On 1 August 1763, the newly appointed commander of the British Caribbean island of Dominica, Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell Dalrymple, betrayed explicit British commercial laws by opening the port of Roseau, Dominica, to foreign commercial vessels. Dalrymple had gone rogue: he had no permission from Parliament or the Board of Trade to institute such a policy.Footnote 1 Several sugar-laden French ships from nearby Guadeloupe embraced Dalrymple's decree and traded with British merchants until Royal Naval vessels seized multiple cargoes and shut down the impromptu free port in January 1764.Footnote 2
While acting illegally, Dalrymple purported to have the best interests of the British Empire at heart in a 1763 letter to the prime minister, Lord Bute. Having observed the “most extensive trade of St. Ustatius [Eustatius],” a Dutch free port in the Caribbean, the lieutenant colonel assured Lord Bute that if Britain were to follow in Dutch footsteps, “the decay if not the destruction of St. Ustatius” would be the result.Footnote 3 Not only could a British free port destroy this rival's commercial success in the region but it could also serve as an alternative to physically conquering other foreign colonies. Dalrymple explained that British merchants could sell printed linens, cotton, naval stores, sailcloth, salt fish, horses, rice, and lumber to French colonists at rates cheaper than those offered by French suppliers. Such a policy would set in place or “fix the dependence of the French Islands upon the [British] free port.”Footnote 4 French trade in the West Indies would shift to the British free port, French produce could be re-exported to Europe for a profit, French colonists would become dependent on British supplies, and British merchants and manufacturers would prosper. “In short,” Dalrymple predicted, “we shall reap the advantage of all (the French) islands without conquering them.”Footnote 5
While Dalrymple's plan was initially suppressed, his arguments would strike a nerve with subsequent British policy makers. In spring 1766, a new Parliament under the Marquess of Rockingham passed the first Free Port Act. This legislation stipulated that colonial merchants could exchange certain regulated goods as well as slaves with foreign merchants in six British colonial ports: four in Jamaica, two in Dominica.Footnote 6 This policy negated English Navigation Acts’ requirements that all trade to and from the colonies must be conducted on British vessels and that foreign ships could only enter colonial harbors “in distress or for refreshment.”Footnote 7 Why had British commercial policy changed so quickly to conform to Dalrymple's model? And what did British policy makers hope to achieve through these free ports?
Much British political-economic thinking of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century regarding commerce in the Atlantic world revolved around the long-standing Navigation Acts, first promulgated in 1651. Generally, these acts aimed at both increasing English revenue, domestic manufacturing exports, English imports of colonial produce (such as tobacco and sugar), and general English mercantile activity and augmenting English shipping to provide a so-called nursery of seamen that could be called upon in wartime. The English also sought to shut out their commercial rivals, the Dutch in particular, from their extensive seventeenth-century carrying trade with English colonies. The Navigation Acts thus prohibited foreign commercial vessels from entering English colonial harbors and stipulated that all trade to English colonies must be carried on English ships. English merchants, however, were allowed to export domestic goods to foreign domains. Most English policy makers believed that such policies would help England increase its overall balance of trade through exports of high-value manufactured goods and slaves to foreign domains and imports of noncompetitive, needed products such as gold, silver, and some raw materials, while debilitating their rivals’ commerce. Along with such relative wealth, revenue, and trade would come the financial and naval foundations for England's power, empire, and security.Footnote 8
Many scholars of the British Free Port Act have generally interpreted this piece of legislation as a break from what they have called mercantilism or, as it might be more precisely described, the tightly regulated system of commerce ruled by the Navigation Acts.Footnote 9 Some have also emphasized the Rockingham administration's desire to ameliorate tensions with colonial subjects who had recently protested against the Stamp Act and legislation aimed at curbing interimperial smuggling.Footnote 10 While other scholars have investigated the Free Port Act's effect on commerce in the Caribbean, few historians have analyzed petitioners’ and policy makers’ considerations.Footnote 11 Much of the scholarship that mentions the debates surrounding the Free Port Act cites Frances Armytage's 1953 book, The Free Port System in the British West Indies, as the main or only source.Footnote 12
In this article, I challenge some of the key arguments in the existing literature and extend the understanding of the implications of the Free Port Act. I reject any idea that British policy makers intended free ports to promote mutual understanding and universal prosperity, as certain trade theorists, David Hume most prominently, would have hoped. Nor did the act prioritize the interests of Britain's North American colonies, only secondarily seeking to relieve mounting tensions between them and the metropole and provide some benefits to the colonial economy. Rather, this legislation remained within the spirit of the Navigation Acts by aiming to increase the power and wealth of the mother country over its rivals while specifically benefiting powerful domestic manufacturing and mercantile (and sugar) interest groups in Parliament.
The Free Port Act should also be seen as arising within a context of an early modern rise in free ports and (regulated) “free trade” (that is, encouraged commerce between foreigners). Like Dalrymple, many British policy makers envied the Dutch free ports of St. Eustatius and Curaçao, which, especially during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), had diverted commerce from British ports and supplied the enemy French. The British were also following and adapting on a long lineage of free ports that included Italian, French, Danish, and even Spanish models.
Yet far from being the sincerest form of flattery, such emulation had the specific purposes of ruining the ability of their rivals (especially the Dutch) to conduct commerce with British enemies in the West Indies and making foreigners (especially Spanish and French colonists) dependent on inexpensive British domestic manufactures and enslaved Africans. These elements constitute some of the pillars of what has been variously called “free trade,” “informal,” or “commercial” empire.Footnote 13 This imperial strategy correlates with the proscriptive desire held by a very small subset of thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as discussed by scholars such as Sophus Reinert and James Livesey, that directed international trade could serve expansive imperial ambitions.Footnote 14 In this circumstance, exports of British products into foreign domains could destroy the wealth of rivals, yield enormous profits that would add revenue to the Exchequer, and direct the economic activities of other empires’ subjects. Britain might not be able to tax these people directly, enact legislation upon them, or conscript them for military duty; this was not colonization per se. But the phenomenon does fall into the wider category of empire, which could encompass controlling sea-lanes and foreign trade practices in an increasingly competitive and militaristic commercial environment, as well as the wider development of a capitalist world system and a global division of labor with Britain at the core.Footnote 15 Through free ports, many prominent Britons hoped, Britain could ruin the economies of its rivals and transform these foreign realms into dependent markets and supply depots, extending Britain's revenue and commercial empire. Free ports could shackle foreign subjects to the British economy, just as military acquisitions had done before.
