ABSTRACT
The trade restrictions imposed on British colonial commerce by the Navigation Acts of 1660, 1663, 1673, and 1696, affected the export trade of the Northern Colonies and of the English sugar islands in opposite ways. These laws directed that the chief products of the West Indies should be carried in fixed channels whereby British subjects could share in the monopoly of their production. Some reflection on the comparative extent, both in area and population, of the British colonies in the temperate and tropical zones impresses one with the inequality of these regions as complementary trade areas. The chapter attempts to trace down to 1730 the growth and character of trade between British North America and the foreign sugar settlements and the development of opinion concerning it. The returns from the foreign settlements were, in the great majority of cases, recorded as entered from Barbadoes or some other British island.
