0309B

The increased demands of the London market were to the fore in promoting commercial endeavours to exploit 'British fisheries' as deep-sea concerns in the later 17th century, though these concerns often ran counter to vested Scottish interests and were notably less remunerative than the better-planned commercial endeavours of the Dutch. The plans of a City-based consortium in 1696 to create a maritime centre for fishing, shipbuilding and provisioning on the Isle of Dogs, remained on the drawing board.
The growing demands of London and the south-east for supplies and raw materials - not only foodstuffs but also wool, linen, coal and salt had a profound impact on the political economies of Scotland and Ireland. Parliamentary support for the determination of English manufacturers to control and curtail Irish competition underlined the political subordination of Ireland to England. Meanwhile, the channelling of Scottish supplies into English markets created the conditions for political dependency, especially as the growing 'pull' of London was complemented by the 'push' effect of European mercantilism and continental warfare, which was cutting Scotland out of alternative markets.
   Scotland's dependency on English markets was compounded, from 1700, by the failure of the Darien Scheme to establish a Scottish colony for East and West Indian trade on the Panama Isthmus. The failure of this venture was partly attributable to inadequate preparation and a fatal disregard for the strength of Spanish power in the area. But it was primarily perceived as the result of William of Orange succumbing to the competing interests of the English East India Companies. William, who had primarily accepted the role of monarch of the three kingdoms in 1689 in order to secure British reinforcements against French expansionism under Louis XIV, was heavily dependent on parliamentary votes of supply. He could not afford to offend commercial power blocs whose parliamentary influence could prejudice his war effort, which was then focused on ensuring that the Spanish empire should not pass undivided into French hands on the death of the ailing Carlos II.
   The Darien Scheme was the culmination of several fruitless, but not unrealistic, Scottish endeavours to become commercial players in the colonial game as Scotland sought to break out of the economic grip of European mercantilism and stave off closer political union with England. Following the Revolution of 1688-91, growing parliamentary assertiveness, coupled to the reaffirmation of discriminatory English Navigation Acts, further diminished opportunities for Scottish entrepreneurs. While throughout the British Isles doubts remained about the financial viability of the trans-oceanic endeavours of the East Indian and African Companies in comparison with rival Dutch ventures, transatlantic undertakings had an impact that ranged far beyond the balance sheet.
   In the mid-sixteenth century, the number of recorded plant species had been roughly 500, virtually the same number as in Classical times. By 1623 this figure had increased to 6,000, but when the English botanist John Ray compiled a catalogue of plants eighty years later, nearly 20,000 species had been identified. This impressive growth of knowledge can be attributed to commodity exchange on a global scale, in general, and to the colonisation of the New World, in particular. Some of these discoveries, such as the potato, made a significant contribution to dietary standards, demography and estate management, as they could be grown as a source of nutrition that improved survival prospects on small plots of land suitable for rural cottars, village labourers and urban householders. Less beneficial to health, tobacco and sugar cane became major cash crops, the basis of plantations in the New World sustained by slave labour, and of innovative domestic manufactures financed through joint-stock and other commercial partnerships. Slave plantations also became the major source of rice and rum. Despite this, the prevailing dietary pattern in much of Britain beyond the south-east remained similar to that of North Sea and Baltic states dominated by herring, oatmeal and aquavit staples.
   Political culture � not just in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, but in other provincial centres throughout the three kingdoms - was being transformed by the coffee houses supplied by beans primarily from the East Indies. As textile manufacturing increasingly catered for fashionable draperies as well as staple woollens, changing tastes were enhanced by West Indian imports of indigo and other plant dyes.
   The growth in transatlantic trade benefited such western ports as Bristol and Liverpool, where merchant houses became involved in all forms of commodity exchange, from Madeira wine to cargoes of slaves from Africa. Whitehaven in Cumberland enjoyed a short-lived prosperity, though it was soon eclipsed by the enterprise of Glasgow, which flourished through trading illicitly with the colonies prior to the Act of Union of 1707 and came to dominate the British tobacco and the Scottish sugar trade thereafter.
   The American colonies also played a significant role in the constitutional development of Great Britain. John Locke (1632-1704), as a colonial administrator for the Carolinas in the 1680s, commenced work on his contractual theories of government (government by consent), which became the prevailing basis for Whig ideology after the 'Glorious' Revolution. While it is difficult to comprehend why a man born in Wrington, Somerset, should need to contract into an established, civil society as well as into government, such contracting becomes more understandable when applied to a man who emigrated to the frontier society of the American colonies. Locke's friend, the Irish philosopher William Molyneux (1656-98), sought to turn this logic to the advantage of the Irish parliament, which he stated was an independent entity as the contractual embodiment of the English interest in Ireland. Colonial ventures also provided alternative constitutional models. Scottish networks in the New World had operated in association with, but separate from, English colonial government, which led some polemicists to contend that a league with the Dutch was more suited to Scottish interests politically, confessionally and commercially, than incorporation with England. Others, who sought a federative arrangement with England, found precedents in the federal and confederal arrangements for Scottish colonists in South Carolina and East NewJersey respectively during the 1680s. But by 1700 the fiasco of Darien had manifested the need for an accommodation within Britain.
   However, the Revolution of 1688-91 had made the prospects of an accommodation seem less feasible than under the ousted house of Stuart. Despite the political pragmatism that characterised the constitutional settlements in all three kingdoms, Whig ideologists portrayed the Revolution as the aristocratic triumph of Protestantism, property and progress over a Catholic monarch intent on tyranny. At the same time, the exclusive, oligarchic nature of the Revolution settlements, which established parliamentary monarchy and debarred Catholics from the throne, negated James ll's inclusive endeavours to promote religious toleration, the harmonising of landed and commercial interests and British (not just English) colonialism.
   The reliance of the monarchy on votes of supply to pursue continental wars served to lay the basis for the military fiscal state, which would find heroic embodiment in John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough and the acceptable face of political opportunism. The massive build-up of armed forces, especially of the royal navy, was to be serviced by the establishment of the national debt in 1693, financed through the Bank of England from 1694.
   Confessional minorities such as Dissenters and Catholics remained, respectively, second- and third-class citizens in public life. An Anglican supremacy was also established in Ireland with penal laws confirming that dissenters and Catholics had no part to play in public life, although its parliamentary dominance was tempered by the intrusive role the English parliament was prepared to play in Irish affairs, even to the commercial, judicial and land-owning detriment of the ruling English interest in Ireland. In Scotland, Presbyterianism rather than Episcopalianism, was declared supreme in the Kirk, but only Catholics were rigorously excluded from public life.

   The revitalised Scottish Estates were in continuous conflict with the court, as William regarded their attempts to effect permanent limitations on the monarchy as a constitutional inconvenience best remedied by union, a sentiment increasingly shared within his English ministry and parliament. The Scots, however, had also marked their commitment to commercial independence by the establishment of the Bank of Scotland in 1695. When denied English and continental backing, the Darien Scheme had been revamped defiantly in 1697 as a commercial covenant between God and the Scottish people.
   More in Part C....