Chapter Nine Tobacco's Commercial Capitalists1 Decades before the Glorious Revolution, English commercial capitalists traded tobacco within a state-protected cross-Atlan- tic industry. From 1619, Chesapeake planters of Maryland and Virginia grew tobacco for specific English merchants, and both profited from its sales in prearranged markets. By 1689, tobacco entrepreneurs on both sides of England's empire pre-negotiated shares of trading profits among growers, carriers, and merchants. After 1722, plantation owners, ship's captains, and merchant specialists participated in a sequential business operation that hauled American tobacco to Great Britain in English ships for worldwide distribution. None of this happened because merchants bought cheaply and sold dearly. American tobacco became a worldwide addictive commodity only after capitalists cut its manufacturing costs, increased its market supply, and reduced its retail price. In the 1690s, England's leading commercial capitalists, such as Micaiah Perry and Thomas Lane, added their merchant expertise to sustain a process that was already rapidly transforming a six- teenth-century luxury for elites into a low-cost necessity for working people.2 It was tobacco's bargain price and narcotic embrace that bound it early to a potentially limitless market. From the days of James I, tobacco-making profited planters, shippers, and sellers because they grew, transported, and dis- tributed their leaves at a price that even the poorest smoker could afford.3 Long before 1689, this consortium of capitalists created vast revenues for England's treasury, sizable rents for its colonial landlords, and large profits for those who invested in the tobacco business. Although cost efficiency and market share played a crucial role in determining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tobacco profits, it was the English state's guardianship that propelled the industry to prosperity. From the trade's earliest days, even absolutist kings functioned as the protectors of Chesapeake tobacco. Despite their near ruinous interference in other com- mercial ventures, such as the East India and coal trades, James and Charles I used charters and proclamations to shelter Virginia tobacco from its deadliest rivals.4 Later, Cromwell and the restored Stuarts eschewed proclamations and, instead, prompted Parliaments to unify colonists, landlords, shipbuilders, manufac- turers, and merchants around one continuous transoceanic tobacco trade. Crown, Parliament, and empire worked as an ensemble to ensure capitalist trading in tobacco decades before William of Orange conquered England. However, even as the tobacco trade produced great wealth for England's elites, the industry suffered from debilitating con- straints that only a post-Revolutionary Parliament could resolve. First, the tobacco industry had to survive the caprices of kings, particularly those of James II in the 1680s.5 Second, before 1689, the state poorly defended legitimate traders from the Scottish and American smugglers whose "tax free" tobacco prices lured their potential clientele. Finally, limited markets, overproduction, falling prices, and declining profits frightened tobacco dealers as much as they terrified corn, sugar, cattle, coal, and textiles manufactures before the Glorious Revolution. After 1689, Parliament acted to reverse these countervailing forces. From 1689 to 1722, Members wrote statutes to suppress competition, to tighten customs regulations, to lower labor costs, and to expand markets for tobacco. The best way to com- prehend Parliament's transforming power in the tobacco trade is to contrast the industry before and after the Glorious Revolu- tion. The story begins with the birth of an English smoking business. Commercial Capitalism and Tobacco, 1619-1660 The English people smoked tobacco before Virginia existed. The habit arrived in Europe shortly after the discovery of the New World, and spread to England during Elizabeth's reign. By 1603, not even a king's "counterblast" against the "filthy smoke and stink" kept the English upper classes from tobacco, and only cost limited its use to genteel households.6 In the first decade of the seventeenth century, tobacco's market price declined rapidly, and smoking spread throughout England an into all class- es. As it did, potential profits for tobacco suppliers so excit- ed investors that its planting became first a rage and second a business in England, Wales, and, Virginia. Before 1620, English- men managed a new seventeenth- and eighteenth-century business on both sides of the Atlantic. Although historians have dwelt on England's Chesapeake tobacco industry, a large domestic tobacco business antedated the American enterprise.7 In the first decade of the seventeenth century, cultivators only planted tobacco in gardens surrounding Westminster, but soon after a national trade connecting English landlords, farmers, and merchants developed in England's West Country.8 By 1619, when Virginia's first large crops arrived in England, home growers already supplied English cities with tobac- co at constantly falling prices. Twenty-two "counties in England and Wales," and even "the islands of Jersey and Guernsey" grew tobacco during the 1620s.9 The Crown prohibited homegrown tobac- co to protect Virginia's one salable commodity in 1619, but England's domestic tobacco farmers risked prosecution to profit from a spreading national addiction to smoking.10 Because James banned English tobacco, the scope of this domestic industry remains a mystery, but its planters quite possibly grew enough tobacco to supply the entire home market into the 1650s.11 Despite the illegality of their enterprise, English farmers won buyers because it was cheaper to grow tobacco for domestic con- sumption in Gloucestershire than Virginia. The introduction, however, of larger amounts of Chesapeake tobacco during the second decade of the seventeenth century unleashed a cutthroat price war between homegrown and colonial tobacco.12 This struggle for customer loyalty and market share became most contentious after 1619. In that year, the Virginia Company complained that homegrown eroded their profits, and it petitioned James I to outlaw English tobacco farming. James had weighty reasons for agreeing to the Company's requests: domestic tobacco paid no taxes, and its sales decreased the Crown's revenue from Virginia's imported leaves.13 In 1619, he extended an existent ban against tobacco planting within a certain distance of London to include all England and Wales. Virginia Company merchants rewarded the king by agreeing to pay higher duties on their imported tobacco.14 James' ban, however, never ended competition between the two tobacco businesses. Hostilities escalated in the early 1620s, and they became even more litigious after 1624, when the Crown replaced the Virginia Company with rotating groups of tobacco monopolists.15 In 1624, James issued another proclamation that repeated his ban against planting tobacco in England, and added threats "upon paine of forefeiture" to persons who imported any tobacco "which is not the proper growth of the Plantations of Virginia, and the Sommer Islands."16 Simultaneously, to better protect his tobacco revenues, James required merchants to unload their cargoes in "Our citie of London, and not elsewhere, in any of Our Realmes or Dominions" before they sold or reexported it abroad.17 The home growers--and the smugglers--responded to James by defying his new ban as much as they had his old. Eng- lish farmers continued to grow their illicit crops, and urban merchants marketed them, or a smuggled variety, throughout Eng- land during the next sixty years. Home growers were able to remain a powerful productive force within the tobacco industry because of location and a formidable support from landlords and merchants throughout the West Country.18 Although no "one in the later seventeenth century was so treacherous as to suggest that the Justices of the Peace were themselves growing tobacco, . . . it was certainly growing on their land."19 As long as it profit- ed them, England's gentry and merchants defended those tobacco farmers who