2 - Economy

Summary

Conditions before 1814

THE eighteenth century was a time of unprecedented economic expansion for Guernsey, or, more specifically, St Peter Port, whose worldwide maritime activities gave its commercial sector an opportunity to grow ‘unrestrained by territorial limits’. Gregory Stevens Cox’s study documents the transformation of St Peter Port, ‘a relatively poor town of some 3,000 inhabitants’ in the seventeenth century, into ‘one of the principal commercial entrepôts in the Atlantic economy’.

An important contemporary account of eighteenth-century trade is provided by Daniel De Lisle Brock (first president of Guernsey’s Chamber of Commerce and Bailiff 1821–42) in his chapter on ‘The Commerce of the Island’ in William Berry’s History of the Island of Guernsey. Brock, a scion of a leading mercantile family born in 1762, dated St Peter Port’s increase in prosperity from its involvement in privateering during William III’s French Wars. The main buyers of the spirits and tobacco captured as prize goods by the early privateers were smugglers from the south coast of England, where duties on such luxuries were high. Over time, a substantial market for these commodities was created, to satisfy which, ‘on the return of peace, the inhabitants were induced to import and keep in store the goods which they knew to be in such demand, and which accordingly continued to attract the English smugglers’.

The need to continue sourcing wines and spirits on the worldwide market gave a fillip to insular participation in the wider carrying trade, and warehousing built to accommodate such cargoes also allowed the town to develop a ‘respectable’ role as depository and bulk-breaker for dutiable goods destined for legal entry into Britain before the introduction of the bonding system in the early nineteenth century.

These activities, combined with the economic input of thousands of naval and military personnel stationed in Guernsey during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, made the late eighteenth century what one nearcontemporary described as ‘a heart-stirring period’ in which ‘the tide of wealth was always on the flow’. Many of the town’s merchants became ‘opulent’. A sizeable force of urban artisans and labourers were kept in work, notably in cooperage and tobacco-processing, which employed no fewer than 1,800 people by 1800.Burgeoning local consumer demand stimulated an unprecedented expansion in St Peter Port’s retailing and service sector.