| This dissertation examines the making, implementation, and enforcement of English commercial policy towards Ireland during the heyday of the British colonial system. It argues that the Restoration marked the emergence of a new and broadly coherent trade policy towards Ireland, as part of a comprehensive restructuring of England's commercial and colonial policy along mercantilist lines, in which neither direct pressure by special interests nor purely fiscal considerations played much of a rote. Between 1660 and 1663, the Irish tariff schedule was overhauled, the Irish were mostly excluded from direct participation in the Atlantic commerce under the Navigation Acts, and the Irish trade in raw materials was placed under strict controls, ail with the objective of making Ireland commercially dependent on England and preventing any of England's European rivals from enriching themselves with Ireland's resources or markets. Compliance with these measures, which was evaded and resisted by the merchants of Ireland, was bolstered from the 1670s as imperial administration was centralized under the rule of the Treasury and Customs Commission in London. Ireland's broadly subordinate trading position in the British empire, along with the mercantilist orientation of the English state, was consolidated during the 1690s under the Williamite regime.;Beginning in the early 1700s, as the colonial system became increasingly characterized by the clashing and balancing of competing interests by the imperial parliament at Westminster, Irish Protestant interests became active participants in the shaping of commercial policy in Ireland for the first time since the Restoration. By early in the reign of Anne, the Irish Parliament had gained a large measure of control over the granting of the short-term supplies now necessary to maintain solvent government in Ireland. This new power was used periodically throughout the eighteenth century to bargain with London for enlarged commercial privileges for the Irish within the empire. An Irish "lobby" was also organized in the British capital, which, especially when allied with British or British West Indian pressure groups, was successful in resisting a number of additional trading restrictions proposed for Ireland, as well as in securing important concessions, including modifications of the Navigation Acts in Ireland's favor and continued official support for Ireland's linen industry. |
