The Currency of Empire
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CHAPTER 7

Economic Rebellion, Competition, and Growth in English America, 1680–1685

Edward Randolph manifestly exaggerated when he claimed in 1676 that Massachusetts was brimming with silver. Even the most bustling mainland colonial towns in the 1670s possessed only a trifling sum of coin compared with most port towns and cities in England, itself concerned with its money stock. Nevertheless, this exaggeration, like most of Randolph’s wild assertions, contained an element of truth. By the early 1680s in particular—as colonial economies matured and trade accelerated—mainland colonists enjoyed a greater circulation of coin than at any previous time in their history. Colonials did not retain all of this incoming coin—they exported much of it to buy imported goods on a scale eclipsing any previous era—but they did indeed keep a significant portion for internal circulation. Neither was this just a smattering of coin, nor did the coin center merely in Boston or Port Royal. Across much of the Eastern Seaboard of North America, and even in the surrounding countryside, coin became more readily available in the early 1680s than ever before, with ordinary men and women pairing silver coin with country pay to mediate day-to-day exchanges. The chief exception to this trend was the Chesapeake region, yet even Virginians might have enjoyed the beginnings of a metallic currency had they imported silver, not slaves, from their provisioning trade with the West Indies.

The West Indian islands were the source of most of the silver money that arrived in eastern North America in the 1680s. The mainland colonies sold a vast array of supplies and provisions to Jamaica, Barbados, and Dutch Curaçao, including wheat, flour, barrel staves, timber, beef, pork, beer, biscuits, and horses. Silver coin and bills of exchange made up most of the balance, flying uninterrupted to bustling seaports on the eastern mainland seaboard. “All ships from Ireland, Bermudas, New England and New York, loaden with provisions, carry off for the same ready money,” Governor Carlisle remarked in Jamaica in 1679.1 Even when sugar made up the balance instead, its subsequent carriage to London by Boston merchants had the roundabout effect of increasing the colony’s money supply by diminishing the colony’s trade deficit with England for imported goods.

The provisioning trade, in most cases, was perfectly legal, and absolutely necessary for the sugar islands. If that were the only major source of coin for the mainland colonies, imperial officials might have left them alone. But there were other, illicit sources of coin. Buccaneering was one. Though the buccaneers were largely banished from Jamaica by the early 1680s, they were driven not out of existence but to North American seaports. The buccaneers arrived there not to pillage but to spend pirated silver. Most colonists earnestly welcomed them in; the pirates indeed had a hugely positive impact on the colonial money supply. Colonists used some of this coin for internal circulation; in other cases to buy more imported goods—either way, it was an economic benefit. To attract outside money, some colonial governments also competitively devalued their currencies, hoping to outdo their neighbors by offering pirates—as well as legal traders—the highest shilling value for their pieces of silver. Furthermore, several settlements developed nascent plans for colonial manufacturing, designed specifically to quell the export of coin. However distant the prospect, colonial-made textiles threatened to undercut England’s most dependable overseas market (the colonies themselves) for the same goods. Finally and most maddening of all, smuggling still proliferated across virtually all of English America.

Put together, these colonial efforts to better themselves economically and monetarily posed an extremely grave danger to the mercantilist program. These actions persuaded English administrators of the need to bring the colonies under much stricter discipline. There was no doubt that English America had grown more prosperous in recent years; the colonial money supply reflected this growth. Colonists attributed this growth to greater economic productivity and to legal, just means of commerce. Absent mercantilist restrictions, many colonists believed, they would be even wealthier. The Lords of Trade attributed colonial affluence to illicit activity: to piracy, currency manipulation, the ominous birth of colonial manufacturing, and most critically smuggling. From the Crown’s point of view, economic subversion was made possible by the rebellious, independent political spirit of the colonial world. For the former to end, the latter had first to be extinguished. The Crown’s conviction on this point hardened in the final years of Charles II’s reign.

By the early 1680s, the worst of the political storm on Jamaica had passed; the Crown and the planter-assembly had broadly reconciled their severest differences. Part of the reason was their united front on another key point of the Crown’s agenda: antipiracy. The planter-assembly, royal governor, local merchant community, and Royal African Company all had a stake in eradicating what remained of the buccaneering interest in Port Royal. No longer privateers with legal commissions, the freebooters had crossed unequivocally over into the criminal realm of piracy. Their continued forays disrupted the island’s trade of contraband and slaves to Spanish America, raised the cost of shipping insurance and freight, discouraged vessels from stopping at Port Royal, and attracted hosts of runaway slaves from the sugar plantations.2 Here the planters found common ground with the otherwise-hated RAC; even the two rebel leaders of the assembly, Samuel Long and William Beeston, agreed with the company that buccaneers had caused “irreparable damage” to those “imploying themselves in planting and Merchandize.”3

Privateering commissions were already on the outs under the first governorship of Sir Thomas Lynch in the early 1670s. In recent years, however, Jamaica’s buccaneers turned to the warring French and Dutch powers in the Caribbean to secure privateering commissions; nevertheless, they still returned to Port Royal with looted silver.4 Their resilience undermined the entire plantation system. “The onely Enemy to Planting is Privateering,” Governor Lord Vaughan declared in 1676. Vaughan made it a capital offense to sign a privateering commission with a foreign power, but for those who had already done so, he offered amnesty to any who surrendered within a year. About three hundred privateers turned themselves in. But Vaughan knew this action to be insufficient. “These Indyes are soe Vast and Rich, and this kind of Rapine soe sweet,” he told the Lords of Trade, “that it is one of the hardest things in the World to Draw those from it which have used it so long.”5

So long as the problem of buccaneering persisted, the Spaniards’ eagerness to buy slaves and contraband goods from the English correspondingly diminished. One pirate raid in 1677, for instance, robbed the Spanish of nearly 50,000 “peeces of Eight”; another confiscated at least 20,000 pieces.6 The Lords of Trade scolded Vaughan for his apparent inability to get a handle on the situation, telling him, “the King intendeth to make a Plantation of Jamaica and not a Christian Algiers.” Buccaneering, said Sir Thomas Lynch in 1677, “hinders correspondence and a secret Trade with your neighbouring Spanyards, which brings infinitely more profit.”7 In 1680 the Jamaican Council demanded immediate action to “reduce the Privateers,” so that Spanish traders might “bring us store of Mony and Goods, wherewith to purchase our English Commodityes.”8 A string of new silver strikes in Mexico in the 1680s made Jamaica’s trade with the Spanish Main all the more alluring and the persistence of buccaneering all the more reprehensible.9 “The Spaniards hate us for the multitude of English that here preys on them,” Governor Lynch told the Council in 1684, “and in Spain they had rather the Dutch should have theyr Money then wee.”10

Even Sir Henry Morgan, the former face of privateering, changed his mind on the matter. Morgan had recently become a substantial plantation owner, possessing more than one hundred slaves.11 In 1680–1681, he again served as the deputy governor of Jamaica, having replaced the Earl of Carlisle. Morgan now disavowed the buccaneers as “vagabonds” and “Ravenous Vermin”: men who “discourage Spaniards from private trade with us,” and “presume even to plunder and take vessels belonging to this Island.”12 Indeed, under Morgan’s leadership in 1681, the planter-assembly passed the most stringent antibuccaneering laws in the island’s history.13 “Our losses and troubles through pirates are intolerable,” Lynch remarked two years later. Pirates had lately raided English vessels in Cuba, Hispaniola, the Bay of Honduras, and the Spanish Main—losses calculated at £50,000—including an assault in which “they tooke 65 pounds of Gold.”14 Yet the Spanish were still the primary target; in one such attack near Panama, English pirates allegedly “put the Spaniards to torture to discover if there were more silver.” The most famous assault of the period was a land raid against Vera Cruz in 1683, conducted by an assortment of English and Dutch pirates aboard thirteen vessels. The incursion yielded 960,000 pieces of eight (£216,000 sterling), allotting each participant 800 pieces of eight (£180 sterling).15

