Attacks on Enemy Exports, Not Imports

With this encouragement of captures for their own sake, however, there was undoubtedly coupled a desire to cut down the enemy's trade. But this desire, too, has to be conceived in a strictly mercantilist spirit. To inflict military injury on the enemy, either directly or indirectly, was not—at least not to any notable extent—the object of the interference with his trade. On the contrary, the primary object was that of waging commercial war against him, i.e., of depriving him of a source of gain, or, in other words, beating him off the field; and, parallel with this, it was aimed to extend a country's own trade—which could be done, and was constantly attempted, at the expense, not only of the enemy country, but also of neutral countries. This brought it about that the establishment of a blockade dealt the latter a much harder blow than is the case at the present time. The intention was to prevent them from receiving any profit either from the enemy country or from other countries, and so far as possible to expel them, as well as the enemy, from sources of gain which had previously been open to them. It is perhaps not altogether clear whether considerations of this nature influenced some of the measures of the recent blockade. But however that may be, it is true that such a policy has no connexion whatsoever with the blockade of the enemy as such, but may be pursued, as actually happened a hundred years ago, purely as an end in itself. The objection to the proposition that 'free ships make free goods' was rooted in this object much more than in the inclination to encourage captures for their own sake; for as goods belonging to subjects of enemy countries were liable to seizure on neutral vessels, the neutrals were prevented from taking over the traffic which the enemy himself had been able to carry on before he was driven from the sea, as the British historian Lecky has well observed. And this was still more the case with the fourth of the great disputed questions concerning the law of war at sea, namely, that of commerce nouveau, or, in British terminology, the rule of 1756, the wording of which, as elaborated by British jurists, was that 'a neutral has no right to deliver a belligerent from the pressure of his enemy's hostilities, by trading with his colonies in time of war in a way that was prohibited in time of peace.' This principle prevented the neutrals from pushing their way either into the enemy's coasting trade or—and this was more important—into what might be regarded as a special form of coasting trade, namely, trade with the enemy's colonies. In time of peace both of these were jealously guarded preserves of the trade and navigation of the home country; but in time of war the belligerent power that was debarred from the sea willingly turned them over to neutrals with the double object of maintaining the traffic and of preventing it from falling into the hands of the enemy.

The characteristic difference between the policy of that time and the policy of to-day is that, when the masters of the sea a century ago tried to prevent neutrals from carrying on a certain kind of trade, their object was not to kill that trade altogether, as is the case nowadays, but to seize it for themselves. It is therefore indisputable, as the neutrals complained and as Stephen himself admits, that British vessels were allowed to trade with France, while neutral vessels were overhauled and seized. In full accord with this and with mercantilist trade policy, it was sought first and foremost to cut off all kinds of exports from the enemy to the neutrals, especially if they competed with those of the home country. In complete contrast with the efforts of the recent war, the endeavours of that time were aimed, on the one side, at getting rid of the excess of export goods in the home country and, on the other side, at preventing the enemy from selling his products. This was in part due to the fact that apprehensions were always felt of low prices on these goods in the home country and also of high prices in the enemy country. On the one side, therefore, the whole of Stephen's account is permeated by anxiety lest the price of British colonial goods should decline as a result of their being kept out of the continental markets by French and Spanish colonial goods. In previous wars, according to his view, the British home market, 'relieved by a copious exportation from temporary repletions,' gave them (the colonies), 'in its large and ever-advancing prices, some indemnity for the evils of the war,' while at that time, according to his statements, the prices were sinking on the Continent in consequence of the importation of goods from the enemy's colonies. On the other hand, he is dominated by dislike of the idea that the same neutral trade should provide access to America of the textile and iron goods of the Continent in competition with those of Great Britain herself. What troubled him, therefore, was not that the Continent should get colonial goods, but that it should get them from the enemy colonies, which, like the mother country itself, should be cut off from exports, he thought, but not from imports.

Finally, therefore, all this implies that no cutting-off of imports to the enemy could come into the line of the policy pursued. It denotes merely an effort to place those imports under the control of the naval power itself, so that the country might thereby give preference, so far as possible, to its own products and those of its colonies, and also so that it might take over trade and navigation with the enemy mainland. The latter consideration, however, took a secondary place, as Great Britain often had need of neutral shipping to supplement her own overworked mercantile marine; and it is especially noteworthy that the neutrals' supply of the enemy's (e.g., the French) market with the belligerent's (e.g., Britain's) own products was an all but self-evident matter, against which there was really no objection to raise from a British point of view. Manifestly, such a blockade policy diverged fundamentally from that of the recent World War.

The only substantial exception to this general tendency—and even that a very partial one—concerned import goods of purely military importance, that is too say, military supplies, naval stores, and sometimes, at least in principle, foodstuffs for the enemy's fighting forces on land and sea. These items were emphasized by Pitt, for instance, in the great speech which he delivered before the House of Commons on February 2, 1801, immediately before his retirement, in defence of the policy of maritime blockade that he had introduced. In the actual execution of the policy, however, it is difficult to find any marked traces of this; and, significantly enough, it was coolly stated in Parliament, in 1812, that the clothing of the French army came from Yorkshire, and that 'not only the accoutrements, but the ornaments of Marshal Soult and his army' came from Birmingham. The reservation was made, however, that they had not been ordered directly by the French government!

It may be remarked in passing that Edward III, four and a half centuries earlier, had already given licences for the exportation of corn to the enemy, though the ruling thought at that time was that of procuring revenue for the Crown.