ABSTRACT
This chapter shows economic theory proved an effective weapon in the hands of the anti-protectionists. The famous free-trade petition of the London merchants in 1820 heralded a change in Britain’s commercial policy toward her colonies as well as toward the rest of the world. Foreign ships were allowed to carry colonial produce anywhere provided, again, that the country whose flag the vessel carried, granted reciprocity of treatment to Britain. The differential duties on timber, favouring Canadian over Baltic supplies, owed their origin to the exigencies of the Napoleonic wars that had severed Great Britain temporarily from the Baltic source of supply. The supporters of the existing system also argued that it was the duty of the mother country to be mindful of the vested interests of the colonists engaged in the timber business. Anti-protectionists, opposed to the imperial system of tariff preferences, belonged to the general free-trade movement.
