Flushed by the military and diplomatic successes of the 1750s, British politicians envisaged great things of their empire during the 1760s. Spanning the world, it seemed to offer endless possibilities of profit. Colonial products could meet British needs; colonial consumers could buy British goods; and colonial settlers could pay British taxes. In the Americas, thought the prominent English politician Lord Rockingham, Britain had a veritable “revenue mine.” Canada occupied an important place in this scheme of things. Its fish and furs would yield great wealth. Whale oil for lighting, whalebone for corsets, and iron from the forge at Saint-Maurice would contribute to the trade of empire. Hemp and flax grown along the St. Lawrence would reduce British dependence on foreign countries for those commodities. And wood from Canadian forests would supply the West Indies. In addition, as Lord Shelburne of the Board of Trade happily pointed out, the Peace of 1763 had given Britain the opportunity to provide “the clothing of many Indian nations, besides
70,000 Acadians [he meant French Canadians], which in so cold a climate must annually consume full ?200,000 value of British manufactures.”
This grand mercantilist scheme, founded on the belief that self-sufficiency was the cornerstone of empire and designed according to regulations that gave a monopoly of imperial trade to British merchants, was severely shaken by the American Revolution. Recognizing the large contribution that the Thirteen Colonies had made to the trade of empire, Shelburne feared that with their loss “The Sun of England’s glory... [had] set forever.” The Scottish economist Adam Smith disagreed. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, challenged the very precepts of restriction and monopoly on which the prevailing views of empire depended. But Smith’s endorsement of free trade among nations was not enough to set aside familiar doctrines. With the support of commercial men whose fortunes had been built under the old system, British politicians sought to make the empire that remained after 1783 as self-contained as its predecessor. The British North American colonies would replace New England, New York, and Pennsylvania as suppliers of the West Indies; naval stores—especially hemp for rope and white pine for masts—would come from New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence rather than from Maine and Massachusetts. Growing numbers of British North Americans would consume British manufactured goods, and foreign ships and merchants would be excluded from colonial ports.
This commercial edifice was easier to design than to build. British North America could not feed itself let alone supply the West Indies. By necessity, American grain, livestock, and lumber were allowed into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and the best policy-makers could do was limit the trade to British vessels. Similarly, American naval stores, lumber, livestock, flour, and grain were allowed into the British West Indies, and rum, sugar, molasses, coffee, and other commodities from those islands could be shipped—in British vessels—to the United States. Even this level of compromise was not without benefit to the northern colonies, however. Late in the eighteenth century, when West Indian ports were opened to American vessels, distressed Nova Scotian officials saw their “Capital stock.. .wasting,... [their] merchants removing as fast as they... [could] and... [their] interests suffering in every point....” Smuggling opened another crack in the dike of the Empire’s self-sufficiency. American fishermen, permitted to dry their catch on the long, indented coasts of Nova Scotia, Labrador, and the Magdalen Islands, conducted a lively illicit trade in such commodities as tea, rum, sugar, and wine. According to one aggrieved Nova Scotian merchant, there was scarcely a house without “an American package” in 1787. Twenty years later the Governor of Newfoundland estimated that 90 per cent of the molasses consumed in his colony came illegally from the French West Indies via the United States. Early in the nineteenth century this dark trade was helped along by Nova Scotian gypsum, which was exchanged for contraband in increasing quantities in the boundary waters among the islands of Passamaquoddy Bay. Officials attempted to “shut the [American] Rascalls” off the coast, but they were hamstrung by circumstances and by the readiness of contraband traders to consider themselves “one day British subjects and the next citizens of the United States, as it best suits their interests.” In England, the difficulties of maintaining a closed, self-sufficient Empire were becoming clearer. A rising population and increasing urbanization had raised doubts About the country’s ability to feed itself. After 1795 a succession of bad harvests had driven up the price of bread. Famine seemed imminent unless grain could be acquired from abroad. But the colonies were not up to the task of producing it in sufficient quantity. Flarvests, and thus prices, fluctuated wildly, and the high costs of transatlantic transportation generally offset the tariff advantages that the British gave to colonial grain.
