Consensual Employment Contracts

Burke advocates government restraint in Thoughts and Details largely because he believes that a harmony of interests between individuals emerges in employment agreements that are based on consent. “I deny… that contracting parties should originally have had different interests,” Burke writes concerning the relationship between the farmer and the laborer. He continues: “The contract is of the nature of a compromise; and compromise is founded on circumstances that suppose it the interest of the parties to be reconciled in some medium. The principle of compromise adopted, of consequence the interests cease to be different.”Footnote ²¹ In essence, the self-interest of the employee converges with that of the employer when both freely choose to enter into a contract, leading to a coordination of effort that promises mutual benefits.

Burke argues that within this harmony blossoms a collection of commercial virtues. He explains how it is to the farmer's advantage to keep his employees happy, well-nourished, and energetic because these conditions will make them more efficient workers: “It is the interest of the farmer, that his work should be done with effect and celerity; and that cannot be, unless the labourer is well fed, and otherwise found with such necessaries of animal life, according to it's habitudes, as may keep the body in full force, and the mind gay and cheerful.”Footnote ²² In turn, the central interest of the laborer is to help the farmer maximize profit. Otherwise, the absence of profit means that the employee will not receive “abundant nutriment, and cloathing, and lodging.”Footnote ²³ Thus voluntary market exchange creates an ethic of commercial virtue: the agricultural worker must demonstrate strong work habits, discipline, and dexterity in order to assist his employer in generating revenue. He must show industry, efficiency, and vigor, as well as personal responsibility for his own physical and mental well-being. “Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion, should be recommended to them,” Burke writes in describing which qualities should be encouraged among poor laborers.Footnote ²⁴ To an even greater degree, the incentive system prompts the farmer to treat his workers well, including providing sufficient nutriment and shelter. The farmer must be a responsible steward of his land, workers, and tools. For Burke, consensual employment arrangements transform a diversity of interest into mutual advantage.

Supply-and-Demand Laws and the Price System

According to Burke, the balance of interest can be disrupted by arbitrary government intervention. Excessive state involvement in the agricultural economy would distort the laws of supply and demand that naturally govern market activities. If minimum wage laws make salaries more expensive than the result of their labor, then “the stone which we had forced up the hill would only fall back upon them in a diminished demand, or, what indeed is the far lesser evil, an aggravated price of all the provisions, which are the result of their manual toil.”Footnote ²⁵ Burke here displays a grasp of the principles of inverse proportionality and unintended consequences: heighten the wage above a certain barrier, and the consequence would be a decrease in the demand for labor—a fundamental premise of supply-and-demand principles.Footnote ²⁶ This intrusion into the market economy would militate against the efforts of the laborer and threaten his very employment status.

Burke recognizes a further result of the interaction of supply and demand in Thoughts and Details: they ensure the smooth flow of commerce in agricultural economies, thereby meeting the material and biological needs of market actors. “The balance between consumption and production makes price. The market settles, and alone can settle, that price,” Burke writes. “Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer, when they mutually discover each other's wants.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, “if the goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise.”Footnote ²⁸ Prices are coordinating instruments guided by the cool hand of supply-and-demand laws that fulfill people's market desires. Disturbing the laws of commerce would endanger this concord between producers and consumers, jeopardize the market's ability to satisfy individual needs, and imperil the very operation of agricultural production.Footnote ²⁹

These insights underscore Burke's belief that market economies are not zero-sum activities. The mutually advantageous partnership between the farmer and the laborer, Burke argues, springs from the fact that each made the conscious decision to enter into a contract with the other for a self-interested purpose. Both gain in some way from the economic arrangement.

Economic Regulations and Rationality

Shklar maintains that there was “no trace” in Burke's economic ideas of an awareness of the “complexities of social life.”Footnote ³⁰ The underlying philosophical lesson in Thoughts and Details, however, is Burke's affirmation of the complicated nature of socioeconomic activities in civil society and his opposition to the intrusion of abstract rationality into market activity. Burke concludes that government planning based on theoretic reason, removed from the pulse of human activity, struggles to reflect the particular insights and knowledge needed to make meaningful economic exchanges. Thus state intervention would inhibit public prosperity and subvert the common good. From his perspective, it would dilute experiential participation in social and economic life by substituting the capricious power of government officials for the habits and customs of individual market participants.

