The New Economic History and the Burdens of the Navigation Acts: A Comment
IN a recent article, Gary Walton attempted to discover and then analyse the basic defects of three different measures of the burden of the Navigation Acts." Like Sir Francis Bacon, he sought a vantage point from which to survey "the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below".2 The resulting evaluation unfortunately contributed more confusion than enlightenment to an already overcast landscape. In assessing the work of Lawrence Harper,3 Walton makes two mistakes. The first is to confuse the merits of Harper's techniques with the merits of his conclusions. By no stretch of generosity can Harper's measurement techniques be labelled anything but nonsensical.4 Walton provides no evidence to contradict this view. He nevertheless suggests that the only reason for preferring the measurements of Thomas over those of Harper is because the former are smaller than the latter.5 If a measure is nonsensical, its magnitude is irrelevant. To discredit Harper's estimation procedure is of course not to prove that his final conclusions are incorrect. It does prove that the measures in question cannot be used as supporting evidence for any given hypothesis. The second mistake of Walton is his assertion that Jonathan Hughes has "eloquently and persuasively defended Harper's conclusions".6 Three rather different questions were examined by Harper: (i) Did the entrepot provisions of the Navigation Acts place a heavy burden upon the colonists? (2) Was the overall impact of British mercantilism detrimental to colonial development? (3) To what extent were real economic burdens a contributing cause to the American Revolution? What Hughes Dointed out7 was that Robert Thomas's original articles