Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The Ship and the Plough
Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare necessaries of life, but traffic gives us a great variety of what is useful, and at the same time supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental. For these reasons there are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, add wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.
The words are Addison's. He goes on:
Our ships are laden with spices and oils and wines; our rooms are filled with pyramids of china, and adorned with workmanship of Japan; our morning's draught comes to us from the remotest corners of the earth; we repair our bodies by the drugs of America and repose ourselves under Indian canopies.
Thus splendidly did trade present itself to the eyes of an English Secretary of State at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Such an assessment, as is well known, is by no means unique in the era with which the following pages are concerned, i.e. the period from about 1500 to 1750. There are countless examples of the contemporary glorification of trade, especially foreign trade, which was regarded as the chief, and by some as the only, means of securing the national prosperity. Foreign trade was the great wheel setting the machinery of society into motion – to use a metaphor which often appears in the economic literature of the period. Trade was the driving force of the nation.
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