Burke describes the limitations of rationality in Thoughts and Details when cautioning against attempts to set regulations governing the relationship between farmers and their workers. “Legislative acts, attempting to regulate this part of oeconomy… require the exactest detail of circumstances, guided by the surest general principles,” Burke writes, in order to generate new “firm and luminous general principles”Footnote ³¹ to direct a practical activity affected by the law. For Burke, appropriate government interference in private commercial matters would demand comprehension of specific information about the personal socioeconomic conditions of individuals. Such information would need to be packaged and simplified into categorical, rationalistic principles, which, Burke suggests, fail to evince the rich complexity of economic activity. In Burke's assessment, government officials do not possess sufficient foresight, wisdom, and knowledge to understand why members of civil society choose to enter into particular commercial or employment contracts.

Burke highlights these views when discussing how monolithic wage regulations overlook the diversity of labor in the agricultural economy. In Thoughts and Details he categorizes the different types of laborers as full-time workers, part-time workers, and children.Footnote ³² Burke writes that this classificatory system shows that the state mandating “a very stiff, and often inapplicable rule, or a blind and rash discretion” can “never” furnish the “just proportions between earning and salary on the one hand, and nutriment on the other.”Footnote ³³ Instead, Burke continues, “interest, habit, and the tacit convention, that arise from a thousand nameless circumstances, produce a tact that regulates without difficulty, what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all.Footnote ³⁴ The “very stiff” rule, according to Burke, reflects a misguided attempt to impose an abstract principle on very different contractual agreements, personal socioeconomic arrangements, and market conditions.

In stressing the limitations of rational knowledge in organizing market activity, Burke anticipates F. A. Hayek's theory of knowledge in regard to economic life. Hayek famously argues that the locus of decision-making authority should be reserved to the private market participant, since he holds more knowledge about his specific socioeconomic situation than a government bureaucrat. Hayek calls this information the “particular circumstances of time and place.”Footnote ³⁵ His insight relies on the premise that “practically every individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.”Footnote ³⁶

Burke employs similar reasoning in Thoughts and Details. For both thinkers, government restraint allows for a largely self-regulating market order. Statutes informed by abstract principles, and carved meticulously into stone by legislators, cannot effectively control what “tact,” as Burke says above, regulates “without difficulty.” Burke's opposition to theoretic rationality in markets calls into question the argument that he capitulated to the very same danger, abstract reason, that he rebuked French philosophes for adopting.

The Tone of Thoughts and Details

Beyond the ostensible rationalist overtones of Thoughts and Details, the impassioned quality of Burke's argument has drawn attention from scholars. Himmelfarb, Preece, and Frazer have noted that the seemingly high temperature of Burke's pronouncements in the tract in favor of market liberty appears to breach his political philosophy of prudence. Not only does Burke employ categorical statements, but the delivery of his arguments lacks nuance. For example, Burke says the government regulation of provisions is “always worst”Footnote ⁶³ in the time of scarcity.

The idea that Burke surrenders his philosophy of prudence in Thoughts and Details is true only if one accepts that the tone of his other speeches and writings is one of restraint. This essay disagrees with this assumption. First, the passion expressed in Thoughts and Details does not distinguish it from the strong emotions conveyed in Burke's other writings. The irony about Reflections, for instance, is that while the heart of its argument cautions prudence, its mood is one of emotional force, not caution. As Burke famously wrote, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has never succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This is not a statement of moderation but a melodramatic lament.

Similarly, many of Burke's other writings and speeches about commercial subjects and market liberalism are animated by fervent declarations, including those articulated earlier in his career. In referring to the commercial freedom advanced by the Free Port Bill of 1766, Burke wrote, “The trade of America was set free from injudicious and ruinous Impositions.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This was in 1766, almost thirty years before he wrote Thoughts and Details. In 1773, in regard to England's control of Irish goods, he wrote in a letter that “no man living loves restrictive regulations of any kind less than myself; at best, nine times in ten, they are little better than laborious and vexatious follies.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the same letter, he considered a proposed tax on absentee Irish landlords in a “very evil light.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In addition, in his 1778 letter to a leading Bristol merchant, Burke described the pernicious effects of England's trade barriers against Ireland. “We cannot be insensible of the calamities which have been brought upon this nation by an obstinate adherence to narrow and restrictive plans of government,” he insisted.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1797 he recalled that he had led the parliamentary effort in 1772 to repeal the “absurd” laws against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing.Footnote ⁶⁹ (These bills will be addressed in the next section.) These examples are not intended to show that Burke's logic was not grounded in principles of practical reason, but that the delivery of his argumentation praising economic freedom was oftentimes rife with passion and not cool detachment—just as in Thoughts and Details.

