ABSTRACT
There is a general consensus among historians that England experienced a profound economic change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At the beginning of this period, England was an economic backwater, standing on the edge of the economic heartland centred in Italy, the Mediterranean, the Low Countries and Germany. A good barometer of this relative economic underdevelopment was its overseas trade, characterized by the domination of a single export – cloth – which accounted for almost 80 per cent of England’s total exports in 1565. The revenue from this single export was then expended on a long list of imports. Besides raw materials and luxury consumables such as wines and spices, many basic industrial items also came from abroad, from goods like crude iron, battery, nails, needles, pins, knives, paper, soap, glass, and mirrors to ‘frivolities’ such as tennis balls and children’s dolls, and yards of sumptuous Italian luxury textiles such as velvets, silks, satins and taffetas.1 Early modern England thus suffered from two economic problems: the love of foreign luxuries, and the lack of native skills to satisfy its own wants. Yet this very state of underdevelopment became the backbone of English economic progress, as it generated stimuli for individual creativity and fostered the national craving to transcend its existing limited international role, in other words, cultivating the virtue of adversity.2 By the early seventeenth century notable industrial progress had been achieved. Reflecting on their industrial achievements in 1608, Londoners proudly proclaimed that while during Elizabeth’s reign ‘Englishmen were not so skilful in trades, to make all kind of wares … but now … the people [had] mightly increased both in number … and in all good skill, and [were] skilful of all kind and manner of trades.’3 At this date, John Stow also claimed that ‘the best and finest knives in the world are made in London … The Englishmen began to make all sorts of pins and at this day they excel all nations.4 Many other goods were also now made in England, including those which had previously been imported from abroad such as silks, gloves and hops.5
