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3. Edward Misselden and the "Natural Freedom" of Trade
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CHAPTER 3 Edward Misselden and the “Natural Freedom” of Trade Edward Misselden (›. 1608–1654) is known to posterity for two books, Free Trade, or the Means to MakeTrade Flourish (1622) and The Circle of Commerce (1623), in which he crossed metaphors with Gerard de Malynes over the true cause of England’s trade “crisis” and took up arms for the “Balance of Trade” and against the par pro pari as the First Commandment of commerce . Scattered praises of the “natural freedom” of trade found in his books have caused some historians of economic thought to label him a pioneer of the modern conception of economic life as an autonomous system.1 But advocates of this position have failed to resolve the opposing stands on key issues such as bullion exportation taken in Misselden’s ‹rst and second volumes or to consider to what extent his more modern-sounding positions were nothing more than special pleading on behalf of the East India Company (as his more traditional-sounding positions supported his earlier association with the Merchant Adventurers). But, then, Misselden’s life, like his thought, suffered from his trying simultaneously to serve two masters. Of Edward Misselden’s date of birth we have no record, though he appears to have been slightly the junior of Thomas Mun, his onetime neighbor in Hackney and eventual fellow in the East India Company. Misselden originally came up through the ranks in the Merchant Adventurers’ Company. In 1615, he was sent to Amsterdam to negotiate on their behalf as England teetered on the brink of a major economic depression fueled by wartime international currency manipulation, war, and the ill-advised attempts of Alderman Cockayne (already described) to grab a greater market share of the wool trade.2 The European con›ict eventually called the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618. But 1617 to 1623 were also the years of the Kipper- und Wipper-Zeit, a series of currency manipulations in Poland, Germany, and the Baltics that raised the cost of English imports and made it more pro‹table for English merchants to bring in foreign goods (and to export bullion).3 As B. E. Supple pointed out, the early-seventeenth-century English economy was 54 “suf‹ciently ‘sticky’ to throw large sectors of the economy out of gear if the circulating medium were suddenly diminished.”4 Thus, though their analyses begged the question of the side effects of a long-term positive trade balance , Malynes, Misselden, and Mun were wise to address themselves to the immediate problems of a negative balance.5 When they were not arguing over the king’s seeming lack of interest in the Protestant cause, Parliament and the Privy Council spent a good portion of 1620 and 1621 in debates that resulted in the calling (in April 1622) of a formal commission of inquiry into the cloth trade and the issuing of the Proclamatio contra Exportationem Bullionis.6 On the Commission sat persons “of quality and experience”—Members of Parliament, gentry, and merchants alike, including Thomas Mun and Dudley Digges, and to which Gerard de Malynes and Edward Misselden addressed their testimony and their respective volumes in the policy wars, although only Edward Misselden made it onto the Commission as a result. Misselden ‹red the ‹rst shot when his Free Trade (1622) dismissed the idea of reestablishing a par pro pari monetary exchange as useless. Although not mentioned by name in Misselden’s book, Gerard de Malynes took the attack personally and responded with his own version, The Maintenance of Free Trade, in which he made a line-by-line attempt to destroy Misselden’s position and rehabilitate his own. Before a year had passed, Misselden countered with The Circle of Commerce (‹nished June 1623) and Malynes returned ‹re with The Center of the Circle. By then Misselden was too preoccupied with his own affairs to respond further; from 1623 to 1633 he served as deputy-governor of the Merchant Adventurers’ branch at Delft, while negotiating with the Hague on behalf of the East India Company.7 With the increasing success of the English East India Company, a once simmering rivalry between Dutch and English traders had begun to boil over. At the Dutch settlement of Amboyna, ten English East India Company traders were executed while still others were imprisoned by their hosts. The negotiations to get some satisfaction for the English East India merchants, like those to gain import concessions on English cloth for the Merchant Adventurers, dragged on for...