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S F O U R making the fair trader: papermaking, the excise, and the english state, 1700–1815 Leonard N. Rosenband The “fair trader,” proclaimed generations of English officials, needed protection .1 He was worth cultivating because he paid his full share of the excise duty, the tax on the goods crafted and grown in England’s shops and fields. But his numbers never satisfied the state. Despite the swelling ranks of excise officers and the newfound precision offered royal gaugers by instruments such as the hydrometer, illicit producers continued to outwit science.2 Hidden cellars , casks with false bottoms, counterfeit revenue stamps, and the blind eye of the exciseman, bought with a guinea or two, all drained the Treasury. His trade was “so liable to fraud,” lamented the leading papermaker James Whatman II in 1764, “that at least half the paper that is made [in England] pays no Duty at all.”3 This essay considers the “dishonest traders” in the papermaking industry in England between 1700 and 1815, the manufacturers who bedeviled both Whatman and the English state during the high tide of the fiscal-military regime. Britain’s war-making prowess had expanded greatly across the eighteenth century . So, too, had the state’s capacity to ferret out and collect the revenues necessary to harden its sinews of power. The number of excisemen mushroomed and their marching orders grew increasingly thorough. Producers in many trades, paper manufacturers included, sought relief in sharp practices. The papermakers slipped untaxed quires into their reams, hid fine sheets in bundles marked second class, and evaded the duty altogether by reusing stamped ream wrappers. As the solicitor general explained to the Court of Exchequer in 1801, “The profits [are] through the multiplication of these instances; we do not often detect them.”4 The attorney general confessed that the honest manufacturer was often compelled to mimic the fraudulent producer: “As this practise was begun one followed another and they were obliged to do so almost in self defence.”5 Moreover, the Commissioners of Excise acknowledged the complicity of grocers, printers, and stationers in the papermakers’ evasions. The dishonest traders in paper cast long shadows beyond their own art. Robert Darnton taught us to consider the legal boundaries that framed past worlds, but even more, to look beyond them in search of everyday creativity and unexpected connections. One of these surprises is the corporate flavor of English papermaking in the age of Adam Smith. There were rivalries and regional tensions in the trade, but it lobbied Parliament as a single body for favor and protection, and often had its way. Honest traders and rogue papermakers alike mastered their art in an atmosphere charged with cabals, conspiracy, and dreams of monopoly. They blunted competition by drawing up mutual price lists for their reams. They briefly closed their mills to humble the rag merchants, whose cast-off linen dominated every papermaker ’s budget. They also shuttered their shops in vain efforts to drive down the wages of their skilled hands.These intrigues violated both the statute and the common law concerning the restraint of trade, but they went unpunished. When the dishonest trader secured his paper in a loose wrapper or sent it under a counterfeit excise stamp, he met a far different fate. He paid dearly, since his moonlight business threatened the underpinnings of the fiscal-military state. He had entered the contested terrain of his trade, where the master papermakers ’ semi-clandestine regulation of their craft and its commerce collided with the state’s appetite for revenue, its elaborate system of supervision, and its regiments of excisemen. Parliaments and prime ministers ceaselessly tried to turn the “free” trade of tax-evading papermakers into “fair” trade.The state provided excise officers with intimate details of paper production and commerce, sent these men into workshops and warehouses, and set national standards for the weights and measures of stationery and pasteboard. Historians such as John Orth, John Rule, Peter Linebaugh, and, of course, E. P. Thompson have focused on the numerous attempts by England’s governors to undo worker governance of their trades and workbenches.6 Scholars have paid less attention to the English state’s efforts when the regulatory grasp was enjoyed by entrepreneurs.7 Adam Smith, however, spent many pages on the regulatory reach of the manufacturers. As long as trade and production flowed freely, he concluded, prices inexorably S P R I N T , P...

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