ABSTRACT
Change derived from circumstances distinctive to England: the assumed right of freedom of trade in the general context of economic activity; and the exceptional status of representative rights, an efficient means of asserting such freedoms. This became manifest in the impositions dispute of 1610, when the merchant community combined with gentlemen MPs to deny the king’s right of prerogative customs dues, and demand that all such matters be subjected to parliamentary consent. This was not, as sometimes supposed, a surrogate defence of the right of consent to land taxes. MPs took that right for granted, and sought, specifically, to extend it to the customs dues. The merchant contribution to the campaign was also more direct and radical than historians have suggested. They were initiators in the ambition to displace the prerogative of impositions and establish the principle of freedom of trade, and local records show that they recognised the constitutional changes that this involved. In the reign of Charles I, the Commons adopted a strategy of withholding the customary grant of tonnage and poundage, until the king relinquished the power of impositions. Their insistence on this provoked the final breakdown of relations with the king in 1629.
