ABSTRACT
The monopolies of the seventeenth century have been generally condemned by almost all the economic writers who from the time of David Hume to the present day have dealt with them. In the days of the monopoly the profits of the mine owners and smelters were so regulated by the monopolists, that they were insufficient to attract anyone to devote himself to such a trade. In England the system of monopolies was from the beginning the expression of a definite and independent royal policy, pursued with ever-growing eagerness in spite of statutory opposition from the days of Queen Elizabeth, and in a few decades so successfully developed that in almost every important trade national monopolies arose. The difference between capitalist organisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as regards liberty of trade, comes out very clearly in the history of industrial monopoly in England.
