Let’s Cheat: a Synopsis of the Overseas Commerce Pivot–Big Picture
The English overseas commercial pivot (1550-1620) inherited a great deal from a series of long before events and their consequences that followed the 1066 Norman Conquest. The impositio of Norman (French) elites over the previous Saxon elites and traditions exacted serious consequences on English society—and individual choices, reactions and expections—that colored personal ambitions and governance, not to ignore fragmentation of the aristocracy most engaged in policy-making and implementation. Both Smythe and Sandys were gentry, and of both it is recorded they were prickly about deference to the aristocracy.
The English chronology produced an English post-1550 economy, society and policy process that was in many ways distinct from its other European rivals. Tudor policy processes evolved during the dynasty and were greatly affected by personal priorities and personalities of the sovereign. While we have limited our discussion about religion as it affected the Tudor policy systems, the reader ought to be sensitive that the Crown felt differently as did the Tudors from their Stuart successors. Elizabeth was more open on this issue than James, but then England never founded a permanent colony during her reign.
[999] The struggle between Protestants and Catholics came to one of several crisises during the pivot period and the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot was just a year previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company; in fact, the key advocate for the Outer Ports presided over the trial of Guy Fawkes. Also American historians, I believe, have not been sufficiently sensitive to the various Protestant groupings that had developed during the genration between Virginia and the post 1620’s settlement of Massachusetts—and to understate the impact of the carving out of Catholic Maryland from Virginia, and the roles of Virginia leadership as they affected Maryland’s colony-building. In any event Massachusetts and Virginia developed along different paths because of religion, their values and different policy processes.
The evolution from the Norman Conquest (1086) established policy system, that was typical of a medieval policy-making process suitable to a kingdom after its conquest by an “outsider”. That conquest polarized the conquered from the conquerors and the effort by the latter to establish dominance set off a distinctive path that led to Elizabeth’s 1550 policy system and the resulting configuration of England’s policy elites, particularly the aristocracy. The War of the Roses started a hundred years earlier; Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, was only seven decades previous to Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne. Henry VIII, author of England’s Protestant Reformation, imposed the Anglican Church of England and the consequences on the aristocracy—and local governance—were profound. The grandchildern of a transitoning aristocracy disproportionately were elites associated with the Virginia Company. [999]
The first theme answers the question of why Columbus risked sailing over the edge of the world? To reach China, India and the East Indies, you dummy! Why didn’t everybody just use the Silk Road like they had done for literally thousands of years? Because in 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and ended the Byzantine Empire. Without Constantinople’s demise Columbus would not have discovered North and South America and the West Indies. In that sense that fall had done better than Helan of Troy–it launched more than a thousand ships during Europe’s subsequent Age of Discovery and Exploration. The victor that won first place in the Age was Europe’s new found dominant power: Spain-Holy Roman Empire. Our first theme captures what I call “the Shadow of Spain” and its model of colonization, the Spanish conquest, as a strategy of English colonization that conflicted with the England’s strategy of overseas commercialization that emerged out of the Elizabethan post-1550 English pivot to overseas commerce. That rise of Spain also provides an understanding of the rise of European mercantilism, a global political-economic system whose competition turned colonization into an premature, not ready for prime time, existential race for the medieval European powers.
The Second Theme explains the volatility of English population growth, its increasing mobility, the rise of English urbanization, as influenced by the enclosure movement, black death pandemic, and the quite unexpected explosive population growth that began as the pivot played out. A second dynamic was the rise of London as a mega city, and the marginalization of secondary cities and ports that led to a fractured, if not competing group of cities (the Outer Ports) that developed their own overseas programme independent as they could from London. A third theme, the two different parths of London and the Outer Ports and how they entered into the incorporation of the Virginia Company. The weaknesses of the English economy will be assessed and we will demonstrate how they led to an informal concensus that development of overseas trade and commerce, if not colonization, was a logical economic development strategy to pursue as England competed with other European mercantilist powers. Finally, we will develop how the medieval policy system of Elizabeth lent itself to a discombobulated and fragmented nexus of interests, values and perspectives that ill-suited the mission of the Virginia Company, and jaded the perspective of its leadership and participants.
Interaction between Enclosure Movement, Plague and Population Explosition Creates London’s Mega City and Marginalized Rival Outer Ports–I suggest that the English overseas commerce pivot was seriously affected by England’s macro evolution as affected by the distinctive path drawn by implications, complications, and feuding dynamics unleashed from the English enclosure system which began in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, and unleashed a number of tensions and dynamics of change that sent England down a path that not only led to Elizabeth’s policy system which produced the Virginia Company, but continued after her death to James I who incorporated and oversaw the operations of the Company. It was a direct reaction to the enclosure system that produced the bifurcated English urbanization that led to the London mega city and the marginalized Outer Ports.
For this history, the path relevant to the overseas commerce and colonization pivot started with the English enclosure movement, followed by the Plague which, counter intuitively, precipated an incremental compensating increase in both wages and birth rates to trigger a mobile population to leave manor-based agriculture in favor of an urban settlement pattern that benefited London to disproportionatel that by 1500 it not only began to overwhelm London itself, but also, left the other cities, towns and regional centers to a fate of near stagnancy, small and uncompetitive in size, generating incremental growth insufficient to rapidly growing London, in process of being transformed into a mega city of the medieval age. That bifurcated urban landscape was responsible for the two subsidiary corporations within the master Virginia Company—and the subsequent distinctive development of Virginia from Massachusetts. In addition the overlap of the bifurcation greatly influenced the drift to the English civil war, and can account for some of Parliament’s and Stuarts inability to work out compromises. As we will also see the different paths of the Outer Ports and London in regards to discovery and exploration led to distinctive types of commerce and definitions underlying colonization that followed alongside. This made the planning and implemention of any colony more complex to the point that in its initial start of each colony both planning and post-landing governance and economic development were faulty, while Indian relations more a disaster, at least for Jamestown.
