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Adam Smith on the Navigation Acts And Anglo-American Imperial Relations

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Although many scholars have cited the Navigation Acts as one of Adam Smith's key exceptions to his general embrace of natural liberty, there remains a need for a systematic account of Smith's under-explored beliefs on the Acts, and specifically the Act of Navigation of 1660. My article seeks to fill this gap by providing a descriptive and critical examination of his commentary on the commercial restraints, and locating it in wider eighteenth-century debates over their utility in Anglo-American imperial relations with specific reference to Thomas Pownall and Edmund Burke. I argue that Smith's thoughts contained important tensions that were exposed by Pownall's and Burke's analyses of the Acts. I conclude, however, by offering a possible explanation for the ambiguities in Smith's qualified support for the Act of Navigation of 1660: Smith suggests that the legislator should not establish ironclad rules for national defence policy and commercial policy stripped of circumstance — such as always promote either protectionism or free trade — but rather should be willing to modify them, and if necessary discard them, in a manner that is responsive to the historical evolution of the international imperial order, the progressively heavy burdens of empire, and the spirit of natural liberty.

Keywords: ADAM SMITH; BRITISH EMPIRE; EDMUND BURKE; FREE TRADE; GLASGOW; IMPERIALISM; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; NATIONAL DEFENCE; NAVIGATION ACTS; THOMAS POWNALL; WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; WEALTH OF NATIONS

Document Type: Research Article

Affiliations: Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06119, USA

Publication date: 2022

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