British Navigation Acts
The British Navigation Acts were a series of laws enacted from the mid-17th century aimed at regulating trade between England, its colonies, and foreign nations. Rooted in mercantilist doctrine, these laws sought to ensure that colonial trade benefited the English economy by restricting the shipment of goods to British-built and British-owned ships, thereby limiting foreign competition. The first Navigation Act was passed in 1651, which prohibited foreign ships from trading with English colonies, and was followed by several revisions, including the significant Act of 1660 that enhanced the restrictions further. These acts stipulated that certain colonial products could only be shipped to England or its colonies, a strategy designed to bolster England’s customs revenues and foster domestic industries.
While the acts aimed to consolidate British maritime dominance and increase trade, they also led to challenges, including widespread smuggling and colonial resistance, particularly from groups like the Puritans who felt excluded from representation in Parliament. Despite initial protests, trade with England expanded, contributing to Britain’s emergence as a leading commercial power. The Navigation Acts laid the groundwork for the economic relations between Britain and its colonies, influences that persisted well into the 18th century, even as tensions grew and eventually contributed to the American Revolution.
British Navigation Acts
Locale British Empire, including the American colonies
Date September 13, 1660-July 27, 1663
England passed a set of laws designed to force the American colonies to trade only with the British Empire. The acts succeeded in enriching Britain, but they created tension between the home country and its colonies.
Key Figures
Charles II (1630-1685), king of EnglandSir George Downing (1623-1684), member of Parliament and commissioner of customsFirst earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), lord chancellor appointed by CharlesGeorge Monck (earl of Torrington, 1608-1670), privy councilorThomas Povey , influential English merchantJohn Shaw (fl. 1660’s), English financier who brought the Navigation Act of 1660 before ParliamentThomas Wriothesley, fourth earl of Southampton (1608-1667), lord high treasurer of England
Summary of Event
During the Elizabethan era, England, hitherto an agricultural country, began to emerge as a great nation ready to compete with the other European nations for wealth and power. The doctrine of mercantilism that the Crown adopted decreed that a nation must attain a favorable balance of trade—that is, it must export more than it imported—in order to accumulate bullion for financing war efforts and maintaining national security. Because the navy was thought to be essential to the strength of the nation and because commercial maritime activity enhanced naval power, attention in the seventeenth century centered upon the promotion of English shipping. Success demanded the overthrow of the Dutch monopoly in the carrying trade.
All the great commercial rivals of the seventeenth century accepted the tenets that colonies existed for the benefit of the mother country and that the colonies’ trade should be restricted to the mother country. As England’s knowledge of its colonies and of the new products to be reaped from them increased, so did its expectation of the colonies’ potential contribution to its grand scheme. England lacked definite laws relating to commercial policy, however, until 1650, when a combination of private corporate interests and the national interest motivated Parliament to enact legislation designed to attain the national goals.
Thus, in an attempt to break Dutch control of commerce, Parliament in 1650 forbade foreign ships from trading with the colonies without a license. The following year, Parliament enacted a law stating, in part, that only British-owned ships, of which the master and majority of the crew were also British, could import goods from Asia, Africa, and America into Great Britain, Ireland, or the colonies; only British ships or ships of the country of origin could import European goods into Great Britain, Ireland, or the colonies; and foreign goods could be imported into England only from the place of production. The act also prohibited British merchant ships from sailing from country to country to take on produce for import; more seriously, it provoked a two-year war with the Dutch. The entire period from 1651 to 1660 was marked by a great commercial struggle among the powers of western and northern Europe. Furthermore, the last years before the Restoration in Great Britain were fraught with uncertainty and financial difficulties.
When Charles II came to the throne in 1660, he acted upon the urging of the merchants to promote British commerce. He established two councils, one for trade and one for plantations, consisting of lords, merchants, planters, and sea captains. Through the Crown’s instructions to these councils, commercial policies gradually were defined. At the same time, Parliament gave the policies statutory authority. The first of these measures was the Navigation Act of 1660, sponsored by John Shaw, a prominent financier, and Sir George Downing, later commissioner of customs.