The English enclosure movement, a movement that overlapped four centuries, is more complex and evolutionary than a simple description of its features suggest. The movement gathered momentum in the 13th century, such that during the Tudor years, the late 15th century into the 16th and 17th–the last being the period on which I focus, continued well into the 1800’s. An important caveat to our use of enclosure as our “starting point” for England’s transition from medieval to early modern history, is that it wasn’t. One could, for example, insert the making of the Magna Charter in 1215 as the break and starting point. Or the reforms of Henry II, or even those of the Conqueror himself. What is more reasonable to say is the enclosure movement unleashed forces of change, economic, social and political drivers that would over centuries aggregate into noticeable disruption in the traditional medieval system in ways of discernable importance to the making of the Virginia Company
F. J. Fisher’s succinct definition that ‘Enclosure–i.e. the suppression of common grazing rights–by agreement was a feature of the age,” but he also acknowledges the huge sweep of time enclosure persisted, adding his next sentence “But as pressure on land mounted, the question of its use became increasingly a political one.“ [99] F. J. Fisher, Tawney’s Century”, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961), p. 5. This is because the devastating Black Plague followed in the fourteenth century. The plague radically altered the manor’s class configuration and in so doing almost revolutionized its economics and fostered more enclosures for other purposes than sheep and wool—mining for example. Embraced initially by a few aristocrats hoping to increase their wealth and position by restricting the use of their manor’s land and putting it to use for their profit. Previously, manor land had been available to serfs for common use such as firewood, grazing livestock, and hunting. With enclosure by the manor lord, these acres were demarcated by enclosing them with hedges or fence after harvest. Once enclosed the lords used the enclosed area for their sheep herding, which they either used for meat or reqiored their manor serfs to make raw wool/cloth. The net result of early inclosure was the removal of land from serfs and the increased use of sheepherding for wool and meat. The former provided the raw material for wool and cloth manufacturers who in rather short order formed companies and grew into England’s first export manufacturing cluster.
Overtime the enclosure movement created several groupings from serfs that were dispossessed from the confiscated land: The first group, and the most fortunate, were those serfs that were able to purchase or acquire land from the lord thus becaming free holders, i.e. former serfs. A second group spun off from the manor were proto artisans and trading merchants who usually moved off the manor and gravitated to more urban settlements. From these urbanized areas they formed a nucleus for further growth of population and wealth that developed into an urban center. The third group, those serfs that abandoned their manor and headed for wherever they could find a living to sustain themselves and their households. The simple act of enclosing part of their land reshaped over time manor agricultural economics and facilitated urbanization, class mobility, and population mobility. Each driver interacted with the others and, without intention or planning, England was infused with sustained drivers of change that led away from a strict medieval economy. With increased population mobility less tied to agricultural manors a new population drove a new urbanization movement that continued for five hundred years.
Having said this, the Black Death hit England in June 1348, spreading to London by September, and advanced through the Isles by 1351. The initial outbreak of plague is estimated to have killed about one-third of the population. Over the following decades the plague returned at intervals that persisted into the seventeenth century–for example the plague returned to London in 1603-4, immediately previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company. As one would expect the Plague disrupted England and Europe and that tested the sustainability and continuity of the medieval systems hit by it. It also wreaked havoc on families, personalities, attitudes, expectations and the mental health of all.
How hard was England hit? Not easy to estimate; England had no formal census until 1801. Testing out Google’s chat AI, it came up with the following–based on historical tax records: In 1300 the population of England was estimated between 4.5 and 5.5 million. By 1350 at the height of the first onslaught of the black plague pandemic (post 1348) it was down to an estimated 3.75 million–killing off of approaching half the population. By 1400, the low point was about 2.1 million. By 1500 after a century of stagnation, the population was about 2.2 million. After 1500, however, a dramatic change erupted: by 1550 the population estimated at 4 million. increased by 1600 to estimates that ranged between 4.1 and 5 million. Other estimates place the population as high as 5.5 million by 1650. This is the period discussed in this module; it is a half-century previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company and it continued for centuries after that.
[999] The chief reasons for the population increase were an improvement in agricultural productivity and crop innovation (wheat, crop rotation, more use of fertilizers), warmer temperatures, fewer plague episodes, new job opportunities mainly from cloth/wool-related manufacturing and sales employment, greater demand for products especially food and personal care due to dependent urban populations, which led to mild increases in prosperity. The aggregation of these factors likely meant a somewhat better nutrition, a rise in birth rates, and lower mortality rates. I am reluctant to break out with “happy days are here again in merrie olde England”, but it is reasonable that by the time of Shakespeare’s England (1564-1616), the country had recaptured some of its pre-plague population base whose expectations expanded [999]
Over the centuries during which the enclosure played out compels a reminder-caveat that enclosures’ definition, and the positions taken for or against it, vary noticeably across time periods. In the beginning the cry of those affected negatively was “depopulation” and the focus was on the lot of the disposed serfs. By the time of Henry VIII, and certainly Elizabeth, however, accompanied by population growth, enclosure was a fixture of the English economy and responses to it varied according to one’s position and station in life, as well as the attitude of the Crown.Agricultural innovation and increases in food and textile production provided offsetting perspectives; beyond sheep herding and cloth, mining exploration developed jobs and wealth around extractive mineral clusters which demonstrated enclosure’s ability to develop clusters that attracted investment by wealthy entrepreneurs. Our Thomas Smythe (Virginia Company CEO), for example, inherited his father’s (Customer) mining investments and continued his efforts.