Still, events conspired to maintain Britain’s commitment to an essentially closed trading system. In 1803, the renewal of war between Britain and France led each side to blockade certain European ports. When American ships bound for Europe were seized by the British, President Thomas Jefferson sealed his country’s harbours. This immediately eliminated the competition that had all but excluded British North American vessels from Caribbean harbours. With the schooners and the sledges of American dissidents carrying flour, potash, and other goods northward to fill the holds of British North American ships, merchants had few difficulties assembling cargoes. Their task was made even easier by the creation of a handful of British North American “Eree Ports”—where British and American vessels could trade in certain goods—and business prospered in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Until these arrangements broke down in the early 1820s, the Maritime provinces reaped the economic benefits of their pivotal role in Atlantic commerce.
At the same time, Napoleon’s European blockade seriously impeded the enormous trade in northern European (Baltic) wood on which Britain’s expanding economy depended. Soaring prices quickly offset the high cost of shipping bulky timber across the Atlantic. Wood shipments from British North America increased a thousand-fold in five years after 1804. This was clearly a “hot-house” trade, called into existence by special circumstances. Not surprisingly, those engaged in it sought security for their enterprise. When they were successful in winning a tariff preference that gave colonial producers a substantial advantage over their foreign competitors, British North American wood sold in a thoroughly protected market. The consequences for the colonies were immense. Erom the St. Lawrence and New Brunswick, from Pictou and Prince Edward Island, hundreds of vessels sailed with cargoes of timber. Expansion and prosperity defined the times.
In England, however, rising support for free trade soon raised a cloud on the horizon of colonial optimism. The timber duties were especially opprobrious to those who followed Adam Smith in supporting a laissez-faire trade policy, and in 1821 their opposition led to a reduction in the preference afforded colonial timber.
One of several maps of Upper Canada drawn—in this case on birchbark—by Elizabeth Simcoe (1766-1850), wife of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, and a talented amateur artist. Although several of these towns existed only in Colonel Simcoe’s plans, the sketch suggests his vision of Upper Canada as the “vestibule of commerce” between Great Britain and the American interior.
Through the 1830s, as free-trade ideas gained momentum, old arguments for the duties were reiterated with new zeal: commerce was the link that bound Britain and its colonies together; without the duty preference, the timber trade would fail and colonial exports would be reduced to a few furs; to abandon the duties would orphan devoted colonial children and hurt the mother country. Together, invocations of patriotism, the arguments of vested interest, and inertia prevailed. The duty preference was again extended to colonial wood and with it the leaky, creaking structure of mercantilism survived into the 1840s.
For the colonies this was something of a Pyrrhic victory. Continuing uncertainty about the fate of the timber duties greatly exaggerated the volatility of a trade that was already highly susceptible to normal business-cycle fluctuations. Through the 1820s and 1830s bust followed boom in New Brunswick (and to a lesser degree in Upper and Lower Canada) as British market swings, rumours of tariff changes, and
Colonel John Graves Simcoe. Simcoe (1752-1806) was Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor. “The most persistently energetic governor sent to British North America after the American Revolution, he had not only the most articulate faith in its imperial destiny but also the most sympathetic appreciation of the interests and aspirations of its inhabitants” (The Dictionary of Canadian Biography). Oil on ivory (undated) by unknown artist.
Actual adjustments affected the heavily dependent colonial economies. So large did the question of the preference loom in New Brunswick that in 1831, when news of the
Defeat of a proposal to reduce the duties reached St. Andrews after five months of apprehension, citizens offered rousing toasts to the British mps who had defended their interests and then engineered an elaborate celebration in the harbour. On the evening of St. George’s Day,
A Boat said to be Baltic built, was filled with a cargo of combustibles and... towed into the harbour, where she was moored. The Effigy of a distinguished supporter of the Baltic interests was suspended from the mast with a paper in his hand bearing the superscription “Baltic Timber Bill”—several pounds of gunpowder were concealed under his waist coat, and there was a large quantity in the boat. The combustibles were set fire to, and in due seasons, poor-was blown to atoms.
But no such fate stilled the free-trade cause in Britain. By mid-century, the colonial system that generations of British North Americans had considered “so eminently-prescribed by nature and society” as to be immutable had been dismantled. In retrospect it was less a coherent set of principles than a will-o’-the-wisp of piecemeal measures implemented to serve British interests. But such had been their effect on colonial economies and colonial lives that many feared their passing. From Montreal came a manifesto in favour of annexation to the United States, and to the alarm of local magistrates, the inhabitants of Chatham, New Brunswick, marched through the streets on July 4, 1849, firing pistols in the air and singing “Yankee Doodle.” In the end, however, the impact of the commercial revolution of the 1840s was less catastrophic than anticipated. After decades of sheltered growth, the colonies were sufficiently robust to stand alone.
World History