Enacted by the Convention Parliament on September 13, 1660, and confirmed by the first regular Restoration Parliament on July 27, 1661, the act was similar to that of 1651 in many respects. Certain defects and ambiguities in the earlier act had hindered enforcement, and certain revisions were necessary. The act of 1660 provided that only British-built or British-owned ships of which the masters and three-quarters of the crew were British could import or export goods or commodities, regardless of origin, to and from the British colonies. It further restricted shipment of certain enumerated articles produced in the colonies (sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, ginger, speckle wood, and dyewoods) to Great Britain or its colonies and required ships sailing from the colonies to give bond that they would unload their cargoes in the realm. The enumeration clause was intended to increase England’s customs revenues, to ensure its access to raw materials, and to advance domestic industries by creating employment in the trades that employed the enumerated products.
In practice, the 1660 regulations created many problems, and shippers took advantage of loopholes and ambiguities to evade the law. Probably to facilitate enforcement, Parliament passed the Act of Frauds in 1662. It restricted the privileges of the act of 1660 to ships built in England, except for ships bought before 1662.
Great Britain still had to clarify the dependent relationship of its colonies to the mother country. If the government were to recover from virtual bankruptcy incurred by the Puritans and royal debts, it could not allow the colonies to buy European products at cheaper prices, and it had to gain customs revenues from the colonial merchants. To make Great Britain the sole exporting center for colonial imports and thus constitute it as a “staple,” Parliament, on July 27, 1663, passed the Act for the Encouragement of Trade. Henceforth, European goods could be imported to the colonies only from England and in English-built ships. The only exceptions to the rule were salt for the New England and Newfoundland fisheries, wine from Madeira and the Azores, and provisions, servants, and horses from Ireland and Scotland.
Significance
Because of the complexity of the Navigation Acts, administrative discretion was important in determining how they should be interpreted and enforced. In the colonies, enforcement lay with the governors, who were required to send to England reports of all vessels trading within their jurisdiction and copies of the bonds required of all ships’ masters. Both colonial and English sea captains, however, found ways of continuing direct trade with Europe, and smuggling was common. In the period immediately following passage of the Navigation Acts, the colonists protested the restriction of their markets. As English markets became glutted with colonial goods, the returns that the colonists could expect decreased. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony objected to the acts on the basis that, since they were not represented in Parliament, they were not subject to the laws passed by Parliament. Gradually, however, most colonists adjusted to compliance, and the insurrections that occurred in the years following cannot be attributed in any large sense to the Navigation Acts in isolation.
As far as England was concerned, the legislation did achieve its purpose. Colonial trade with England and British overseas shipping increased more rapidly than before. There were sufficient causes for the American Revolution apart from the Navigation Acts, and the habits of trade that the acts established lasted beyond the eighteenth century, by which time Great Britain had become the world’s greatest commercial and maritime power.
Bibliography
Andrews, Charles, M. England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy. Vol. 4 in The Colonial Period of American History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964. Argues that the Navigation Acts were expressions of Great Britain’s goal to develop a great commercial and colonial empire.
Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Collection of essays about Great Britain and its colonies in America and the Caribbean. Chapter 3, an essay about the economy of Great Britain and its colonies, contains information about the Navigation Acts.
Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Provocative revisionism on mercantilism, colonialism, the English merchant class, the role of politics, and the place of London in the commercial and maritime structure of the British Empire.
Clark, Sir George. The Later Stuarts, 1660-1714. Vol. 10 in The Oxford History of England. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1955. A standard history of late seventeenth century England. Depicts the Restoration period, 1660-1685, as characterized by an elaborate and rigid system of trade regulation and protectionism, policies that originated under the Commonwealth.
Davies, Godfrey. The Early Stuarts, 1603-1660. Vol. 9 in The Oxford History of England. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1959. Stresses the link between the powerful Dutch commercial empire and the aspiring English determined to compete with and surpass the Dutch.
Dickerson, Oliver M. The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951. Analyzes the impact of the Navigation Acts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role of mercantilism, and the origins of the American Revolution.
Harper, Lawrence A. The English Navigation Laws. New York: Octagon Books, 1964. The definitive work on the series of Navigation Acts of the 1650’s and 1660’. Argues that the English acts were an experiment in social engineering and an early manifestation of the economic system of mercantilism.
McCusker, John, and Russell Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607-1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Comprehensive assessment of the pre-revolutionary economy of Great Britain’s American colonies. Includes information on the Navigation Acts.
Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650-1770. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Examines the competition between England and the Netherlands in the North Sea economy to describe how England’s increasingly coherent polices of mercantilism undermined Dutch trade in the region.