There are two additional factors to consider when examining the level of emotion in Thoughts and Details. First, the zeal of Burke's promarket inclinations can be explained by his perception that the prospect of Jacobin-like wealth redistribution plans posed a hazard to social order in England. In this light, Burke's passionate statements in Thoughts and Details, as in Reflections, were proportional to the perceived excesses of radical French schemes. Put another way, a seemingly disinterested, moderate reaction to a revolutionary threat might be immoderate, since that sedate reaction would be inadequate to rival the fervor of the revolutionaries. One paramount reason why Burke communicated his economic thoughts with such emotional force was to match the fire of Jacobin extremism advocating wealth redistribution.

The second factor is simply that Burke first drafted both the memorandum to Dundas and Pitt and the letter to Young as private writings, and did not get around to polishing their rougher edges to make them suitable for publication. Burke admitted that the memorandum was “hurriedly scribbled”Footnote ⁷⁰ and cautioned Pitt not to mind “whether any thing in this [paper] is too hot or too cold, too strong or too weak.”Footnote ⁷¹ Perhaps the hasty nature of the writing permitted Burke to display a level of passion for market liberty inconsistent with his reputation as an advocate of prudence. This argument is unconvincing, however, because Burke displayed a zeal in support of market liberty in both his private correspondence and public writings and speeches. In addition, Burke wrote some of his private letters, including his letter to Young,Footnote ⁷² with an eye toward publication. Therefore, it is safe to say that Burke intended to expose his enthusiastic promarket convictions to a wider audience. In the end, the seeming passion in Thoughts and Details does not distinguish the tract from Burke's previous writings on the subject of political economy.

The Free Port Act of 1766

One of Burke's first major legislative initiatives in Parliament was to play a leading role in the Rockingham ministry in revising Britain's imperial system of commercial regulations in favor of freer trade. Implemented under the administration of Lord Grenville, this system had imposed mercantilist-leaning restrictions against European traders in the British West Indies and North America. The Grenvillian commercial regulations limited foreign imports and European rights of commercial navigation, and sought to preserve West Indian monopolies and narrowly confine trade ports. In doing so, Grenville claimed he had merely made an effort to extinguish illicit trade in the West Indies.Footnote ⁷³

The Rockingham ministry of 1765–66, of which Burke was emerging as a leading member in Parliament, aimed to reform this regulatory framework. The culminating ornament of its efforts was the Free Port Act, which received royal approval on June 6, 1766. The act established free ports in Jamaica, a British colony—in Kingston, Montego Bay, Savannah la Mar, and Santa Lucea—and in Dominica, in Roseau and Prince Rupert's Bay. It relaxed trade regulations between British colonial posts, including its North American colonies, and the West Indies, including Spanish and French colonies.Footnote ⁷⁴

The act was not a pristine act of statesmanship, nor did it contain wholly original ideas.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was passed hastily without rigorous deliberation. Rockingham lawmakers sacrificed some legislative independence by allowing merchants to heavily influence the crafting of the bills. Moreover, it did not promote a pure laissez faire trade policy: for instance, it prohibited particular foreign imports in Jamaica of goods that were produced on the island, including sugar, molasses, and tobacco. Its implementation of these regulations and other customs duties prevented the act from fully bursting the monopoly of British West Indian planters, who were originally hostile to the idea of liberalizing trade. The legislation was not able to stem the flow of all smuggled goods.

But the act did signify strong movement in the direction of freer commercial intercourse by the very fact that it established six new free trade ports. The free port system endured until 1822, over fifty years after it was created.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Rockinghamites also lent new support to traders in North American colonies who had been calling to invigorate trade relations with West Indies merchants.Footnote ⁷⁷ As the London North American Merchants stated at the time, “We consider [the commercial reforms] as the basis of an extensive System of Trade between Great Britain and her Colonies framed on liberal principles of reciprocal Advantage.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Nancy F. Koehn describes the legislation this way: “Some ten years before Adam Smith would take the doctrines of mercantilism to task and half a century before David Ricardo would articulate the theory of comparative advantage, MPs decided that the prosperity of the imperial economy was best promoted by not regulating all aspects of colonial exchange.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Along with Charles Townshend and Chancellor of the Exchequer William Dowdeswell, Burke was one of the main backers of the act.Footnote ⁸⁰ He led the Rockinghamite effort in studying the nuts and bolts of British imperial commerce and their implications for Britain's national interest, enough so that by the end of the legislative process his reputation switched from being Lord Rockingham's “Right hand” man to being “both his hands.”Footnote ⁸¹ In a letter written to correspondent Charles O'Hara in early March 1766, in the midst of negotiations over the bill's outline, Burke said, “We now prepare for a compleat revision of all the Commercial Laws, which regard our own or the foreign Plantations, from the Act of Navigation downwards.”Footnote ⁸² In Short Account of a Late Short Administration, Burke made the claim, perhaps exaggerated, that the Rockingham ministry was the first administration to actively consult and act upon the wisdom of merchants when deliberating the free trade provisions.Footnote ⁸³ Burke wrote of the act, “The trade of America was set free from injudicious and ruinous Impositions—Its Revenue was improved, and settled upon a rational Foundation—Its Commerce extended with foreign Countries; while all the Advantages were secured to Great Britain.” Burke insisted that the interests of West Indian traders, who traditionally opposed foreign competition, and North American merchants, who favored free trade with foreign sugar colonies, were “perfectly reconciled,”Footnote ⁸⁴ although he was most likely overstating their harmony in this regard.