By the mid-1680s, Lynch’s aggressive antipiracy campaign had mostly succeeded in throwing the buccaneers out of Port Royal. But the pirates found refuge elsewhere, first in other parts of the Caribbean—the Leeward Islands, Bahamas, and Central American lagoons—and then in places far beyond.16 “We have many villanous wretches amongst us who would be glad of any occasion to gett mony,” remarked the governor of Bermuda in 1684, “… to make this country a Refuge of Pyrats is the Intention of the people.” Carlisle had warned the Lords of Trade back in 1679 that the buccaneers had told him they “would leave their Interest in the Island, and sail for Road Island, or to the Dutch, where they could bee entertained.”17 This they did, and before long they sprawled across much of the North American seaboard, as well as the Indian Ocean, even forging a sanctuary settlement on Madagascar. Located 250 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa, Madagascar was prime estate for raiding East India Company vessels carrying boatloads of silver to India or expensive spices and fabrics on the return trip. There seemed few places the marauders would not trek; even a Pacific raid in 1686 allotted three hundred pieces of eight to each participant.18

But North America was the buccaneers’ favorite destination to spend looted coin. Pirates were already frequenting North American seaports as early as 1680, but within a few years they were such regular guests that they ranked among the mainland’s most important sources of money. Buccaneers who had once returned to Port Royal after a successful venture now opted for Newport, Charles Town, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and the Albemarle region of northeastern Carolina. “The Law wee have made against privateers,” Governor Lynch reported in 1684, “neither discourages them nor lessens their Number, while they have such retreats as Carolina, N. England and other Colonyes.” Gold and silver, he said, was the colonists’ chief incentive, for “they are now full of Pyrats money, and from Boston they have told me, the Privateers have brought in £80000.”19 This figure was almost surely exaggerated, but the point stands that tolerating the arrival of pirates into one’s seaport made monetary sense. Pirates sold confiscated goods at bargain prices; they spent silver and gold money lavishly in taverns, brothels, and shops. Moreover, colonial merchants and labourers earned a handsome sum of coin repairing and victualing ships belonging to pirates; lucrative profits awaited any savvy colonial merchant willing to bear the risk.20

One of the more dramatic illustrations of the support that pirates received comes from Boston, in the year 1684. William Dyre, the newly appointed surveyor general of the customs in America, seized a vessel that plainly belonged to pirates. In doing so, however, he was “much discouraged and severely Threaten’d by many, but more especially by one Mr. Samuel Shrimpton, a merchant of this place, to have my Brains beat out or a stab for seizing said ship.” Shrimpton was the wealthiest merchant in Boston and the purported recipient, Dyre said, of “Great Quantitys of piratically plundered Gold, silver and plate.”21

Private colonies like Rhode Island were most notorious for harboring pirates, and here the Crown had little to no means to check the practice. The royal governor of New Hampshire, Edward Cranfield, recorded one such incident in Rhode Island in 1683. Upon his visit there, “two Pyrates came in” with a supposed commission from Lynch. The governor of New York, Thomas Dongan, was also present, and both Cranfield and Dongan recognized Lynch’s signature as an obvious forgery; neither were his titles even correctly given. “Dongan and my self desired the Government to secure them, but they refused”; the governor of Rhode Island “was of another Opinion and Declared the Ship a free bottom.”22

Massachusetts Bay, expectedly, bore a reputation as a “Receptacle of all piratical and uncustomed goods,” to quote William Dyre in 1684.23 Several of the men involved in the aforementioned attack on Vera Cruz in 1683—yielding 960,000 pieces of eight—apparently spent some of their money in Boston.24 The governor of New Hampshire, in 1684, described an incident in Boston when a French privateering ship arrived with £700 of silver and gold per man. “The Bostoners no sooner had intelligence of her being upon the coast but they dispatched a messenger and pilot to invite and convey her in,” he said; “the pirates are likely to leave the greatest part of their [silver] Plate behind them, having bought up most of the choice goods in Boston.”25 Randolph, of course, routinely called Massachusetts a “common receptacle of pyratts,” claiming they “brought great bootyes to Boston … money, plate, and rich commodityes.” Worse still, he said, the Boston mint “encouraged pyratts to bring their plate hither, because it could be coined and conveyed in great parcells undiscovered.”26

Piracy became such a vital source of coin for New England that, years later, supporters of a colonial paper currency reasoned that the recent decline of piracy made silver an impractical currency in New England. One Boston pamphleteer in 1716 cited the buccaneers and fishery as having formerly been the two most “principal Means to draw in Silver … the Privateers did bring in considerable Quantities.” Another writer, in 1720, remarked that of the money then in circulation, “it came great part of it from Pyrates.”27

Buccaneering was practically the only source of coin for Carolina; several merchants in Charles Town earned generous sums of silver and gold servicing and victualling pirate vessels. The Carolina proprietors required their quitrents in coin, strengthening the incentive for tolerating piracy. After a succession of two openly pro-pirate governors in the early to mid-1680s—appointed by the merchant-dominated council—the proprietors sent a new antipirate governor, James Colleton, to govern the colony in 1686. Resistance to his governorship was so strong that he dismissed the entire council and declared martial law, though he still failed to fully stamp out the practice.28 “It may be said, that formerly Silver was very plenty here,” a defender of paper currency remarked to hard-money critics in South Carolina in 1732; “I answer thereto … the Privateers brought in great Quantities of Spanish Silver.”29

Virginia and Maryland comprised the two main exceptions. The tobacco economy made the Chesapeake a target rather than a beneficiary of piracy; buccaneers sometimes raided the slow-moving tobacco vessels traveling to and from the lightly guarded Chesapeake, sometimes absconding to the northern colonies after a successful looting. “The last yeare and this present yeare this Government hath been ill Infested with Privateers, or rather Pyrates, of whom wee have very ill Apprehensions,” the Virginia secretary wrote the Lords of Trade in 1683.30 The Chesapeake also had no significant seaports for pirates to spend their money; moreover, the 5s valuation for Spanish coin (4s6d in Maryland) was lower than anywhere else on the Atlantic seaboard.

The response from England to this new outburst of piracy, at first, was astoundingly weak. The legal apparatus for dealing with pirates was not yet developed; the onus for enforcing antipiracy laws was still on each colonial government. Not until 1684 did a shift begin to occur. That year, King Charles commanded all governors to prosecute any persons who “knowingly entertain, harbor, conceal, trade, or hold any correspondence” with pirates.31 Dutifully, each colonial government passed the antipiracy legislation. Enforcement was another matter. Colonial juries habitually delivered acquittals, convicted pirates curiously “escaped” from colonial jailhouses, and governors and magistrates recurrently accepted bribes from merchant allies.32 The problem was so pervasive that in 1687 King James II commanded governors to no longer permit colonial magistrates to hurry pirates “immediately to their Tryals before any Evidence could be produced.”33

Buccaneers considered a host of factors when determining which North American seaport to visit. Was it a private colony or a royal colony? What was the reputation of the governor? What of the merchants? And how many shillings could a piece of eight earn there?

Colonial governments raised the value of Spanish money to new heights in the early to mid-1680s. Coin devaluation, indeed, became the most popular means in colonial America to attract foreign silver, whether from pirates or ordinary tradesmen. The timing conveniently, though not accidentally, aligned with the pirate ascendancy in eastern North America; pirates were more likely to bring their coin into a port for 6s apiece—or better yet, 6s9d apiece—than, say, 5s apiece. Colonial leaders knew this fact well, and their governments, by consequence, actively competed over which province could offer pirates, merchants, tradesmen, and anyone else with coin the most bang for their buck.

In 1682, on the eve of this new devaluation wave, the rates for a Spanish dollar (piece of eight) were as follows: 4s6d in Maryland (the same standard as in England); 5s in Virginia, Carolina, Jamaica, and Barbados; 6s in New York, Massachusetts, and the Leeward Islands; 7s8d in New Jersey.34 Rates changed rapidly thereafter. In 1683 alone, four colonies—Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Carolina—raised the piece of eight from 5s to 6s.35 The following year, 1684, the New York assembly—meeting for the first time in the colony’s history—advanced the dollar from 6s to 6s9d. The new rate was 12.5 percent higher than in Massachusetts. James, Duke of York, elected not to repeal the new statute, but less than two years later, as king, he warned Governor Dongan that “you shall not, upon any pretence whatsoever, permit any [further] alteration to bee made in the value of the current coyn.”36