Enclosure Movement Creates Clusters in Sheepherding, Raw Cloth and Wool Mfg, Population Mobility that Results in English Urbanization with London Evolving Into Homebase of Wool&Coth Mfg Oligarchy Company of Merchant Adventurers and a One Export No Import Overseas Commerce—
3: You Can’t Keep them Down on the Manor: Cloth/Wool Manufacturing/Merchant Clusters Develop
As to the manor, England’s medieval unit of its agricultural economic base, the effect of those changes were to remove land from use by serfs and encourage them to move on for better or worse. That resulted in a new group of free holders (i.e. non-serf landowners), some of which evolved into gentry resulting from some entrepreneurial venture. After the black plague when local agricultural labor became expensive and forced manor lords to respond, created a new round of tensions and outcomes. In the later years of this transition, the Tudor’s tended toward preservation of arable land, but its priority was low and attention to it was inconsistent, leaving its implementation to those with “a dog in the fight”. In several ways by the 1550’s enclosure had settled into a position similar to our present day eminent domain: messy, loud, oozing moral platitudes, and decided upon by local justices-jurisdictions. [99] See also Maurice Beresford, “Habitation versus Improvement: the Debate on the Enclosure Agreement” in F. J. Fisher, Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961).[999]
Development of proto-classes, artisans, free holder agricultural householders broke away from serfdom and created opportunities for future generations, while a more mobile English population moved about to find and take advantage of opportunities that fostered densely packed geographies with more complex economic, and social, communities that spawned both disruption and innovation potential; these forces of change moved off from our history’s front page into the back pages almost automatically and imperceptibly. Over the centuries that followed one could see an English medievalism slowing evolving, but still profoundly medieval in character, values, and configuration. English medievalism was not motionless, static, or stagnant, but more in transition to an unknown future at some unknown later date.
As long as enclosure continued to feed a revival of population from the Black Plague, the two drivers of change worked behind the scenes creating pressures and tensions that fostered new changes and drivers, of which the formation of a wool and cloth manufacturing cluster was, for me at least, the most important influence on the the design (joint stock corporation) which when combined with London’s mega city urbanization profoundly shaped the Company’s organizational politics and the process by which a royal public-private partnership came into being in 1605-6.
Manor depopulation followed, anomic uprisings occurred, and incremental urbanization began.. The manor lords, despite the economic change created within their manors, still enclosed more pasture land, raising yet more sheep for use in wool manufacture and foodstuffs–until sheep outnumbered the English by three-to-one. This raised the question as to what to do with all this sheep wool and raw cloth made from it? Home (manor)-based manufacturing followed, and then powered by water, manufacturing on a larger scale by companies commenced, and, lo and behold, wool and cloth manufacturing clusters sprinkled throughout the kingdom.
Wool manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties developed flourishing, if small, wool/cloth production clusters. Scattered about England, wool and cloth manufacturers were accordingly able to easily source wool and attract workers from their regional manors. Those with an entrepreneurial bent were able to form companies thus jump-starting a serious manufacturing wool and cloth cluster that added to the local-regional elite whose wealth usually was plowed back to the company thereby in good times expanding production and employment.
Wool/cloth manufacturing startups also led to a more mobile population who either moved from serf agriculture into cities to became a proletariat, or creating former serfs into land owning yeomen/artisans in regional economies. In short, England increased its population mobility and during these centuries a measured urbanization followed. The exception to this as we shall later describe is London. Those serfs who were unable to successfully cope with displacement were transformed into economic refugees who eventually resettled in the budding urban areas or London where the opportunities seemed apparent. From this we will hear assertions of “surplus population”, and from others, usually more followers of a radical Protestant sect, who promoted a need for “Christian charity”. Success of this first wave English underclass was very uneven, with the result that more unsuccessful piled into neighborhoods or entry level wool cloth factories as proletariat.
Since agricultural manor-based labor proved expensive during and after the plague, manor lords were under pressure as well as they too had to find places to settle their sons and daughters in the English primogeniture-obsessed society. The kingdom’s social hierarchy became more complex as its aristocracy and its daughters-widows and gentlemen found their place in a elite hierarchy in some flux. The rise of the Tudors added to this as they clashed with the installed base of the aristocracy in their effort to centralize power in London’s court. The rise of the wool and cloth merchants only added to the mix, as a gentry elite took shape.
Some wool was homespun and lords sold it to merchants for more revenues. Manor lords also sold meat to domestic merchants. Increasingly, the end products typically fell into the hands of small manufacturers or companies of sheep-herders who either grew their business or sold it off to larger manufacturers, meat processers, and domestic merchants who distributed both as well as the wool and cloth products. Since lighter blends were likely to be exported to Iberia and Antwerp, export of such cloth became an opportunity to supplement the predominant sale of cloth domestically. Accordingly, manufacturers often concentrated near port cities, the most successful of which was the London metro area. By 1500 the English exported more finished cloth than raw wool to Antwerp principally. There was little import to England involved in this trade.