resisted royal proclamations against planting tobac- co. Worldwide tobacco profits were so promising in these dec- ades, however, that Virginia's merchants scrambled to keep their industry going despite the questionable viability of the home market. Even before they could rely on a domestic monopoly, they reduced production costs, increased their imports into England, and penetrated continental markets wherever possible. To do this, they required Crown consent and additional privileges. In the late 1620s, Virginia importers pressured Charles I to in- crease the total tobacco tonnage that he permitted them to sell in England, and, simultaneously, to remove customs charges on tobacco brought from Virginia for reexportation to the continent. Needing his tobacco revenues as much as tobacco monopolists required their markets, Charles agreed. In 1631, he permitted more American tobacco into England, and granted duty drawbacks on tobacco that was first landed in England, but reexported within a specified time for sale in foreign markets.20 Later, in 1651, Cromwell's Navigation Act strengthened this refund policy, and Restoration statutes reinforced it between 1660 to 1689. After the Glorious Revolution, these duty drawbacks remained the linch- pin of the Chesapeake based English tobacco industry. Without these refunds, Virginia's tobacco prices would never have been able to compete profitably in continental markets.21 More to the point of this chapter, drawbacks reinforced the bonds that al- ready integrated the state, Chesapeake planters, ship captains, and English tobacco merchant communities in profiting from one continuous import for reexport business. As a result of the drawback policy, Virginia imports rose from 50,000 to 1,600,000 pounds between 1620 and 1640.22 Although much of it was reex- ported after 1631, Charles' permission for the Company to sell greater quantities of Virginia tobacco within England itself created a greater urgency than ever for the king to stamp out West Country tobacco farms. Just when Virginia tobacco needed him most, however, Charles lost his throne. The Civil Wars destroyed the state's ability to safeguard England's monopoly tobacco patentees, and they freed its rivals to resolve market share problems through free trade. No tobacco import figures exist for the 1640s, but evidence suggests that English and American sales climbed despite warfare. While Charles and Parliament fought, domestic producers supplied tax free tobacco to England's smoking populations. Virginians, meanwhile, legislated liberty for themselves to traffic within foreign markets using Dutch ships.23 A free tobacco trade lasted until Cromwell introduced a Commonwealth ban on homegrown, and his government corralled the tobacco producing colonists who dared to send America's brand to Europe in Dutch carriers.24 Although Cromwell's statute banning homegrown attempted to protect Virginia's planters most by authorizing all "persons" to "grub, cut up, destroy, and utterly to consume" any English tobacco they discovered, his major contribution to the Chesapeake trade came with passage of the 1651 Navigation Act that never mentioned tobacco.25 This statute destroyed forever London's monopoly position in the American tobacco trade. Until 1651, without royal permission, all merchants had to unload colonial tobacco in the capital before they could sell it elsewhere. London's near monopoly of this lucrative tobacco trade infuriated outport merchants, and they responded by bankrolling local plant- ers or negotiating with Scottish smugglers for illicit crops.26 Despite three decades of state proclamations banning homegrown and trade with interlopers, West Coast merchants bought and sold English and American tobacco, some by attaining special privy council permission, others without.27 Their actions created chaos within Virginia's tobacco trade, and encouraged Scottish smugglers to sell their Virginia hauls along England's coasts and into Ireland. After the 1651 Navigation Act, importing Chesa- peake tobacco became both legal and lucrative for businessmen in Whitehaven, Bristol, Plymouth, Dartmouth, Southampton, and other coastal cities. As Cromwell's Navigation Act permitted all port city merchants to buy and sell tobacco freely, it also encouraged them to sever their affiliation with home growers and smug- glers.28 When representatives, often merchants, of these port cities voted in later Parliaments, they supported fiercer re- strictions on homegrown, and greater state defense against tobac- co smuggling Scots. Cromwell's Navigation Act had made the symbiotic relationship between port merchants and England's tobacco farmers much less profitable. Legislating An American Tobacco Industry, 1660-1689 Charles II returned to England a champion of Virginia's revenue producing tobacco trade. In 1660, he signed his first statute to prohibit the "Planting Setting or Sowing of Tobaccho in England and Ireland."29 When this act failed to accomplish its goals, he ordered Parliament to pass a reinforcing act (1671) that commanded "Constables, Tythingmen, Bayliffes and other publique Officers" to "plucke up, burne, consume teare in pieces, and utterly destroy all Tobacco seede, Plant, Leafe, planted, sowed or growing in any Field, Earth or Ground" in England and Ireland.30 These acts decreed that banning homegrown tobacco benefited "his Majestyes Customs" and aided "his Majestyes Plan- tations" beyond the seas. Legislators who supported the act announced that the ban boosted "imployment" and furthered the use of "English Shipping and Seamen." They contended that it also stimulated the woolen industry and other manufactures, and it rendered trade "to and from [markets] . . . more safe and cheape."31 When Charles II mandated bans on tobacco planting, Parliament's port city merchants, who had once dealt in home grown, were now among those who voted for its enforcement. Besides outport merchants, other Members of Parliament now viewed a safeguarded Virginia tobacco monopoly as beneficial to their trades. The Navigation Acts snared English shipbuilders too. Back in 1624, James I had proclaimed "that no person . . . presume to import any Tobacco whatsoever, in any forreigne bot- tome."32 However, Virginia tobacco trafficking was so profitable that outport merchants risked cargo forfeitures to carry their illicit tobacco in Dutch ships to continental customers. James' proclamation tying English ships to Virginia tobacco died with him, and Charles I (though the prohibition was implicit in all Navigation Acts) never issued a special proclamation linking tobacco and ships. During his reign, and the Civil Wars that followed, nothing stopped English and American merchants from employing Dutch ships to carry Chesapeake tobacco to the Nether- lands. In 1651, Cromwell's Navigation Act ordered this traffic stopped, but it too contained no clause that explicitly united Virginia tobacco, English ports, and English built ships. In 1660, Parliament took this supplementary step in its "Act for the Encourageing and increasing of Shipping and Navigation." The statute enumerated tobacco, along with six other colonial commod- ities, that merchants must bring to English ports in English ships before claiming drawbacks on tobacco reexported--again in English ships--to European markets.33 Reinforcing Acts followed, and shipbuilding for tobacco importing and reexporting became a specialized English industry whose economic impact rippled through dozens of subsidiary industries, including port city tobacco-related urban development projects.34 In 1660, London still dominated the Chesapeake tobacco trade, but other coastal cities from Plymouth to Bristol to Whitehaven soon vied with it to buy and sell Virginia's principal export. From the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution, Bristol benefited most.35 In 1660, its merchants only hired ships to bring tobacco home for sale and reexportation. Before long, however, Bristol's fleet carried much of the 3,881,000 pounds of tobacco it imported yearly.36 The tobacco trade also spread northward along England's West Coast toward the end of the seven- teenth century. The