-:ABOUT THE BOOK:-

Third volume of the critically-acclaimed the Maritime Enlightenment, which spurred economic liberalism and humanitarianism, unlike its continental version, breaking free from historic attitudes to slavery and serfdom, imperial history. The immediate cause understood the latent wealth-creating power of US trade, misdirecting energies for some years. US north-south divisions were exacerbated by trade tariffs to appreciate its importance. The post Singapore, China and UAE were directly because of their encouragement of decline was heralded by political the green debate. Written by someone series stressing maritime trade as the driver of world history, wealth-creation, technologiical inventiveness, art and literature. This book tackles contextualising current debates on of America's War of Independence is revealed to be about illegal maritime trade. Jefferson and Madison never more than than slavery. The failure of France's Revolution and Germany's 20th-century wars were also failures 1945 rise of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, maritime trade and shipping. Britain's indifference then hostility, contrasting with its previous encouragement; its greatest strength. Nick's chapter on shipping's efforts to achieve net-zero is a must read for anyone involved in at the heart of maritime trade since the 1970s, the series is an important counterweight to political history we are usually fed, a different way of thinking about the world, past and present.

A vital text for today. An outstanding dissection of the development of global shipping across three centuries... as the single most important element of globalisation. Informed by profound insight and written with precision. It traces the emergence of Britain as the global maritime hegemony, shaped and funded by the City of London and intimately connected with the rising strength of the Royal Navy....and an important story about what happens when a maritime nation forgets the sea and loses itself in the process... The purpose of history is to reflect and possibly learn and this text does exactly that.

Professor Andrew Lambert

A splendid, invigorating and intellectually challenging book that repays careful and considered study. The style is accessible and engaging... backed by comprehensive research.

Dr Keith Nuttall

-:CHAPTER-1:-

Setting the Scene in the Atlantic

‘The whole creation is one vast Exchange.’
Edward Young (1683–1765)

Portuguese, Dutch and English expanded worldwide in the 16th-17th centuries, specifically for trade. Portugal pioneered Asian trade but lost many bases to the Dutch after 1580. They retained Brazil, upon which Portugal’s two million people economically depended as the world’s leading sugar producer until late-17th-century Caribbean competition. It also exported hides, whale-oil, brazilwood, cotton and tobacco. Portuguese Angola was Brazil’s main slave-source and it kept Mozambique. Portugal, seemingly near collapse in 1691, revived by increased European demand for sugar. By the early-1700s, it had 528 sugar estates, many large. William Dampier, visiting Bahia (Salvador) in 1699 noted its ‘great trade’ with 32 large ships in port, two slave ships from Angola and much coastal shipping. The 1690s discovery of gold and 1720s of diamonds revived its economy spectacularly. In 1703, Portugal got more gold than it ever had from Africa, or Spain from 16th-century America, enabling it to settle unfavourable European trade balances, enriching Crown and Church. But divine right monarchy and lack of an educated middle class or strong merchant ethos hindered economic development. First-half 18th-century Anglo-Portuguese trade was based on Brazil’s demand for light woollens for gold, sent to England in weekly packets from Lisbon from 1706. Preferential duties from 1690 gave Portugal’s fortified wine, port, its 18-century fashionable status in England. The 1703 Anglo-Portuguese Methuen Treaty fixed Portuguese wine import duties 30% less than French, extended to the Dutch in 1705. Portugal’s salt was still sold Europe-wide especially for Dutch herrings and it imported Baltic grain in Dutch ships.

By contrast, Spain hijacked Inca and Aztec people, agriculture, gold and silver, settling temperate inland highlands. After 17th-century silver production decline, 1690’s levels again matched the 1580s and grew. Its priority was its safe carriage from Puerto Bello to Seville by monopoly groups with no interest in expanding trade, returning with mainly expensive French manufactured goods. Havana’s and San Juan’s fortifications were sited to ensure its safe passage, not develop commercial opportunities. Huge smuggling resulted. Official fleets shrank, costs mounted and less silver and taxes were remitted to Spain. Seville declined. By 1700 its American trade was mainly controlled by foreign Cadiz-based merchants. There was almost no inter-colonial trade, banned to support Spanish exports. Dependence on the bullion fleet meant that when it was lost, as in 1715, it was disastrous, deepening depression.

