after December 1 of that same year, no goods could be imported to or exported from any current or potential English colony in Asia, Africa, or America unless shipped in an English vessel that had an English captain and three out of four sailors who were also English. The law listed enumerated articles that must be shipped from the colonies directly to England before being shipped and sold elsewhere. The original list included tobacco, sugar, cotton, ginger, and indigo and other dyes.
By the early eighteenth century, the list of enumerated articles had grown to include naval stores, hemp, rice, molasses, beaver skins, furs, and copper ore. Other items such as coffee, pimento, coconuts, whale fins, raw silk, hides and skins, and pot and pearl ash were later added as part of the Sugar Act of 1764. Related acts were also passed requiring that goods heading across the Atlantic to the colonies must first stop in England to pay duties before heading to the New World. Provisions for posting bonds, registering vessels, and appointing customs officials to oversee the system were enacted as well.
Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most American colonists ap preciated the positive effects that the Navigation Laws had on their livelihoods. Shipbuilding boomed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island especially. Since the colonists were considered Englishmen under the provisions of the Navigation Laws, captains sailing from Boston and Newport soon dominated much of the trade on the Atlantic. The laws also helped colonial growers of enumerated articles by ensuring them a steady market for their goods as well as granting them access to an established credit system with the mother country. Enumerated items like tobacco were further helped by regulations that prohibited the development of competing products within the empire. Tobacco, for example, could be grown in the American colonies, but was banned from cultivation in England, Ireland, and the Isle of Guernsey. Equally important, the Navigation Laws established bounties or direct payments for several items, including naval stores, lumber, barrels, raw silk, hemp, and indigo.
Colonial opposition to imperial controls on trade and shipping grew after the middle of the eighteenth century. As part of the overall system of regulating commerce throughout the empire, Parliament had passed a series of laws to encourage manufacturing in England. The Wool Act of 1699 banned the export of woolen cloth from a colony if carried by water. The Hat Act of 1732 placed a similar ban on exports of beaver hats. The Iron Act of 1750 outlawed the construction of iron mills that employed the latest improvements in technology. Many colonists in New York who manufactured hats and in Pennsylvania and Virginia who ran iron mills opposed the restrictions on their growing industries.
Protests against the regulation of trade and shipping increased dramatically after the conclusion of the French and Indian War. Once the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, Prime Minister George Grenville took greater control of the colonies by implementing several measures, including a more active enforcement of the Navigation Laws. American smugglers who ignored the laws would be captured and tried by British naval officers in the vice admiralty courts. When Parliament took the further step of laying internal taxes on the colonies, the Americans rose in open revolt against an imperial system that had been governed by the Navigation Laws for more than a hundred years.
Mary Stockwell
See also: Mercantilism.
Dickerson, Oliver M. The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951.