Even though the Free Port Act preserved some commercial regulations to placate the interests of West Indian traders, this fact should not be interpreted to mean that Burke held mercantilist leanings at this early point in his parliamentary career, or that he possessed a neutral, moderate attitude toward commercial trade. In Letter to a Noble Lord, published in 1796, he indicates that he would have pushed for further free trade reform if not for extenuating political circumstances. After stating that he had analyzed the “whole commercial, financial, constitutional and foreign interests”Footnote ⁸⁵ of the British Empire in his first session in Parliament, he continued by averring, in regard to the act, “A great deal was then done; and more, far more would have been done, if more had been permitted by events.”Footnote ⁸⁶ And as Burke said of the Rockinghamites’ efforts in 1766, “We are, it is true, demolishing the whole Grenvillian Fabrick”Footnote ⁸⁷ of unnecessary mercantile restrictions. Burke held firm pro-trade convictions very early in his parliamentary career, and indeed lamented that more could not have been accomplished to promote greater commercial intercourse at the time.

The 1772 Repeal of Statutes Banning Forestalling, Regrating, and Engrossing

Burke's embrace of commercial freedom before Thoughts and Details extended beyond foreign trade. He also directed his energies toward helping make domestic markets freer more than two decades before he wrote the economic tract. Traditionally (and the eighteenth century was no exception), rising costs of provisions were met with public suspicion that middlemen and dealers were driving up prices through the trading practices of forestalling, regrating, and engrossing.Footnote ⁸⁸ These practices were traditionally illegal under English statutory law,Footnote ⁸⁹ which was enforced to varying degrees in different eras.

In 1772 Burke led efforts in Parliament to repeal statutes that proscribed these trading practices. Or at least Burke took credit in playing a leading role: in a May 1797 letter to Arthur Young, his friend and an agricultural economist, Burke contended that he had pushed for this repeal “of the absurd code of Statutes against the most useful of all trades, under the invidious names of forstalling and regrating.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Young backed up Burke's claim: the statutes, he wrote, “were repealed by motion of the Right Hon. Mr. Burke, so convinced was he from much evidence, that those laws had no other tendency but by restriction to raise instead of lowering prices; as I know from conversations which I had the honour of formerly holding with him.”Footnote ⁹¹ There is little historical evidence of Burke's speeches in support of the bill, but the law's preamble provides a strong statement of promarket principles that reflects Burke's own support for commercial liberty: “Restraints” on provisions “by preventing a free Trade… have a Tendency to discourage their Growth and enhance their Price.”Footnote ⁹² The editors of the latest volumes of Burke's writings and speeches write that this preamble “strongly suggests” Burke's involvement in its drafting.Footnote ⁹³ In addition, Sir Gilbert Blane, a Scottish naval surgeonFootnote ⁹⁴ interested in political economy, had reported that “the preamble to this bill, and the speeches in the debate, particularly that of Mr. Burke, set the impolitic tendency of the ancient laws in the strongest point of view.”Footnote ⁹⁵

In a manner that recalls his regret that the Free Port Act did not advance free trade policies as much as it could have, Burke reportedly made a comment regarding middlemen trading practices, in reaction to Adam Smith, that shines further light on the tension that Burke faced as a legislator between acting on principle and prudence. After Smith displayed indignation that Parliament had not immediately passed a law legalizing forestalling, following a judge's decision that banned it, Burke reportedly said, “You, Dr. Smith, from your professor's chair, may send forth theories upon freedom of commerce as if you were lecturing upon pure mathematics; but legislators must proceed by slow degrees, impeded as they are in their course by the friction of interest and the friction of prejudice.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Burke may have mischaracterized the pace of his own political advocacy; Wendell Herbruck has written that the 1772 repeal of the trading practices was “an amazing change of front” relative to the prevailing negative attitudes toward them.Footnote ⁹⁷