Guilds, Towns and Cities Emerge from Enclosure and Develop–Cloth-making existed ages and eons before the enclosure movement, and it gained early access into the English guild system as it took form following the Conquest. Among the very first to achieve a guild charter, not only in London, but also in many regional centers as well, Unwin observes “… the weavers secured at an early date by the open grant of charter. Like the bakers they gained the privilege of farming their own taxes. But they secured it much earlier (before 1130) and continued to hold tit till Tudor times. The position of the weavers amongst London trades was in this respect unique, but in the 12th century there were gilds of weavers enjoying similar privileges at Lincoln, Oxford, York, Winchester, Huntington and Nottingham … [and] Winchester. While the inclusion of guilds added to the wool and cloth industry expansion and professionalization, it also injected specialization in England’s emerging craft industries and that invited competition in recruitment, and supplemented the effects of the Company’s concentration.
Economist B. E. Supple concluded these exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent, and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6]. Naturally, the incremental increase in private land ownership meant a disruption of the medieval manor based class system, and the development of an landed (free holder) agricultural yeoman, along with increases in artisans, and merchants, also moving to more urban locations where they were more likely to prosper.
Over the years many of these prospered and infused development of a gentry proto-class that, by the time of the Virginia Company participated in East India and Virginia Company affairs as investors, advocates, shipowners and sea captains, merchants and staff and leadership for the guilds that developed. Manor lords and the regional aristocracy in turn took advantage of their opportunities, some drawn into overseas adventures, others into the military, and others to the court and Crown. Also, some along with gentry were attracted to English mining, and the extraction of materials such as ores, coal and copper.
The cloth cluster prospered joining in the formation of its occupational guilds, a workforce entity that developed skillsets, limited competition, set pricing and labor costs for the larger denser communities that crossed the red line into urban areas. In so doing, the sectors blended into England’s larger guild movement by organized themselves into regional/occupational guilds. Overseas merchants, among others, routinely organized themselves into guilds and companies to maintain and control access to the special techniques and knowledge, or ‘mysteries’ of their trades. Many only later sought out royal grants to allow them further immunities of self-government, relief from certain taxes, and most importantly, unimpeded rights to travel from and reside beyond the realm … [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10.
Guilds led to more cohesive and skilled regional clusters , that as the cluster matured, it tended to centralized into and around larger businesses, which tended to grow best on the peripheries of newly densely populated or urban areas–a process that inherently favored London and its suburbs, and a few regional centers, particularly those with ports whose residents demanded wool and cloth products for their use and benefit. The development of guilds in this time also created a supplemental-alternative path to individual prosperity through skills training. “The Statute of Apprentices of 1563, by making long indentures mandatory, helped to bring stability to industry and farming. Yet commercial success had its debit side. The pursuit of wealth and the frantic race to acquire land and power meant that most people cared only for their own interests, and not for the public good, or the needs of those weaker than themselves. It was a greedy and avaricious age, corrupt in many ways … The rich lived well [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 9
Occurring in two expansionary bursts, between the 1480’s and 1510, and the 1530’s to 1550 cloth export by the first decade of the seventeenth century (1600-1610) were three quarters of England’s total exports, of which three quarters went to Germany and the Low Countries. Brenner estimated the guild-like Company of Merchant Adventurers controlled one half of London’s total export trade, and asserted that the Company of Merchant Adventurers “constituted England’s outstanding commercial group by any test of wealth or power, and that its leading members enjoyed a disproportionate share of London’s highest political positions” [99] Brenner, p. 3.
During the sixteenth century that followed after its incorporation, Company of Merchant Adventurers took steps to limit access of “mere merchants” into its membership, casting out retailers, wholesalers, finance and other merchant groups. Keeping these elements from being able to export, at least easily, profitably and at a scale, the were able with their geographic and industry monopolies marginalized other rivals, frustrated opportunities not to their benefit, while further accumulating the wealth derived from export of England’s sole export industry–thus limited export only to cloth/wool/textiles. Simultaneously, the Company of Merchant Adventurers turned their own corporate leadership into small, narrow near-perpetual oligarchy that founded member family dynasties that effectively closed the door for the rising gentry class that could not achieve membership in the Company.
With the royal charter they secured a royal grant of monopoly to a specified geography (Antwerp) that limited competition, reduced risk, and provided legitimacy to the traders in their relationships abroad. Being the first of guilds-exporters, the pattern was set for all that followed. The all-important take away was that a guild monopoly over a trade was then infused with a second monopoly to trade that product in a defined geography. This model became preconditions for future overseas trading ventures. Thus these devolved from the Company of Merchant Adventurers before the sixteenth century.
Cloth industry became more concentrated as it matured, raising the cost of entry so over a few generations only a few merchant owners dominated overseas wool export, and the Company of Merchant Associates-Adventurers (see below) that held the royal export monopoly developed into an oligopoly of its own. There was little trickle down from the cloth export and the exclusionary membership policy by the Company meant a very large percentage of English merchants were shut out from cloth and export, and left to their own devices.
Propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, around London was pronounced, and it transformed the Company of Adventurers into a London-based industry nexus, Accordingly Outer Port ‘Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe … emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in commercial cities across England. Exeter had one, as did Newcastle, Hull, Chester and York. Bristol’s Merchant Ventures which dated back centuries, had recently received its first charter of in corporation from King Edward VII in 1552 [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10 Effectively shut out out of cloth export they looked in other directions for opportunity.
the salience of the Company of Merchant Adventurers joint stock corporation How did the London London wool and cloth/sheepherder merchants gain a head start and were able to restrict their membership to the advantage of the few members? The answer lies in the particular business structure of the Company of Merchant Adventurers: England’s first major joint stock corporation. Blending a guild-like cloth industry membership with a royal monopoly into a structure with exclusive export across the English Channel to the continent, the new corporation was, almost by definition, the first English proto-type joint stock corporation relevant to English overseas trade. The Company received its first charter in 1407; obtained its breakthrough charter from Henry VII in 1496 and 1505, and Elizabeth’s 1564 charter transformed Company’s membership into a patriarchy of families that created a lock on the Company’s “board of directors” and committee leadership that could be passed on to their successor-first born.
With restricted membership allowed to the Company by Elizabeth, the Company’s governance, now self-perpetuating, meant the leadership held control over the non Board Company shareholders. The upper levels of the Corporation held virtually a monopoly not just in continental wool export, but also the Company itself. Inheritance of this membership became the entry for future leaders, and rendered the Company structure a closed oligarchy dedicated to continental trade of English cloth. From that point on the London-based leadership of the Corporation incrementally placed restriction on cloth merchant in the outer ports and cities, as well as factors in he continental ports of trade which effectively shut them out of .the cloth overseas trade. While Elizabeth moderated this in the course of her reign, it did not alter a core resistance of the Company governance to entry by non-London merchants.
In alliance with the Crown in policies concerning commercial trade, and aligned with English Crown vs. Parliamentary politics, the Merchant Adventurers proceeded to dominate the political governance institutions of the City of London, placing the latter within the King’s orbit, by securing the election of its members to important positions of power during much of the pre-English Civil War period. That meant great power and influence of London merchant adventurers associated with the corporation amassed great influence over the governance of the City of London, and the investment and finance activities of the capital city of England during the century in alliance with Elizabeth.
Headquartered in London and Antwerp, the Company of Merchant Adventurers elites were in a potentially influential and strategic position from which they could assume a commanding role in England’s overseas trade and commerce. They chose to do so, but for the most part limited their activity to protecting and enhancing their Company access to northern Europe through Antwerp and to confine themselves to cloth-wool apparel related products for export. They were not interested in imports, save to commodities of use to cloth and wool industry/guilds. In that cloth and wool constituted three quarters of all English exports in this period, their use of London as their principal English port secured for them status and a level of protection as they set up foreign contacts, relations, and trade abroad–which over time evolved into becoming the “establishment” of English foreign trade. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 23-4 The Company of Merchant Adventurers also left those interested in other commercial trading to their own devices and lobbying. While they did not oppose such ventures head on, the Company’s dominance over overseas policy felt the pressure of their deadweight on the policy process.
The net effect, intended or not, was that a small, powerful oligarchy of London merchant adventurer families, for all practical purposes, marginalized overseas trade by non-member merchant adventurers. The exclusive monopoly of the wool-cloth Merchant Adventurers Company on wool export to the Continent meant it constrained access of others to London’s access to Europe’s wealth and blocked English entrepreneurs access to the Orient and East Indies. The simple take away is London was where the action was. The Company marginalized entrepreneurs and aspiring gentry from areas other than London who were stymied by London’s size and concentration of power and institutions. Unwilling to abandon their place of origin they pursued their adventures from their homelands and dealt with London’s power as their needs required. This, of course, intensified their frustration and it also fragmented the focus of their trade and render their business plans and overseas missions more complex and multifaceted. Perhaps most of all it allowed the entrepreneurs more leeway to take advantage of the more profitable, if risky, war-raiding and privateering.
The narrowness of interests within the Company followed from its lack of inclusiveness within the wool and cloth sector and the closed organizational structure of the Company secured by royal charter continued into the 1560’s. The latter is due, as Brenner’s asserts, that these wool-export minded London merchants “more tightly controlled conditions under which the cloth export commerce was pursued–and specifically the Merchant Adventurers success precisely from the 1550’s and 1560’s in getting the government to increase their privileges considerably. Indeed, in view of the relatively favorable conditions that actually prevailed for London denizen merchants in the traditional cloth trade with northern Europe from the late1550’s to the early 1600’s it is not easy to see why they would have felt the need to seek alternatives farther afield. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 10-11.
By the early, 1500’s. these cloth/wool companies had located around England’s key port cities, most of all London whose cloth/wool cluster dominated not only the metro economic base, but extended its organizational tentacles into the country’s wool-cloth cluster as well. The cluster’s ebbs and flows injected volatility in prosperity/recession and disrupted the kingdom’s workforce that triggered relocation of the workforce not to ignore disturbing anomic riots such as “Evil May Day of1517” when thousands of City residents rose up against foreign workers and residents, pillaging the homes of the foreigners, and hanging a number who they felt were stealing bread crusts from their mouths and jobs from their families. Lack of a social safety net meant the unequal distribution of wealth produced horrible living conditions, horrific housing, and and desperation in the underclass.
