Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- 6 How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640
- 7 Touching the wires: industry and empire
- Part IV The empowered community
- Index
- References
6 - How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- 6 How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640
- 7 Touching the wires: industry and empire
- Part IV The empowered community
- Index
- References
Summary
Trade was never esteemed an affair of state until the (seventeenth) century…There is scarcely any ancient writer on politics who has made mention of it.
Since the time of Henry VIII the wealth and revenue of the country have been continually advancing, and, in the course of their progress, their pace seems rather to have gradually accelerated than retarded. They seem not only to have been going on, but to have been going on faster and faster.
The capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.
The propensity of industrial districts for resistance, riot and rebellion
Supporting the tendency for words to spread between localities, districts and regions, fourteenth-century England was a far more commercial and industrial society than it had been in the past, and remained so through the greater and lesser mortality crises with which that century was littered. Commerce means trafike, in commodities, people, and ideas. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cloth industry probably did as much to transform the landscape and generate and routinize lines of communications as any other agency. Clothworking districts were always prominent in contemporary accounts of disorder, resistance and rebellion. Nineteen years after the earthquake of 1381, Henry IV's officials had difficulty collecting taxes in cloth-making districts: violence broke out at Dartmouth, Bristol (where a mob that included large numbers of women drove off the collectors), and at Williton and Kentsford in Somerset. At Frome an order was issued confiscating all pikes, sticks with iron heads like lances, and axes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Commonwealth of the PeoplePopular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649, pp. 301 - 338Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010