To somewhat complicate matters, however, devaluation could also be secured more discreetly. By ordering clipped coin to pass at face value, some governments permitted colonists to accept Spanish money at rates higher than the law, at first glance, suggested. An unclipped piece of eight, if minted in Mexico or Spain (though not in Peru), contained 17.5 pennyweight (dwt) of silver. Clipped coin was often as light as 12 dwt—one-third lighter than a full-weight dollar. Yet during this period, a number of colonial governments declared clipped money legal tender at the same rate as full-weight coin, allowing clipped money to pass at face value. This method of valuation was called currency by tale, as opposed to currency by weight. Virtually all pirate money was clipped to some degree—often by the same pirates—and so governments that allowed clipped money to pass at the ordinary rate—currency by tale—significantly enticed buccaneers with clipped money. The opposite approach—currency by weight—deployed a sliding scale of valuation, deducting a certain number of pence for each missing pennyweight from the coin. Pennsylvania, West Jersey, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands enacted currency by tale; New England, New York, East Jersey, and Carolina, currency by weight. The decision on which way to go—tale or weight—made a colossal difference in each colony’s currency, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

Pennsylvania, for example, enacted currency by tale. After 1683, clipped dollars were legal tender in Pennsylvania at 6s a piece, the same rate for unclipped money. The assembly voted down a motion that dollars “goe by weight,” and so, in reality, the Pennsylvania valuation for Spanish coin was far higher than the 6s rating suggested, for the law assigned a 6s rating for clipped money. The New England and Carolina governments also priced full-weight dollars at 6s but deducted a certain number of pence for each missing pennyweight. Consequently, though Pennsylvania and Massachusetts each rated the dollar at 6s, the de facto rating in Pennsylvania was substantially higher. A 12 dwt coin in Massachusetts passed at only 4s2d; the same coin in Pennsylvania passed at 6s. Barbados, like Pennsylvania, instituted currency by tale (though at 5s, not 6s); New York, like Massachusetts, instituted currency by weight, but at 6s9d for unclipped money and 4s8d for coins weighing 12 dwt (higher than Massachusetts, but lower than Pennsylvania).37

The greatest downside to currency by tale was that it banished full-weight coin from circulation, flooding colonies like Pennsylvania and Barbados with clipped money. Clipped money also circulated in New York and Massachusetts, of course, but at a discount, appearing alongside full-weight coin that did not receive a discount. In Pennsylvania and Barbados, however, no trader in his right mind would spend full-weight money when he could spend lighter coin at the same rate. In such colonies, “not one piece in a hundred weighs so much” as a full-weight dollar; “none but extreme light pieces will be brought in.”38 When a typical tradesman encountered full-weight money in a colony with currency by tale, he either exported the coin, hoarded the coin, or clipped the coin before spending it. Hence the governor of Pennsylvania complained to William Penn in 1689 that the law “incourages vile persons to clip all those species of moneys.”39 Some years later, when New York joined Pennsylvania in rating currency by tale, a merchant there reported that after the change, “none remain’d with us but such as was lessened by others.”40 Those who wished not to clip money—the vast majority of tradesmen—simply exported full-weight coin from the colony when purchasing imported goods and saved the clipped money for internal circulation. For this reason, the East Jersey assembly in 1686 repealed currency by tale, arguing that it had detrimentally caused “the continual draining of silver money that is most valuable.… The best of the coin is carried away.”41

Currency by tale could lead to amusing predicaments, such as occurred in Boston at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Beginning in 1696, Boston merchants agreed in concert to adopt currency by tale because the Crown had refused to allow their government to increase the rating for full-weight dollars. A few years later, a certain English shipmaster ventured into town to “pay a sum of money,” seeking provisions and other victuals. A local wharfman, upon seeing the shipmaster with “heavy pieces of Eight, asked him what he was to doe with that money.” The shipmaster replied that he intended to spend it. To this, the man laughed and “told him if he would let him have it for a few hours, he would bring it to him with advantage.” True to his word, the wharfman returned with all the coins clipped and with the remaining sum of silver that he had shaved off: a significant quantity. With a wink and a grin, the wharfman assured the shipmaster that the money would be accepted at the same rate as if it were unclipped, and the wharfman was right.42

Currency by weight suffered a critical disadvantage, however. The inconvenience of having to repeatedly weigh coins on scales, and then calculating their precise shilling value, was particularly taxing, even unbearable for some. Currency by weight, too often, caused inordinate “Trouble in receiving and paying”: “’tis hardly possible to weigh or compute every groat and sixpence we pay.”43 In rural areas especially, where few to no scales existed, most men and women still relied on face value only, irrespective of silver content or the law. Locke summarized the dilemma well: “nothing can make Clipping unprofitable,” he said, “but making all light Money go only for its weight”; nevertheless, “the weighing of Silver to every one we had occasion to pay it to, would be very troublesome, for every one must carry about Scales in his Pocket.”44

Given the many discrepancies, then, between currency by tale and currency by weight—as well as the many variations in how many pence each currency-by-weight colony deducted for each missing pennyweight—it is an extraordinary task for the historian to draw up a comparative chart of the precise rates at which silver passed in the several English Atlantic colonies in any given year. It suffices, then, to note that money passed at the highest rates in the Middle Colonies; at slightly lower rates in New England, Carolina, and Barbados; and at the lowest rates in Jamaica and the Chesapeake.

How aware were pirates of the various rates and methods for valuing coin in each colony? It is not possible to say with any real certainty, but pirates were likely more aware of this information than some today might credit them. News traveled slowly in the early modern Atlantic world, but travel it did, and for pirates possessing hundreds or thousands of pieces of eight, this was knowledge well worth possessing.

Of course there were many other reasons for wanting to devalue the dollar. The antipirate colonies of Virginia and Jamaica were also zealous to devalue the dollar in the 1680s. As before mentioned, the House of Burgesses petitioned the king on the matter in 1680, applauded Governor Culpeper for advancing the dollar to 6s in January 1683, and then watched the Crown repeal his proclamation in September (despite having previously granted him permission to devalue). In Jamaica, beginning in 1683, the planter-assembly also struggled relentlessly to advance the dollar to 6s. The goal was not to encourage piracy but to ease debt payments to the Royal African Company. Jamaican planters collectively owed more than £130,000 to the RAC, and the proposed devaluation would abate their debts by 20 percent.45 But Governor Lynch, now armed with a twenty-one-year revenue, refused his consent, detailing sixteen reasons against the bill. The next governor, Sir Hender Molesworth (1684–1687), simultaneously worked as the RAC agent for Jamaica. Needless to say, this doomed the assembly’s effort.46

Cleverly, Jamaicans responded by undertaking de facto devaluation. They did so by mimicking, extralegally, the Barbadian example of currency by tale. Late in 1682, planters and tradesmen reached a voluntary agreement to institute currency by tale, as in Barbados. They did so outside of law, as such a bill would never have passed the governor’s desk. Full-weight coin soon vanished from the island, and RAC agents howled at being pressured to accept clipped money at 5s for debt payments.47 Governor Lynch warned the islanders that the RAC had already complained to the Lords of Trade about “the Light Money at Barbados.”48 Sure enough, the company petitioned the king that “light Spanish monys pass there without any determinated weight” and is “every day introduced lighter & lighter.” The assembly, in reply, characteristically denounced the RAC as a monopolist company that had notoriously mismanaged its business; besides, they said, most debt was settled in sugar, not coin, and so the “lightnes of mony can be no prejudice to the Royall Company” and “may be refused” if offered (by this they meant that clipped money might be refused in favor of sugar money, not the full-weight silver desired by the company).49

Meanwhile, as the Crown battled efforts in Jamaica and Virginia to raise the dollar to 6s, the same imperial administrators expressly permitted a 6s valuation in New Hampshire, now a royal colony. In 1683 the governor, Edward Cranfield, followed the recent lead of Connecticut by raising the dollar to 6s. He did so, however, by mere proclamation, without a corresponding act from the assembly, which subsequently opposed the action. The next year, several New Hampshire residents petitioned against the proclamation, to which the governor insisted that six shillings was a “just value” for the coin, and that his decree had been an “advantage to the Province by bringing that money [in] more than formerly, and herein these people have no reason to complain.”50 The Lords of Trade, in early 1685, rebuked the governor for advancing the coin without royal permission, but let the proclamation stand.51 Their decision came less than two years after they repealed a like proclamation in Virginia for which the governor had received permission.52

On the surface then, imperial currency policy seemed almost entirely arbitrary in the 1680s. The Crown, though it had demonstrated an undeniable disposition against devaluation, had little option but to tolerate it in private colonies, and in royal colonies the Crown fluctuated between allowing devaluation and prohibiting it. And yet there was also a degree of logic to the apparent inconsistency; it was not as capricious as may seem at first sight. The Crown most actively resisted devaluation in the tobacco and sugar plantations, citing a possible reduction in the customs revenue. The RAC also played a major role in blocking devaluation by law in Jamaica, and in Virginia the Crown’s quitrent revenue was a principal factor. Either way, royal income was at stake, an especially pressing issue as the king sought to continue ruling at home without Parliament (which he had successfully done since dissolving parliament in 1681). Still, from the standpoint of colonial planters, the Crown’s policy on devaluation seemed utterly haphazard and discriminatory; it proved immensely frustrating to watch neighboring colonies advance the rates of coin without the ability to follow.