Asian products transplanted to the Americas were sugar, indigo, ginger and coffee. Plantation-grown, they were shipped to Europe quicker. California and River Plate settlements produced hides for Europe’s growing leather market. But there was no large Spanish seafaring population. No Spaniard could have adapted Lord Halifax’s 1694 words; ‘The first article of an Englishman’s political creed must be that he believeth in the sea.’ Colonists were banned from trading with foreigners, except the asiento de negros, shipping African slaves by Genoese, then Portuguese, Dutch and French companies. Reliance on foreigners demonstrated inability to mobilise skills, capital and enterprise.

Castile was moribund, economically retarded. Foreigners contrasted the ‘vitality and populousness of…peripheral regions’ with Castile’s ‘emptiness and misery.’ After losing the Spanish Netherlands and Italian lands in 1713, battling 1687–1714 Catalan revolts, it could have reformed, but Spain’s Bourbons doubled down, imposing Castilian law and language throughout Spain, especially on wealthier maritime Catalonia. For 200 years commercial forces were neutered. J.H.Elliot describes a time of ‘maximum political and intellectual stagnation especially in inward-looking Castile,’ distrusting foreigners, despising trade, especially with heretics.

1700 is as good a watershed as any, but Europe’s maritime trade’s growth trajectory really starts on foundations laid by 16th-17th-century Dutch merchants who supplanted Spanish and Portuguese, achieving commercial hegemony by the 1650s. Thereafter, their relative not absolute decline was mainly due to damaging, expensive, defensive wars against France. Commercially still strong, they had insufficient Caribbean colonies. Nevertheless, a 1701 French guide referred to Amsterdam’s 8,000 ships ‘whose masts and rigging form…a forest so dense…the sun could hardly penetrate.’ Whatever the number, it elicited many similar comments on exceptional volumes. Daniel Defoe described Amsterdam’s people as ‘middle persons in trade, the factors and brokers of Europe.’ Its monopoly West Indies Co. (WIC) was however, much less effective than England’s many competing companies. Surinam and Curacao, with Willemstad’s excellent port an important slave gateway to Spanish America, hosted displaced Dutch from Brazil, including Jews. By 1700, it traded cocoa, tobacco, indigo, sugar, coffee and hides, was a ship repair and financial centre, but small when England dominated North American and Caribbean trade, which in 1700 provided 21% of English imports, 33% by 1750. In 1700, American trade and settlement trends were clear; Dutch influence was declining, Portugal only had Brazil, Spain was on the defensive, France’s Canadian colony lacked people. England’s colonies’ lacked unity but their populations increased impressively and local representative institutions were strong.

Andrew Lambert stresses that dynamic economies need regular supplies of new merchants, which occurred in English ports after the 1651 Navigation Act and subsequent refinements, requiring English ships to carry its American and Caribbean imports and exports, triggering merchant shipping companies’ formation. By 1680 London’s Port Book recorded about 1,500, including Jews, officially readmitted by Oliver Cromwell. Shipping became England’s fastest-growing industry. After the 1688 Glorious Revolution the royal prerogative was subordinated to Parliament where merchants’ interests were championed. It was understood that maritime trade was England’s future. By contrast Dutch merchants after the 1670s-1680s, switched investment to land, bonds and country houses. Comparison with Venice’s commercial families from the 1500s, eschewing maritime risk to become landlords and bondholders is irresistible. Herring fishing was still strong in 1728 when an English resident estimated 800 herring busses employed; less than a century earlier, but each nearly twice as large, declining thereafter. Cod and whale fishing declined due to competition. Portuguese and French salt imports and cask-making thus also declined. Leiden’s cloth industry’s 1671 production, 139,000 pieces, fell to 85,000 in 1700, 54,000 in 1750. The Anglo-Dutch scientific revolution also stopped in Holland in the 1670s. Furthermore, Jan Pietersen Coen’s 17th-century call for Dutch emigration to Java’s fertile soil went unheeded, massively outweighed by English North American settlement, creating a growing market. England thus gradually overtook Dutch economic dominance by about 1720.

