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At the same time the mother country compelled English merchants to buy tobacco from the American colonies only. These laws were known as Navigation Acts. Their purpose was to regulate the trade of the empire and to enable the mother country to derive a profit from the colonies which had been planted overseas.
How did Britain use the Navigation Acts to maintain its balance of trade?
In effect, the Navigation Acts gave English subjects (defined as anyone living within the British realm) and English ships a legal monopoly of all trade between various colonial ports and between these ports and England. Even the trade between colonial ports and foreign countries was limited to English vessels.
Navigation Acts prevented the colonies from shipping any goods anywhere without first stopping in an English port to have their cargoes loaded and unloaded; resulting in providing work for English dockworkers, stevedores, and longshoremen; and also an opportunity to regulate and tax, what was being shipped.
How did the Navigation Acts affect the British economy?
The Navigation Acts were a series of laws passed by the British Parliament that imposed restrictions on colonial trade. British economic policy was based on mercantilism, which aimed to use the American colonies to bolster British state power and finances.
Navigation Acts. Written By: Navigation Acts, in English history, a series of laws designed to restrict England’s carrying trade to English ships, effective chiefly in the 17th and 18th centuries.
What did the Navigation Act of 1832 restrict?
The first Navigation Act restricted the ships used in trade between Great Britain and her colonies to only British or colonial ships. For trade between Great Britain and other European countries, ships had to be British, or built in the European country which produced the goods.
The system came into its own at the beginning of the colonial era, in the 17th century. The great Navigation Act passed by the Commonwealth government in 1651 was aimed at the Dutch, then England’s greatest commercial rivals.