The realization by many elites that badly distributed prosperity and an economy that could not produce sufficient number of jobs, because it rested on one industrial sector called attention to the lack of products other than cloth and wool which importation could introduce into the English economy increasingly called into question the previously dominant economic strategy of import substitution suggesting strongly it was counter productive. It was also increasingly clear the traditional English economy could not meet demands from a competitive mercantilist Europe, prone to war and colonial empires.
By the 1550’s, actually earlier, the Company essentially ran the one-horse export economy that England enjoyed. As such it developed into a bastion of wealth for its members, this wealth was put to use in a number of investments and opportunities. The take away from these observations is the English cloth export evolved into an foreign trade dead end. It stopped with cloth and wool export only, with little to no import. What import to England existed was on the initiative of other nations for the most part. The wealth generated from this one-export no import commercial trade brought about by the first great trading company, the Company of Adventurers, held by a small group of family dynasties who dominated the Company of Adventurers and its transactions, and who passed on their position through primogeniture inheritance.
Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in ports such as Antwerp, the primary entrance point, and over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to develop and sustain an advantage in cloth trade that other English regions could not penetrate. English cloths came to be shipped almost exclusively to Antwerp, and from there to their ultimate destinations in various parts of Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 6. During the fifteenth century, the focus of the Company of Adventurers was abroad; that’s where its offices were and the continent and its ups and downs, conflicts and opportunities, captured the interest of these merchant adventurers.
Innovation and entrepreneurship were suppressed and restricted to a very few elites that had successfully accessed their corporate oligarchy in guilds, which itself than seized ahold of City/town governance, and accessed national policy-making through their use of structures like the guilds, obtaining local or royal offices, acquiring concessions, and, in overseas trade, incorporating joint stock great merchant trading companies with monopolist trade charters from the Crown. The system that emerged exhibited an overpowering tendency to create a network of internal oligarchies within each corporate and public structure involved in both policy and in its implementation. Mired deep within the still traditional and aristocratic elite social structure saturated with inequality that dominated most every feature of the English Tudor policy system, England by 1550 needed and wanted to compete, produce and grow, but simply could not easily rise above its clogged policy system to achieve some sort of economic break out,.
Closed policy-elite stagnation ensued and the issue of the time was how to break into the policy process and access effectively the decision-makers that allowed for change. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Crown was able to siphon off what it viewed as its share of the profits generated to support its priorities and lifestyle, Through its definition of partnership, its monopolistic charters regulated but also defined and legitimized the policy making and implementation of those it chose to support. Robert Ashton in some frustration is forced conceded that the process, lacking a strong Parliament in particular, “ an impecunious government can perhaps hardly be blamed if it also saw in the licensing system a means whereby it might kill the economic and fiscal birds with the same stone” [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 18
Some merchants, however decided that opportunity lie in expanding overseas trade to the four corners of the globe, particularly the Far East and the East Indies. And so in the middle 1550’s England started its oversea commercial trade pivot. With the power emanating from their privileged monopolies London-based cloth merchants pleaded their case to the central royal government in residence at London. At the point when growth in the cloth trade stagnated during the decade of the 1550’s the impulse of those desiring to trade in untouched markets directly affected the course of overseas trade and foreign commerce. New Adventurers were drawn to action. While not abandoning their memberships or relations with the powerful Merchant Adventurers, they copied her structure and centralized, hierarchical leadership derived from the Company of Merchant Adventurers and incorporated the first of the major “regulated” joint stock trading companies to be formed during this the second half of the sixteenth century.
While the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which still included by far the greatest number of the City’s wealthiest merchants provided relatively little investment support “to the network of new, growing and dynamic overseas trading companies, “becoming even more obsessively focused on their short-route cloth trade with northern Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 21-3. While the Merchant Adventurers trade was thus an increasingly unitary one [cloth export to northern Europe], and separated from the others [expanded goods and import into new markets] the southern and eastern trades [the latter] experienced an increasingly intertwined growth, motivated by the same interlocking group of merchants with common commercial goals” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 15-17.
In essence a new group of trading merchants had spun off from the Merchant Adventurers [the Muscovy or Russia Company], and the latter pushed into trading with the Spanish, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey–forming the Levant Company in 1592. Our soon to be friend, Sir Thomas Smythe was a major leader in the latter set of trading companies.
In many ways, especially social, the Company elites transformed London into a Company town, Company members and officeholders transformed their elites into an English elite quite different from the dominant landed agricultural-manor-based aristocracy; the Company was a merchant elite, an urban commercial one that concentrated in the mega city that London had become. Having said that, however, company elites often chose to involve themselves in London politics and to secure elective office, alderman, and the Lord Mayor. Their primary interest, aside from securing what benefit they could from London politics, was to access and cement an alliance with the Crown and the Sovereign. Their wealth made loans to the state possible, and their experience offered advice and middlemen for the sovereign to supplement his initiatives and priorities abroad.
As a prominent and affluent element in London’s governance of the capital city they could offer considerable resources and advantage to the cash-starved monarchy. In the Tudor period they gained access to court politics and acquired the sovereign’s favor at least to the extent the Queen saw them as a useful ally in domestic finance and foreign affairs, an ally that brought stability and critical resources. With London England’s mega city and the Crown as allies the Company’s members and core oligarchy became as close to the commercial established as England possessed at that time.
