Colonial Trade

The colonial trade, which at that time was conducted in all countries on the lines of the Old Colonial System, deserves special attention in this connexion. The fundamental idea of that system was that the mother country and the colonies should constitute an economic whole, with a strict division of labour between them, so that the mother country alone supplied the colonies with the industrial products and other things they needed, and in exchange received alone, or practically alone, the raw materials, precious metals, foodstuffs, and stimulants that the colonies produced, all with national vessels and through national merchants. In this case, therefore, not only were exports to the colonies regarded as economically profitable to the mother country, but the same also held good of imports from the colonies. Accordingly, it was considered a great triumph if a country succeeded, by means of the maritime blockade, in conveying the products of enemy colonies also to its own shores, and at the same time in preventing those products from competing with the products of their own colonies on the mainland of Europe. A great many, not to say the majority, of the controversies that arose in those days regarding the matter of the commercial blockade, especially in Great Britain and America, turned precisely on the question of colonial trade, which also quantitatively played a surprisingly great part in the total commercial intercourse of the sea-trading countries, especially through the re-exportation of colonial goods that arose out of it. Thus, according to the so-called 'official values' in the statistics of trade, the British exports of foreign goods (which means substantially colonial goods) rose uninterruptedly in the course of the revolutionary wars from 21 per cent. of the total in 1792 to 36¼ per cent. in 1800. Likewise, the French re-exportation to Europe of goods from the West Indies immediately before the Revolution was greater than the whole of French exportation of domestic staple products of the textile and liquor industries. On the other hand, the transit trade of the United States in French, Spanish, and British West Indian products increased prodigiously during the same period, representing in 1806 a value of no less than $60,000,000, or one and a half times the value of the exports of the domestic goods of the United States.