Overall, then, the British Free Port Act constitutes a modified way that Britain sought to achieve the same long-standing goals as did the Navigation Acts and serve as an alternative to military conquests. With the intent of diverting commerce from the rival Dutch free ports and impeding their ability to trade with the enemy French, the administration meticulously crafted the act in terms of the products that could be bought and sold and commercial duties imposed to extend Great Britain's domestic mercantile, manufacturing, sugar, and slaving industries. Meanwhile these industries would be economically reconquering places such as Havana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique that Britain had conceded at the Peace of Paris in 1763. Most British politicians recognized the need to emulate other free ports opening in the Dutch, Danish, and French islands while instituting special restrictions in British free ports to prevent foreign competition and augment Britain's relative wealth, power, and commercial reach.Footnote 16 Investigating this legislation helps us understand a longer genealogy of British free trade imperial desires that would predominate, but not originate, in the nineteenth century.
British Political Economy Background
By the early eighteenth century, European countries could generally exchange commodities with one another in Europe, the only impediment being tariffs on foreign goods.Footnote 17 This more open interimperial commercial system did not extend to the colonial realm. Through the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651, the British government sought to dictate the terms, location, and commodities that British merchants traded with foreigners outside of Europe. Generally, the Navigation Acts forced foreign merchants to bring their wares to metropolitan England rather than the English colonies. Foreign goods would then be taxed in England before transshipment to the English colonial realm. While the Navigation Acts labeled certain colonial commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, as “enumerated,” meaning that British colonists had to export them to Britain, British colonial ships were free to take non-enumerated commodities wherever they wished, including to other empires, and could import foreign commodities (of nonmetropolitan European origin), subject to customs duties.Footnote 18 Foreign ships, however, were strictly forbidden from entering British colonial harbors and depositing their goods. The English Parliament hoped the Navigation Acts would eliminate commercial competition, particularly by the Dutch, enhance customs revenues, benefit the English mercantile and (especially) manufacturing sectors, stimulate English shipping, and provide controlled and strategically directed interimperial trade.Footnote 19
Many early modern British political-economic thinkers believed that the ideal trading relationship was to privilege imports of gold, silver, and raw materials and exports of high-value domestic manufactured goods, thereby achieving higher employment and a favorable balance of trade. British leaders often sought to intervene in the global economy to gain such a balance and do what I call commercial battle with rival European polities. Contemporaries such as David Hume deemed this attitude “jealousy of trade,” which emphasized that one country's gain was another country's loss, that a nation should shelter home industries from competitive foreign products, and that empires should secure favorable trade agreements after major wars.Footnote 20 The doctrine privileged military strategy and sectional advantage of certain domestic producers over pure economic gain and consumers’ desires and relative strength over absolute economic growth (if such growth also aided enemy economies). There is some truth to Adam Smith's vitriolic statement in his 1776 Wealth of Nations that each European nation looked with “an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trade[d]” and considered “their gain as its own loss.”Footnote 21 By strategically controlling imports and exports through legislation such as the Navigation Acts, many in Britain believed they could enrich the metropole, protect its manufacturers, increase its wealth and revenue and thereby military power, and “ruin” the nation's rivals by denying them valuable commerce.Footnote 22 Similar logics followed France's L'Exclusif commercial system that tried to prevent French colonies from trading with other empires and Spain's Casa de Contratación that attempted to rigorously direct its colonial Atlantic trade.
Besides ideas such as balance of trade and jealousy of trade, another useful way of conceptualizing general British commercial policy is through one part of the so-called mercantile system as detailed by Smith in The Wealth of Nations. According to Smith, wealthy and powerful British producers and merchants increasingly helped dictate Britain's political economy, such that the mercantile system's goal was to establish and protect commerce beneficial to these actors in particular. For instance, legislation in the form of outright prohibitions or high tariffs helped ensure that Britons could sell domestic finished products (such as textiles) at home and abroad. But materials for manufacture (such as raw wool) should not be exported, making it harder for foreign countries to acquire raw materials to manufacture goods that would compete with British products.Footnote 23 While Smith generalized and hyperbolized to some degree, historians generally concur that such were the primary goals and aspirations of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political economy, if not always the reality on the ground due to lack of enforcement or contingent pragmatic considerations.Footnote 24
Most British Atlantic commercial legislation in the eighteenth century corresponded in some way to balance of trade, jealousy of trade, and powerful interest group- and metropolitan-focused priorities. By this logic, most British politicians did not seek to close all forms of interimperial trade: these commercial connections were acceptable if they did not harm key British industries or British shipping, denied profits from rivals, and led to a favorable balance of trade. For instance, the English Navigation Act of 1663 allowed wine produced in Portuguese Madeira and the Azores to enter English colonies directly, exempt from Crown duty. English policy makers reasoned that such trade would not harm English domestic interests (England did not have a significant winemaking community), would aid an ally (Portugal), would compete with French wine production, and could open up a market in Portugal for English manufactured goods—in particular, woolens.Footnote 25 A similar story is the British cod fisheries, which by the Navigation Acts were allowed to send produce to any British or foreign realm as long as it was carried on British ships and imported foreign goods paid the necessary customs duty upon entry. The cod trade helped colonial economies, increased English shipping, and prompted a flood of specie into the British Empire, all without harming domestic interest groups. Tensions arose only when the powerful British West India planter lobby (located mainly in London) realized that as British cod fisheries grew in the 1760s (after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced most French out of Newfoundland), they were exporting more fish to foreign markets and importing French sugar and molasses, competing with British sugar products. In response, Britain passed the Sugar Act (1764), which lowered the tax on foreign molasses but dramatically increased the enforcement of the collection of duties on foreign sugar and molasses.Footnote 26 While there is scholarly debate on this point, examples in the eighteenth century of interimperial trade that diverged from Britain's overarching commercial and strategic concerns can mostly be explained by a lack of British power projection and enforcement on the ground, due to British colonial officers’ pragmatic local considerations or smugglers’ adept strategies.Footnote 27 While varying in enforcement impetus and sometimes accommodating colonial needs, eighteenth-century British policy generally reflected an overarching belief that the British state should direct foreign trade mainly to serve domestic interest groups and the wealth, power, and security of Britain.
Global Trends and Examples of Free Ports
While world-systems analysis has its critics, many of its general tenets apply to the British Free Port Act and demonstrate how this legislation accorded with general global capitalistic trends from the sixteenth century onward. Increasingly, European policy makers emphasized the economic benefits of producing manufactured goods (such as textiles) and exporting them to colonial markets in exchange for raw materials. This phenomenon would in time result in unequal exchange and flows of surplus value from, in scholar Immanuel Wallerstein's terminology, the colonial periphery to the metropolitan core. The major empires of the Atlantic world, especially the French, Portuguese, Spanish, and British, adopted such a mindset, enacting prohibitions on colonial manufacturing and inhibiting colonists’ ability to import foreign-manufactured products.Footnote 28 The British would attempt in 1766 to extend their imperial periphery beyond the territorial limits of the British Empire, gaining foreign raw materials and markets for British manufactured goods through free ports.
