The English Patents of Monopoly

PREFACE

DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England experienced a series of attempts to establish monopolies by royal letters-patent, both for external and internal undertakings. The external or commercial monopolies were conceded to groups of merchants who exported to foreign countries the staples and manufactures of England. These great commercial companies, notably the Merchant Adventurers and the East India Company, embodying conspicuously as they did so much of national ambition and energy, have naturally attracted the attention of investigators, while the internal monopolies, less prominent but no less interesting, have been hitherto comparatively neglected. The avowed motive of both the foreign and domestic monopolies was that of organizing trade and industry under a national regulation which should protect and stimulate these enterprises. The system of internal monopoly, however, included a greater variety of objects and a greater complication of motives than did the group of external monopolies. It included, for example, a control of the press and of postal communication, primarily for political purposes; it comprised also licenses for contraventions of penal statutes, inspired by fiscal motives as well as the necessity of relief from cramping regulation. More important, from an economic point of view, than either of these were the undertakings in which it was hoped that the establishment of monopoly, under royal sanction, might be the means of encouraging new or weak domestic industries. The value of a systematic investigation of the latter, and the justification of this monograph, lies not only in the light derived from one experiment with industrial privileges, but in the special significance of this phase of English economic history. With some allowance for overlapping, it may be said that in England "monopoly" formed the connecting link between "mercantilism" and "protection." The system of exclusive privilege supplemented, if it did not entirely supplant, the earlier policy which prohibited the export of specie and of raw materials and enacted statutes of

"employment;" and it led the way to the policy of protective customs duties.

The materials for this study were collected in the Harvard College and Law School Libraries at home, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and at London in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, the Privy Council Office, the Patent Office, the Guildhall, Lincoln's Inn Library and the Library of the Society of Antiquaries. Acknowledgments are due to the authorities and officials of these institutions for unfailing courtesy and timely assistance. I regret that the kind interest of many friends in England can be recorded here only in a general expression of grateful appreciation. But I owe especial thanks to Mr. E. W. Hulme for guidance in tracing the history of inventions from 1560 to 1660, and to Mrs. Lilian Tomn Knowles and Mr. George Unwin for helpful suggestions from their own studies in the economic history of this period. The two latter, differing somewhat as to the interpretation of the industrial policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, aided my effort to do impartial justice to the motives of the advocates of "ordered trade" as well as to those of the advocates of "freedom."

My study of this subject has been conducted under the guidance of Professor Edwin F. Gay of Harvard University, and I am indebted to him for sympathetic assistance from first to last. I do not dare to think what my results would have been without his stimulus and encouragement, without his hints as to sources of information, and without his suggestions as to the broader historical relations of my subject. A service that I could ill have spared was his conscientiously thorough criticism of my work, for which I cannot be too grateful.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., August, 1906.