The Meaning of Mercantilism and the Working of the Navigation Acts in the Seventeenth Century

Nuala Zahedieh

This paper uses the Navigation Acts to examine mercantilism in theory and practice. It looks at the ideological convictions that shaped the ambitions of the architects of the Navigation Acts and draws on extensive research on England's seventeenth-century colonial commerce to assess how far these aims were realized. Success was in large measure owing to unforeseen and contingent circumstances that reduced the costs of compliance to a similar level to the costs of evasion. The shipbuilding resources of the American frontier and a competitive advantage in violence in the Caribbean played an important part in enabling English merchants and shippers to compete with their Dutch rivals. Finally, the paper looks at some unintended consequences of the Acts that flew in the face of all that mattered to the mercantilists.

[WP # 99007]