The Crown also had much intellectual support in its anti-devaluation posture. Devaluation carried little favor among most prominent economic thinkers in England. Recently in 1675, a London printer published, for the first time, a decades-old economic treatise by Rice Vaughn, entitled A Discourse of Coin and Coinage. The members of the Lords of Trade had almost certainly read the book, and in it, Vaughn blasted the altering of currency rates, calling it an act of “Injustice and Oppression” against “all which are forced to receive less in Intrinsical value than is due unto them.” A few years later, in 1684, when a customs officer on Nevis complained of the 6s rating in the Leeward Islands, the Commissioners of the Mint in London forwarded their opinion that trade was “in no wayes to be ballanced by notions and names of money or things, but by the real and intrinsic value of money and commodities truly answering each other.” Prices will rise in proportion to the raising of coin, they argued, and so the law will not attain its purported end. This was the consensus among most economic thinkers in England in the 1670s and 1680s.53

More important, from the Crown’s standpoint, competitive currency devaluation undermined any notion of a united English empire. Devaluation prompted intercolonial quarreling, suspicion, and jealousy. If the Lords of Trade could have banned the practice everywhere in the 1680s, they would have. For now, however, there was little the Crown could do to prevent private governments from autonomously determining their own rates for coin. As for New Hampshire, it was a royal colony surrounded by private New England governments, and as it had little consequence to the mercantilist system, the Crown saw no use in challenging its 6s rate.

The fact that devaluation was an issue at all in the colonies—together with the proliferation of piracy—served as further evidence to the Crown that consolidation was absolutely necessary. In both cases, piracy and coin devaluation, imperial administrators encountered the quagmire of a decentralized colonial sphere outside of its immediate control, whose actions, at any moment, could seriously jeopardize the empire’s whole mercantilist foundation.

The relatively flourishing economic state of colonial America in the early 1680s made the Crown’s push toward imperial consolidation all the more tempting. With sound reason, the Lords of Trade believed that England’s colonists were thriving as never before. Smuggling and piracy played no small part in this relative prosperity; so too did the lawful provisioning trade to the West Indies for silver. But one way or the other—through legal or illegal means—colonists were better off economically. Imperial officials saw this prosperity as reason to bring colonists under stricter discipline and to channel more of that wealth into England. On the other end, many colonists resolutely believed that the empire had already overburdened them economically and that anything additional would add all the more to the injustice.

In Massachusetts Bay, silver and even gold coin become more common in the late 1670s and early 1680s. Historians have underestimated the extent to which Bay colonists in this period used coin to settle routine exchanges. The court records of Essex County—home of Salem, Massachusetts—reveal a surprising number of instances of colonists’ even possessing gold money. One Martha Haffield, for instance, owned at least £21 in gold; others owned smaller sums of gold.54 The same court records prove the consistent use of “money silver” in daily exchanges: a saddle, for instance, earned for one seller “12s in silver”; a doctor’s visit cost a patient “in silver, 2s6d.”55 A merchant in Salem rented his twenty-ton vessel for “£12 10s per month in current silver of New England”: an expression that could include pine-tree shillings, foreign coin at New England rates, or a combination of the two. In this case, monthly rent for the vessel was 250 pine-tree shillings, or almost 42 pieces of eight. Also in Salem, in 1681, a yeoman farmer sold four oxen and twenty lambs for “£18 10s in silver money of New England”: 370 pine-tree shillings, or 62 pieces of eight.56 The more well-to-do certainly possessed and spent on a regular basis. The inventory of a wealthy tradesman, Edward Wharton, in 1678, included £99 4s in “new England money”: nearly 2,000 pine-tree shillings, or 330 pieces of eight.57 Another estate, in 1685, included £580 in foreign coin and plate, £60 in English coin, and £23 in Bay shillings (460 pine-tree coins).58 Even a more modest estate, such as that of Anne Burt, calculated at £47, included £2 10s of silver money (50 pine-tree shillings) and another £3 of debts owed to her expressly in silver.59

Even in the most rural areas of New England, coin gradually entered circulation. The governor of Connecticut, in 1680, attested that the provisioning trade of food and timber to the Caribbean islands had procured “some money” for the colony.60 When the governments of Connecticut and New Hampshire revalued the dollar in 1683, both colonies, for the first time, assigned different values to the heavier Mexican piece (6s) and the lighter Peruvian piece (5s), indicating that enough of these coins now circulated to warrant such distinction.61 In New Plymouth, for the first time, the government was now able to collect fines in silver; for example, the penalty for fornication, previously settled in country produce, could now only “be payed forthwith in Mony.” Silver now settled a wide range of lawsuits in Plymouth: one defamation case in 1686 involved the astounding sum of “two hundred pounds of silver money,” or more than 650 pieces of eight.62

Often times, payment was split between silver money and country pay. In 1679 the £10 stipend of a widow in Essex County was met “half in New England silver money and half in corn.”63 A Boston bricklayer in 1675 agreed to build two brick arches for an ironworks company for £20: “half in silver money of New England as soon as the work was finished, and half in English goods at money price delivered at Boston within a month after the work was finished.”64 In 1680 a millwright contracted to build a windmill for £160, “half in silver and half in fish or other goods at money price.”65 In 1676 a debtor owed a £12 payment to one Susanna Satchwell, payable “in silver or fat cattle fit for slaughter.”66 In Ipswich in 1678, two carpenters agreed to build a barn for £10: 10s was tendered “in silver,” and the remainder “in corn and pork.”67

To be certain, country pay still utterly dominated the rural economy. One should not venture to the opposite extreme and claim that silver coin was more prolific than it truly was. Indian corn, wheat, peas, malt, barrel staves, and even fish were all still regularly tendered in public and private payments. Many private payments, wages, court settlements, and salaries included no coin at all, only produce. Until 1680, neither the clerk nor secretary of the Massachusetts General Court received coin for their pay, and even after 1680, they still received three-quarters of their salary in country produce.68 Grammar school teachers in New Plymouth received “att least twelve pounds in currant marchantable pay”; in the same colony, in 1682, the two surviving daughters of a man recently deceased were to receive “eight pounds in current country pay when they come of age.” Also in Plymouth, a man and woman who had cared for a six-year-old orphan in “destitute condition” received “five pound in good currant country pay” for their “considerable charge and trouble in the keeping of her.”69 The Rhode Island assembly in 1687 declared “sheep’s wool” legal tender at 7.5d a pound, alongside other country “species,” including butter, corn, and pork.70 Such remained the norm in the most rural areas of New England; nevertheless, especially as one drew nearer to the port towns, there is no doubt that by the early 1680s, ordinary New Englanders enjoyed far greater access to coin than in any previous era.

The known output of the Boston mint is also incredibly revealing. In 1679 alone, the mint produced approximately 20,000 pine-tree shillings, or about £1,000 worth of the coin. The only precise records available on the mint’s output are from 1671 to 1680, during which time John Hull produced 74,777 shillings worth of Boston coin of varying (and unknown) denomination, amounting to some £3,738.71 Historian Mark Peterson says that for the years between 1652 and 1682, “we can conservatively estimate that Hull produced 225,000 shillings’ worth of sterling-grade Massachusetts money and as many as 300,000 individual coins,” amounting to approximately six shillings of silver coin for every man, woman, and child in Massachusetts. “The Boston mint clearly produced a workable supply of small change for New England,” Peterson writes, “even if we allow for the likelihood that substantial quantities of Massachusetts shillings were exported out of the region.”72

By contrast, most southern colonies had practically no coin at all in circulation, even in the 1680s. The one exception was in Charles Town, where pirate money supplied the bulk of the silver, with the rest supplied from a small provisioning trade with the Caribbean; other than that, coin in Carolina was negligible. “Money here is but little, and that Spanish,” reported one Charles Town resident in 1682, on the eve of the pirate ascendancy; “… our pay is what the Countrey affords.”73 No wonder residents soon proved so eager to welcome pirates in with chests full of silver.

