6 - Merchants and Planters

Summary

The prosperity of the English sugar colonies has been, in a great measure, owing to the great riches of England, of which a part has overflowed, if one may say so, upon those colonies.

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith marvelled at the speed with which the English-speaking colonies in the Americas had developed since their first settlement. Yet, he insisted, ‘The progress of our North American and West Indian colonies would have been much less rapid, had no capital but what belonged to themselves been employed in exporting their surplus produce.’ In Smith's eyes, the dependence of colonial expansion on capital exported from Britain was potentially dangerous. While conceding that it might be advantageous for developing regions to borrow from more advanced countries, he regarded it as unnatural for colonies to be restricted, as they were under the navigation system, to a single metropolitan creditor. Such a relationship, Smith concluded, had distorted Britain's trade and manufacturing and left her vulnerable to colonial trade boycotts. ‘In her present condition’, he warned, ‘Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders scarce incident to those in which all the parts are properly proportioned.’

More than forty years ago, the question of capital and colonisation was addressed by Richard Pares in his posthumously published Merchants and Planters.