Profit and Power

Abstract

Between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the Treaty of Breda in 1667, which concluded the second Dutch War and marks a turning-point in diplomacy, only one year—1610—saw peace between the great European states. For the rest, the period was marked by a series of armed conflicts waged by land and sea; the fact of war was accordingly one item common to the calculations of statesmen, administrators, and merchants. Omit this and much of what came to be the national policy—in economic terms, the mercantile system—becomes unintelligible. ‘Profit and Power’, wrote Sir Josiah Child in his New Discourse of Trade, ‘ought jointly to be considered’.¹ Unlike their nineteenth-century successors, seventeenth-century statesmen and writers were unable to contemplate an economic system working in a political framework of peaceful normality. War, with its repercussions on trade and industry, on social order, on the food supply of the people, and on the capacity of the State to defend itself and its subjects’ interests, was an ever-present consideration in their minds.