In absolutist, agrarian-dominated France, Colbert’s commercial policies backed by a huge naval fleet in the 1660s-70s, tried copying and competing, but in Court-dominated monopoly companies, merchants were not represented. Its colonies were ruled by military governors, unlike merchant-driven English colonies’ representative assemblies. Most settlers were from Gascony, Normandy, Provence and Dunkirk, maritime provinces of a continental-influenced country. Louis XIV’s Catholic obsession, epitomised by his 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, triggered the exodus of 175–200,000 Huguenot artisans and entrepreneurs in wool, linen, silk, velvet, watch and clock makers, printers, papermakers, navigators and shipbuilders, over-contributors to France’s economy, settling in the United Provinces, Switzerland, England and Ireland, invigorating their economies. French Baltic trade was conducted by Dutch merchants, which Louis kept attacking.

France and England accelerated in different directions. War after 1688 was the prelude to another Hundred Years War, fought worldwide, funded by over-taxed, subsistence peasants against a stronger Britain, due to trade-created wealth. Resource-rich France had four-times more people. Its ability to rebuild, to attack English trade and possibly invade to install an intolerant, Catholic, absolutist, Stuart king were religious, political and commercial threats.

As Louis sold offices and titles with tax-free salaries, to clear indebtedness, many French merchants abandoned trade for judicial and administrative sectors, buying offices to lose the stigma of being ‘in trade’. As Defoe said, ‘an estate’s a pond, trade’s a spring.’ The idea that the nobility’s job was to fight and die for France, this their tax-free pay-off, was outdated with maritime trade’s wealth-creation clearly demonstrated for over a century. Heavier tax on merchants, industry and agriculture discouraged investment in wealth-making sectors nurtured by Colbert. Because England’s and Holland’s wealth derived from maritime trade, France tried destroying it. Strategy shifted to privateers funded by investors throughout France. Dunkirk’s and Ostend’s claimed thousands of ships and cargoes, especially returning Mediterranean and Caribbean convoys. Charles Davenant’s 1696 An Essay on East India Trade asked what supported ‘this expensive war so long,’ the answer ‘the great wealth which for 30 years has been flowing into us from Our Commerce Abroad;’ cloth and coal exports, Norwegian and Baltic timber imports, trans-Atlantic tobacco and sugar imports and re-exports, increasingly significant to England’s economy. The ascent of maritime trade had begun.

Because the ton-mile ratio involved in long-haul volumes far exceeded European trade, more ships were needed to carry the same tonnage. As Josiah Child said, ‘No trade deserves so much…as those that employ most shipping…they are…the most profitable…ships and seamen…[are] the strength and safety of England. As England’s fastest-growing industry, perhaps 25% of the population depended on shipping, more than any other sector except cloth-making and building. Its 115,000 tons in 1629 increased to 340,000 in 1686, but due to war losses 323,000 in 1702. Maritime trade value in 1700 was five-times higher than 1600, 20% of it trans-Atlantic, from almost nothing in 1650. Dependence on unfinished woollen cloth exports to Europe ended. Finished, bleached, dressed, dyed, expensive cloth where profit margins were greater was exported further and wider with diversification into cottons, silks, shoes, hats, glass and ironmongery for captive North American markets. Thus, cloths’ value rose, but fell from 75% of all exports in 1660 to 50% in 1700. As volumes increased, economies of scale reduced costs.