port of Whitehaven opened its legal sea doors to tobacco after 1660, and it also continued an illicit trade that found Scottish tobacco dealers freighting "Whitehaven ships to America as a means of circumventing" the Navigation Acts.37 In all the outport cities, fresh corps of commercial capitalists sought contracts with, and made loans to, Chesapeake plantation partners to sell their tobacco in England and on the continent.38 These commercial capitalists built fresh tobacco fortunes because Parliament now honored their American liaisons, and enforced, with their aid, the recent bans on domestic produc- tion. In 1660, and again in 1684, English legislators further endorsed the Virginia connection by writing bills that reiterated the state's drawback policy first introduced in 1631 empowering English merchants to build businesses that imported, for reexport sale, American's finest tobaccos.39 Merchants and shipbuilders appeared prominent among those who protected Chesapeake tobacco after 1660, but it was England's landlords who most cherished Virginia's monopoly during the Restoration era. Landowners dominated Parliaments, and they wrote Navigation Acts to secure America's tobacco industry be- cause they hoped that protection for the Chesapeake colonists might augment the value of their rent rolls. Tobacco importers sold one third of Virginia's crop in England, and the gentry counted on these merchants to spend part of their profits buying English commodities to sell in the colonies. In these years, the political nation treasured the sugar and tobacco colonies because their products seemed so to complement England's manufactures. Legislators viewed their homeland and its overseas settlements as one "self-sufficient commercial empire" in which "the colony was to purchase its manufactures from England."40 Parliamentary statutes embraced this ideology and they pictured "His majesties Plantations beyond the Seas" filled with "Subjects" who would buy "English Woollen and other Manufactures and Commodities."41 The 1663 Navigation Act especially expressed a growing Parliamentary consensus that there could be no consuming "English Plantations" in the Chesapeake if "planting and makeing Tobaccho" in England continued.42 By 1663, England's domestic tobacco industry began to die from neglect as the logic of Parliamentary statutes began to persuade English landowners to enforce the home ban and to venerate Chesapeake tobacco. Parliament and the Crown wrote and rewrote their Navigation acts to "vent [English] Commodityes" by "sowing, setting, planting and cureing" tobacco in America.43 The desire for port duties, profits, and rents also drove Charles II and his Parliaments to fine-tune all other statutes that focused English tobacco production in the Chesapeake while opening the empire's market for "only" American grown tobacco.44 Although much would be left to do after 1689, the Crown and Parliament united during the Restoration era to ban home produc- tion, to set duty rates that favored American over foreign leaves, to update acts granting drawbacks to tobacco reexporters, to reinforce laws ordering the delivery of colonial tobacco to England before selling it abroad, and to widen English ports and rivers to receive American tobacco. In these many ways, the Res- toration Parliaments handed almost the entire English tobacco industry to colonial planters. When they did, their statutes diffused the benefits of the tobacco trade among a multitude of English businesses, including shipbuilding, farming, and even an English tobacco processing industry (an industry that historians have yet to explore).45 From 1660 to 1689, Parliament directed Americans to develop a tobacco industry, and English businessmen made it a reality by establishing new social relationships link- ing Chesapeake planters, seafaring captains, and English tobacco merchants in a consecutive trade. Once the English state estab- lished America's tobacco monopoly, London and outport commercial capitalists rushed in to negotiate everything from the financing to the selling of Chesapeake tobacco. To profit from American tobacco, empire merchants coordinated a business dependent as much on colonist growing tobacco cheaply as it was on finding a wider customer base through lower prices. Russell Menard has explored the Restoration era tobacco trade cycles, and he has uncovered the economics of an English- American industry whose success (once state protected) counted on vigilant reassessments and reductions of the production and circulation costs involved in marketing Chesapeake tobacco.46 In 1660, tobacco capitalists still complained "of overproduction, glutted markets, shortages of manufactured goods, planter indebt- edness, and the absence of money."47 By 1670, the criticisms ceased because the reexport trade "increased penetration of European markets by Chesapeake tobacco."48 A brief dip in profits was followed by "a genuine boom in the middle to late 1670s. . . . A strong demand for Chesapeake leaf on the European continent may have been the major stimulus to the boom. In the peak years of 1678 and 1679 London export averaged 5.5 million pounds, 40 percent of imports."49 However, demand alone never maintained profitability during the Restoration era.50 Menard's most exciting discovery about the English-American tobacco indus- try, and it may apply to many other colonial industries, was that planters and merchants worked ensemble to ensure "greater output, lower risks, more efficient distribution, and increased produc- tivity" while simultaneously lowering tobacco prices worldwide.51 Calculation of costs and profits entwined producer and distribu- tor in a joint tobacco adventure that only began in the Chesa- peake growing fields. The correspondence of planters and mer- chants abound with evidence of this planter-merchant collabora- tion to expedite and cheapen the processes involved in making and selling tobacco to insure profitability through wider markets. To make their tobacco marketable, commercial partners in capital- ism corresponded about everything, including bills of exchange and the availability of transport.52 The letters that William Byrd wrote to Micaiah Perry, or those that William Fitzhugh penned to John Cooper, detail the coalescing cross-Atlantic commercial relationships within the tobacco trade.53 This [letter] comes to accompany Captain Bradly & cover the inclosed bill of ladeing & invoice for 100 hogsheads of tobacco & four of furres & skins which I hope will come safe to your hands. I have charged bills of ex- change on you for L165 sterling payable to Bradly . . . ; doubt not but youl see our titles made good. . . . Fraight being now very scarce, & tobacco indifferent plenty though sold hereabouts at great rates I have endeavor'd to ship what I can forward. . . . I hope as you are concern'd in this ship & have induced us thereto, you will take care shee bee yearly sent away early from England, & (you need not doubt) wee will performe our part here.54 These planter-merchant letters humanize the developing business connections among the most direct beneficiaries of the tobacco trade, and they reveal much about the logic of late seventeenth-century capitalism in tobacco. Industrial success meant watchfulness, competence, cooperation, coordination, and labor saving expedients.55 Because making and selling Chesapeake tobacco was an industry always threatened by competition and surpluses, it required capitalists to search for fresh ways to cut costs by streamlining production. It mostly existed, howev- er, as a business designed by Parliamentary law that began opera- tions in the colonies. After 1660, American planters, ship captains, and English merchants facilitated the growing, ship- ping, and selling of cheap, abundant colonial tobacco within a market located, protected, and directed by statute. Despite state support, it was never easy to sell Chesapeake tobacco. Glutted markets and falling prices in 1685 signaled that existing protective legislation and efficient marketing were not sufficient for success. Whether the tobacco crisis of the late eighties resulted, as many contemporaries believed, from