Free ports were not a new phenomenon by the eighteenth century. Several early modern chronicles of commerce mention the Port of Calais being “rendered a free and neutral Port for all Nations” in 1412 and the opening of the ports of Leipzig, Trieste, Marseille, Ancona, and Venice in the seventeenth century.Footnote 29 In 1662, King Charles II of England directed the newly acquired port of Tangier to welcome all merchants except those from beyond the Cape of Good Hope or from other English colonies. Merchants entering the port merely had to pay a customs fee, and all exports returning to England from the port were required to be carried on English ships.Footnote 30 Before becoming a part of the British Empire, Scotland had expressed desires in the ill-fated Darien expedition to make the area around what is now Panama into a free port. Some East Indian Company merchants also harbored designs for a free port off the west coast of Borneo in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 31 France had bought Dunkirk from England in 1662 and welcomed foreign merchants there, a policy that British officials observed intensely.Footnote 32 “Free ports” were those open to merchants of all nations where these traders paid no or significantly reduced customs duties.Footnote 33 “Free” did not refer to trade being free from all duties, but rather to commerce that extended beyond national and imperial borders.Footnote 34 One famous early European free port, Livorno on the western coast of Tuscany, exhibited slightly different characteristics. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the grand duke of Tuscany welcomed foreign merchants, artisans, consuls, and ship captains to settle in the port. Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici hoped such a policy would encourage overseas commerce in his realm and draw trade away from his rivals in Italy.Footnote 35
Free ports, in general, were a response to the Livorno example, in which the Medici family as early as the 1590s saw an opportunity to increase their wealth by attracting and providing security to enterprising foreign traders. The initiative was intended to divert trade from the Medicis' rivals, prompting a race in other Italian city-states to decrease customs duties and accommodate trade with Jewish, Portuguese, Turkish, Greek, and Armenian merchants. Many English merchants traveled to Livorno and other Mediterranean and European free ports, observing their success; scholars such as Corey Tazzara argue that such concrete examples of free trade preceded and inspired later Enlightenment theorization of the benefits of such commerce.Footnote 36
While certainly aware of such European developments, the Rockingham ministry focused attention more on the free ports popping up in the Caribbean. The Dutch established the free ports of St. Eustatius (the so-called Golden Rock) and Curaçao in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 37 In these ports, customs officers collected only nominal duties on transactions. St. Eustatius attracted substantial levels of foreign trade, reaped high profits by supplying other colonies with needed goods, cheaply re-exported the produce of other empires, and gained significant aggregate customs revenues.Footnote 38 In many ways, these ports also conformed to wider Dutch political-economic priorities of the time that emphasized neutrality. This strategy would allow the Dutch to control commerce to various empires and help alter the balance of wealth and power between other rival states; it might also incentivize certain empires to protect Dutch trade since their commercial activity would be linked. The Dutch often sought to direct trade to prevent a European hegemon from arising—for instance, by harming its sometime-ally, sometime-rival Britain by providing supplies to French colonists in the Seven Years’ War.Footnote 39 Dutch neutrality combined with Dutch free ports thus threatened to buttress the wealth and power of France, making the destruction of St. Eustatius and Curaçao a matter of British national security.
Surprisingly, Spain, although known for its restrictive imperial commercial regime, followed next in establishing Caribbean free ports. It granted the port of Monte Cristi in Santo Domingo (today the Dominican Republic) on the border of French Saint-Domingue the right to trade with all friendly nations for a period of ten years starting in the 1750s.Footnote 40 Spain intended the Monte Cristi port to serve local problems of supply, help the region rebuild its infrastructure after several destructive earthquakes, and encourage migration to a strategically important and contested borderland area.Footnote 41
St. Eustatius, Curaçao, and Monte Cristi all played a critical role in supplying French colonists in the Seven Years’ War. Thwarted by superior British naval power, the French could not supply their colonies adequately during the war; in 1758, for instance, only two ships entered Martinique from France as per the law, while eighty-nine either left or entered from nearby St. Eustatius.Footnote 42 Such trade frustrated British imperial officials, who sought to cut French supply lines. Additionally, despite official prohibitions, hundreds of British North American vessels supplied the French with cod, lumber, and other provisions through Dutch and Spanish free ports.Footnote 43 British archives contain multiple letters by colonial governors decrying the “pernicious trade” that British and Anglo-American merchants undertook to supply the very people with whom Britain at war.Footnote 44 British policy makers would not easily forget such a lucrative and destructive commercial model.
After the war, the Danish, too, established free ports in St. Thomas and St. John in 1764. However, from its founding in 1671, St. Thomas had gradually assumed the role of a local entrepôt for Franco-British trade and commerce between Danish subjects and Spanish colonies. The Danish crown recognized the island's potential for lucrative interimperial commerce and had officially opened trade with North and South America, a policy that culminated in the Danish 1764 free port decree.Footnote 45
The French also experimented with free ports. After losing New France in the Seven Years’ War, Versailles realized that French Caribbean supplies of lumber, food, and livestock would soon grow even more scarce. In 1763, France established Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe as temporary free ports, restricting the goods that could be traded there and including nominal customs duties. French colonial officials could purchase essential supplies from foreign merchants in exchange for rum and molasses. While vacillating on this policy and experiencing pushback from some continental French producers, by 1767 France had settled on Cul-de-Sac (Castries) in St. Lucia and Môle Saint Nicholas in Saint-Domingue as its two free ports in the West Indies.Footnote 46
By the 1760s, then, British policy makers would have been anxiously aware of the concept of free ports that threatened to divert British Caribbean commercial activity and custom revenues to foreign locales.Footnote 47 But based on Britain's goals and specific restrictions, its own free ports were a conscious adaptation of such previous models. That is, the British model was export oriented, bent on extending Britain's commercial empire by fostering foreign consumers’ reliance on British exported “goods” (manufactures as well as enslaved Africans) and obtaining from them lucrative raw materials (such as sugar, cotton, and molasses) that could be imported or re-exported, thus making such foreign colonists what I term economic subjects of London. Previous free ports had generally not held such expansive ambitions. Parliament was reformulating and refining a familiar model to extend its “commercial empire” of foreign dependency, increase its relative power, and aid domestic producers within the context of British political-economic priorities in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.