With France hostile, Royal Naval protection was needed where merchant interests were threatened, its manpower, 22,000 in 1689 rose to 48,500 in 1695. The 1696 Plymouth naval dockyard commanding the Channel approaches reflected trans-Atlantic and Mediterranean trades’ recent growth. Some specialist dockyard facilities like rope, sail and block and tackle-making were among the earliest factories, blocks perhaps the first mass-produced products using machine tools. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick made Louis restore all territory taken, renounce Spanish Netherlands’ claims, recognise William and his heirs, allow United Provinces’ border fortresses and cancel Dutch import duties.

France could not match English borrowing or interest rates after the 1694 Bank of England’s establishment. English debt was national, not royal and personal, a monarch’s promise inadequate against a funded National Debt, loans guaranteed by Parliament and extraordinary expenditure spread over longer terms. Money voted for the navy was double France’s. The 1696 Board of Trade and Plantations liaised between traders and Admiralty on convoy protection. The Royal Society promoted inventive culture. With rational Newtonian thought, ideas of improvement accelerated in a widening, trading world. England’s financial, economic, intellectual and political infrastructure, necessary for a dynamic trading nation, was established just before 1700. Royal Navy ships defending Caribbean trade enabled increased sugar exports, slave imports and provisioning by New England, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas; fish, cattle, horses, pigs, grain and timber, ideally inter-dependent not only to British islands but French, Spanish and Dutch, contravening the Navigation Acts, but unenforceable.

London’s 1660–1700 trade tripled. In the early-1720s it handled 80% of imports, 67% of exports and 87% of re-exports. Increasing volumes encouraged lower insurance rates, faster loading and discharging in larger ships and faster financial and business information. Thousands of jobs depended on London’s port, from dockers to insurance, banking and service industries. London’s 2,000 coffee houses in 1700 were information exchanges, diffusing knowledge. In 1702, 140,000 tons of shipping was London-owned. No other port owned more than 20,000 tons. Trading companies consolidated. For example, in 1676, 573 firms handled 11,000 lbs of tobacco, by 1719, 117 handled 22,000. London dominated ‘sack trading’, from vino de sacca, Iberian wine to England, stores and people to Newfoundland and fish back to the Mediterranean, for which local and Norwegian supplies were inadequate. Vibrant London merchants, continually re-invigorated by Dutch, Jews, Huguenots and Germans, accessing credit without government hindrance, dominated growing trans-Atlantic trade, although in the 1720s, Europe still provided 55% of Britain’s imports, 77% of its exports and 72.6% of its re-exports. London manufactured ship’s instruments, telescopes, clocks and navigation tools. By 1700 it was Europe’s leading instrument maker, many exported. Other industries were created; clay pipes for imported tobacco, earthenware cups for imported tea and coffee, leading to specialised pottery manufacture. Thus, increasing maritime trade led directly to new industries, wealth-creation and employment. For all except the very poor, life improved.

There were vast differences in individual merchant fortunes; spectacular failures to impressive successes, some in the same lifetime. War made and broke fortunes. Detailed evidence is sparse for middling English merchants. Most progressed through enterprise and hard work. Gilbert Heathcote (1652–1733), apprenticed to an Eastland merchant in 1667, spent time in the Baltic, returned to the City, built a business network in the Baltic, Africa, Spain, Newfoundland, New York where he had a brother and Jamaica where he had three more, shipping slaves to Spanish colonies. In the 1690s he imported sugar, ginger and indigo from Jamaica, his commodity and shipowning business worth twice his original Baltic base. A Glorious Revolution supporter, he was one of many who loaned William money in 1689 for war with France and more thereafter, was a member of the Eastland Company, the Vintners Company, the Honourable Artillery Company, eventually becoming an MP. Active in the formation of the new East India Company (see Chapter 3), he gave evidence against the Royal Africa Company (RAC) when its monopoly was up for renewal and played a leading role in forming the Bank of England. He combined many ingredients of successful merchants; apprenticeship, education, a period overseas to accumulate start-up capital and an extensive kin network.