In Virginia a common silver currency was a real possibility in the 1680s but never came to pass. The House of Burgesses, in 1683, even recognized the circulation of “Coyne comonly called New England money.”74 Many middling farmers on the Eastern Shore and lower James River had finally diversified from tobacco monoculture, shifting production either partly or entirely toward the Caribbean provisioning trade. Approximately seventy vessels—mostly hailing from New England—sailed annually from the Chesapeake to Barbados, carrying livestock, pipe staves, tobacco, and pork and other foodstuffs to the sugar planters. A nascent shipbuilding industry had even emerged in Virginia, producing thirty-ton sloops, ketches, and other small watercraft.75

Several economic factors precluded Virginians from acquiring anything close to a common silver currency. For one, tobacco monoculture remained the standard economic pursuit, even as the price of tobacco still hovered around a penny a pound. Two, the manipulation of silver rates by neighboring colonies, with no freedom to compete in like manner, impaired the effort; Virginia, more than any other colony (excepting Maryland), was the greatest loser in the intercolonial devaluation wars of the late Stuart period. Buccaneering, as before mentioned, did not increase Chesapeake access to money as it did for the rest. But more important, African slaves, not silver, constituted a majority of the returns from the Chesapeake’s trade with the Caribbean. Ships belonging to the Royal African Company rarely visited the Chesapeake; planters had to acquire slaves from intercolonial trade.76 Slaves still counted for less than 10 percent of the Chesapeake population at the end of the 1680s; nevertheless, their numbers had increased threefold since 1670, primarily as a result of Virginia’s trade of livestock and provisions to the Caribbean.77 If elite planters had desisted from purchasing African labor in this period, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Virginians might have enjoyed the beginnings of metallic currency in the 1680s, with returns from the Caribbean coming over in coin and bills of exchange, just as the trade functioned for other colonies. Virginia planters, instead, opted for slaves over silver.

On Barbados, silver coin finally displaced the islanders’ total dependence on sugar money and book credit. Now, even among skilled workers, “no Man will doe business here but for ready Money,” the governor remarked in 1682; three years later, he called silver the “Currant money of this Island,” regretting, however, that most of the coins were clipped by about one-third, circulating at 5s a piece as if they were full-weight.78 The council had prohibited the “Importation of bad & light money” in 1678, but currency by tale doomed the effort.79 Clipped or unclipped, however, the appearance of any coin at all on Barbados was a welcome change. It certainly benefited North American colonists who did business on the island; in 1674, for instance, a Barbadian resident bought a thirty-ton ketch from a Massachusetts shipbuilder for £250 “in silver”—that is, about one thousand (clipped) pieces of eight.80 Silver, to be sure, was still far from plenteous; though Barbadian planters were by far the wealthiest colonists in the empire, they still held most of their assets in valuables other than gold and silver. By way of comparison, per capita imports of English goods in the 1680s were as follows: £3.47 on Barbados, £2.06 on Jamaica, £0.63 in the Chesapeake, and £0.59 in New England.81 Slaves and land made up the rest of their assets. By this time, three-quarters of the island’s inhabitants were African slaves; as for the land, the top 7 percent of property holders owned more than half of the island and presumably the majority of silver.82

Sugar, by contrast, remained the predominant currency on the Leeward Islands until the end of the century. The planters there had gradually adopted the same consolidation model as Barbados for plantation agriculture, attendant with a black majority by 1680. But of coin the planters were lacking. “They have little Money, but Buy and Pay with Sugars,” one visitor to Nevis wrote in 1688. As late as 1699, the council on Montserrat paid the island’s Anglican minister an annual salary of twenty thousand pounds of sugar, recorded for him in book. “In the Leward Islands there is very little money,” the governor wrote in 1691; “… those who need provisions & cloathing buy them with Shugr.” By contrast, “in Barbadoes,” he said, “tis true they have a money Trade.”83

Jamaica still boasted more silver and gold than any other colony, notwithstanding the island’s export of coin to North America for provisions. Almost all of the island’s coin holdings were the result of the Spanish contraband trade. “We have much Money imported by our Trading Sloopes” from “all along the coast of the [Spanish] Mayn,” remarked Governor Lynch in 1682, adding the following year, “Wee have had more Money coming this year than ever.”84 Incoming coin included pieces of eight, but also gold Spanish doubloons and French pistoles, both of which passed on the island at 20s (£1), the value of an English guinea. As one planter bragged in 1683, the islanders imported from the Spanish “bars and cakes of Gold, wedges and piggs of Silver, Pistols, Pieces of Eight and several other Coyns.… Almost every House hath a rich Cupboard of Plate.” “Whereas most other Plantations ever did and now do keep their accounts in Sugar,” he continued, “… it is otherwise in Jamaica, for in Port Royal there is more plenty of running Cash.”85

The Middle Colonies—New York and Pennsylvania being chief—enjoyed a marked increase in coin in the early 1680s. Regional exports had advanced notably in the past two decades. As late as the 1670s, furs were still the dominant staple of New York, but with the market price for peltry now severely depressed, New Yorkers turned steadily to food provisioning. Middling merchants abandoned the transatlantic fur trade and focused instead on the coastwise trade with New England, the Carolinas, and the West Indies. All along the Hudson River, interior settlers sold small agricultural surpluses of grain and flour to sloops headed first to New York City and then to ultimate destinations far elsewhere.86 Some wealthier merchants exported the produce all the way to Lisbon and Madeira, the ships returning from across the Atlantic with Portuguese silver and gold.87 Most of the New York grain, flour, and staves, however, went to Dutch Curaçao, one of the most vibrant commercial entrepôts in all of the Caribbean—heavily engaged in the Spanish contraband trade but in desperate need of food and provisions. Because New York had retained much of its original Dutch character, the two were natural trading partners.88 “Flour from New-York is counted the best,” one visitor to Curaçao remarked; by the end of the 1680s, New Yorkers exported approximately sixty thousand barrels each of flour and grain to the Caribbean, especially Curaçao, every year, importing, in turn, pieces of eight, bills of exchange, and also Dutch-minted “lion dollars,” more commonly known as “dog dollars” (the stamp was known to resemble the figure of a dog more than that of a lion; see figure 9).89 By the end of the century, Curaçaoans imported about £50,000 worth of goods each year from New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.90

Though New York now commanded a prominent space on the commercial map, its position remained humble and still largely dependent on the Boston entrepôt. Few English vessels, as of yet, traded directly with the Middle Colonies; merchants in New York, the Jerseys, and Philadelphia purchased most of their imported goods from merchant-middlemen in Boston, who siphoned away some of the coin that New Yorkers had received from Curaçao. Additionally, many of the small watercraft deployed by New York merchants for West Indian trade were built in Boston, though a growing number of Curaçao-bound vessels were now New York owned and New York built.91

A New York mint, if established, would effectively signal to the rest of the Atlantic world that the province indeed merited attention. But would the Duke of York, future King James II, approve? The duke, in 1675, had already turned down Governor Andros’s proposal for a mint, but in 1684, Governor Dongan and the new representative assembly sought again to woo the duke, this time armed with new reasons. First, irregularity in the local currency had undoubtedly grown in recent years—from the influx of pirate money, no doubt, but also from the concurrent circulation of dog dollars, Mexican pieces of eight, and Peruvian pieces of eight, all arriving from West Indian trade. But second, and perhaps most important, the founding of a mint would bring to the colony great prestige. A New York coinage, with a New York stamp, would unquestionably boost the repute and confidence of the colony. New York had changed a lot since 1675; the duke appeared to recognize this fact, replying to Dongan that he was “inclinable enough to assent to your motion for a Mint” but would “resolve further to consider of the matter.”92 Months later, in February 1685, the duke became king. All talk of a mint fell through. Three years later, New York merged with the Dominion of New England, and a coin bearing the distinct symbols and markings of New York was now out of the question.

