The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
~The Communist Manifesto1
An historic change took place during the reactionary period of Charles’ personal rule, which resulted in solidifying a bourgeois opposition to the monarchy and its adherents. Under James I, regular trade across the Atlantic was undertaken. The Virginia Company, first chartered in 1609 to Levant Company-associated personages, engaged on the usual monopoly terms to trade in tobacco. But despite its complete control of economic governance of the colony, the company collapsed in 1624. This was mainly due to a lack of investment by the City’s merchant class. The plantations of Virginia were very new, and required constant infusions of money, goods and labor. “As was obvious to contemporaries, the great merchants of London were prepared neither to take the risk nor to wait [for profits].”2 James had intended to reorganize the company, but died before it was carried out.
Rather than resurrect the company, Charles I administered the colony directly through an appointed royal governor. Suddenly, with the monopolists cut out, anyone with the means could trade in tobacco. Commerce across the Atlantic now took place under the rough-and-ready conditions of free trade, rather than the regulated monopoly companies trading to the East. This opened opportunities to entrepreneurs who had heretofore been excluded from the great trading routes. “Originally men of the ‘middling sort,’ they were mostly born outside London and were, in many cases, the younger sons of minor gentry or prosperous yeomen.” Some also came from middling business families in the towns — shopkeepers, domestic traders, or mariners.3
Initially various arrangements were made. Some retailers entered into partnerships with planters, advancing capital and taking payment in a share of the crop. Or resident plantation owners partnered with ship captains who sold their crop in England. In 1616, a program to promote colonization granted fifty acres of land to anyone who paid his own or another person’s way to the colony; this facilitated new-merchant land ownership. The Atlantic merchants were, therefore, from the beginning involved with promoting colonial production. Trendsetting merchants, men like Maurice Thomson, not only imported tobacco, but were also able to dominate the provisioning trade to the colony, to their great profit. As early as 1632 the Virginia Assembly voiced complaints about the planters’ chronic and substantial indebtedness to “unconscionable merchants.”4
If there is a hero who can speak for his fellows in this mixed drama of careers open to the talents, colonization, City revolution and London merchants and shopkeeping tradesmen breaking into the protected, closed corporations of world commerce, it is Maurice Thomson, the “greatest colonial merchant of his day,” a much neglected figure in our histories whom Brenner has rescued from near obscurity…5
As a leader “among the colonial merchants, freebooters and interlopers” Thomson supported government restrictions on Dutch merchants, building up the English navy, and founding new colonies in Africa and the Far East.6
Older overseas monopolists resisted the anarchic conditions of free trade. As contractual “mere merchants” their responsibility was to buy, ship and sell goods, plain and simple. Their companies “operated under restricted, corporately controlled conditions designed to regulate competition to minimize risk, and to ensure profits.”7 They were, in short, an early form of cartel. In 1634, 175 men engaged in the tobacco trade from America; in 1640 the number had risen to 330. In the same two years the Levant Company’s large and lucrative currant trade had only 61.8
The new Atlantic merchants were thus able to make fortunes for themselves. Members of this class joined in new business ventures, and intermarried among each others’ relatives, creating extended networks of family and business associates. Thomson and others were soon able to return to London, where they ran their affairs from an office. Not quite as wealthy as the monopoly oligarchs, they were close enough. They also traded with Bermuda and some Caribbean islands, reexported tobacco to Holland and the Continent, aggressively attacked Spanish ships and ports in the West Indies, and increasingly interloped on the established monopoly companies’ preserves all the way to the East Indies.9 As the European tobacco market became saturated circa 1640,10 they turned to the English presence in Guyana and Barbados where they became “profoundly involved as capitalist entrepreneurs in colonial production…[of] sugar planting, while pioneering the Africa-West Indies-Virginia-New England trades in slaves, provisions, and staple crops.”11 Most essentially, unlike the older merchant princes, they were not beholden to the king for their wealth.
The aristocratic opposition to the Stuarts was led by a small group of Puritan nobles and knights who desired to establish colonies in the New World to which Puritans could escape from Laud’s persecution. Principal among these were the same Lords Brooke, Saye and Sele, and the Earl of Warwick who actively opposed paying ship money to Charles, along with gentry connected to their families and party. Almost certainly through the offices of Puritan divines, such as the activist Hugh Peter, they came in contact with the Atlantic merchants who could provide experience, technical know-how, and additional financing. They collaborated on establishing new colonies in Massachusetts Bay, Providence Island (later moved to Central America), and Bermuda as refuges for Puritan expatriates.12 By 1640, these two powerful groups had already been working together for a decade. The self-governing colonies became strongholds of Independency, as were some exile English communities in Holland. Leading Atlantic merchants “forged very intimate connections with the Independent militants who formed the lay and clerical leadership of the colonizing movement to New England…”13 Cooperative activities between the aristocrats and Atlantic merchants in the 1630s also included privateering against Spain in the Caribbean; new colonizing efforts north of Virginia; and “joint political resistance in the City and Parliament.”14
The Atlantic merchants and Independent ministers also had many close ties to the religious separatists of the less affluent middling class, that were indispensable to the former.15 With their wide commercial and personal contacts among London “shopkeepers, mariners, and artisans,” the aggressive, free-trading merchants, primarily religious and political Independents, would come to play a prominent role in the overthrow of the old regime in London. This gave them “powerful influence” in both Houses which they used to pursue their political demands, not infrequently against a reluctant Parliament.16
From the beginning of 1642 they and their supporters, including businessmen of the livery companies, would provide Parliament’s financing and administrative organization. At the same time they democratized the London government; allied themselves with the war party in the Commons; attempted to reconquer Ireland; pursued the Independent reformation of religion; “and pushed ultimately for parliamentary supremacy, something like a republican settlement in the state.”17 The Atlantic merchants were, in short, the bourgeois vanguard of the English Revolution.18
1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1848, 1970), 36
2 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 97
3 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 114, 685
4 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 103-105, 129-130
5 Valerie Pearl, “Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 by Robert Brenner,” Urban History 22, no. 2 (August 1995): 290, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44613964 Accessed 27 October 2018
6 Pearl, “Merchants and Revolution…by Robert Brenner,” 290
7 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 106; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 63
8 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 25, 27, 76, 105; Ashton, “Three Phases in the Role of the City,” 47
9 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 125, 127, 148, 154-155, 169-170, 410-411
10 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 161
11 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 685-686
12 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 275-276, 278-279, 684-685
13 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 416-417
14 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 281
15 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 426
16 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 395-396
17 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 396
18 It is curious that Brenner himself does not make this claim. To him the bourgeois revolution in England happened at an earlier time. For Brenner’s views on this subject, see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 641-644, 648-656; Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past & Present, no. 70 (February 1976); Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 97 (November 1982). Both are reprinted in The Brenner Debate, eds. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)