ABSTRACT
Professor Jacob Viner certainly is right in observing that to mercantilism as well as to post-mercantilism, both power and wealth were ultimate ends. Colonies would be expected to fulfil a double function: they would diminish Great Britain’s dependence on foreign goods and they would produce commodities that would swell the volume of English exports. That set of policies which shaped the relations between Great Britain and her colonial empire, from its birth until the American War of Independence, is usually referred to as the “Old Colonial System.” Community of interest against the aggressor existed only temporarily among a certain number of states which combined against the most powerful and voracious of their kind. A system of the colonial balance of power emerged which not only became part of the European balance of power, but multiplied the causes of conflicts and rendered them more acrimonious than before.
