Navigation Acts

Navigation Acts (1651–1696).The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 temporarily cut the American colonies' supply lines to the mother country, leading the colonists to establish commercial relations with the Dutch and French. At the end of the war, England sought to reassert control over the American trade by passing a series of laws that came to be known as the “Navigation Acts.”

The first statute, passed by Parliament in 1651 and reenacted in 1660 upon the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, stipulated that all goods brought into England be imported only in English ships, and that “enumerated commodities,” such as tobacco and sugar grown in the Americas, be exported only to England or English colonies. The second Navigation Act, passed in 1663 and known as the Staple Act, required that European commodities be exported to the English American colonies only via approved ports in England. A third Navigation Act (1673) set customs duties for the colonies and established a cadre of officers in the colonies to collect them, in the hope of better controlling the flow of “enumerated commodities” to England and its possessions. A fourth Navigation Act, the 1696 Act of Trade and Plantations, strengthened the machinery of metropolitan control by setting up admiralty courts in the colonies. Together, these statutes summed up seventeenth‐century English mercantilist thought by creating an exclusionary imperial commercial system restricted to English and colonial traders and designed to benefit the mother country. Subsequent statutes passed with similar intent, such as the Molasses Act of 1733, exhibited the same mercantilist spirit.

In considering the Navigation Acts and the empire's mercantile regime, British and American historians have divided over two issues. The first is the extent of smuggling to contravene the acts. The surviving evidence seems to confirm the effectiveness of the parliamentary laws, coupled as they were with the threat of prosecution. On the other hand, the evidence is incomplete, since successful smuggling leaves few traces, and the presence of French, Dutch, and Spanish imports in American markets seems too great to be accounted for in any other way.

Whether the Navigation Acts contributed to the ferment that led to the Revolutionary War has engendered more heated debate. Historians long viewed the laws as exploitative and debt‐inducing, at least after 1763 when the ministry decided to make the colonists pay for the Seven Years' War. However, Robert P. Thomas in 1965 estimated the burden of the acts in the 1760s and 1770s to be less than 0.5 percent of average annual American income. So slight a burden, Thomas suggested, could not have caused revolt. Thomas's conclusion, hotly debated at first, eventually became historical orthodoxy. Subsequent scholarship, however, showed that the burden of the acts was not evenly distributed, and that they did impose significant costs on certain groups—in particular, tobacco and rice planters, colonial merchants and manufacturers, and artisans and mechanics—actors central to pre‐Revolutionary agitation. These groups may have thought the burden intolerable enough to warrant rebellion.
See also Colonial Era; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

Lawrence A. Harper , The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth‐Century Experiment in Social Engineering, 1939.
Robert P. Thomas , A Quantitative Approach to the Study of the Effects of British Imperial Policy on Colonial Warfare: Some Preliminary Findings, Journal of Economic History 25 (1965): 336–355.
Larry Sawers , The Navigation Acts Revisited, Economic History Review 45 (1992): 262–284.

David Hancock