ABSTRACT
During the first three hundred years of its history, the trade in printed books in Britain was both centralised and organised. This situation was not unique to the book trade. All economic activities were subject to state control, either directly or, more often, through trade gilds and similar bodies. As formal control broke down in the seventeenth century, the protectionist and mercantilist policies developed under the early Stuarts and essentially followed by all governments until very late in the eighteenth century maintained the same tradition. The evolution of the theory and practice of free trade, which was to be the dominant economic theory of Victorian Britain, represented a profound change in the organisation both of the economy as a whole and of trading practices within it. The book trade was not exempt from this change of attitude, and as a consequence its formal organisation in the nineteenth century was far less rigid than it had been previously.
