t reproach. England was not
now, as in the time of James I, thought to be overpopulated; and
Barbados and Jamaica found favor, not only because their products were
neither raised nor made in England, but because they could be exploited
by slave labor. It was pointed out that happily "by taking off one
useless person, for such generally go abroad [to the islands], we add
Twenty Blacks to the Labour and Manufactures of the Nation." Negroes
procured in Africa at slight cost might, indeed, be counted as
commodities of export, while the island colonies cultivated precisely
those commodities which England would otherwise have imported from
foreign countries. And the statistics of the custom-house confirmed the
theory of the pamphleteer; in 1697, seven eighths of all colonial
commerce was with the tobacco and sugar plantations, and Jamaica alone
offered a greater market than all the Northern and Middle colonies
combined.

It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when
they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may
in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and
present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of
Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the
tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's
commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial
carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English
and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial
products--sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the
so-called "enumerated" commodities--could be shipped only to England or
to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation
into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,--with the
exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland,
of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed
to be imported into England,--unless they were first landed in England.
In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial
consumers of colonial products, a third act was passed in 1673 providing
that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to
England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In
1705 rice, molasses, and naval stores were added to the list of
enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enfo