Britain's Post–Seven Years’ War Problems and Initial Reforms
In 1763, Britain faced a profound moment of opportunity and anxiety. The Treaty of Paris had given Britain the greatest territorial empire the world has ever seen, with jurisdiction over regions as diverse as French Canada, Spanish Florida, Grenada, and Bengal and over peoples ranging from Muslims, Hindus, and Catholics to those of various Native American communities and enslaved (and some free) people of African descent. But besides the ambition and euphoria that came with victory, such gains provoked multiple questions. How should Britain manage these spaces and secure them militarily? Should Parliament (rather than the crown) adopt an even greater role in ruling the empire? How could it pay back the more than £146 million war debt with £500,000 yearly interest payments on an annual income of only £8 million? And how should Britain govern its vastly extended empire commercially? How empire should look was still an undefined and contested notion. But in the aftermath of a devastating and transformative war, British politicians were beginning to see the future of the empire as one that demanded the state's attention to transform the porous fabric of British imperial sovereignty into something more cohesive, controlled, and uniform to further extend Britain's wealth and power over its rivals.Footnote 48
Following such precepts, the new prime minister, George Grenville, thoroughly investigated colonial reports and was particularly appalled to learn about the lack of enforcement of the Navigation Acts during the war.Footnote 49 Grenville calculated that illicit trade between British American colonies and other European empires denied Britain £500,000 per year in trade and advanced by that amount the commerce of its rivals.Footnote 50 Parliament thus passed the Sugar Act (1764) and later the Hovering Act (1764), which made any foreign vessel loitering off the coasts of the British colonies liable to seizure by His Majesty's ships of war or customs officers.Footnote 51 While intended primarily to halt smuggling between British colonists and French and Dutch merchants, the Hovering Act applied to all interimperial trade, including Anglo-Spanish commerce. British Royal ships began seizing Spanish gold- and silver-bearing vessels found near British colonial ports. With these newly enforced restrictions on British trade, Spanish Americans turned to Dutch or even French sources as easier and safer supply options.Footnote 52
The subsequent outcry from merchants, West Indian colonists, English business owners, and politicians maintained that Grenville's policies were restricting Spanish exports of bullion and raw materials and thereby damaging British manufacturing and commerce.Footnote 53 Many argued that the Spanish trade did not harm Britain, since Spaniards would never export commodities (such as slaves, textiles, and East Indian produce) that would compete with British ones.Footnote 54 Maddeningly, many feared Spanish Americans would soon enrich French and Dutch ports instead of British ones, purchasing manufactured goods and slaves from these foreign entrepôts.Footnote 55 Under pressure, Grenville allowed Spanish vessels “thro’ distress or for refreshments” to come into British harbors, provided they did not carry any “foreign Merchandize.”Footnote 56 By all accounts, this policy did little to revive Anglo-Spanish commerce, as Royal Naval patrols and British customs officers continued to threaten and seize Spanish vessels due to the ambiguity and half-hearted nature of Grenville's redaction.Footnote 57
Britons continued to lament the nation's depressed economic situation. In the fall of 1765, Yorkshire MP George Savile summed up North American merchant opinion on Grenville's reforms: “Our trade [with Spain] is hurt, what the devil have you been doing? . . . pray remedy it, and a plague on you if you wont.”Footnote 58 Liverpool and Lancaster merchants complained that Grenville had limited the exportation of British manufactures and thus a “Great Course of Trade has been entirely diverted into the hands of the French and Dutch.”Footnote 59 Reports flooded into Parliament that a Manchester textile manufacturer had to fire four hundred weavers, and one in Leeds dismissed close to one thousand workers as a result of the commercial crisis.Footnote 60
The new Rockingham ministry pored over treaties and parliamentary acts in late 1765 to find a loophole that would allow Spanish vessels to trade in British colonial ports if they imported only bullion. Two members of Rockingham's administration, the attorney general Charles Yorke and the solicitor general William de Grey, concluded that allowing Spanish ships laden with only bullion to come into British harbors conformed with the original 1651 Navigation Act and, more importantly, was well within the “spirit of the law.”Footnote 61 Merchants, manufacturers, and magistrates from “Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster, Halifax, Leicester, and Derby,” as well as commercial officials and members of the administration, all insisted the Navigation Acts had never intended the British mercantile and manufacturing industries to suffer as they had under Grenville's reforms;Footnote 62 “the importation of Bullion . . . [was] justifiable by the Spirit and meaning of the several Acts relating to Navigation.”Footnote 63 Through such arguments, Rockingham convinced the king to issue a forceful, unambiguous decree at the end of 1765 preventing all British customs officials from seizing or molesting any foreign vessel importing bullion into British colonial ports.Footnote 64 This logic concerning the “spirit” of the law was a key first step by British policy makers in diverging slightly from the letter of the Navigation Acts by admitting foreign ships into colonial ports.
But this limited measure failed to revive the Anglo-Spanish trade. British customs officials and the captains of men-of-war on the lookout for smugglers remained an impediment to consistent interimperial commercial interaction; Spaniards still mistrusted British ships and preferred to trade with the Danish, Dutch, and even French.Footnote 65 To restore Anglo-Spanish trade, increase revenue, pry open foreign markets for British manufactured goods and slaves, and “conquer” and destroy their rivals, the Rockingham administration began to listen to ideas percolating from the West Indies, from people like Dalrymple, which Grenville and his predecessor Lord Bute had rejected. In the context of declining Anglo-Spanish trade and flourishing foreign free ports, never before had British Caribbean trade issues been so acute nor had a solution seemed so obvious.
Ideas for British Free Ports
As various petitioners and members of the Rockingham ministry would argue, the idea of free ports, opened under certain restrictions, made sense given Great Britain's long-standing and immediate geopolitical advantages and priorities in the 1760s. Great Britain could claim almost all of eastern North America after the Seven Years’ War and thus access to flour, livestock, lumber, cod, and other supplies that foreign Caribbean sugar islands desperately needed to survive. British slavers dominated Atlantic waters. And British manufacturers were beginning to produce higher-quality and relatively cheap cotton and woolen textiles in greater abundance, prompting a search for foreign markets to sell their industrial surplus.Footnote 66
Lacking depth of support in the House of Commons, the Rockingham ministry sought a close alliance with the leaders of these trades: British merchants, slavers, and manufacturers.Footnote 67 These people wanted to reclaim lucrative foreign markets like Havana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique that the British had gained in the Seven Years’ War but then given up in 1763 Peace of Paris to appease jealous Jamaican sugar planters and secure a peace with disaffected French ministers. During the eleven-month occupation of Havana from 1762 to 1763, British traders sold somewhere between three thousand and ten thousand enslaved Africans to Cuban colonists for more than twenty thousand cattle hides and multiple warehouses of sugar and tobacco.Footnote 68 Similarly, on average each year, Guadeloupe had sent more than ten thousand tons of sugar, valued at £425,000, to Great Britain, in exchange for huge quantities of iron, thousands of pounds-worth of manufactures, and anywhere from four thousand to five thousand slaves.Footnote 69 Free ports, many advocates argued, could reestablish such foreign economic domination.