James' insistence on more than doubling tobacco duties in 1685 or from market surpluses is debatable.56 The late 1680s downturn in tobacco sales is not. Although Parliament had encouraged Ameri- can tobacco and commercial capitalism, planters and merchants were again drowning in too much tobacco for available markets. Distributors found that they could no longer profit from merely cutting costs of production: further "expansion would have to rely on increased demand."57 Post-Revolutionary statutes and military victory over France combined to resolve the problems of demand for tobacco, and they also ripened a late seventeenth- century English form of commercial capitalism. Legislating Great Britain's Tobacco Industry, 1689-1722 Although 1689 ended forever the Stuarts' ability to place a royal agenda ahead of Parliamentary ambitions, most English industries still faced serious impediments to commercial success, and tobacco was one of these. For one, the Chesapeake tobacco business had to endure years of but briefly interrupted wars between 1689 to 1713. For another, it also required further Parliamentary assistance to reduce production costs, to control smuggling, and to end Scottish interloping. Together, the main- tenance of trade relationships even in wartime and Parliamentary statutes passed from 1689 to 1722 made possible the survival of England's Chesapeake-based tobacco business. They also con- structed the environment in which tobacco's capitalists discov- ered the Shangri La of a reliable, self-expanding, profitable market to sell the two-thirds of America's tobacco crop that the English people could not consume. Warfare with France, after 1689, challenged the ingenuity of tobacco entrepreneurs in America and England. Before 1689, tobacco traders profited through cutting costs of growing, ship- ping, and selling tobacco, but the war added to just these busi- ness expenses. On the colonial side, wartime interruptions forced some Americans to abandon tobacco altogether. Many grow- ers who owned their own lands switched to subsistence farming, sought other markets for their commodities, or experimented with new crops such as flax, hemp, or cotton-wool.58 Most growers, however, carried on in the tobacco trade. To avoid the risk of having their cargoes captured by French privateers, they waited, often less than patiently, for English warships to convoy their tobacco across the Atlantic.59 If this were not possible, many contracted with Scottish interlopers to carry their tobacco beyond the war zone.60 The largest plantation owners retained and deepened their business association with their English mer- chant contacts throughout the war years. Increasing numbers of substantial planters "ventured on consignment" arrangements despite "great risks, doubled freight rates and astronomic rates for insurance (when available)."61 They did so because they knew that their tobacco brought profits "if" it arrived in England, and "if" English merchants found ways to sell it at home or on the continent. On the English side, tobacco importers also modified their business practices during the war, but they too, for the most part, persisted in the tobacco trade. Many did so because, when war disrupted normal trading practices, their on-hand surpluses remained large.62 For at least London's major traders, tobacco supplies increased during the next few years because imports rose steadily to their wartime peaks in the 1690s.63 When these stocks dwindled, many English merchants traded other commodities while they awaited tobacco deliveries. Some dealt in slaves and sugar, while others exchanged their cash for National Debt stocks, bonds, or short-dated securities.64 In the outposts, where it was less common to invest in these new securities, merchants loaned surplus cash to local industrialists, or they became urban rentiers. Although all the greatest tobacco mer- chants held investments in these multiple enterprises, the most well known, such as London 's Micaiah Perry, Thomas Lane, Robert Bristow, Arthur North, Francis Lee, and Thomas Corbin persisted as tobacco businessmen.65 Even in the war years, these tobacco entrepreneurs developed, defended, and expanded their connection with the Chesapeake tobacco trade by encouraging imports and by seeking alternative markets. It was not tobacco business as usual after 1689, but it was tobacco business. Although the rate of tobacco production slowed during the war years, the total pounds of tobacco shipped from the Chesapeake to England expanded until 1700. Thus "average imports of 27,996,328 for the years 1685-1688" grew to "30,702,843 lbs. by 1696-1699."66 Planters such as Fitzhugh and Byrd continued to grow, ship, and consign their tobacco to their London and Bristol commercial partners. During these years, the largest plantation owners opened new accounts, or strengthened old ties with their established English contractors. Fitzhugh communicated with Bristol merchant Cornelius Serjeant, while George Mason and William Byrd I reinforced their relationships with London's John Cary. Byrd's letters to his business partner illustrate the developing wartime interdependence of planter and merchant: I doe here ingage that if you will send in a good ship, of four five & six hundreds hogs- heads on as reasonable termes as others I will lade att least one halfe of her & pro- cure the remainder of others. All or far the greatest part shall goe consigned to your selfe who (I know) are as capeable of dis- poseing of itt to the best advantage as any man; & doubt not but you will doe itt. I hope you'l like the proposition & send a ship of some force.67 The war years ripened partnerships, and they also created new forms of contractual relationships between planter and mer- chant. After 1689, most Americans carried on trade in tradition- al ways with their English agents or local independent merchants, but others consigned crops to a new breed of "metropolitan com- mission merchants."68 During these "years of interrupted and then resumed growth," Chesapeake growers often entrusted their crops to merchants, such as Perry and Lane, who endeavored to find markets for the surplus crops that always threatened to overwhelm England's tobacco industry.69 Early in the 1690s, Lon- don's leading tobacco merchants tried to unlock the Baltic market for Chesapeake tobacco through negotiations with Swedish buyers, and in a short while they claimed to have doubled exports to this region of Europe.70 As the war closed old markets, London deal- ers conceived the idea of opening a "mercantilist Eldorado" by pursuing a Russian contract that would allow them to supply all Muscovites with Virginia tobacco.71 Although these promising new markets never proved potent enough to circulate the entire Chesa- peake crop, exploring them added to the business skill of tobac- co's leading commercial capitalists. As a result of such tobacco merchant negotiations, the first nine war years complicated tobacco marketing, but they kept the Chesapeake industry alive. Although later war years shook "out rather roughly" numerous growers and merchants, most substantial planters and formidable dealers emerged after 1698, and even after 1713, with their trade intact, and a clearer vision of what they required to facilitate the circulation of America's abundant tobacco product in world markets.72 Finding and holding fresh customers topped their list, but they still relied on Parliament's ability to shelter their industry from unnecessary competition and costs. The Chesapeake tobacco industry did not require the Glorious Revolution to free itself from feudal restraints, but state protection continued to be crucial for its expansion after 1689. When warfare combined with surpluses threatened their livelihood in the 1690s, tobacco's leading producers and merchants peti- tioned Parliament for statutory help. London's largest import- ers, such as Micaiah Perry, Sir Jeffrey Jeffreys, and his brother John, became leaders in tobacco's Parliamentary lobby to safe- guard shipping, to strengthen Navigation Acts, to lower duties, to end the Royal African Company's monopoly in selling slaves, to change the way in