Shipping was serviced competitively in English-built ships, huge capital investment drawn from London’s commercial community with new docks, shipyards, wharves and warehouses. Caribbean sugar and American tobacco became so cheap, prices rock-bottom by about 1685, that demand soared. English 1650–1700 per capita sugar consumption quintupled. Imports of 23,000 tons in the 1690s encouraged sugar refining in London, Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool, supporting re-exports, shipping and shipbuilding. Bristol had 25 refineries by 1750. Consumption continued increasing as sugar-infused cocoa, jam, chocolate, confectionary and rum punches became popular. Over 200,000 North American and 30,000 Caribbean settlers’ considerable purchasing power bought British manufactured goods. In 1708 Bridgetown Barbados had 1,200 stone houses with glass windows on wide streets, rents equivalent to Cheapside’s houses.

In 1700 Chesapeake Bay sent 38,000 lbs of tobacco to England, 80% of Europe’s tobacco, the rest from Brazil for Iberia. Over 200 snuff-types were mixed with sugar, orange blossom, jasmine and bergamot. British manufactured porcelain, gold and ivory snuff boxes became status symbols. In 1700 London was the main tobacco processor and sugar refiner. Britain’s 1729–1770 tobacco imports tripled with 85% re-exported. For strategic reasons, early English settlers took hemp seed, a vital Baltic import to plant, becoming important in New England’s, Virginia’s and Maryland’s economy, producing cordage, cloth, canvas, sacks and paper. England soon re-exported its surplus hemp, tar and turpentine imports.

Indian, American and Caribbean re-imports rose from almost nothing in 1640 to nearly £2 million in 1700, tobacco and sugar 40% of England’s re-exports, prices competitive with Spanish and Portuguese. Trans-Atlantic trade, of greatest commercial value to England/Britain, rose nine-fold from 1700 to 1774, but all non-European trade grew. By 1700, 30% of imports and 15% of exports by value were Indian and American, Britain increasingly the world’s trading hub. Indian textiles clothed Caribbean and American freemen and slaves. In 1700 England’s colonies provided about 39% of its imports and 18% of its exports. By the 1730s that became 48% and 24% of an ever-growing volume. Although 70% of colonial goods entered through London, 55% went beyond, encouraging improved roads, canal and river navigation, bringing some of England’s most fertile and productive regions within affordable reach of London and Bristol. By 1695, the Ouse was navigable to Bedford. All sucked wealth inland, exactly as maritime trade had stimulated medieval northern Italy, Flanders and Brabant.

In 1701 when England’s deposed James II died in France, Louis recognised his son, further breaking the Ryswick treaty, having already cancelled Dutch import duty reductions. War resumed in 1702, the War of Spanish Succession, sparked by Louis’ grandson’s inheritance of Spain’s throne which, with Naples and Sicily, threatened English Mediterranean trade. Furthermore, their American and Caribbean colonies would encircle English colonies from Quebec to South America. Defoe outlined the issues. ‘What is England without trade? Without her colonial trade, her trade in Turkey and Spain? What will become of her when a French garrison is installed in Cuba, when a French fleet returns with Havana’s silver? What would be the value of…Virginia were the French to trade from Quebec to Mexico?’ The 1700–01 French Council of Trade identified French weakness compared to Dutch and English, not in merchant capability, but overcomplex regulations, control and restraint.

