Before the sixteenth century, England was much more nearly self-sufficient than during later centuries. The country as a whole depended little on other countries, and the local communities and landed estates had slight intercourse even with other parts of the country. Towns were small and widely scattered, trade was insignificant, wants and tastes were simple and crude, and most of the commodities used were produced on the farms and manors. The violence and confusion of the long period of conquest from the fifth to the eleventh century, and the turbulent and aggressive military organization of society under feudalism, involved a process of concentrating land ownership in a few powerful families, with the subjection of the masses of the people as servile workers on the land. Governmental institutions, whether associated with the crown, or with the church, or with feudalism, were dominated by the greater landlords, lay and clerical.

But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this agrarian society was undergoing transformation. Feudal landlordism was being undermined. The Black Death of the middle of the fourteenth century decimated the population and gave to the surviving laborers an economic bargaining power which the hostile, landlord-controlled government could not entirely counteract. This, combined with other factors, obscurer but perhaps more significant, enabled the servile workers to become wage laborers and in many cases free tenants and independent yeomen. The Hundred Years' War with France and the later civil wars, the Wars of the Roses, carried off, in fratricidal conflict, a large proportion of the feudal aristocracy. The strong Tudor monarchy at the end of the fifteenth century turned more and more from the older landed aristocracy and tapped sources of strength in a new aristocracy not exclusively agrarian and in the urban and commercial classes.

The second period in the history of English economic

society extends from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, and is marked by the rise of the mercantile classes. The trading interests came into prominence at the time of the disruption of the feudal aristocracy. New wants and more elaborate tastes were introduced by the Renaissance and by the enlarged contacts of Englishmen with the Continent. The simple processes of production connected with the medieval manor no longer sufficed to gratify the expanding wants and tastes. The age of discovery and exploration gave new and powerful impetus to commercial expansion. Henry VII and later rulers, in the development of a strong national government centering around the monarchy, were no longer able to depend on feudal revenues and feudal military and political services, and were increasingly dependent on a monetary income. A money economy supplanted the older feudal economy in the conduct of public affairs. The securing of money for the maintenance of hired armies and for the carrying on of the increasingly diversified and expensive functions of government became therefore a matter of utmost urgency. The landlords were wealthy, but their wealth was in fixed capital, and in the produce of their lands, and the most effective means of increasing their taxable money was by encouraging the exportation of their surplus. The revenues of the government came to be increasingly dependent on the fluid wealth brought into the country by means of mercantile enterprises and the semi-piratical activities of the sea rovers. In consequence, the rulers came to look with increasing favor on those who were connected with maritime activities.

But when imports were greater than exports, money was going out of the country to pay the “unfavorable” balance of trade. The policy of the government came, therefore, to be fixed upon the maintenance of an excess of exports over imports. Foreigners (Venetians, Flemings, the German Hansards) who had controlled English trade were by degrees ousted in favor of Englishmen. Commercial treaties were entered into from time to time, with the object of promoting English exports. Charters were granted to numerous companies of Englishmen, the Merchant Adventurers, the Baltic company, the Muscovy, Levant, East India, Virginia, Hudson Bay companies, and various others, with monopolistic trading rights and with extensive political and military powers, for trading with various regions of the Old World and for making settlements and developing markets in the New World. A long series of navigation acts, notably those of the middle of the seventeenth century, sought to check the Dutch and other rivals and to monopolize the commerce and resources of the overseas possessions. For the maintenance and enlargement of these possessions, which were acquired in the first instances more or less by accident, an imperialistic policy was by degrees developed and worked out largely in connection with the numerous wars in which England engaged. The outstanding feature of this policy of imperialism and expansion was the maintenance of the balance of power among Continental countries—a policy which enabled England to secure control of the choicest regions of the world and to develop them advantageously while her Continental rivals were consuming their energies and resources in the waging of devastating European conflicts. The imperial aim was to develop complementary economic relations between the home country and the colonies, by which the colonies were to furnish cheap raw materials not produced in England, and to buy from England more costly manufactured goods, thus increasing the "favorable” balance of trade.

The power of the mercantile classes was further augmented by greater mobility not only of their wealth but of their intelligence. Men of varied contacts, alert, resourceful, concentrated in towns where interchange of

.

ideas and pooling of interests and energies were relatively easy,—with such advantages, their influence in furnishing the dynamic forces and in determining the direction of progress, was out of all proportion to their numbers and their wealth.

These various tendencies and forces enabled the merchant princes to rival in power if not in social prestige the landed aristocracy of ancient lineage, and led in fact to an enlargement of the economic basis of aristocracy by the inclusion of mercantile wealth. Many of the more recently created members of the aristocracy had much in common with the classes connected immediately with trade, and the resulting alliance (an alliance out of which grew the Whig party) led to an increasing ascendancy of mercantile and imperial interests.

During the period of the rise of the mercantile classes, the manufacturers were petty in economic character, and were dominated by the merchants. Industrial capital was subordinate to commercial capital. The period since the eighteenth-century revolution in technique, by which industrial capital and the industrial classes were emancipated from mercantile domination, is the third of the major periods in the history of English economic society.

The above statement, it is to be observed, assumes a causal connection between the revolution in technique and the transition from the mercantile to the industrial era of economic society. And yet the complexity of causal relations provides in this as in most instances a perplexing and at the same time a fascinating problem of historical study. So intricate are the forces which determine human events, and so variable are the conditions under which the forces operate, that the laws of historical causation transcend the utmost reaches of knowledge yet attained by historians. The formulation of general laws of causation seems at present impossible; it is sufficiently difficult to fix upon the causes of a particular historical occurrence. We may ask the astronomer what brings about eclipses of the sun, or the meteorologist what natural forces are responsible for a storm, and the explanations appear to be definite and final. But if the historian is asked for the causes of any familiar historical phenomenon, as the rapid rise of new economic groups in England toward the end of the eighteenth century, his explanation will seem tentative and perhaps vague.

Although attainment of finality and completeness in the study of historical causation may never be possible, yet, in the case of the phenomenon mentioned,—the rise of new types of industrial society,—the problem is relatively simple. It is true that there were already in existence tendencies toward more highly organized activities in manufacturing as well as trade; and it has been assumed that the concentration of industrial capital and the regimentation of industrial labor somewhat as in the modern factory system would have come about independently of the introduction of machinery. It has been assumed that spinners (by way of illustration) would ultimately have been separated from their other employments, gathered together in large establishments, and set to work with spinning wheels under conditions not unlike those of the modern spinning factory. To this the reply may be made, by way of analogy, that if Napoleon had not assumed control in France during the later revolutionary period, probably some other commanding personality would have risen to power and directed events into substantially the same channels, because prevailing conditions were favorable. But this assumption cannot be said to nullify the important fact that it was Napoleon, and not some one else, who actually did direct affairs. It is interesting to consider what might have been the developments in English economic life had not the era of invention intervened, but it is certain that the forms