Specifically, British free ports had four targets. First, they would draw trade away from Dutch free ports, “ruining” their economic success, destroying the wealth of a rival power, and inhibiting the Dutch from supplying British enemies such as the French. Second, with the destruction of Dutch free ports and the opening of British ones, British North Americans would be encouraged to trade within the British system rather than illicitly in foreign harbors. However, in the Free Port Act, the Rockinghams still failed to privilege the interests of British North American merchants, granting them only the inadequate concession of a reduced tax on foreign molasses. Third, British free ports were meant to encourage Spanish bullion ships to enter British harbors, thus restoring the lucrative Spanish trade. Fourth, they were designed to draw French consumers into British markets, supplying them with slaves and manufactures while taking away French sugar (which would be re-exported to Europe for high profits, thus preserving the British West Indian sugar monopoly) and molasses. Petitioners and politicians framed the last two aims as a means of incorporating Spanish and French Caribbean settlers into the British commercial empire. The flood of British imports would make these foreigners loyal customers of British manufactured goods and slaves, economically dependent upon Britain (which could shut off all trade during wartime). They would produce the raw materials and specie that Britain desired. They would become British imperial subjects in all but name.
There is evidence for such claims in the petitions sent to the Rockingham ministry. The initial petitions for the establishment of free ports came from merchants and slavers, manufacturers and textile owners, colonial administrators, and experienced parliamentarians. First, many merchants and colonial officials who had spent time in the West Indies were envious of the Dutch free ports of St. Eustatius and Curaçao and wanted to undercut their success. While much of the previous scholarship has focused on English emulations of the Dutch in the seventeenth century, Britain continued in the eighteenth to look at the Dutch as a model.Footnote 70 But as Reinert demonstrates, “emulation” encompasses not merely copying but also improving on commercial ideas and policies.Footnote 71 Most advocates of British free ports conceded that not all goods should be traded in these harbors, as in the Dutch; instead those commodities to be imported and exported should be strategically chosen.
As early as 1762, merchants from Liverpool crafted a petition to the secretary of state for the Southern Department, the Earl of Egremont, calling for the newly captured island of Grenada to become a free port to “improve the commerce and Navigation of Great Britain.” These merchants had great respect for the Dutch commercial success that many of them had experienced firsthand. Selling cheaper and highly demanded British slaves and manufactured goods in Grenada to foreigners, they noted, would not only increase British profits but also result in “the great Diminuition of the Trade of our Rivals”—and in particular, the Dutch trade with the enemy French in wartime.Footnote 72
Another report, this time sent to the Rockingham ministry by a British merchant and captain named Francis Moore, corroborates such arguments. Moore lived in St. Eustatius for several years and reported that the Dutch received enough French West Indian produce (sugar, rum, and molasses) “sufficient to load 40 or 50 large ships yearly.” He also reported that every year the Dutch sold £100,000 worth of cloth, as well as large quantities of enslaved Africans and fish, to French and Spanish customers.Footnote 73 But Moore argued that French colonists, especially those in Martinique and Guadeloupe, would willingly come to a more easily accessible (due to prevailing Caribbean wind patterns) British free port to exchange such products. Dominica could “destroy” St. Eustatius, since “most of the rich and Industrious Inhabitants of St. Eustatius would follow the Current of a Business,” and thus “the Opening (of) the Ports of Dominique will be a Means of our Rivaling the Dutch.”Footnote 74 When Parliament interviewed several merchants in the winter and spring of 1766 while considering the passage of the Free Port Act, many testimonies emphasized that British free ports should have “the End and Design of Rivaling the Dutch” and could finally ruin “that curs'd Rock,” which would decrease British North American smuggling especially to French colonists.Footnote 75
In the public debate over free ports in the early to mid-1760s, British newspapers and books likewise supported this logic. The Scottish political and economic author John Campbell wrote in his 1763 book Candid and impartial considerations on the nature of the sugar trade that some had considered “whether it might be expedient for us to follow the example of our neighbors in the opening . . . of FREE PORTS in America. Certain it is, that the Dutch are very great gainers by those of St. Eustatia and Curaçoa.” Based on the Dutch commercial success, Campbell believed that a free port on the island of Tobago would encourage the Spanish colonies of northern South America to trade with the British rather than the Dutch.Footnote 76 Additionally, an anonymous Lloyd's Evening Post opinion piece argued in late April of 1766 that “our island of Dominica is, in everything, preferable to the barren rock of St. Eustatia”; thus, the newly conquered island should become a free port similar to Dutch ones in order to “ruin . . . the Dutch Colony of St. Eustatia,” which had for a considerable time “hurt the commerce of Britain in America” by supplying British colonies with foreign goods that undercut British manufacturers.Footnote 77
A little more than a year after seeing his free port scheme fail, Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple weighed in on such arguments. In a 1765 letter to the first lord of trade, Lord Dartmouth, Dalrymple noted that the British would reap high profits in a free port system due to “the advantages we have over all other nations in these articles of Trade [flour, manufactured goods like textiles, and slaves] necessary for the West Indies,” and to the strategic location of Dominica between Martinique and Guadeloupe. If Britain were to carry out such a scheme, he avowed, “it is evident that the free ports of [French] St. Lucia and St. Ustatius must fall” and the policy would “counteract the free ports of other Nations,” such as those of the French and Danish.Footnote 78 George Scott, the military governor of Grenada, had proposed similar arguments to the Board of Trade as early as 1763, stating that the English could “supply the people of New Spain in their Neigbourhood upon better terms than the French of Martinique or the Dutch of St. Eustatia,” and the British would “therefore accumulate great wealth to themselves and intirely exclude those two Nations from this very valuable Trade.”Footnote 79 Emulating and ruining Dutch commerce and, to some degree, nascent French and Danish free ports lay at the center of petitions for British free ports.
While no longer a strong military or naval presence, the Dutch still were a significant commercial rival and remained a threat to British interests through their interimperial trading, which had supplied the enemy French and Spanish during the war. Dutch free ports had also led Anglo-American merchants to defy many Navigation Acts requirements by trading with enemy powers, exporting enumerated goods, and skirting British customs duties. Whereas the Navigation Acts had tried to limit Dutch commerce via prohibitions, the Free Port Act would achieve the same ends through an increase in foreign trade; Britons were confident that foreigners, given the opportunity, would choose to buy cheaper and (they thought) better-quality British manufactured goods and slaves over Dutch ones. Free ports could truly become tools of empire building and maintenance—decreasing smuggling, attracting foreign consumers, and funneling North American trade back into the British commercial system.
Intimately related to arguments to economically ruin the Dutch were proposals stating that British free ports could make Spanish and French islands dependent on British goods, thus further extending Britain's commercial empire. Dalrymple was the most prominent promulgator of this idea. He reasoned that if Dominica became a free port like St. Eustatius, a significant number of French colonists would choose to do business with British rather than French merchants. This development, Dalrymple argued, “in time of peace must render the French Colonies dependent on us for subsistence” and “may have very happy consequences in any future War” by allowing Britain to shut off vital trade with the islands, leading necessarily to their surrender.Footnote 80 Much better, he maintained, to profit from and control trade to French colonists than leave such commerce in the hands of the Dutch.