which merchants packed tobacco, and to enforce existing laws against smugglers. Legislators attended to the tobacco industry's petitions after the Glorious Revolution, and between "1689 and 1723 there was an act of Parliament affecting the tobacco trade approximately every other year."73 Although many of these bills merely increased the price of tobacco con- sumed in the mother country, those that mentioned tobacco--and several others that did not--either continued or extended the protection of the Chesapeake's major commodity.74 Neither the "Act to Settle the Trade To Africa," nor the statute that made a "Union of the Two Kingdoms of England and Scotland," for example, contained the word "tobacco."75 The first bill, however, ended the Royal African Company monopoly on supplying slaves to the colonists reducing the labor costs for growing American tobacco.76 The second made Scottish smuggling unnecessary, and bonded all American and British tobacco men into a community of financial, productive, and commercial capitalists searching for global customers. Pioneering ideas to enhance the Chesapeake's tobacco busi- ness, however, remained at a premium during the first nine years after the Glorious Revolution, but, despite warfare, Parliament still updated and augmented Restoration era Navigation Acts against smuggling and planting of tobacco in England.77 When peace returned in 1698, London tobacco lobbyists gained more substantive legislation. Early in the 1690s, seventy-two mer- chants had petitioned for a statute that outlawed "bulk" shipping in favor of carrying tobacco in "hogsheads" to save on transport charges.78 Parliament tabled the bill during the war years, but, after a struggle between large and small planters, petitioners got their bill in 1698.79 Major importers, such as John Cary, Micaiah Perry, and Arthur North, supported this large plantation owners' "plea" for banning bulk tobacco freighting because such packaging lowered costs for shipping tobacco from the Chesapeake to England.80 They argued that "loose" tobacco curtailed profits (and reduced customs receipts) because it emboldened ordinary seamen to smuggle tobacco.81 In 1698, Parliament included reforms for packaging tobacco within an omnibus statute that tightened procedures for importing several other commodities.82 While the "hogshead" statute increased profit margins through tighter packaging requirements, another 1698 statute cheapened labor costs for tobacco growers. In response to a barrage of post-Revolutionary planter and merchant petitions, Parliament first limited, and, in 1713, finally scrapped the Royal African Company slave-trading monopoly.83 London tobacco lobbyists, such as Edward Carleton, Thomas Cary, Thomas Corbin, and the ever present Micaiah Perry, stood in the forefront of the campaign against the Royal African Company. As spokesmen for the tobacco industry, these men linked plantation prosperity with free trade in slaves, and the revocation of the Royal African Company monopoly to sell them: the said plantations are of very large ex- tent, and capable of great improvements; but, for many years past, have lain under great discouragement and poverty, for want of negroes to carry on their work; which is partly occasioned by the unlawful measures practiced by the Royal African Company there, by causing all ships, that brought any ne- groes, to be seized for their own use and praying, that they may be heard to give their reasons, to demonstrate how great an advan- tage it will be to this kingdom, and the plantations, by making the trade to Africa free and open.84 At first, the African Company's lost monopoly benefited West Indian sugar planters most, but tobacco growers also reaped the rewards of slave labor in the production of tobacco by 1710.85 These first post-Revolutionary tobacco-related acts tight- ened Navigation Acts, coerced small producers to use smuggler- proof packaging, and increased labor supplies, but they did not prevent Scotland from competing legally or illegally with Eng- land's tobacco capitalists. Although there is no way to quantify Scottish smuggling, English merchants held Scotland principally responsible for most of the illicit trade carried on between the Chesapeake and Europe.86 In 1694, Micaiah Perry spoke for Eng- land's entire merchant community when he testified that the tobacco business suffered most from "illegal trade driven by the Scotts." He reported that in previous years he had shipped at least "800 hogsheads of tobacco [North]; and of late he has not sent one," because the Scots reached his customers before he could.87 From the point of view of Perry, England required more than Navigation Acts to stop Scottish competition. However, Scotland's merchants were more than interlopers. Before the 1706 Act of Union, they were both customers and competitors who shared an island and a monarch. Even before the Restoration, a rival Scottish capitalism developed alongside England's, but Scotland's tobacco merchants had a great advantage over their Southern counterparts because they ran a business that mixed legal and smuggled leaves. The Navigation Acts excluded Scotland from English colonial markets, but Scottish merchants bought their legal, and sometimes even their illegal, American tobacco in Liverpool and Whitehaven.88 Before long, in imitation of their English rivals, Scotland's legislators protected their tobacco home market, and Scottish commercial capitalists began to compete with English merchants for European customers.89 By 1700, the Scots imported two million pounds of Chesapeake tobacco through normal channels, but, at the same time, they smuggled perhaps as much as five hundred thousand pounds into Glasgow alone.90 The Scots mixed, spun, and reexported their two tobaccos to the continent and even (underground) to England at cheaper prices than English merchants could match.91 Other factors contributed to Scotland's competitive edge in the tobacco trade. Glasgow's principal asset, a closer and safer port, particularly in times of war, than either London or Bris- tol, meant cheaper carrying costs for tobacco exchanged between America and Scotland.92 When smuggling added quantity to its totals of Virginia's quality tobacco, Scottish competition became lethal. To level tobacco's commercial playing field, Parliament legislated the "Union of the Two Kingdoms of England and Scot- land."93 At least partially, England's landlords and capitalists supported the Union because they feared Scottish competition in woolens, corn, cattle, banking, East India trade, and, of course, tobacco.94 In the seventeenth century, Parliament had passed Navigation Acts to control a similar Dutch rivalry, and, when the Dutch disregarded these acts, it financed wars to force compli- ance. Legislators intended that those Navigation Acts would also stop the Scottish intruders, but a shared island made the acts unenforceable and warfare impracticable. In the end, an English and Scottish Parliament settled their political and commercial rivalries through a statutory negotiation in which English capi- talists and landlords voted to include Scottish capitalists and landlords into enterprise Great Britain. The Act of Union inte- grated two economies, and "It turned Great Britain into the largest free-trade zone in Europe and entrusted the regulation of both Scottish and English trade and industry to the British Parliament."95 The Act of Union also reduced tobacco smuggling, and, after Parliament passed yet another statute in 1722, Scot- tish merchants agreed to pay their fair share of tobacco duties.96 Although England's tobacco importers, especially those of London and Bristol, had hoped that incorporation would help them to defeat their Scottish rivals in the marketplace, they turned out to be wrong. Whitehaven, and especially Glasgow, won out in the competition for leadership in the Chesapeake tobacco busi- ness. By the 1720s, the Act of Union linked colonial tobacco growers ever more closely to a streamlined and well-ordered international tobacco trading consortium with its largest firms centered in Whitehaven and Glasgow.97 The statutory removal by integration of Scottish