The population of the Middle Colonies had advanced rapidly since the 1670s. Word spread through much of the Atlantic and to England of the “great and rich Tracts of land” available in the region: an opportunity for ordinary men and women to “get Land of their own, and live exceeding well.”93 By the end of the 1680s, the combined populations of New York, Pennsylvania, and the Jerseys—though counting only one-third of the populations of either New England or the Chesapeake—almost equaled the free population of the entire English Caribbean. New York still had the most residents, 14,000; but the Jerseys had 8,000 settlers, and even more impressively Pennsylvania’s population had soared from a mere 700 settlers in 1680 to more than 11,000 in 1689.94 Proprietor William Penn brilliantly marketed more than 750,000 acres to six hundred subscribers, including entire companies that freighted scores of immigrants: Germans, English Quakers, and Dutch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. The immigrants were overwhelmingly of middling status, establishing farms across the several rural townships west and north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River. Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, showcased a host of artisans, craftsmen, and a tight-knit community of middling Quaker merchants. The soil was more fertile than that of New England; the climate more temperate than that of the South; the easy, rolling hills well adapted for tillage; the many pleasant streams ideal for milling grain.95

Silver coin was difficult to come by in the first few years of the Pennsylvania settlement. The trade deficit with neighboring colonies and England was predictably great; exports from the colony were still largely underdeveloped, causing a “notorious scarcity of money in the province”; indeed, “almost all the money goes out,” said a recent arrival.96 As expected, the Pennsylvania assembly, in 1683, declared “Country-growth or produce” to be legal tender in public and private payments. “There is a Necessity for the Sake of Commerce in this infancy of things that the growth & produce of this Province & territories thereof, Shall pass in Lieu of Mony,” they said. Such produce included “all marchantable Wheat, Rye, Indian-Corn, Barley, Oats, Pork, Beef [and] Tobacco,” thereafter “accounted current pay.”97

Penn craved the circulation of a common silver and gold currency for his infant colony, even telling friends that he planned to erect a Pennsylvania mint.98 In one promotional pamphlet in 1685, Penn instructed forthcoming immigrants that it was “most advisable” to bring along estates at least “one-third in Money, and two thirds in Goods.” On the same page, he appealed to the colony’s high valuation for coin—6s per dollar, irrespective of weight—“so that a man worth £400 here [England], is worth £600 there, without sweating.”99 To Penn’s delight, the sum of silver coin in Philadelphia increased considerably in the middle and latter years of the 1680s. Quaker merchants exported growing quantities of wheat, flour, beer, biscuits, horses, and barrel staves to Barbados and Curaçao—returning silver to the colony, not slaves—and some of the more ambitious merchants established an export trade with the Wine Islands and southern Europe. Pennsylvania wheat, flour, and bread made way to New England and Newfoundland; beef, pork, and barrel staves to the Chesapeake and Carolinas. A small shipbuilding industry even surfaced in Philadelphia, confined mostly to small watercraft.100 Some newcomers, most notably the Quaker merchant Thomas Budd, hoped also to introduce the colonial manufacture of linen, which might abate the trade deficit with England and even provide enough “quantities to sell to the Inhabitants of our own neighbouring colonies.”101

Colonial manufacturing, on a scale even closely resembling that of large-scale production, was, in truth, a distant prospect. The cost of labor was far higher in America than in England or Europe; the enormous acreage of land available made colonists less likely to enter wage work, despite the higher pay. “Poor People both Men and Women, will get near three times more Wages for their Labour in this Country, than they can earn either in England or Wales,” said one writer from Pennsylvania.102 Small-scale production of homespun cloth had grown in recent years, but this could only partially satisfy local demand, and the production certainly fell short of the quantity needed to dispense the cloth widely to other parts of America.103 But as one resident of New York predicted, if they only had “more Tradesmen amongst them, they would in a little time live without the help of any other Countrey for their Clothing.”104 And colonists surely had strong pecuniary incentives to manufacture cloth; otherwise—as Thomas Budd said in 1685—they must be “supplied from England, where it must be dear [expensive], after Freight, Custom, and other charges.”105

Nevertheless, however unlikely the prospect for now, colonial manufacturing was a definite menace to England’s mercantilist empire. Manufactured goods accounted for 90 percent of all exports from England to the Americas. Of these, English manufactures were of the utmost importance; between 1660 and 1686, the export of English-made goods to the American colonies had nearly doubled—amounting now to a value of £211,933.106 No mercantilist in England wished to hear of Americans making “Shooes and Hats” (as one report said of West Jersey in 1681); the English mercantilist or manufacturer trembled at news that colonial shoemakers were now supplying most of the internal market in New England and that a growing number of craftsmen inhabited rural townships.107 The word from New York was of “every one making their own Linnen, and a great part of their woollen-cloth for their ordinary wearing.”108 If Americans demanded less imported merchandise, England’s trade surplus with the colonies would suffer, and colonists would keep a far greater proportion of the coin that they earned from the Caribbean provisioning trade. Worse, they might expand this Caribbean trade by exporting to the islanders colonial-made textiles, not simply flour, bread, and barrel staves—a legal trade under the Navigation Acts. Considering that London merchants then exported more than £100,000 in English-made manufactures every year to the Caribbean, the thought of a cheaper colonial competitor in this area was a particularly dreadful one.109

Smuggling, nevertheless, remained a far more immediate concern to the mercantilist empire. The problem was decades old; it had yet to be resolved in any meaningful way, despite multiple efforts, including most conspicuously the appointment of resident customs officers in the Americas. Most colonial tradesmen had little to no scruples at all with smuggling. For the individual tradesman, illicit commerce boosted opportunities for gain; for the colony, more collectively, it increased either the provincial money supply or the volume of imported merchandise. It was in the colonists’ immediate economic self-interest to pursue free trade, so long as they could get away with it.

In recent decades, some colonial historians have argued that smuggling had waned considerably by the early 1680s. By this time, they contend, smuggling was mostly confined to luxury goods. As evidence, these historians cite the recorded increase in England’s transatlantic trade after 1660, maintaining that this increase indicates greater colonial compliance with the Navigation Acts. Furthermore, because enforcement mechanisms were still extraordinarily weak during this period, these historians argue that the supposed increase in colonial compliance implies that the economic incentive to smuggle had diminished: the price of English goods and of English freight was no longer higher than the Dutch competition, or smuggling would have continued unabated. Consequently, these historians argue, the Navigation Acts were not nearly as burdensome to colonists in the 1670s and 1680s as historians had initially thought.110

First, the statistical increase in English transatlantic trade and shipping after 1660 does nothing to prove any real, or at least substantial, decline in smuggling. The simultaneous rise in colonial population, and the consequent rise of colonial consumption and production, necessarily increased the volume of transatlantic trade across the board. The New England population nearly tripled between 1660 and 1689, from 32,000 to 86,000; the Chesapeake population grew from 26,000 to 82,000; the slave population in the English Caribbean went from 34,000 to 98,000. Consumption, in turn, multiplied.111 Furthermore, improvements in agricultural efficiency, especially in the growing and curing of tobacco—the average crop size per worker rose from 1,514 to 1,829 pounds between 1660 and 1680—boosted colonial production beyond the natural increase received from the rise in population alone.112 Even if smuggling increased after 1660, the volume of England’s trade with the colonies still would have grown extensively.

Regarding the supposed decline in English freight rates, the records on freight rates are thin and highly disparate, rendering any surefire estimation impossible.113 Still, even if rates for English shipping declined in the latter half of the seventeenth century, a probable estimation, that decline does not mean that smuggling was no longer a materially attractive option—even if English freight rates fell below the competition. Direct trade between colonists and foreigners obviated four payments: first, the customs duty; second, the profits accruing to the merchant-middleman in London; third, the many costs involved in clearing the goods out from England before reexportation (unloading, weighing, trucking, warehousing, and then reloading the goods for reexport); fourth, the additional expenses attendant on shipping the goods via an indirect route. As one colonist explained, the Navigation Acts required “making a double voyage … instead of going their voyages direct.”114 While this law benefited English merchants and supposedly the empire more generally, the requirement undoubtedly cost the colonial world a considerable sum of money.

One might object that Boston merchants were often middlemen between the Dutch or French on one end, and the Chesapeake or Caribbean on the other, and these merchants too took middlemen’s profits, whether in the reexport of colonial produce to foreigners or of foreign merchandise to colonial buyers. Unlike the English, however, Boston merchants avoided paying customs on those goods; moreover, they carried the goods directly from buyer to seller without clearing out from England. As Randolph explained, Boston merchants bought produce and merchandise “Customs free,” and therefore “… they were enabled to bring those Goods 50 per Cent. Cheaper to their Market there, than our Merchants could.”115 In this way, Massachusetts became “a Magazine both of all American and European Commodityes,” the Lords of Trade reported in 1675—all “without carrying to England.”116

Lastly, if smuggling indeed diminished as much as some historians claim, this diminishment begs the question why the Stuart Crown exhausted so many resources to stamp out a phantom problem. It was not inexpensive for the Commissioner of Customs to deploy full-time English agents to ports across Europe in 1683 to watch closely for inbound vessels from the colonies that had not stopped first in England.117 The action was apparently not very effective: three years later, James II alleged that “several ships and vessels have carried great Quantityes” of colonial produce “to Holland, Hamburgh, and other places without first landing the same in England.” Months earlier, the Privy Council urged another costly undertaking: that the royal navy be sent to the colonies to “seize all vessells belonging to strangers.”118 Clearly the Crown did not believe that smuggling had abated, at least in any significant way. The Crown treated smuggling as epidemic.