An anonymous author wrote to one of Rockingham's primary supporters, Charles Townshend, with a similar justification, saying that a Dutch-inspired free port in Dominica would open “a chanell of intercourse which [would render] these islands [Guadeloupe and Martinique] in no small degree as useful as if they had been really subject to England.”Footnote 81 The MP John Huske, formerly a merchant based out of Boston, similarly asked the rhetorical question, “Does not the supplying foreign Colonies with what they want, and taking from them what they produce, so far as this extends, make them the Colonies of Gr. Britain, and this too without the expence of supporting or defending them?”Footnote 82 Francis Moore also hinted at Britain “re-gaining” colonies relinquished in the Treaty of Paris: “The French Inhabitants of Martinique, etc. while under the English Government came much into the wear of certain English Manufactures . . . that they will run any Risque to come at Them” and thereby “we [will] obtain the benefit of the French plantations.”Footnote 83 By opening up commerce via free ports, British would regain their former colonists’ economic loyalty and dependence. The MP Rose Fuller and others welcomed the possibility of reconquering not only dependent foreign export markets of the Spanish colonies and French sugar islands but also sources for imports of raw materials such as cotton, indigo, and dyewoods.Footnote 84 Some also suggested that freer trade could bring the Danish West Indian islands into Britain's commercial web. For instance, an unattributed item in the Charles Townshend papers argues that before Grenville's limits on interimperial trade, “the Danish Islands of Saint Croix and Saint Thomas . . . have been almost as usefull to the British Commerce as if they actually belonged to the British Government” as they had purchased “great Quantities of English manufactures” for high-quality rum, which could be exchanged for slaves on the West African coast.Footnote 85
Free ports, these advocates maintained, could take commerce from rival empires and fetter foreign islands to the host's economic desires. These petitioners may have framed their argument to emphasize this notion of imperium via emporium, empire by the market, and actually been more concerned with their own self-interests, but their ideas found resonance with British policy makers.Footnote 86 Free ports were framed as cheap and bloodless options to ruin Britain's rivals and reclaim what it had lost in the 1763 peace negotiations, with domestic mercantile and manufacturing sectors serving as the foot soldiers and prime beneficiaries of commercial imperialism.Footnote 87
The Rockingham ministry was particularly amenable to such petitions, since it had strategically linked itself with the powerful British mercantile and domestic manufacturing lobbies. In order to maintain its goal of providing balance in the British government, the ministry felt it could not ally with the king's men in Parliament and instead forged connections with manufacturing and mercantile interests.Footnote 88 These groups often petitioned together and had gained increased political influence after their critical role in supporting the state financially during the Seven Years’ War through excise taxes and customs duties backed by expanded global trade.Footnote 89 Rockingham adopted the position, according to historian Lewis Namier, that “trade was considered the foundation and the purpose of Empire.”Footnote 90 The Rockingham ministry extended this support and was the first to propose and encourage “public Meetings, and free Consultations of Merchants from all Parts of the Kingdom.”Footnote 91 Along with the chancellor of the exchequer, William Dowdeswell, and the president of the Board of Trade, Lord Dartmouth, Rockingham also regularly hosted private dinners with prominent members of the mercantile class.Footnote 92
Previous historians have argued that British merchant testimonies and pressure contributed to the various reforms the Rockingham administration made vis-à-vis commercial policy and American affairs.Footnote 93 I agree with this assessment but add that the Rockinghams concurred with the claims of merchants and other petitioners that free ports could extend Britain's commercial empire. Rockingham, Dowdeswell, Charles Townshend, and Edmund Burke all advocated for free ports along these lines.
Rockingham directly received many free port proposals, such as that of Francis Moore, and so would have been exposed to the aforementioned arguments in them. While Rockingham wrote little himself concerning the Free Port Act, he seems to have associated it with preserving and extending Great Britain's security and power. Answering the thanks of Bristol and Liverpool merchants for his ongoing efforts to promote the Free Port Bill, Rockingham stated, “No one can be more persuaded that I am that the very Existence of this Country depends upon the protection and increase of its commerce” and that free ports were best at affecting that result.Footnote 94 He declared to the merchants of Leeds that he supported the Free Port Act, since “Commerce is the Basis on which the Power of this Country has been raised, and on which it must ever stand.”Footnote 95
Other members of Rockingham's ministry heard and espoused arguments close to the ones made by petitioners. Most prominent was the chancellor of the exchequer, Dowdeswell, who introduced the free port bill and spoke on its behalf in Parliament.Footnote 96 His general economic philosophy was to reduce excise taxes and customs duties on certain goods, which would “check effectually the practice of smuggling” and increase British revenue overall.Footnote 97 He saw freer trade as serving the goals of the British Empire. Dowdeswell was well respected for his knowledge of commercial matters and was intimately concerned with advancing the British manufacturing interests.Footnote 98 He supported the decree to allow foreign bullion-carrying ships into British colonial harbors because “it produces an increase of her navigation and the carriage of her manufactures” and the “vent of British commodities thro the colonies to places where they otherwise can never be carried.”Footnote 99 After inspecting his Majesty's customs in the British Leeward Islands, he lamented that “the chief Trade of the Inhabitants certainly was with the Dutch from St. Eustatia and Curacoa,” which led “to the great prejudice of the British Manufactures and Navigation.”Footnote 100 He later maintained during the free port debates that Dominica could destroy and replace St. Eustatius as the international entrepôt for West Indian trade.Footnote 101 Ruining rivals’ economies, increasing British metropolitan wealth and revenue, and extending British manufactures to dominate foreign markets all factored into Dowdeswell's free port logic.
Edmund Burke, private secretary to Rockingham in 1765, was charged with collecting “various informations and materials relative to the Trade and Manufactures.”Footnote 102 By the time of the free port debates, Burke had acquired a good deal of information about the West Indies’ commercial situation. By year's end, he was elected to the House of Commons for the Borough of Wendover. Burke adamantly supported the Free Port Act, hoping it would demolish “the whole Grenvillian Fabrick” and current commercial laws.Footnote 103 However, young Burke's intentions were not as radical as this idealistic language might suggest. He was primarily interested in whether his maligned homeland of Ireland could also acquire free port status.Footnote 104 Unfortunately, due to the nature of British politics, he soon conceded that it “would only hurt [the Irish] to attempt crowding them into the train of an act relating wholly to America.”Footnote 105 As Burke also stated, “the advantages reaped by Holland from St. Eustatia gave [him] the hint” for a free port in Dominica that could destroy such trade, and he liked the plan because there was “a preference given to the Mother Country.”Footnote 106 Thus even Edmund Burke, often considered then as now a friend of the colonies, emphasized free ports’ benefits to the metropole primarily and the necessity of emulating and eliminating the Dutch commercial threat.
