English Overseas Trade 1500–1700

IN the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, English overseas trade went through three waves of expansion, separated by periods of near stagnation. These waves of growth arose out of quite different types of external circumstances, to which English manufacturers and merchants successfully responded and adapted. Between 1475 and 1550 the volume of sales of well-known commodities (broadcloths and some other types of woollen cloth) in long familiar markets of central Europe suddenly began to grow rapidly because these markets were becoming more prosperous. This was not, essentially, the defeating of another industry’s competition, nor the widening of the market through cost reductions; incomes expanded rapidly in the existing markets, for reasons that were external to England, and they demanded more of the goods they were accustomed to getting from England. In the second phase, 1630–89, the annual rate of growth was driven forward exceptionally rapidly because there were two expansive elements. One was the capture of south European markets from Italian and Spanish industry, in competition with the Dutch; the decline of the Mediterranean industries that opened these markets to the English and Dutch was an aspect of an overall economic decline whose reasons are disputable, but was, again, external to England.

ENGLISH exports grew rapidly from the end of the 1470s until the end of Henry VII’s reign, though interrupted briefly at times of international tensions. After 1508–10 progress slackened, and though London’s trade showed a continuing rapid expansion, this resulted from diversion of much of the trade of the southern and western ports to the metropolis. In the forties and early fifties there were violent trade fluctuations. Exports were very high in some individual years. They collapsed in 1542–3 and 1547 when war cut Antwerp from its continental markets, but surged forward in the intervening and following years. The heavy currency devaluation of 1546 stimulated them to reach a high peak in 1548–50. The epidemic of 1551, the upward revaluation of the currency in 1551–2 and the quarrel with Hanseatic traders in 1552–3 drove them down again. London exports fell away slightly from the highest peaks of the mid-century, but there was compensation, to an extent that cannot be evaluated, in the recovery of exports through the provincial ports. There were individual years of extreme difficulty, as in 1563 and 1586. Heroic efforts had to be made to open new channels of trade as old ones closed and London lost a part of its trading dominance; but English exports probably showed a modest rising tendency during the second half of the century.

THE markets into which English cloth exports flowed in increasing quantity from the fifteenth century onward were on the whole those of the central and north European lands south of the North Sea and Baltic, and north of the Alps and Pyrenees. In this area they competed with great success against the older Flemish industry in a range of fine and coarse woollen cloths, and, during the later fifteenth century, Flanders adapted itself to this situation by transferring its efforts to lighter, generally worsted cloths. Central European prosperity, a change of fashion among the well-to-do that substituted heavy cloth for furs, and the final triumph over Flemish competition, all contributed to the rapid rise of English exports in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. But southern European markets were almost untouched by English products, beyond modest sales in Spain in exchange for wine and oil. The kerseys that went to Italy were finally sold in the Turkish Balkans, Hungary and Asia Minor (which could not be approached across their German frontiers) rather than in the main Mediterranean markets. Powerful and well-established industries in Italy and Catalonia, and a growing Castilian woollen industry, with ample supplies of Spanish wool, met most of the needs of the countries round the Mediterranean, and only the new Flemish worsteds penetrated their markets at all seriously in the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century.

MERCHANTS traded in order to make profits, and they did so by either importing or exporting, or more commonly by a combination of both. It would be wrong to suppose that penetration to new trading areas was always a search for new markets; commonly its purpose was more direct access to the sources of imported foodstuffs or materials. Indeed, the best opportunities for securing more than routine gains from trade were usually to be found in importing. Most exported cloth was sold in great international markets (especially in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century), where there was a concourse of buyers and sellers. There was competition not only between English and foreign merchants who sent out English cloth, but also with foreigners selling foreign cloth; and the buyers were usually large wholesale merchants with resources and skills at least equal to those of the exporters. There were many wealthy traders on both sides, whose capacity to hold stocks evened out price fluctuation. Though imported goods were sold in England under competitive conditions, the merchants faced much weaker and less well-informed buyers. Mercery wares were often sold retail, or to small chapmen stocking up their packs to carry through the countryside, or to modest merchant intermediaries who took them round the fairs.

TRADE beyond Continental Europe (except to Mediterranean Turkey) was of little consequence before the Civil War. Then it rose dramatically, to an extent that changed the whole pattern of England’s overseas trade. By 1700 America and Asia were providing a third of all imports, and the re-export of their produce accounted for nearly a third of all English exports.⁵