Furthermore, English mercantilists themselves conceded—unapologetically—that the Navigation Acts contravened the colonists’ narrower economic self-interest. Sir Josiah Child even estimated, in 1693—with clear hyperbole—that were it not for the Navigation Acts, “you should see forty Dutch Ships at our own Plantations for one English.” More extremely, one English opponent of Massachusetts, in 1689, proudly boasted that the “Parliament of England have never by any Act of theirs favoured the Plantations” but have always ensured that colonists be “restrained and burthened beyond any in England, as appears by the several Acts made for the increasing of Navigation.”119 Finally, there is no reason to doubt the accounts of men such as Governor Sir Thomas Lynch in Jamaica, who said in 1682 that smuggling prevailed on the island because the Dutch “sell European Goods 30 percent cheaper than we [the English], & will paye deerer for American Goods.”120

The evidence is clear that illegal trade remained a significant fact of life in much if not most of the English colonial world in the 1680s. The colonists’ provisioning trade to the French and Dutch Caribbean islands, in particular, offered numerous opportunities to illegally obtain European-made goods. Historian Cathy Matson has found that New York merchants regularly landed French and Dutch goods in the coves and inlets of East Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island, avoiding detection by use of small watercraft. Wealthier merchants in New York even continued a direct trade with Amsterdam.121 In East Jersey the customs collector, William Dyre, encountered fierce opposition from local merchants. In 1685 Dyre seized a vessel there for refusing to make entry at the customs office. Upon inspection, he found that one of the two shipmasters was French, and there was “but one English man on board.” The cargo included all sorts of “European Goods,” including gloves, linens, and Persian silks. The owner of the sloop, a Jersey man, publicly “railed at me and strangely contemned the Custome house.” Dyre brought the case to court, but “the Jury (who bought much of the goods) found for the Defendant.” The judge ordered Dyre to pay court fees, and after he refused to pay, the judge took Dyre “into his Custody.” “I still remain prisoner,” he wrote the Commissioner of Customs weeks later; “… to complain to the Governor is to no purpose.” Such incidents were not unique to New Jersey. In October 1684, the acting governor of Maryland, George Talbot, astoundingly stabbed to death the king’s customs collector.122

Direct trade between Virginia planters and Dutch tradesmen had declined somewhat since the 1650s; nevertheless, another illegal trade—a more indirect form—prevailed between the two, now mediated by carrier vessels from New England and New York, whose masters purchased the tobacco en route to French Newfoundland or to the Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao and St. Eustatius. The Navigation Act of 1673 required that colonial buyers of tobacco or sugar post bond to deliver the same to England. To avoid this requirement, shipmasters often covered the tobacco with legal fish or flour, and also did so when carrying European goods to colonial markets. “Under Colour of a Trade to Newfoundland for fish, great quantities of Wine Brandy and other European goods are imported,” the Lords of Trade reported in 1687.123 Five years earlier one member of the Virginia Council informed William Blathwayt that “not one in ten payeth” the duty required by the Navigation Act of 1673.124

Scottish tradesmen steadily infiltrated the Chesapeake economy during this period. Until the Act of Union in 1707, this too was an illegal form of commerce. By the 1680s, Glasgow merchants collectively imported as much as 250,000 pounds of tobacco a year, entirely sidestepping the English customs and paying the planter a higher price than the legal English trader.125 Because the Scots enjoyed close commercial ties with the Dutch, the Scots often carried this tobacco directly for Holland. Scottish freight rates were demonstrably lower than rates for English ships, and in bulk trades like tobacco, freight was often the greatest expense. Scottish shipmasters passed easily for Englishmen and “seldome faile [as] counterfeit masters,” Randolph later recorded; even Dutch shipmasters quite frequently feigned English names, to the wink and nod of a knowing official.126 Scottish tradesmen also penetrated southeastern Carolina, selling goods to buyers at comparatively low prices. A Charles Town jury acquitted one such trader in 1687, doubting (supposedly) that the crew was not English. Nevertheless, according to the customs collector, the jury “declared, that if it had been never soe evident” that the crew was indeed Scottish, the Carolina charter “gives them full Power to Trade with Scotland and Ireland.” Money was the chief impetus to this refractory behavior, the customs collector explained in the aftermath of that trial: Scottish merchants “are evidently able to undersell the English, their Goods being either much Courser or Slighter … and will be sure to goe off there, being cheap.”127

Well into the 1680s, English sugar planters in the West Indian islands still recurrently welcomed “forreign Vessels” into their ports. Some of these vessels belonged to the nearby French islanders, selling wine and luxury goods; others included Dutch traders selling linen and buying “great Quantitys of Sugar.” The many shrouded inlets, coves, and bays in the area made it extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for imperial officers to monitor the full spectrum of commercial activity.128 This difficulty was especially pronounced in the English Leeward Islands, positioned practically at a stone’s throw distance from St. Eustatius (Dutch), St. Thomas (Danish but Dutch-dominated), Martinique (French), and Guadeloupe (French). One customs official in 1687 estimated that the Hollanders come “to St Christophers twice or thrice a week”; the French sell “brandys and french wines … our Merchants who pay his Majesties Customs being not able to supply them at near the Price they so illegally get them.”129

Sugar planters courted illicit slave dealers, most of all, with the utmost zeal. This activity increased dramatically in the 1670s, so that by the early 1680s, English planters bought as many as one-third to one-half of their slaves from interlopers instead of the Royal African Company. Slave prices, consequently, fell to their lowest levels ever.130 Dealers generally smuggled Africans into port at night, or on the back part of the island; with courts made up of planter juries, moreover, the RAC faced profound difficulties in successfully prosecuting these smugglers.131 In one instance in 1682 a Jamaican judge awarded more than £1,600 in damages to an interloper seized by the company.132 One RAC agent in 1681 reported of a smuggler in Barbados “bringing about 100 Negroes which were then put on shore without Interruption”; the smugglers’ confidence and reputation has “growne very high,” he said.133 Leeward planters, largely neglected by the company, were especially eager for smuggled slave labor, and the planters’ successful embrace of this illegal traffic played a significant role in granting the Leeward Islands a black majority by 1680.134

Those who maintain that there was a severe decline in smuggling in the 1670s and 1680s do not deny the interloping trade in slaves and luxury goods. But smuggling of all sorts remained common through this period. To be clear, the extent of this activity did not match the extraordinary levels of the 1650s, but that indeed was a truly exceptional decade. After 1660, enforcement was marginally stronger than before, increasing the risk of seizure. The trade after 1660 was more dependent on subterfuge and oftentimes chance; the networks between buyer and seller were less stable and less permanent than they had been at midcentury.135 Mild efficiency improvements in English shipping may have also made smuggling slightly less worth the risk. In some cases, it was just as profitable to simply follow the law; in other cases, perhaps more numerous, there was much profit and money to be made in breaking it. One way or the other, however, English administrators and mercantilists took the problem of colonial smuggling very seriously, and for good reason. More and more they concluded that political coercion of the more extreme type was the only realistic solution.

When James II ascended the throne in February 1685, England was in the midst of a trade boom unparalleled in the nation’s history. The extreme economic pessimism of the early to mid-1670s had long vanished.136 The economic tide began to turn after 1674, when Charles signed a peace treaty with the Netherlands. The French and Dutch fought on for another four years, priming neutral England to vend textiles abroad. The kingdom’s trade balances with Germany, the Low Countries, Portugal, Spain, and of course colonial America were all very favorable, offsetting England’s trade deficit with France, the Baltic countries, and India. The English East India Company enjoyed record-setting profits; the company reexported more than half a million calicoes a year to continental Europe.137 By the mid-1680s, the “grand Emporium” of London had become the world’s foremost commercial entrepôt, supplanting even Amsterdam, equipping the city’s several thousand merchants with a “greater quantity of new Money.”138 The output of coin at the Tower Mint averaged £370,820 per year in the 1670s; in the 1680s it averaged £543,658 per year, an increase of nearly 50 percent.139 Furthermore, the enlarged revenue from customs was adequate enough for Charles to rule independently; he last convened a Parliament in March 1681, dissolving it a week later. Charles governed without any Parliament in the final four years of his reign.

