ABSTRACT
The author of ‘The Libel of English Policy’, a fifteenth-century poem which has been called one of the earliest tracts on commerce in the English language, pressed upon his readers the desirability of exploiting the geographical situation of their country to levy a toll on the trade of other countries passing through the ‘narrow seas’, guarded by Dover and Calais, then in English hands. By the middle of the seventeenth century trade had become a little more civilized and commercial writers had different ideas as to how to derive profit from an island position. We should, they said, endeavour to create a large entrepdt trade. Ships from the north of Europe could unload their cargoes at London, Dover, and other convenient ports whence they would be re-shipped to the south and to the New World; similarly goods from the south for the north would be unloaded and reshipped in English harbours. The establishment of these centres of exchange would be made easy by the fact that differing kinds of commodities and of ships were found in the two areas separated by the English Channel. The advantages of creating and encouraging an entrepdt trade were obvious for English shipping, warehouses, and customs revenues. These arguments occurred all the more simply to independent economic thinkers because they had before them a first-class example of how such a scheme could operate in their neighbours’ country across the North Sea. The United Provinces had ever since the foundation of the Dutch republic derived a large part of their national income from shipping, fishing, warehousing, international finance, and the other constituent factors in a world-centre of commerce and trade. Peter de la Court, whose treatise on The State of Holland was written about 1662, but not-translated into English until forty years later, attributed the origin of the Dutch entrepdt system mainly to the existence of special duties on aliens in England which had discouraged Protestant merchants from settling there and had driven them to Amsterdam, where equal taxes, religious toleration, and a favourable geographical situation made the capital of Holland the most prosperous city in Europe. 1 Modern historians confirm and enlarge de la Court's description of the Dutch achievement. The merchant statesmen of Amsterdam with their watchword of free trade, with low duties, enabled their city to outstrip by the time of Cromwell the older entrepdts of Antwerp and Hamburg. 2
