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The trade of the empire, like the other developments of imperial public life, has been profoundly influenced by the variety of Imperial trade policy. local conditions under which it has flourished. In the early settlement of the North American colonies their trade was left practically free; but by the famous Navigation Act of 1660 the importation and exportation of goods from British colonies were restricted to British ships, of which the master and three-fourths of the mariners were English. This act, of which the intention was to encourage British shipping and to keep the monopoly of British colonial trade for the benefit of British merchants, was followed by many others of a similar nature up to the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the introduction of free trade into Great Britain. The Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849. Thus for very nearly two hundred years British trade was subject to restrictions, of which the avowed intention was to curtail the commercial intercourse of the empire with the world. During this period the commercial or mercantile system, of which the fallacies were exposed by the economists of the latter half of the 18th century, continued to govern the principles of British trade. Under this system monopolies were common, and among them few were more important than that of the East India Company. In 1813 the trade of India was, however, thrown open to competition, and in 1846, after the introduction of free trade at home, the principal British colonies which had not yet at that date received the grant of responsible government were specially empowered to abolish differential duties upon foreign trade. A first result of the commercial emancipation of the colonies was the not altogether unnatural rise in the manufacturing centres of the political school known as the Manchester school, which was disposed to question the value to Great Britain of the retention of colonies which were no longer bound to give her the monopoly of their commercial markets. An equally natural desire on the part of the larger colonies to profit by the opportunity which was opened to them of establishing local manufactures of their own, combined with the convenience in new countries of using the customs as an instrument of taxation, led to something like a reciprocal feeling of resentment, and there followed a period during which the policy of Great Britain was to show no consideration for colonial trade, and the policy of the principal colonies was to impose heavy duties upon British trade. By a gradual process of better understanding, largely helped by the development of means of communication, the antagonistic extreme was abandoned, and a tendency towards a system of preferential duties within the empire displayed itself.
At the Colonial Conference held in London in 1887 a proposal was formally submitted by the South Colonial preference. African delegate for the establishment within the empire of a preferential system, imposing a duty of 2% upon all foreign goods, the proceeds to be directed to the maintenance of the imperial navy. To this end it was requested that certain treaties with foreign nations which imposed restrictions on the trade of various parts of the empire with each other should be denounced. Some years later, a strong feeling having been manifested in England against any foreign engagement standing in the way of new domestic trade arrangements between a colony and the mother-country, the German and Belgian treaties in question were denounced (1897). Meanwhile, simultaneously with the movement in favour of reciprocal fiscal advantages to be granted within the empire by the many local governments to each other, there was a growth of the perception that an increase of the foreign trade of Great Britain, carried on chiefly in manufactured goods, was accompanied by a corresponding enlargement of the home markets for colonial raw material, and consequently that injury to the foreign trade of Great Britain, while as yet it so largely outweighed the trade between the United Kingdom and the colonies, must necessarily react upon the colonies. This view was definitely expressed at the Colonial Conference at Ottawa in 1894, and was one of the factors which led to the relinquishment of the demand that in return for colonial concessions there should be an imposition on the part of Great Britain of a differential duty upon foreign goods. Canada was the first important British colony to give substantial expression to the new imperial sentiment in commercial matters by the introduction in 1897 of an imperial