Fifteen years after the 1772 repeal, when the City of London petitioned the House of Commons to revive the prohibition against regrating and forestalling, Burke was quick to ridicule the idea. Burke asked Paul Le Mesurier, one of the aldermen of London who supported banning the trading activities, “whether he was not aware that a free commerce was the species of commerce most likely to flourish and to prosper?” Burke intimated the irony in the aldermen calling attention to supposed economic stresses at a time when they themselves appeared not to be suffering from price increases. The petition against forestalling and regrating, Burke remarked, “came from the Aldermen concerned in it after dinner, for their Petition had all the marks of plenitude and fullness about it.” According to the report of his speech, “While they had plenty of provisions, [Burke] advised them not to want to go to loggerheads with the providers, but to let them fatten as well as themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁸ (Burke did offer to reconsider the motion in August.)Footnote ⁹⁹ In sum, historical evidence strongly suggests that Burke's opposition to the prohibition of forestalling, regrating, and engrossing was informed by a belief in the free circulation of provisions.

Irish Free Trade Bills

Might Burke have supported the promarket laws out of political convenience rather than economic principle? Consider the Free Port Act. Without a doubt, the Rockinghamites did have considerations other than pure economic policy in mind. After Grenville attempted to enforce the mercantilist restrictions of the Navigation Acts in 1763–64, England experienced a weakened market for international trade in 1764. Even after Grenville tried to alleviate this impact by relaxing some limits on Spanish trading vessels, the mercantilist laws still restricted the importation of foreign goods. The Grenville administration continued to be blamed for the feeble trade market, and so the Rockingham ministry found a political opportunity to ostracize Grenville and win over disaffected merchants.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For Burke himself, it is also quite plausible that he saw this as a personal opening early in his parliamentary career to widen his constituent base and enhance his political legitimacy. One could, then, interpret Burke's support for the act as a response to the growing discontent of merchants in the service of his own political advancement, and not as an expression of his economic convictions.

Yet this narrative does not hold up in light of Burke's later efforts to support free trade when his constituents, many of whom were also merchants, opposed removing protectionist regulations. From 1774 to 1780 Burke represented Bristol, a bustling trading city inhabited by leading English businessmen. During public discussion in the late 1770s over lowering trade barriers between England and Ireland, merchant Samuel Span, writing on behalf of the Society of Merchant Adventurers of Bristol, expressed resistance to the free trade measures. In Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland, published in May 1778, Burke responds to Span in a careful but resolute way. He argues in favor of reducing commercial restrictions based on the principle of a unity of interest between two trading parties—an idea very similar to his message in Thoughts and Details that consensual market exchange is the trigger for collective advantage between the farmer and the laborer. “Justice to others is not always folly to ourselves,” he writes in Two Letters.Footnote ¹⁰¹ “You trade very largely where you are met by the goods of all nations.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Burke's letters, then, emphasize one of the philosophical pillars of his economic doctrine that motivated his push toward reconciliation between Ireland and Britain, and one that he later stressed in Thoughts and Details: voluntary trade relations are not zero-sum transactions but instead tend to benefit both parties involved. He writes to Span, “[It] is but too natural for us to see our own certain ruin, in the possible prosperity of other people. It is hard to persuade us, that every thing which is got by another is not taken from ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁰³ He continues: “Trade is not a limited thing; as if the objects of mutual demand and consumption, could not stretch beyond the bounds of our Jealousies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

For Burke, the liberal diffusion of trade engenders a larger common good benefiting people from different cultures and political communities—in this case, Ireland and England—and is not an economic system in which one gains at the other's expense. As Burke wrote in an earlier letter to Span, “The prosperity arising from an enlarged and liberal system improves all its objects: and the participation of a trade with flourishing Countries is much better than the monopoly of want and penury.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Therefore, Burke's categorical rejection of zero-sum logic in Thoughts and Details was not unique to that tract; he sharply criticized such thinking over fifteen years prior during debates over the Irish trade bills.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Burke's written communication in Two Letters is marked by a more delicate tone than in Thoughts and Details, casting light on his struggle to balance his support for free commerce with the weight of political realities. Burke was acutely aware that Span, and the merchants he represented, opposed Burke's free trade positions. Yet even in this context, Burke does not conceal his convictions. Again calling to mind his wish that the Free Port Act had gone further in promoting trade, Burke here conveys regret that the proposed Irish trade measures had not advanced market liberty even more. “The fault I find in the scheme is, —that it falls extremely short of that liberality in the commercial system,” Burke writes, “which I trust, will one day be adopted.” He says that the resolutions calling to soften trade barriers between Ireland and Britain “aim, however imperfectly, at a right principle.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

What is even more compelling is that in his reflections on Irish trade, Burke employs language comparable to that he uses later in Thoughts and Details when integrating the principles of economics with the laws of nature and of God. In order for Ireland to pay additional taxes, Burke argues, it must first be granted more commercial freedom. “In the order of nature, the advantage must precede the charge,” Burke writes. “This disposition of things, being the law of God, neither you nor I can alter it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Burke invokes the “laws of God” in Thoughts and Details to justify the laws of supply and demand. Here, he appeals to the law of God to demonstrate why Ireland should be afforded the blessing of greater economic liberty.