Their narrow view of such trade, however, was not encouraging or facilitative for a more expanded notion of overseas trade, and, as we shall see made London somewhat more vulnerable to political instability particularly when the cloth/wool trade was in some difficulty or in lean years when exports declined due to war or market issues. In such times when the gilds and cloth/wool companies reduced their workforce or were not hiring workers the economic refugees from the countryside looking for employment easily visible groupings of restive and sometimes volatile underclass raised anxiety of more affluent and secure Londoners, as their neighborhoods and substandard housing could not easily be ignored or bypassed.
While not reaching the point of opposition to the Company of Merchants of the establishment of this era, they saw potential in copying the Company of Merchant Adventurers methods and organizations. When an opportunity opened up in the 1550’s the more adventurous, under the leadership of John Cabot’s son, Samuel broke the ice by creating a new merchant trading company (Muscovy) around a new trading elite that sought opportunities, mostly in China and Japan, following the Portuguese and Spanish leads.
The 1550 pivot seemingly threatened to be a pivot in overseas trade away from the Company of Adventurers, but was not regarded so in that period. It was more a wave of interest in overseas trade that was perceived as an economic opportunity that should be seized. Led by a generational change in English entrepreneurs, and sons of the establishment that were willing to carpe diem. Since they did not threaten the interests of the establishment, but indeed offered them prospects that stabilized England’s tensions and offered prosperity to the rising population and growing urban centers.
As London became king of the wool export trade, it compelled England’s outer ports to devise their own path. England’s post 1550’s overseas pivot followed a bimodal development pattern: London and the Outer Ports. The rivalry and bitter competition played a notable role in England’s invasion of Ireland, and global discovery and exploration. London’s approach to overseas trade, the trading factory, and the great merchant trading companies differed radically from that used in the Outer Ports. We will discuss that in more detail below.
Equally, important, London’s organizational vehicle, the joint stock Company of Merchant Adventurers became the model, the corporate form that dominated England’s overseas trade and commerce, and colonization. In that the Tudor’s, for reasons to be soon discussed, delegated much of overseas commercial trade to private corporations the joint stock corporation’s strength, the ability to attract private investors in a manner that transcending individual companies and wealthy merchants it proved to most in that time period as the most promising corporate structure suitable to the task.
That form of business organization demonstrated an ability to achieve dominance over the domestic cloth industry. Its entry into partnership with the sovereign and the English state in its overseas export venture was made possible by a sovereign grant of monopoly to that corporation in the industry export to northern Europe. To the merchants on the inside, however, its attractiveness included a flexibility in its governance structures that centralized corporate authority into a few largest investors of the corporation–offering to them security in an investment most risky.
What made the joint stock merchant trading company seemingly effective in their view was it oligarchic and restricted membership created wealth that could be reinvested in more expeditions and trade. By the late 1500’s the joint stock corporation, not unlike a Russian doll, proved amenable to superimposing a hierarchy of internal oligarchies, that centralized its governance in a few, very few investor who were converted in to a corporate governance by family dynasties. Later on, we shall focus on this issue, but for now the change in joint stock governance over the last half century came at the increasingly noted expense of fostering jealously and frustration of those who wanted in on this opportunity.
The point of controversy was on their “monopoly” which closed their access and prevented others from participating and sharing in its wealth creation. Their perception was they lacked the political and policy making power to do so. The point of this is the dominant corporate structure of English overseas trade and commerce, had entered into the seventeenth century with what proved to be a fundamental flaw–a flaw so serious the structure would be unable to enter effectively into the new policy area du jour: colonization.
How the partnership with the state and sovereign was affected by the union of the joint stock corporation and the royal monopoly and grants or, the crown, privilege. Unable to form their own great merchant trading company, the Outer Ports turned to privateering, the development of Irish plantations, and after the 1580’s, leadership in the discovery and navigation of North America and the West Indies.
3. Unbalanced Urbanization: London as a Mega City, Marginalization of Outer Ports
London in 1500 had about 50,000 residents. Estimates of its 1400 population, the low point in the Plague era, were about 40,000-50,000, down from an estimated 1300 population between 80,000 and 100,000. By 1550 estimates indicated London grew dramatically after 1500 (a range of 60 to 120%): 80,000 to 120,000. In 1600 London’s population doubled to 200,000, and it doubled again to 400,000 by 1650. From 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 by 1600 means a 400% increase over the century discussed in this module. London’s population growth did not stop; in 1700 it increased to about 500,000, and in 1750, 700,000. The 1801 census recorded over one million. Whether or not these are ballpark figures, this is a serious increase in population–which in its early years was as unsettling as comforting.
[999] Alan Taylor cites that “During the sixteenth and early seventeenth the rural people suffered increasing displacement and unemployment as their aristocratic landlords adopted a program known as enclosure …. Probably about half the rural peasantry lost their lands between 1530 and 1630. … The new poor gravitated from the rural villages to the market towns and seaport cities, especially London, which grew from 120,000 people in 1550 to 200,000 in 1600, and 375,000 in 1650. A sprawling and frightening metropolis, London became notorious for filth, poverty, plagues, fires, crime, and executions. A city of extremes, London also hosted in expanding commerce manifest on the riverside docks, as well as displays of aristocratic splendor and power at the royal court. The growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed reduced the wages of that employers had to pay. The growing population also bid up the costs of food and housing, depressing the already bleak living conditions of the poor (pp. 121-2 [999]
This explosion was not matched by any other English city. For all practical purposes population growth excluding London were minimal. In England it seemed all roads led to London. How did this compare to other European mercantile capital cities? Paris, Europe’s largest city of the time, had about 150,000 to 250,000 residents in 1500; it is estimated to have grown to 275 to 350,000 by 1600. France, however, was much larger than England: estimated to be 14 to 16 million in 1500, and18 to 20 million by 1660. England, on the other hand, estimated at 4 to 5 million in 1500, and 4 to 5 million in 1660. Despite Paris’s initial lead,\
London’s growth rate, probably tripled to quadrupled its population from 1500 to 1600, and England’s non-London population essentially stagnant. I am reluctant to push these AI estimates beyond the obvious; London clearly became England’s dominant population center. This incredible London growth, given England’s rather static growth, supports our belief that England’s initial population explosion translated into a London explosion that turned it into a rapid growing “mega city”.