competition shifted the geographical focus of the entire legal tobacco industry, and it made northern England and Scotland the coordinating center for Great Britain's tobacco importing for reexporting business. The French Connection From 1689 to 1722, statutes reduced costs, protected trade, limited fraud, and reduced competition within the tobacco trade, but they did not guarantee its businessmen a predictably profita- ble economy of scale. No matter how much the industry advanced, the dilemma of too much product persisted into the eighteenth century.98 Trade boomed for five years when the Nine Years' War ended in 1698, encouraging colonial planters to buy more slaves, to cultivate more acres, and to produce more tobacco. During these years, imports of American-grown tobacco increased from a 1680s decade of no more than 28 million pounds a year to between 30 and 35 million after 1697.99 On the English side of the Atlantic, London tobacco dealers sought outlets for these larger Chesapeake crops by opening markets in Russia and France. These trades had not matured, however, before war caused tobacco men to fret again over their unsold hogsheads of tobacco. But, entre- preneurs on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated what they had learned from the previous decade about surviving warfare. From 1702 to 1713, Americans retrenched, experimented with new crops, and smuggled.100 For the lawful Chesapeake trader, the English government resurrected and improved on the convoy system.101 London's leading tobacco merchants petitioned Parliament to restrain the Royal African Company from unfair competition in the slave trade.102 The wealthiest English tobacco dealers, such as Robert Atwood, Richard Chiswell, Henry Furnese, Gilbert Heath- cote, and Sir William Scawen, retrenched by investing surplus funds in the Bank of England, the East India Company, the East- land trade, and the Levant Company. However, most remained tobacco merchants, and they labored to find new customers through a negotiated Russian tobacco monopoly.103 Most importantly for the industry's future, England, even in wartime, became a "major supplier of tobacco to France."104 Jacob Price has analyzed the eighteenth century French market for Anglo-American tobacco. His work on the industry from 1680 to 1790 leaves no questions about how and why a Glasgow centered syndicate of commercial capitalists profited from the distribution of American tobacco. Starting from the assumption that the tobacco industry required markets above all, Price uncovered the French connection. In brief, toward the end of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV sold a monopoly for supplying France with tobacco to a consortium of French financiers. After 1689, and as an accidental byproduct of the Nine Years' War, the French monopolists discovered their choice supply in Chesapeake leaves.105 English merchants negotiated contracts with these French buyers and the connection came into being. When war interrupted again after 1702, English merchants plotted for its renewal even in wartime. From 1702 to 1710, the tobacco crisis became so acute that English and Scottish tobacco men sought government permission to supply the French monopolists through neutral ships. Price has detailed the intricate negotiations of ministers and merchants to keep the lucrative tobacco trade open during the war years, and it is not necessary to reproduce that story here. It is necessary, however, to note that these ef- forts, and the later postwar attempts to write government to government agreements, failed.106 Nevertheless, English and Scottish tobacco merchants discovered during these years how valuable their French customers were to their future success, and they re-contracted with the French immediately after the war. As a result, and "without the assistance of Whitehall, British tobacco exports to France expanded beyond the wildest dreams" of any politician or trader by the 1720s.107 Although it is true that tobacco men opened the French trade without the assistance of Whitehall after 1713, that commerce would never have existed without the Parliamentary statutes that produced "Great Britain," and located its tobacco industry in the Chesapeake. Long before the French connection, Parliament con- structed a cross-Atlantic tobacco industry to benefit its pro- prietors. The most prominent beneficiaries, whose names remain forever attached to the tobacco business, included the Byrds, the Randolphs, the Carters, and the Fitzhughes on the American side. Before the men of Glasgow replaced them the 1720s, the Jeffries, Lanes, and Perrys led the list of English merchants who grew wealthy from the Chesapeake tobacco business. However much Parliament concerned itself to please these individual tobacco men, it wrote Chesapeake legislation to reduce the economic anxieties of a much broader constituencies of landlords and capitalists who counted on the tobacco trade to stimulate Eng- land's stagnating shipbuilding, farming, and manufacturing indus- tries.108 The French connection never resolved these larger problems of market surpluses between 1689 and 1721, but Parlia- ment, in the case of tobacco, produced a field in which a coali- tion of commercial capitalists successfully financed an American tobacco industry whose product soon found its perpetual market in France. Parliamentary statutes designed this Anglo-American industry in which leading British merchants grew wealthy by reducing costs of production and transportation so that Chesa- peake tobacco's cheap prices forced open a French market that could absorb the two thirds of its total output that the English people could not smoke.109 Great Britain's commercial capitalists remained prominent in the tobacco trade until the American Revolution. Historical forces that separated the production of tobacco in America from it sale in Great Britain, and the continued existence of slavery, slowed the development of a real capitalism in tobacco, a capi- talism in which the industrial capitalists would dominate land- lords, interesting-taking capitalists, commercial capitalists, and, especially, a working class. Only in Newcastle's coal industry did such a possibility exist before 1722, and its pros- pects are the subject of the next chapter. Chapter Nine: Endnotes (1) Jacob Price's work is essential for comprehending the rela- tionship between American tobacco planters and British merchants on the one hand and British merchants and European buyers on the other. His most important works include: Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); "The Economic Growth of the Chesapeake and the European Market, 1697-1775," The Jour- nal of Economic History 24 (1964), 496-511; France and the Chesa- peake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674-1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973); Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615-1753 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); "The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707-1775," in Studies in Scot- tish Business History, ed. Peter L. Payne (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1967); The Tobacco Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics, and Diplomacy in the Quest for a Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676-1722 (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1961); Tobacco in Atlantic Trade: The Chesapeake, London and Glasgow, 1675-1775 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1995). For the most complete recent bibliog- raphy of secondary works on Tobacco see, Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1994), 248-274. Other secondary works on tobacco used for this chapter include: C. M. MacInnes, The Early Tobacco Trade (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926); Russell R. Menard, "The Chesapeake Tobacco Industry, 1617-1730," in Paul Uselding, editor, Research in Economic History, vol. 5:109-77 (Connecticut:Jai Press, 1980); Jacob M. Price and P. G. E. Clemens, "A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675- 1775," Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 1-43; Joan