Burke continues: “If men are suffered freely to cultivate their natural advantages, a virtual equality of contribution will come in its own time, and will flow by an easy descent, through its own proper and natural channels. An attempt to disturb that course, and to force nature, will only bring on universal discontent, distress and confusion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In addition, Burke urges that those who believe in zero-sum trade should embrace “a way of thinking, more rational, more just, and more religious” in order to grasp that commercial exchange benefits both parties.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Such insights are consistent with Burke's remarks in “Speech at Bristol Previous to Election” in September 1780, when he stated that, rather than obeying the antitrade sentiments of Bristol merchants, he had “conformed to the instructions of truth and nature” in supporting the relaxation of Anglo-Irish trade barriers.Footnote ¹¹¹ All of these statements illuminate Burke's view that liberal commercial activity is a reflection of nature and should be defended on grounds of rationality, justice, and even piety—an argument harmonious with his appeals to nature and God in Thoughts and Details.

Burke acted on his word in support of freer commercial relations between Ireland and England. According to the London Evening Post, during a House committee meeting in early April 1778 on the question of Irish trade, Burke, “took a much more enlarged view of the subject than the motion included: he wished to give Ireland a substantial, and not a seeming good, by giving them at once a free manufacture and export of every thing.”Footnote ¹¹² Burke proposed an important amendment to one of the five trade resolutions considered by the House committee. It would have allowed Ireland to export goods directly to British colonies that had initially been purchased legally from Britain and foreign countries.Footnote ¹¹³ Burke also was the leading advocate for the fifth resolution that called for removing duties against Irish cordage and sailcloth entering Britain.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Burke recognized the limitations of the five resolutions. Yet he hoped that “we might obtain gradually, and by parts, what we might attempt at once, and in the whole, without success.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ That attempt was to advance the gift of commercial liberty: “That to which I attached myself the most particularly was, to fix the principle of a free trade in all the parts of these islands.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Once again, Burke displays his unshaken support for liberal trade. Once again, however, he exhibits an understanding of the fact that principles sometimes have to be cooled temporarily because of political realities.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In short, Burke's approach to the Irish trade bills reinforced his promarket inclinations that were evident in the Free Port Act and the 1772 repeal of laws against middlemen trading practices.

Additional Evidence

More pieces of evidence point to the conclusion that Burke endorsed the market principles contained in Thoughts and Details years before he drafted the memorandum. In Burke's second session in Parliament, almost three decades prior to writing the economic tract, he opposed efforts by Grenville to regulate provisions for the poor.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In addition, Burke conveyed unremitting support for the competitive price system. Twenty-five years before writing Thoughts and Details, during a parliamentary debate in November 1770 about whether the British government should continue to ban the export of grain, Burke expressed his belief in the efficacy of market prices.Footnote ¹¹⁹ “There are no such things as a high, & a low price that is encouraging, & discouraging; there is nothing but a natural price, which grain brings at an universal market.”Footnote ¹²⁰ There was little chance of ending the prohibition, but Burke's strong push against it underscored his passionate approval of liberal trade, even in the teeth of political opposition. The export ban was continued, by a vote of 155 to 16.Footnote ¹²¹

Then consider Burke's idea in Thoughts and Details that wages should be proportional to labor, a further indication of his support for market freedom. Over twenty years prior, in a letter to his cousin Garrett Nagle written in August 1771, Burke wrote, “I have always found, that the Labour of men is nearly in proportion to their pay.”Footnote ¹²² This insight about the correlation between labor and salary anticipates his wage theory in Thoughts and Details.

Even when Burke did formally champion legislation that appeared to violate his support for free commercial activity, he typically did so for reasons of political prudence rather than economic principle. For instance, a bill in 1772 regulating the price of provisions was approved by Parliament. Burke did not like the law because it clashed with his position on “the general principles of policy,”Footnote ¹²³ his position being that the circulation of food should be steered by market prices rather than by government legislation. He ended up giving it lukewarm support, however, because “the people will have it so, and it is not for their representative to say nay.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Burke is known for his “trustee” theory of representation, under which the representative should ultimately exercise his individual judgment to make political decisions even if doing so opposes the majoritarian wishes of his constituents.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet in this particular case, Burke yielded to the people's desires, even though he opposed them on economic principle.

