How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640

David Rollison

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511807541.009

6 - How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Rollison

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David Rollison: Affiliation:
University of Sydney

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Trade was never esteemed an affair of state until the (seventeenth) century…There is scarcely any ancient writer on politics who has made mention of it.

Since the time of Henry VIII the wealth and revenue of the country have been continually advancing, and, in the course of their progress, their pace seems rather to have gradually accelerated than retarded. They seem not only to have been going on, but to have been going on faster and faster.

The capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.

The propensity of industrial districts for resistance, riot and rebellion

Supporting the tendency for words to spread between localities, districts and regions, fourteenth-century England was a far more commercial and industrial society than it had been in the past, and remained so through the greater and lesser mortality crises with which that century was littered. Commerce means trafike, in commodities, people, and ideas. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cloth industry probably did as much to transform the landscape and generate and routinize lines of communications as any other agency. Clothworking districts were always prominent in contemporary accounts of disorder, resistance and rebellion. Nineteen years after the earthquake of 1381, Henry IV's officials had difficulty collecting taxes in cloth-making districts: violence broke out at Dartmouth, Bristol (where a mob that included large numbers of women drove off the collectors), and at Williton and Kentsford in Somerset. At Frome an order was issued confiscating all pikes, sticks with iron heads like lances, and axes.

Type: Chapter
Information: A Commonwealth of the People
Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649
, pp. 301 - 338

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807541.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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