Despite persistent smuggling, England’s trade with the Americas was exceptionally dynamic in the 1680s. From London, several hundred merchants traded extensively every year with the American colonies; at least nine of these London merchants in American trade possessed estates exceeding £30,000 in worth, and at least eight others possessed estates between £10–30,000.140 By comparison, no more than a dozen merchants in Massachusetts had estates reaching even £5,000, and of those, fewer than half reached even £10,000.141 Between 1663 and 1686, the number of ships clearing London for North America and the Caribbean nearly tripled, from 88 to 257. This trade now accounted for 37 percent of all of England’s overseas tonnage (up from 29 percent in 1663).142 One-third of all goods imported by English merchants for English consumption now came from the American colonies; only one-half came from continental Europe—a drastic reversal from previous decades. On the export side, the colonies represented 40 percent of the overseas market for English-made goods; at midcentury, by contrast, fewer than 10 percent of English-made exports went to England’s American colonies.143 Exports to the colonies included woolens, hats, glassware, paper, wrought leather, saddles, clocks, anchors, cordage, ironware, guns, gunpowder, nails, brassware, wrought copper, gloves, shoes, silks, calicoes, Dutch and German linens, spectacles, looking glasses, playing cards, books, curtains, and carriages.144

The reexport trade of colonial goods from London to continental Europe was a mercantilist treasure trove. As Dalby Thomas, English sugar merchant, wrote of the colonies in 1690, “they never draw from England Gold or Silver, but on the contrary”—through the re-export trade—“… either occasion the Enriching of England by monies brought from Foreign parts for the sales of their product, or by Bartering for other Goods which must have been purchased by monies.”145 Another writer, the same year, boasted that because of colonial trade, “we buy less yearly of Forrainers to the value of half a Million [pounds sterling] at the least, and we export and sell, out of the same Produce, a good deale more than another half Million, which is the same thing in effect, as Mines of Silver yielding above a Million yearely.” The colonies, and sugar plantations especially, made “a great alteration in our Trade and Money for the better,” the writer said.146

The West Indian islands were still the most profitable sector of the mercantilist Atlantic. In 1686 sugar accounted for approximately 66.5 percent of the value of all colonial exports to London.147 That year alone, nearly 1,300 London merchants imported, collectively, almost £675,000 worth of Caribbean goods—sugar dominating (87 percent)—in some 275 oceangoing vessels. (By way of contrast, just over 600 London merchants imported goods from North America to the value of £207,131, of which tobacco made up 68 percent.)148 Sugar exports to London had nearly tripled between 1663 and 1686, amounting, by the latter date, to more than 22,000 tons.149 Barbados produced about 55 percent of this sugar; exports from Barbados alone exceeded the value of all exports from mainland North America.150 English merchants reexported approximately one-third of the incoming sugar to continental Europe.151 “Heretofore we had all our Sugars from Portugal,” Dalby Thomas recalled in 1690; this trade had formerly cost the kingdom “yearly about £400,000.” “Now that great Leak is stopp’d,” he said, and the reexport of sugar “brings us in yearly near the same Summe.”152

The Royal African Company reaped handsome profits from the contraband trade of English manufactures and African slaves to Spanish America. Shares in the RAC yielded for its investors an annual divided of 10 percent in the years between 1676 and 1688.153 James, Duke of York, was president and chief stockholder of the RAC, sweetening the company’s success all the more. In the 1680s the company exported double the value of manufactured goods to West Africa than it had in the previous decade: exports to Africa included English woolens, metalwares, and cotton fabrics from India.154 Between 1673 and 1688, the RAC exported approximately twenty thousand slaves to Spanish America; at £20 a slave this trade amounted to nearly half a million pounds sterling over a fifteen-year period.155 The additional, clandestine export of textiles and metalwares to Spanish America tilted the balance even further in England’s favor; the contraband trade alone was likely worth more than £100,000 every year.156 Supporters of the company celebrated the “great quantity of the Gold and Silver we have of the Spaniards for Negroes and English Manufactory.”157 Jamaica, as the chief base of RAC operations, was thereby “the Key of the Indies, and naturally the seat of Riches and Empire … lying in the very Belly of all Commerce … facing to the South and West, the richest Continent in the World.”158

The tobacco colonies of the Chesapeake benefited the mercantilist empire in different ways. Tobacco imports into London were a little less than one-quarter of the value of sugar imports (£141,606 to £586,528).159 Nevertheless, between 1670 and 1686, tobacco imports had almost doubled, amounting now to an astounding twenty-eight million pounds.160 Of this sum, English merchants reexported more than half to Europe; formerly, English merchants reexported only one-third of Chesapeake tobacco.161 One contemporary estimated that this reexport trade in tobacco earned for England some £200,000 each year (in coin, bills of exchange, or merchandise).162 The customs revenue on tobacco, meanwhile, far exceeded the revenue from sugar. Before the duty increase of 1685—discussed in the next chapter—the duty on tobacco earned about £150,000 per annum; after 1685, the revenue from tobacco exceeded £320,000.163 Virginia’s planters did not fail to take notice. “Our staple Commoditie tobacco accrues to your Majesties Revenue more then twice soe much as we our selves have,” the burgesses petitioned the king in 1684.164

New England remained a serious question mark, of course. Whigs and Tories, for the most part, agreed. “Among these Plantations,” said John Cary, a Whig, “I look on that of New-England to bring least Advantage to this Kingdom”; another Whig, John Pollexfen, called the region “of little use to us.” Josiah Child, the court Tory, called it the “most prejudicial Plantation to the Kingdom of England”; their “Liberty of Trading,” he argued in 1693, came at the “total exclusion of the old English Merchant.”165 Though the region supplied valuable pine-tree masts to English shipbuilders, New England shipbuilders competed against their English counterparts by constructing as many as thirty vessels a year for English merchants. The cost of constructing a ship in Massachusetts was 40 percent less than in England; adjacent timber supplies offset the higher wages.166 “There is nothing more prejudicial, and in prospect more dangerous to any Mother Kingdom,” Child declared, “than the encrease of Shipping in the Colonies.” Carew Reynell, a Whig, agreed, arguing in 1674 that the New England settlements “breed no good Commerce,” and “are rather a disadvantage, than advantage to us.”167

Yet even in these northern settlements—New England, New York, and Pennsylvania—consumer demand for imported goods clearly benefited English mercantile interests. From London alone, in 1686, just over £100,000 worth of English-made goods went to mainland North America; of this quantity, £40,700 went to New England and £17,152 to the Middle Colonies.168 Nor do these numbers include reexported goods from continental Europe. Northern colonists imported an “infinite Quantity of Iron Wares,” “all sorts of Tin-ware,” plowshares, axes, “Saddles and Bridles,” and “many Barrels of Nails” (large spikes to hold wooden houses together).169 Besides improving the kingdom’s balance of trade, this commerce helped to diversify English industry beyond the mere export of woolens. Thus even the northern colonies offered much mercantilist value. The export of English-made goods to the Caribbean islands were not that much greater than that to mainland North America: in the year 1686, the value of English-made exports to the Caribbean was £111,392, compared with £100,541 to North America. Furthermore, of this total, textiles comprised a far greater percentage of the exports to North America than to the Caribbean (53 percent versus 36 percent).170

By most metrics, England’s trade with the American colonies was extremely favorable in the early to mid-1680s. Nevertheless, the persistence of smuggling and other adverse economic and monetary practices in the colonial world represented a pressing thorn in the side of England’s mercantilist Atlantic empire. The kingdom’s newfound prosperity in the 1680s did not abate imperial criticism of these practices; on the contrary, the drive to rein in colonial autonomy intensified. There was yet more money to be made, if only the colonists could be brought to obedience. “Though we are a Nation already pretty substantial,” wrote Carew Reynell in 1674, “yet it’s easie for us to be ten times richer.”171 To increase the “National Home-Treasure,” to secure “Plenty, Glory, and Prosperity to a whole Nation”—said another English writer in 1680—that was the goal of the imperial project, and unlawful colonists ought not to obstruct it.172