Landed Nobility

The first challenge raises the question of Burke's attempt to balance his advocacy for economic liberalism with his defense of the landed nobility. Indeed, Burke is far more famous for the latter than the former. In his discussion in Reflections of England's rich constitutional heritage, for example, Burke writes, “We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.”Footnote ¹²⁶ If Burke was such a strident advocate of market economies throughout his career, why was he such a zealous defender of landed aristocracies—static, stable, but far less dynamic than the vibrancy of commercial activity?

Contemporary perspectives tend to separate classical and medieval notions of the stability of landed property, on one hand, and the commercial dynamism of modern capitalist economies, on the other. This division was not so stark, however, in the emerging economy of England in the early Enlightenment period. While the idea of a “gentleman” in aristocratic society was associated with the exercise of manners and the shunning of commercial activity, it was not unusual for the landed gentry during this epoch to exploit their estates in the pursuit of new technological projects, agricultural improvements, and commercial endeavors.Footnote ¹²⁷ Burke himself embodied this blend: he was a landed aristocrat but also an enthusiastic proponent of agricultural experimentation and capital improvement. He engaged in trading activities with an eye toward profit, and was attentive to price fluctuations in the agricultural market when dealing.Footnote ¹²⁸

Furthermore, for Burke, the virtue associated with the landed gentry was an indispensable precondition for the flourishing of commerce. “Commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians,” Burke writes in Reflections, are the product of “antient manners.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Burke's vision of political economy attempted to reconcile the enduring power of the nobility with the emergence of bourgeois economic activity. In a speech in February 1787 criticizing the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786,Footnote ¹³⁰ Burke stated that in Britain “the Landed Interest, the Monied Interest, and the Commercial Interest formed one great partnership, making up through the medium of discount and interest one great national capital.”Footnote ¹³¹ In essence, Burke did not perceive a tension between stable property and commercial vitality that could not be harmonized.

Mercantilism, the Navigation Acts, and the American Question

An additional objection is that Burke's backing of the Navigation Acts, which imposed protectionist barriers to enhance trading privileges of English traders, contradicts the claim that he was a staunch defender of market freedom. His incremental advocacy for commercial liberty, such as the Free Port Bill, simply reflected his belief that small pockets of free trade should exist within a wider system of mercantilism. Recall Cone's and Stevens's overlapping observations, discussed in section 1 above, that highlighted the ostensible chasm between Burke's protectionist leanings and Adam Smith's free trade convictions early in Burke's public career.

This essay disputes the idea that Burke was a committed proponent of mercantilismFootnote ¹³² at any point in his political career. Burke was frustrated that the Free Port Act did not go further in increasing commercial liberty between West Indian traders and the North American colonies. Moreover, in his “Speech on American Taxation,” given in April 1774, Burke argued that Britain should fully repeal the Townshend Revenue Acts of 1767 and return to its older protectionist system binding the colonies, as codified in the Navigation Acts. He does so not by invoking a coherent justification for mercantilism but by claiming that colonists had become accustomed to the acts,Footnote ¹³³ thereby underscoring Burke's belief in the efficacy of settled tradition in preserving political stability. Not only did Burke suggest in the speech that the trade restrictions might need to be modified in accordance with changing circumstances,Footnote ¹³⁴ but, as discussed above, he had previously led efforts by the Rockingham ministry to reform the Navigation Acts and liberalize trade markets with the West Indies in 1766.Footnote ¹³⁵ Burke's efforts to accelerate the free flow of commerce help explain why he stated in “Speech on American Taxation” that “too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue.”Footnote ¹³⁶

In his “Speech on Conciliation with America,” presented in March 1775, Burke offered conditional approval for the Navigation Acts, while also acknowledging that they limited market activity for the Americans.Footnote ¹³⁷ The general economic thrust of “Speech on Conciliation” was not a rationalization for mercantilism but the argument that growing colonial commercial prosperity benefits both the colonies and Britain, particularly when Britain circumscribes its regulatory reach. “It will be said, is not this American trade an unnatural protuberance, that has drawn the juices from the rest of the body? The reverse,” Burke said. “Our general trade has been greatly augmented; and augmented more or less in almost every part to which it ever extended.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In both “Speech on American Taxation” and “Speech on Conciliation,” then, Burke provided qualified support for the acts as a matter of political prudence rather than as a statement of promercantilist doctrine. He also stressed his conviction, later expressed in Thoughts and Details and writings on the Irish trade bills, that commercial trade does not produce zero-sum economic consequences.