In 1702, France and Spain excluded Dutch and English merchants from their ports. The valuable asiento de negros, the slave supply contract to Spanish American colonies, earlier held by a Portuguese company with WIC links, was granted to France’s Guinea Company. French troops marched into the Spanish Netherlands, forcing Dutch withdrawal from frontier fortresses, threatening Amsterdam with abolition of Scheldt restrictions, so Antwerp could compete. England and Holland could not let the Spanish Netherlands fall to France. It drew Austria’s Emperor, whose son was a Spanish claimant and Brandenburg-Prussia’s Frederick into alliance. The underlying cause however was the same; Louis’ drive for European hegemony and Anglo-Dutch resistance to Catholic absolute monarchy. William instructed John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, while negotiating alliance to especially attend ‘to the security and improvements of the trade of our kingdoms.’ England’s merchants enthusiastically backed war, the strategy blockading Spain and France. In 1704, England’s fleet seized Gibraltar, too small for overwintering, so in 1708 Minorca was taken. After the 1707 Toulon raid resulted in scuttling France’s fleet, its strategy reverted to privateering. Lisbon became England’s Mediterranean fleet’s winter base and Gibraltar’s supply base. French privateers took nearly 700 Mediterranean ships during the war but Gibraltar and Lisbon impeded French ships to and from the Caribbean. Marlborough’s victories from Blenheim to the Spanish Netherlands secured the Dutch frontier, preventing invasion.

Privateers attacked English and Dutch merchant ships in the Channel and Atlantic approaches, taking 4,500 prizes and 2,000 ransoms, escalating marine insurance and reducing trade volumes. The 1708 Cruisers and Convoys Act allocated 43 ships to home stations and relinquished Crown rights to captured ships and cargoes, distributed to capturing ships’ crews from captain to ratings, incentivising naval officers, increasing social mobility. Losses were contained and trade volumes rose again. Dutch trade was hit harder as it depended on France, Spain and Spanish America. St. Malo gradually abandoned privateering for more profitable, safer trade with Spanish America’s west coast. In 1705, three ships returning from Peru declared cargoes over half the value of all privateers between 1702 and 1713. In 1709, seven returned with Spanish silver.

By 1708 French industry was decimated, its shipping reduced and cut-off from the Levant. Louis, dependent on unreformed, inefficient tax farmers’ advances, increased excise duties and forced loans, further depressing trade. Currency manipulation meant capital fled. Borrowing at punitive interest rates ruined trade and industry, whereas England, Britain after 1707’s Act of Union with Scotland, financed war by higher taxes on every class and voluntary loans, no sales of tax-exempt offices and no reneging on interest payments. The union, triggered by a doomed Scottish colony in Panama, was built on hopes of participating in English and American markets. Scotland, of no economic importance to England, benefited disproportionately. Taxes grew from 3–4% of national income in the 1680s to 9% in 1710. Britain was the most heavily taxed European country, levied by professionals, not farmed-out, nor resented because war was fought for national interests, not dynastic glory. Its permanent debt, over £40 million by 1713, cost 50–60% of normal state revenues to service, but long-term borrowing was developed. The war damaged English trade less than French, certainly after 1707, although the Bahamas in 1705, St. Kitts and Nevis in 1706 and 1712 suffered and Montserrat was laid waste, slaves and booty worth £80,000 taken. Antigua’s 1689–1713 sugar production doubled to 10,000 tons and survived attack. Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia), France’s privateering base to attack New England and Newfoundland, was taken in 1710.

Royal Naval protection kept trade flowing. By 1709 France’s Flanders army was destroyed. France faced famine, banditry, civil and religious disorder, Louis’s reign an abject failure except for small territorial border gains. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht gave the Bourbons the Spanish throne. The Spanish Netherlands were ceded to Austria. The Scheldt remained closed. Britain gained France’s part of St. Kitts, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay area, Minorca and Spain’s asiento. Portugal’s alliance was reaffirmed. Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain ‘for ever’, but intolerantly asked that Jews and Moors not live there, although Jews had already moved from Morocco. British warships used Minorca’s Port Mahon as a revictualling, repair and refitting base. It introduced better quality livestock, drained marshes which became orchards and new dockyards were built. Protestant, Jewish, Genoese and Greek merchants settled hoping it would become a commercial hub like Livorno, Britain’s Mediterranean base. After English 17th-century success, French merchants increased Levant trade with lighter, brighter cloth exports, better-suited to Turkish taste and climate. British merchants concentrated more on long-haul American, Asian and African trade. European anti-Semitism continued retarding economic development. Sicily for example, Castilian since 1492 when Jews were expelled, was already condemned to backwardness. Rescinded in early-17th-century Messina, they were discriminated against, mistreated and expelled again in 1740.