Thirsk, "New Crops and Their Diffusion: Tobacco-growing in Seventeenth- Century England," in The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984). (2) Price, The Tobacco Adventure to Russia, 24. (3) This point is developed most completely in Menard, "The Tobacco Industry," 109-77. See also Goodman, Tobacco in History, 161-162, and Price and Clemens, "A Revolution of Scale," 1-43. (4) James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Proclama- tions: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603-1625, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) and James F. Larkin, ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625- 1646, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). (5) In 1685, James II pressured Parliament to raise tobacco duties to increase revenues and colonist feared this would limit demand for the commodity: see, 1 Jac. II, c. 4, and Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institu- tion, 1924), 1:423-433. (6) James I, A Counterblast to Tobacco, 1604. For a complete list of seventeenth and eighteenth century tracts for and against smoking see, Jerome E. Brooks, ed., Tobacco, Its History Illus- trated by the Books, Manuscripts and Engravings in the Collection of George Arents, Jr., 5 vols. (New York: The Rosenbach Company, 1937-52). A summary of the arguments is given in MacInnes, Early English, chapter two. For a survey of the relationship between taxation and the industry see, Alfred Rive, "A Brief History of the Regulation and Taxation of Tobacco in England," William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, 9 (1929): 1-12, 73- 87. (7) Joan Thirsk, "New Crops." This essay should be read in conjunction with Menard, "The Tobacco Industry," and George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908; reprinted, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), and The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754, part 1: The Establishment of the System, 1660-1788 (New York: Peter Smith, 1933). (8) Thirsk, "New Crops," 266. (9) Ibid., 260. (10) Proclamations banning home-growing appeared regularly after 1619 during the reigns of James and Charles I: see, Larkin and Hughes, eds., Proclamations, 1:457-460 and 481-84 and Larkin, ed. Royal Proclamations, 2:11-12, 131-136, 140-141, 162-165, 600-604. (11) Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1932; reprinted, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1958), 1:236. See also Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates, 1:215 and George Lewis Beer, Origins, 407. (12) Gray, Agriculture, 1:235. (13) Larkin and Hughes, eds. Proclamations, 1:457-458. (14) Rive, "Regulation and Taxation," 5-6. (15) For the early history of these Virginia traders see Gray, Agriculture, 1:235-241. (16) Larkin and Hughes, eds., Proclamations, 1: 601-606. (17) Ibid., 604. (18) Thirsk, "New Crops," 266. (19) Thirsk, "New Crops," 283. (20) Gray, Agriculture, 1:255-256, and Beer, Origins, 215. (21) See Beer, Origins, 203-219 for a discussion of drawback policy. (22) By 1685, reexports counted for half the total tobacco im- ported and the percentage was growing. For quantities of imports and reexports, see Gray, Agriculture, 252-253, and Kenneth G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 145-146. (23) Thirsk, "New Crops," 281, and Beer, The Origins, 350. (24) C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, 3 vols. (1911: reprint, Holmes Beach, Florida: William W.Gaunt and Sons, 1972), 2:580 and 2:870. (25) Ibid., 2:580. For Cromwell's Navigation Act, 2:559. (26) Macinnes, Early English, 58-59. (27) Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the Material Condition of the People, Based upon Original and Contemporaneous Records, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 1:345-366. (28) For Cromwell's Navigation Act see, Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 2:559-562. The first Restoration Navigation Act is 12 Car. II, c. 18. (29) 12 Car. II, c. 34. (30) 22 & 23 Car. II, c. 26, "An Act to p'vent the planting of Tobacco in England, and for regulateing the Plantation Trade," section 2. (31) Ibid., section 6. (32) Larkin and Hughes, eds., Proclamations, 1:604. See also Beer, Origins, 238-239. (33) 12 Car. II, c. 18, section 18. (34) 15 Car. II, c. 7, "An Act for the Encouragement of Trade," For information on the gradual transformation of the shipping industry into a national business see my chapter five, and Law- rence Harper, The English Navigation Law: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in Social Engineering (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), chapter on "Ships and Seamen," 321-364. For de- tails on tobacco, slaves, and ships, See Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962), 267-279. (35) MacInnes, Early English, 60. For Bristol, see also, David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Econo- my, 1450-1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). (36) Patrick McGrath, ed., Merchants and Merchandise in Seven- teenth-Century Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Record Society's Publi- cation, 1955), 295. (37) J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Eco- nomic Development of West Cumberland, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1981), 104. For figures on the out- ports, see Price and Clemens, "A Revolution of Scale," 25-29. (38) See Jacob Price's chapter on "Commercial Credit," in Capi- tal, 96-123, for the fiscal connection between the Chesapeake and England, and J. Milnes Holden, The History of Negotiable Instru- ments in English Law (London: The Athlone Press, 1955) for the role of bills of exchange in English-American trade generally. (39) The drawback system was introduced in 1631 and clarified by several statutes after 1660. See Beer, Origin, 215 and Statutes, 1 Jac. II, c. 4. Tax differentials favored American tobacco producers as early as 1631 when "the duty on tobacco brought in by British vessels from Virginia and the Somers Isles was low- ered. . . . Tobacco from the British West Indies was to pay at slightly higher, and Spanish tobacco at much higher, rates. Tobacco brought by foreign ships was charged additional duties of 25 per cent" (Gray, Agriculture, 1:243). (40) Beer, The Old Colonial System, 38. (41) 15 Car. II, c. 7, section 4. (42) Ibid., section 15. (43) Ibid. (44) Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Virginia: The Mariners' Museum, 1953), 96. (45) John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1958), 118. Historians know that tobacco was rolled and spun in Holland, France, Scotland, and England, but none have written the story of English manufactur- ing. Price's description of Dieppe in 1715 should inspire fur- ther work on the English Industry: "the tobacco manufactory at Dieppe was big enough to have a major labour disturbance. The works, which were entirely devoted to the manufacture of spun tobacco, then employed about 1,000-1,100 workers. Of these, about 200 were skilled adults employed in the spinning operation. The bulk of the remainder were children between nine and sixteen employed in preparing the tobacco for spinning"(France and the Chesapeake, 1:192). See also, a petition to Queen Anne from sixty-six "Merchants Planters and Manufacturers of Tobacco on Behalfe of themselves and others" which sheds some light on the English manufacturing process: "rolling Tobacco requires many hands, One house only in London findes full imployment for three hundred hands besides severall other houses in proportion, most of the Wifes and Children of Seamen and Watermen who by this manufacture find maintenance whilst their husbands are abroad in her Majesties Service" (printed in William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 3: 250-253, 1923). (46) Menard, "The Chesapeake Tobacco Industry," 149. (47) Ibid., 133-34. (48) Ibid., 136. (49) Ibid., 136-137. (50) Ibid., 153. (51) "The pattern, furthermore, may be of more than local inter- est. Preliminary investigation suggests that several New World staples shared this history: an initial period in which growth occurred as planters and merchants vastly