The prominent MP Charles Townshend composed several documents demonstrating his jealous respect for the Dutch commercial model while affirming that emulating the Dutch could destroy the prosperity of this entrenched rival. He noted that “the French now send their cottons to St. Eustatia,” from where Dutch merchants could then re-export them for much higher prices, and enviously admired the “profits paid [to] the Dutch Merchants at St. Eustatia.”Footnote 107 Worried that “the Dutch from St. Ustatia will rival us in the whole Trade,” Townshend agreed that Britain should open up free ports in Dominica.Footnote 108 Other supporters, including one Andrew Summer, wrote to Townshend that the proposed policy would “affectually ruin the Dutch Trade of Coracaoa [Curaçao] and St. Eustatia.”Footnote 109 Townshend seems also to have been primarily concerned with augmenting the supply of cotton imports for British manufacturers, which he believed the physical possession of Martinique and Guadeloupe, interimperial smuggling, or British free ports could accomplish.Footnote 110 With such hopes of ruining the Dutch and reconquering French islands in hand, Townshend argued forcefully for free ports in the subsequent parliamentary debates.Footnote 111
Rockingham would have had confidence in Townshend, considering his recommendation by the Duke of Newcastle: “No Man in England understands [the West Indies] so well.”Footnote 112 The prime minister likely trusted the opinions of Dowdeswell and Burke too, since both were experienced in Caribbean commercial affairs. Thus, in the early months of 1766, the Rockingham ministry crafted the Free Port Bill to extend the foreign overseas export of British manufactures with the aim of fostering dependent foreign subjects, ruining Dutch trade, and increasing Britain's relative wealth and power vis-à-vis its rivals—the pillars of a commercial empire. The proposed bill was meticulously refined in terms of the duties and prohibitions leveled on various goods. The bill chose to establish free ports in the island of Jamaica and Dominica for their advantageous navigational locations, and it ensured that no foreign manufactures whatsoever would be allowed to enter the free ports. The bill's three justifications were “considerable Advantages to the Manufactures of Great Britain,” “the Improvement of the Revenue thereof,” and “a Means of Increasing and extending the Trade and Navigation of all His Majesty's Dominions.”Footnote 113
Certainly, as other historians have suggested, the Rockinghams hoped the bill would help ameliorate tensions with North American colonists, increase the influx of bullion into such colonial realms, and undermine their rival Grenville's commercial legacy.Footnote 114 But if the ministry had truly prioritized colonial interests, it would have increased the number of goods that could be bought and sold and significantly lowered customs duties. Instead, the Rockinghams privileged augmenting Great Britain's manufacturing, shipping, revenue, and relative wealth and power over its enemies. Such goals were consistent with those of the long-standing Navigation Acts and petitioners’ calls for conquest through commerce.
Debates and Passing
When the free port bill came to Westminster in the spring of 1766, not all were convinced by its arguments. Alternative solutions to ameliorating Britain's depressed commercial situation, such as only allowing Spanish bullion to enter various British ports, came mainly from the West Indian planter lobby and their leader, William Beckford. This powerful faction feared that their sugar monopoly in the British imperial market would be shattered by a sudden infusion of cheaper French sugar via British free ports.Footnote 115 William Pitt the Elder (the Earl of Chatham) was one of the key allies of the sugar lobby.Footnote 116 Not surprisingly, then, Pitt privately commented in May 1766, “I hope to hear this unsolid idea of a free port is quite rejected and exploded.”Footnote 117 Other politicians with financial interests in British West Indian sugar plantations also dreaded the ascension of French sugar into the British colonial market.Footnote 118
Some in former prime minister Grenville's circle vehemently opposed the bill, but more so on the grounds of its implications for British commerce in general than in solidarity with the sugar lobby. Grenville cynically believed that “the plan of this new Administration was a total subversion of every act of the former” and that the Rockinghams were enacting legislation purely out of spite.Footnote 119 He feared that the Free Port Act would be the first in a series of commercial reforms and that “the sacred Act of Navigation” might be attacked next.Footnote 120 Thomas Whately, a junior minister in the treasury under Grenville, wrote to his former prime minister and expressed similar trepidations concerning the policy. Whately was uneasy “to see so great a liberty guarded by so few restrictions.”Footnote 121 He elaborated, “There is no provision to prevent the importation of French manufactures, provided they be the produce of the West Indies” and so the French could set up looms in their colonial realms and “supply our colonies with whatever they please.”Footnote 122 Unlike the pro–free port faction, Grenville's circle worried that the free ports might backfire. Rivals’ merchandise might out-compete British commodities, draw away British money, flood British markets, and put British producers out of business.Footnote 123
The path to passage remained arduous for the Rockinghams. April saw a bitter general debate in the House of Commons, with Burke, Dowdeswell, and Townshend offering the main pro-arguments, while Grenville and Beckford scorned them.Footnote 124 The ministry began to panic when the influential Pitt also spoke out against the bill.Footnote 125 On 29 April, the London Evening Post commented on the impasse in Parliament, stating, “the design of making a free port at the island of Dominica, is said to be totally laid aside, for this year at least.”Footnote 126
Concurrently, however, many uncommitted MPs began to defend the proposed legislation after hearing the testimonies of various merchants in March and May.Footnote 127 One influential report emphasized the dangerous success of the French and Dutch free ports, which were “supposed to have taken 20 or 30,000,000 of Mexico Dollars since the peace.”Footnote 128 The merchant William Kelly also reiterated explicit arguments for commercial empire, stating that with open trade with the foreign West Indies, “there are some of those Settlements which are nearly as valuable to Great Britain as if they were actually under our own immediate Government.”Footnote 129 Pitt recollected that such evidence “sweated the House finely,” convincing many wavering MPs to support free port legislation.Footnote 130
On 30 April, possibly having a change of heart, Pitt left London for Bath on the pretext of ill health, abandoning the West India planter interest to its fate.Footnote 131 On 8 May, due perhaps to the compromising spirit of the heads of the merchant and planter lobbies, an agreement was reached between the factions. The West India lobby was satisfied with the bill's new provision that French sugar could be imported into the island of Dominica but all foreign sugar coming from Dominica would be heavily taxed if it were re-exported to Britain, and British-grown sugars would have reduced duties entering North America. Four harbors in Jamaica were included in the list of free ports, allowing British planters to trade with Spaniards for bullion.Footnote 132 But the most remarkable and underexamined indulgence granted to the sugar lobby was a clause stipulating that merchants could not export foreign sugars and rum from the free ports directly into any British colony.Footnote 133 The one real concession made to British North Americans (in the vein of the repeal of the Stamp Act) was to lessen the duty on foreign molasses to a still-burdensome one penny per gallon in the Revenue Act of 1766. But New York merchants would later complain that molasses was the only product they could directly ferry from free ports to the mainland and “there cannot be a sufficient Quantity of that Commodity to support any considerable Trade.”Footnote 134 While perhaps harboring some hope of appeasing British North Americans, the Rockingham ministry did not prioritize their interests and instead ended up making a more meaningful compromise with the powerful sugar lobby.