Having lost Port Royal, France built Louisburg on Cape Breton, retaining a right to cure Grand Banks’ fish. Louis agreed to destroy Dunkirk’s privateer base and returned Ypres, Menin and Tournai fortresses. The pretender was banished from France and Hanoverian succession recognised. Dutch national debt absorbed 70% of tax revenue. With security guarantees, its army and navy had to be shrunk, needing decades of peace to rebuild finances, but retained many merchant ships. Amsterdam was still Europe’s main financial hub but declined. Its industries contracted as British trade grew. France was bankrupt, its revenue spent on interest payments, two years in arrears, large sections of industry ruined. Its population declined by over two million. Roads and waterways fell into disrepair. Britain’s navy was stronger than France’s, Spain’s and Dutch combined, her trade increasing especially with and between her North American and Caribbean colonies.

Boston, Massachusetts, depended on whaling, cod and trade. In 1716, New England processed 6.5 million fish, by 1765, 19 million, sent to Bilbao and the Caribbean for fruit, wine, molasses, spices, coffee, flour, beef, pork, salt and indigo. Its waterfront of rope-makers, joiners, riggers, molasses’ refineries, rum distilleries, flour mills, tanners and taverns hosted innumerable ships. Cotton Mather in 1702 described it as ‘the metropolis of the whole English America’ ruled by the ‘codfish aristocracy’. Imported English furniture, ironmongery, ceramics and tea bound it to Britain with streets named Orange, Marlborough and Hanover and 26 annual patriotic events.

After 1688, England’s trade revenues enabled her to break French and remaining Spanish power, despite their richer natural resources, more people and favourable geographical position on Atlantic and Mediterranean trade routes, because of detrimental hierarchical, authoritarian, absolutist insistence on religious uniformity. Britain’s 1713 ‘great power’ status was transformed from 1649, when maritime trade was deliberately promoted as the national goal, despite Charles II’s intervening weakness when Dutch warships towed away England’s capital ship from the Thames. Post-1713 policy changed with different administrations but was not diverted by absolutist whims. The 1688 settlement created stability, consensus, political and commercial direction. Political disagreements, institutionalised by Parliamentary parties, ensured political stability. Growing British trade required an enlarged, efficient bureaucracy. Customs service employees between 1690 and 1716 increased 30%. The excise service almost doubled. Dockyard workers tripled. With justification, this period has been called ‘a commercial revolution.’ Joseph Addison in 1711 wrote ‘Trade without enlarging British territories has given us a kind of additional empire.’

The other early-18th century war concerned Baltic ports, caused by changing trade patterns. With Dutch drainage engineers transforming English wetlands into grain-growing lands, English exports replaced some southern Baltic grain, while surging trans-Atlantic trade and naval growth meant stronger northern Baltic and Norwegian timber, tar, hemp and iron bar demand from Swedish Livonia. Riga overtook Danzig as its largest port. Sweden, at the height of its territorial power, controlled many Baltic exports. Narva’s hemp and timber exports grew. Russian-controlled from 1558 to 1581, Czar Peter wanted it back! Sweden controlled Pomeranian ports. Brandenburg-Prussia and Hanover wanted them back! Denmark wanted Scania and Schleswig-Holstein back! Poland coveted Livonia. These trade issues caused the 1700–1721 Great Northern War. In 1703–1704 English tar prices rose from £16.15s to £36. Baltic dependency as merchant and naval fleets grew was a major British concern, encouraging American masts, hemp, pitch and tar imports. The Bounty Act subsidised New England producers, further increasing trans-Atlantic shipping, helping stabilise Swedish prices. Peter started building St. Petersburg, his ‘window in the west’ in 1703, the war far from over. Sweden’s population was insufficient to win. The 1721 Treaty of Nystad gave southern Pomerania including Stettin and the Oder to Brandenburg-Prussia, Bremen and Verden to Hanover and Livonia to Russia, including Viborg, Novgorod, Reval, Narva and Riga. St. Petersburg, not Narva, was developed and made Russia’s capital. Its navy, swelled by British purchases after 1713, dominated the Baltic.

