John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695-1698

Abstract

O N June 26, i696, there was held in a room in the rambling royal palace of Whitehall at Westminster, the first meeting of Majesty's Commissioners for promoting the Trade of this Kingdom, and for inspecting and improving His Plantations in America and elsewhere. We must imagine ten Stuart noblemen and gentlemen sitting in their silken knee breeches in front of pewter sandboxes and goose quill pens, listening to their commission being read. No doubt it was an interesting meeting, for the men who mingled in the offices of government in that generation were interesting themselves. Charles Montagu was there, the clever and dissolute Chancellor of the Exchequer; so was John Somers, Lord Keeper, ablest of all the great political lawyers-Whiggery in person. Both these men were authors and patrons of authors, and both in their time were presidents of the Royal Society. Further down the table sat Abraham Hill, treasurer of that distinguished and influential body, and John Locke, F.R.S., the Whig philosopher himself. This was the beginning of the old Board of Trade, the architect and instrument of the disastrous Old Colonial System. It went on sitting year in, year out, until I766, when catastrophe was about to fall on the first British Empire, and finally expired in the anxious twilight of the year I782. Everything which has to do with the United States in the era before the Revolution, her Old Testament times, has a certain interest for us. But when we think of the American colonies, it is not only the settlers themselves we must have in mind, but the families from which they came, and all the other Englishmen who created the enterprise and energy and wealth which made colonization possible. If these abundant resources had not gone to America, they would have been spent and enjoyed at home: the sacrifice fell, if unequally, on the whole population. It is not easy to determine who decided that this sacrifice should be made. It was done by many people, unaware in the main of what they were doing, but the most important of them, undoubtedly, were the King and his ministers.

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