If one had to choose, Burke was more receptive to the regulation of foreign intercourse than the domestic grain trade, as evidenced by his qualified approval of the Navigation Acts. But the claim that Burke expressed mercantilist sympathies in his early economic thought is further weakened by considering that Adam Smith, the foremost champion of free trade in the eighteenth century, also defended the acts on grounds that transcended strict economic considerations. Like Burke, Smith judged that the regulations were not the ideal economic framework to maximize commercial intercourse. But, not unlike Burke, he recognized their importance in advancing the national security interests of England. Smith called the acts possibly the “wisest of all the commercial regulations of England” because “defence… is of much more importance than opulence.”Footnote ¹³⁹ And, like Burke, he indicated an openness toward gradually amending them in order to lower existing commercial restrictions.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Conditional support for the acts did not indicate mercantilist orthodoxy.

To an even greater degree than his practical political positions, Burke's intellectual arguments in favor of free trade were opposed to mercantilist dogma. He firmly rejected zero-sum thinking and believed, rather, that commercial exchange promotes mutual benefits. He also maintained that the source of public opulence was vibrant commercial activity between nations. A “Free Trade,” he wrote in his personal notes regarding Anglo-Irish relations, “is in Truth the only scource of wealth.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Unlike many mercantilists, Burke was highly skeptical of the virtues of a favorable balance of trade: “The balance of trade… is a mischievous principle; the effect of which is to accumulate a debt, and the more it inclines in your favour, the greater the debt.”Footnote ¹⁴² Furthermore, Burke wrote in Observations on a Late State of the Nation (1769) that the internal wealth of England “consists in the stock of useful commodities, as much as in gold and silver.”Footnote ¹⁴³ On principle, Burke challenged cardinal tenets of mercantilist thinking.

Exceptions to the Principle of Market Liberalism

Burke does not advocate pure laissez faire economic liberalism in Thoughts and Details. Additionally, there are instances in Burke's career prior to the economic tract when he indicates provisional support for state intervention in the economy, albeit with conditions and qualifications, beyond the Navigation Acts. For example, Burke hints at some sympathy, at least temporarily, for the export bountyFootnote ¹⁴⁴ and import bounty.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Burke argued that taxes did not decrease consumption nor imperil the overall health of Britain's economy during times of war.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In his Sketch of a Negro Code, he calls for heavy state intervention to gradually eliminate the Atlantic slave trade because, in his judgment, human trafficking violated natural law and principles of religion and morality.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

There is one other instance that deserves mention in regard to Burke's encounter with the question of free trade. In 1785, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer William Pitt the Younger—to whom Burke would send Thoughts and Details a decade later—put forward a series of commercial propositions that would have strengthened trade relations between Ireland and England, with the expectation that Ireland would make heavier financial contributions to Britain's imperial defense.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Burke opposed Pitt's measures,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ in effect allying himself with the protectionist merchants whom he opposed in the previous decade over the Irish trade bills.

The flurry of political considerations that came into play in the debate concerning Pitt's commercial propositions has led to varying interpretations of Burke's decision: Burke succumbed to factionist impulses of Whiggism, lending “himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland,”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ as Burke's biographer John Morley described his actions; his mind was preoccupied with India at the time; he thought the propositions were an imprudent way to extract revenue from the Irish, not unlike Britain's strategy with the American colonies; he questioned Ireland's ability to contribute revenue to Britain's imperial defense; he had not made a full recovery from the political bedlam of the previous session, in which he faced sharp political hostility and resistance; he was worried that further concessions to Ireland would have paved its way toward either unrestricted union or full independence.Footnote ¹⁵¹

There is no single unifying theory to explain Burke's motives. His factionalist support for the Whigs’ opposition to Pitt's measures appears to be one of the stronger explanations. Indeed, he was not the only MP temporarily to sacrifice his free trade convictions at the time: for example, William Eden, who endorsed the economic thinking of Adam Smith, took Burke's position as well.Footnote ¹⁵² Moreover, Pitt, also an adherent of Smith's economics, used arguments about the mutual advantages of free trade during debate over his propositions that were similarly expressed by Burke in the late 1770s when Burke was championing greater commercial intercourse between England and Ireland.Footnote ¹⁵³

One might consider Burke's resistance to Pitt's measures to be the most glaring exception to his general pattern of praising commercial liberty before Thoughts and Details. It did not signify a durable shift from Burke's support for liberal trade, however. Throughout the 1780s, the same decade as Pitt's propositions, Burke lambasted the East India Company for establishing a commercial monopoly and undermining the supply-and-demand laws of India's economy.Footnote ¹⁵⁴