ABSTRACT
THE greater part of William Braund's life was spent in the Portugal trade; it is to his activities there that we therefore turn first. The English trade with Portugal held a singular place in the practice and theory of English foreign trade for the first sixty years of the eighteenth century. It satisfied every requirement of mercantile economic theory. England exported to Portugal large quantities of her greatest products, woollens and worsteds, cloths, long ells, serges, tammies, and particularly' our very great article of long bays'. 1 She shipped them almost entirely in her own bottoms, for Portuguese shipping was little developed in European waters. They were sent from the merchants in England to their correspondents, also English, in the factory at Lisbon; the latter distributed them to the Portuguese retailers or merchants, who tapped in their turn a still larger market, that of Spain or the Portuguese colony of Brazil. In part retutn England took port, an import which the strictest mercantile theorist could not oppose since it competed only with the clarets and burgundies of the' hereditary enemy' France. Moreover, since the port, and other less valuable exports, failed altogether to make up Portugal's balance of trade, she was forced, though against all her own laws, to make up that balance by the export of the gold bullion she derived from the mines of Brazil. This fact in itself was enough to make a deep impression on contemporary opinion, which remained, for all the caustic criticisms levelled at the bullionist policies of Spain and Portugal, strictly bullionist. 'Gold in handling will stick to the Fingers like Meal,' ~ the Ministry was told in 1766 by Joseph Salvador, one of the shrewdest financiers of the time.