By the time the Free Port Bill was officially introduced to the House of Commons on 15 May 1766, most of the main issues were settled. After a few small amendments, on 27 May, the House of Commons voted aye. Perhaps because, as Langford suggests, most members “were heartily sick of American problems,” especially after the recent debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act, the bill then passed through the House of Lords before receiving royal assent on 6 June.Footnote 135
Conclusion
The establishment of the British West Indian free ports reflects a general continuity in overall British political-economic goals during the eighteenth century. While British policy makers experimented with and adapted other imperial models concerning the means of conducting trade, the overarching goal of directing interimperial commerce to achieve relative power over one's rivals and benefit metropolitan merchants and manufacturers (and the sugar interest), as demonstrated by the Navigation Acts, did not alter. The Free Port Act may have changed the letter of the Navigation Acts, but it conformed with their spirit. In this political-economic thinking, politics still preceded economics—that is, the political goals of preserving and extending the wealth (especially of its dominant mercantile and manufacturing lobbies) and power of the home nation over its enemies superseded absolute wealth accumulation of all the empire's subjects. To be secure, British politicians believed, the state must overgrow its opponents in wealth and power through increased commerce, finance, industry, and technology, which would then feed into its military dominance.Footnote 136 Due to the increasing cost of war, profiting from commerce became essential to bankroll future conflicts.Footnote 137 Previous scholars have noted that the Free Port Act's provisions diverged from “the old imperial system,” mercantilism, and the Navigation Acts.Footnote 138 In a narrow, technical, tactical sense, this was true—the Free Port Act loosened some prohibitions on colonial foreign trade. But in the broader, ideological sense, the act conformed to dominant early modern British political-economic mentalities and goals concerning the balance of trade, jealousy of trade, and mercantile system, and was very much within the old spirit of the Navigation Acts.
But while many eighteenth-century political economists understood that trade and accumulation of wealth buttressed a state's military power, and others advocated for prying open foreign markets to establish a favorable balance of trade over rival empires, until the 1760s, few made the explicit connection between trading with foreigners and exerting economic sovereignty over them through material dependency. What was particularly remarkable about the Free Port Act was that it directly conflated foreign trade with imperial conquest. Not only could free port wealth bolster Britain's military might but Britain's manufacturing and mercantile industries would be the shock troops in the direct destruction of Dutch and other free ports and the economic subjugation of French and Spanish colonists, making them British subjects in all but name.Footnote 139 Thus, the Free Port Act was a key early moment in a long genealogy of debates on how empire should be constituted, anticipating later calls for aggressive free trade and challenging any neat dividing line in the nineteenth century between so-called formal and informal conceptions of empire.Footnote 140
The logic defied other contemporaneous beliefs that commerce should promote the general welfare and improve relations between nations. Philosophers such as David Hume were cautiously optimistic that commerce between empires could result in mutual understanding, fewer military conflicts, and widespread economic growth.Footnote 141 This vision rested on countering the “jealousy of trade” doctrine. Unfortunately for Hume, the Rockinghams did not express such desires while tailoring the Free Port Act, which, though serving in part as an alternative to bloody military conquest, was also meant to weaken rivals’ economies and brutally shut off their trade when a real war did come.
Nor did the Free Port Act prioritize the interests of colonial North Americans, as some historians have claimed. The act forbade merchants from transporting foreign sugar from free ports to British North America and was limited to six ports in the Caribbean rather than establishing a more extensive system throughout the British Atlantic desired by many.Footnote 142 While the Rockinghams certainly hoped that lowering the molasses tax would appease colonial interests and spur colonial economic development, they paid more interest to, were better informed about, and were more successful in acceding to domestic merchants, manufacturers, and even the West India sugar lobby's desires. Eventually, many British North Americans would complain about the continued burdens, limitations, and restrictions imposed by this legislation.Footnote 143
Instead, the Free Port Act was intended mainly to extend Britain's empire, imperial riches, and strength through supplies, textiles, and enslaved Africans rather than war, cannons, and soldiers. Though Britain had emerged victorious from the Seven Years’ War, the massive debt accrued, the rampant and deleterious wartime interimperial smuggling, and the task of incorporating new domains into the empire made many British politicians anxious about the nation's future.Footnote 144 Britons feared that yet another European war might destroy the nation's fragile hold over its possessions and finances.Footnote 145 Free ports offered some alternative to (but, if necessary, support of) expensive, violent conquest. Instead of naval squadrons and Royal Army officers, merchant fleets and customs officials could reincorporate French and Spanish Caribbean colonists from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Havana into the British commercial empire. In place of costly sieges on enemy harbors, British-made products could drive rivals’ free ports into economic ruin and shut off avenues for enemy trade in case a war did break out.
The British free port system would prosper, in fits and starts, for fifty years. By 1813, the height of the British free port system, one-half of all British exports to the British West Indies landed in foreign colonies having passed through one of the free ports. The list of these ports eventually included ones in Grenada, Antigua, Trinidad, Tobago, New Providence, Tortola, Crooked Island, St. Vincent, Bermuda, and Barbados.Footnote 146 The policy had mixed success in terms of the goals of British reformers, certainly attracting more interimperial trade, but not initially creating a dependency on British products in Spanish and French consumers nor out-competing or economically destroying rival St. Eustatius, Curaçao, or the French free ports.Footnote 147
Despite uncertain initial results, British hopes of conquering foreign domains via freer trade survived. British policy makers abandoned free ports only in the aftermath of the independence movements of Latin American countries. As these new nations broke away from the Spanish empire during the 1820s, they were released from Spanish restrictions on foreign trade. British merchants could now enter harbors in places such as Mexico and Colombia without fear of capture by Spanish guarda costas. At this time, British prime minister Lord Castlereagh allowed Latin American vessels to enter all British ports. Britain finally achieved its dream of trading directly with what was once Spanish America.Footnote 148 It is no coincidence that the free port system immediately preceded British designs to develop commercial relations with Latin America.
But while seemingly a more benign and peaceful form of imperialism, such commercial conquests could still precipitate damaging ends. For instance, colonial Spanish American imports of British textiles (as well as slaves) increased by the late eighteenth century in part via free ports. British textiles began to out-compete and displace woolens produced in places such as Mexico, destroying many Latin American manufacturing industries by the end of the century. The directed, aggressive trade that British free ports extended, one could argue, thus helped underdevelop much of the Caribbean and Latin America, destroying nascent industries and condemning them to agricultural dependence and the further extension of a capitalist world system and global division of labor. The increased level of intercolonial slave trading that occurred in the Greater Caribbean region as a result of the free port system was another tragic human cost of British commercial imperialism, at the time met mostly with ambivalence.Footnote 149 The Free Port Act of 1766 fits into the long conversation about the nature of empire and how it should be organized, one strand of which argued that freeing foreign trade could serve as yet another weapon of empire and conquest.Footnote 150