increased supplies while improving methods of making and marketing their product that permitted them to lower the price to consumers and thereby reach a larger market, followed by a period in which rising costs forced producers to rely on increased demand and the higher prices it brought in order to expand" (ibid., 155-156). (52) Richard Beale Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1676-1701: The Fitzhugh Letters and Other Documents (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 19. (53) Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three Wil- liam Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776 2 vols. (Charlottes- ville: The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 9. For Micaiah Perry, see Elizabeth Donnan, "Eighteenth Century English Mer- chants, Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1931-32), 70- 98. For the Perry family see, Jacob M. Price, Perry of London. (54) Tinling, Byrds, William Byrd to Arthur North, London mer- chant, January, 1685 [/86], 1:48-49. (55) For further discussion of this subject, see John Spencer Bassett, "The Relation between the Virginia Planter and the London Merchant," Annual Report of the American History Associa- tion for the year 1901, vol. 1, Washington, 1902, 551-575. Bassett draws attention to the elaborate proposals of William Fitzhugh to Thomas Clayton and John Cooper about methods to reduce costs within the tobacco trade. (56) 1 Jac. II, c. 4. Certainly influential members of the Society of Bristol Venturers thought James's new tax on tobacco a potential disaster. See Patrick Mcgrath, ed., Records Relating to the Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century (Bristol, Bristol Records Society, 1952), 252. (57) Menard, "Tobacco Industry," 153. (58) Gray, Agriculture, 1:180-181, and Menard, "Tobacco Indus- try," 39-40. (59) Middleton, Tobacco Coast, 292-294. (60) Stock, Proceedings, 2:110-111. (61) Price, Perry, 31. (62) Menard, "Tobacco Industry," 140, and John M. Hemphill, II, Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1689-1733: Studies in the Development and Fluctuations of a Colonial Economy under Imperial Control (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 7-13. (63) Menard, "Tobacco Industry," 141. (64) D. W. Jones has covered this subject in several studies: "London Overseas-Merchant Groups at the End of the Seventeenth Century and the Moves against the East India Company, (Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, 1970), 216. "London Merchants and the Crisis of the 1690s," in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History, eds. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (Toronto: Uni- versity of Toronto Press, 1972), 334-338, and War and Economy In the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 260-266. See also, David Hancock, " 'Domestic Bubbling': Eighteenth-Century London Merchants and Individual Investment in the Funds," Economic History Review 47 (1994):679-702. (65) Price, Tobacco Adventure to Russia, 24. For their invest- ments in other businesses, see 29-37. (66) ibid., 5. (67) Tinling, ed., Byrds, 1:151-152. John Cary was the son of a Bristol merchant, Thomas Cary. William Fitzhugh began his mer- cantile relationship with Bristol's Cornelius Serjeant in June, 1692. Davis, ed., Fitzhugh, 301. (68) Price and Clemens, "Revolution of Scale," 6. See also, Price, Tobacco and the Atlantic Trade, "Merchants and Planters: The Market Structure of the Colonial Chesapeake Reconsidered," 13-15. (69) Price and Clemens, Revolution in Scale, 5, and Price, Perry, 36-38. (70) Price, Tobacco Adventure to Russia, 15. (71) Ibid., 17. (72) Price and Clemens, "A Revolution of Scale," 18. (73) Price, Perry, 52. (74) To pay for the war, high import duties on tobacco continued throughout the colonial period. See 2 W. & M., Sess. 2, c. 5, 4 W & M., c. 15, 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 10, and 7 Anne, c. 31. The re-export tax on tobacco remained one half-penny until it was removed altogether by 9 Geo. 1, c. 21. Price and Clemens evalu- ated the dual nature of these changes: "Parliament did not help the home market by raising the duties on tobacco a further penny per pound in 1697 and another one-third of a penny per pound in 1704 to a nominal total of six and one-third pence per pound. However, in connection with the 1704 raise, the time limit for the reexport of tobacco with drawback of duties was extended from twelve to eighteen months, strengthening the reexport trades and London's role as entrepot" (Price and Clemens, "A Revolution of Scale," 17). (75) 9 Will. III, c. 26, and 6 Anne, c. 11 (76) For the end of the Royal African Company monopoly of the slave trade, see K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (1957; reprinted, New York: Atheneum, 1970), 122-134. For the "public role" of Micaiah Perry, Jeffrey, Jeffreys, John Jeffreys, and others in changing English law on this and other issues, see Price, Perry, 52-59. (77) 4 W. and M., c. 24, section 6, and 7 & 8 Will. III., ch. 22, section 13. (78) Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, American and West Indies, 1689-92, 13:614-615. (79) 10 Will. III., c. 10, section 26. The arguments of the larger planters was made in an essay often attributed to William Byrd, "An Essay on Bulk Tobacco," Thomas H. Wynne, ed., History of the Dividing Line, and other Tracts, from the Papers of Wil- liam Byrd, of Westover, in Virginia, Esquire, 2 vols. (Richmond, Virginia: 1866), 1:141-158. For a discussion of the bulk versus loose issue see Bruce, Virginia, 1:452-454, Middleton, Tobacco Coast, 118-120 and Vertrees J. Wyckoff, Tobacco Regulation in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936), 86-108. (80) Byrd, Bulk Tobacco, 1:152. See also Wyckoff, Tobacco Regu- lation, 98-99. (81) Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162-170. (82) 10 Will. III, c. 10, section 26. (83) 9 Will. III, c. 26, "An Act to settle the Trade of Africa." (84) Stock, Proceedings, 2:217. For a list of London supporters see 2:236 and for Bristol supporters see 2:240. (85) Davies, Royal African, 122-152. (86) Margaret Shove Morriss, Colonial Trade of Maryland, 1689- 1715 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1914), 118. Morriss claimed that Scottish merchants fitted out at least 31 ships for illegal trade from 1691 to 1702. For further information on this illegal Scottish trade, see Theodora Keith, Commercial Relations of England and Scotland, 1603-1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1910), 118-128. (87) Stock, Proceedings, 2:111. (88) T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660-1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), 201. For the illegal trade, see Beckett, Coal and Tobacco, 104-05. (89) Smout, Scottish Trade, 237. (90) Ibid., 201. (91) Ibid., 132. Tobacco-spinning was a new Scottish manufac- turing industry. (92) Price, "The Rise of Glasgow" (reprinted in Tobacco in Atlan- tic Trade), 187-188. (93) 6 Anne, c. 11. (94) Tony Dickson, ed., Scottish Capitalism: Class, State and Nation from before the Union to the Present (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), especially Willie Thompson, "From Reformation to Union," 63-88. (95) Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: Eng- land, Scotland, and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 138. (96) 9 George I, c. 21. (97) Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:xxi-xxii. (98) L. C. Gray, "The Market Surplus Problems of Colonial Tobacco," Agricultural History 2 January, 1928, 1. (99) Menard, "Tobacco Industry," 141. (100) Hemphill, Virginia, 26-42. (101) Middleton, Tobacco, 296-297. (102) Stock, Proceedings, 3:208. (103) Price, The Tobacco Adventure, 33, 105-110. (104) Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:181. (105) Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:179-181. (106) Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:509-525. (107) Ibid., 1:530. (108) Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves; The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 99-104. (109) Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:666.