Thus, Europe’s 18th-century opened with two wars dominated by maritime trade issues. Britain controlled the Sound, Channel and Gibraltar choke points. Its home fleet depended on Baltic supplies, a British fleet sent nine-times between 1715 and 1727. St. Petersburg became the centre of British Baltic trade, a city of canals and shipyards. Peter imposed protective 37.5% tariffs on imports competing with Russian goods. Non-local essentials were tariff-free. But maritime curiosity and an open economy were impossible in authoritarian Russia. People and property had no security. Peter would not share power with anyone, let alone merchants, so maritime trade was insufficient to generate commercial wealth. After Peter’s death, his navy disintegrated. National objectives returned to territorial expansion. The 1734 Anglo-Russian Treaty provided Britain with much timber, hemp, flax, pitch, tar and pig iron, mainly in British ships, in return for luxuries and colonial goods.

One more war opened the 18th century; Continental Christian Europe’s 1684–1718 Holy League against Turkey, starting the process whereby it lost chunks of territory, not maritime driven, although leading to 19th-century maritime trade issues. Smyrna was Turkey’s main port, its 1739 cosmopolitan population an estimated 84,000 Turks, 8,000 Greeks, 6,000 Jews, 2,000 Armenians and several hundred western Europeans.

Maritime trade stimulated Britain’s domestic economy. However, apart from usual maritime risks, the early decades presented extra difficulties; the Baltic’s 1710–22 closure, Caribbean pirates until the Royal Navy eliminated them in the 1720s, French privateers and Barbary pirates. Capital was tied-up for months on long-haul trade, years for Asian trade. Merchants were therefore the largest occupational group among English bankrupts; 13% between 1700 and 1730. Gregory King thought there were 2,000 maritime merchant and trader families, many dissenters who could not hold office. As Voltaire remarked of Quakers, ‘they are reduced to the necessity of earning money through commerce’; interesting word choices, ‘reduced’, ‘necessity’, implying that while admiring English freedoms, he did not connect it with maritime trade, thinking it demeaning: typical French elite ideas.

With Voltaire, the narrative arrives at the artificial construct historians call the Enlightenment, (See Chapter 8) which most describe as French philosophe advice to absolute rulers of exploitative continental peasant-serf societies where enlightened ideas did not penetrate. Real enlightenment continued 17th-century Anglo-Dutch maritime-inspired improvements and inventions. Tutored by Locke, influential British philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), wrote in 1706’s Thoughts Concerning Education of ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations on whom the affairs of Europe now turn.’ The Dutch contribution faded after 1672’s ‘Disaster Year’, French invasion and economic meltdown. After Anglo-Scottish union, Scotland’s enlightenment developed with Edinburgh’s medical school, Europe’s leading scientific institution. Thomas Savary (1650–1715), whose forebearers were Devon merchants, in 1698 patented a steam engine, demonstrating it to the Royal Society in 1699. Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) also from a Devon merchant family, together improved it, the design spreading throughout Britain and Europe. New iron casting techniques developed by the Coalbrookdale Company in the 1720s led to larger cylinders. Political, intellectual, technical and scientific freedom to think, still went hand-in-hand with maritime trade: maritime enlightenment.