Trade expansion Stuarts

Until I studied it, I thought the Stuart era, from James 1 and V1 was the Civil War, Charles getting his head chopped off and Bonnie Prince Charlie but there’s a lot more to it than that. James 1 followed Good Queen Bess, Drake and the Spanish Armada but, by the time of Bonnie Price Charlie, the 1745 and Culloden, the maritime nations, Holland, England, France, Spain and Portugal, were trading with Russia, North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, the Cape of Good Hope as well as the slave trade, India, The Spice Islands and Japan. They may have been stealing from each other, privateering, if you prefer, but the world had shrunk. I must also be borne in mind that thirty odd years later, the American colonies were so far advanced as to become a republic and Cook was in Australia. We tend to think of George 111 when the subject of the America revolution comes up, but they grew from stockades to a European civilisation during the Stuarts.

All this speaks, no just of entrepreneurial spirit, but dependable shipping and advances in navigation. There are great battles, Blenheim and Malplaquet for instance, but underlying all this are the growing fingers of trade, reaching every developed country around the globe. There were struggles over who would control it, but it touched every known continent and was searching for the one they didn’t know, Australasia.

In Europe, it made the Western Approaches a vital corridor and the Royal Navy the most important arm for the protection of trade. The Navy didn’t create, or expand, international trade, but it did impose order out of chaos, even if to Britain’s advantage, in the end.