There are several reasons London did so well relative to the other regional centers of the country; one important driver was the growth of its wool and cloth cluster, which by 1500 was already exporting to northern Europe. If one wanted a job in England, London’s only major national manufacturing cluster was all she had to offer. Unfortunately, the cluster was pockmarked by its ebbs and flows in sales and employment and simply was not able to handle population growth of this magnitude. Such consistent rapid growth had its fair share of negative consequences.
Excepting the export of English raw cloth and wool to northern Europe, English overseas trade and import was underdeveloped when the global overseas pivot commenced in the 1500’s. English elites recognized that overseas trade and commerce was the best and most effective strategy to grow the economy and provide prosperity and innovation that would create jobs for an increasing population. To understand the dynamics of change in play, I briefly describe several English demographic and policy-relevant factors that played observable roles in the Virginia Company advocacy and design. By no means comprehensive or inclusive of the period, my presentation stresses relevant aspects of each as they affected the design, incorporation, and implementation of the Virginia Company and its mission to colonize North America. With little to no thought given to the change in its mission, to establish North American colonies, the changes which today we might call “the democratization of capital for overseas investment”, a new investor base was deemed eligible to purchase ownership shares in the Company
London developed into England’s most visible example of her vastly unequal distribution of wealth, i.e. inequality. It seems that, sooner or later, England’s manor refugees wound up in London, creating large concentrations of poor and the underclass. Obviously, as England’s capital city, London and its suburbs were home base for English elites, London’s concentrated underclass was hard for them to ignore. The impression upper English elites took away was their understandable fear that underclass volatility that constituted a threat both to their safety and England’s stability; associated with that was the perceived link with crime. None of this was lost on English royalty of the period: from Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth I and then the new Stuart King James I all it took to realize these threats was a ride through their capital city.
Periodic anomic events sprinkled through the sixteenth century serving as a consistent reminder that England was truly in a period of transition, and unless its economy could finance a path out for these distressed areas and their residents, with jobs for instance, and unless that economy could satisfy increasing consumption and housing needs, there was trouble ahead. More to the point, public safety meant job creation and quality of life. A quick review of London’s riots reveal that four major London-based mass anomic riots occurred during the sixteenth century: the Evil May Day of 1517 (which we will shortly use as an example), a series of smaller anti foreigner “they are stealing our jobs and taking bread from our mouths” riots and murders that constantly occurred from 1560 until the Apprentice riots of the 1590’s, and the 1592 Southwark riot. We could also mention the 1601 Essex coup which generated anomic London reaction that directly threaten Elizabeth. Job creation or the availability of jobs struck visible interest from London’s residents as well as from its elites.
London’s condition provided motivation for English elites that economic growth should receive high priority and that their interest in finding relief from England’s social disruption was therefore timely. From our policy-making perspective this visible day-to-day witnessing of the social change explains a great deal why Crown policy elites, and parliamentarians coming to London placed economic development high on their agenda, and magnified the inequities, inefficiency, and perceived corruption of the Tudor policy system. The East India and Virginia Companies were a prime beneficiary of this timely economic development background crisis.
As always, employment was the preferred solution. The ebbs and flows of England’s only major economic manufacturing cluster, wool and cloth, was the City’s chief employer. By 1550 it was obvious that it alone could not provided consistent and sufficient jobs and this meant economic development, job creation by developing new sectoral clusters led to the equally obvious need to make products to satisfy domestic consumption and employment, while exporting those which enjoyed overseas market success. Overseas trade and commerce as a job generator, and the best candidate to raise the poor’s standard of living, and also to satisfying consumer demand or a growing population. If Americans in particular are looking for core motivation for their colonization and for the Virginia Company, these are the key underlying needs hoped for–not simple profits for its investors.
Only London could be ranked with the great continental cities. Its growth had outstripped even the doubling of [England’s] population. By the beginning of the seventeenth century [1600] it contained more than a quarter of a million people, and by the end nearly a half million, most of them poor migrants who had flocked to the capital in search of work or charity. London was the center of government, overseas trade and finance, and of fashion, taste and culture. It was ruled by a merchant oligarchy whose wealth increased tremendously over the course of the century as international trade expanded ….
Outside of London, however, the story was quite different. English 1600’s non-London urban demography consisted of “About 800 small market towns of several hundred inhabitants … and in contrast to most of Western Europe, there were few large urban areas. Norwich and Bristol were the biggest provincial cities with populations around 15,000. Exeter, York, and Newcastle were important regional centers though they each had populations about 10,000 inhabitants. [England] … was predominantly rural, with as much as 85% of its people living on the lands [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-early-Stuarts-and-the-Commonwealth