WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
Trade, empire and the Navigation Acts
The Restoration period was the moment when England's overseas trade and empire moved from marginal to significant. The Navigation Acts created a system of commercial laws designed to channel the profits of colonial trade through English hands. The East India Company extended English commercial reach into Asia. England's American colonies — Virginia, Maryland, and the new additions of New York and Carolina — grew rapidly. And at the heart of this commercial empire was the transatlantic slave trade, in which English merchants and colonists participated on an enormous scale. This page covers England's commercial and colonial expansion under Charles II.
Mercantilism and the theory behind the Navigation Acts
The economic theory that drove Restoration commercial policy was mercantilism: the idea that a nation's wealth was measured by its stock of gold and silver, and that trade was a zero-sum competition in which one nation's gain was another's loss. The policy implication was simple: England should maximise exports (earning gold from foreigners) and minimise imports (keeping gold at home), and should ensure that all colonial trade benefited England, not foreign competitors.
The main competitor in 1660 was the Dutch Republic — the most commercially advanced economy in the world, whose merchant fleet was larger than those of France and England combined. The Dutch were middlemen: they carried other nations' goods, dominated European finance, and had planted colonies in key commercial locations (Surinam, South Africa, Ceylon). English commercial policy under Charles II was largely designed to reduce Dutch dominance and replace it with English.
The Navigation Acts
The Navigation Acts were a series of laws, beginning under the Commonwealth (1651) and extended under the Restoration (1660, 1663, 1673), that regulated England's colonial trade:
- Enumerated commodities: Specific colonial goods — tobacco, sugar, cotton, indigo, dyestuffs — could only be exported to England or other English colonies. They could not be sold directly to foreign markets.
- English ships only: All trade between England and its colonies had to be carried in English ships, with English crews.
- Staple Act (1663): European goods destined for the colonies had to pass through English ports, paying English duties.
The effect was to create a captive market: the colonies produced raw materials (tobacco from Virginia, sugar from Barbados) which were shipped to England, processed, and re-exported. The profits flowed through English merchants and the English crown. The costs fell on colonial consumers, who paid higher prices for goods that could have been bought more cheaply from Dutch traders.
Key concept
The plantation system and colonial labour
The American and Caribbean colonies that generated England's colonial wealth were **plantation economies**: large agricultural estates producing single cash crops (tobacco in Virginia and Maryland; sugar in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands) for export. These plantations required vast amounts of labour. Initially this was provided by **indentured servants** — poor whites who contracted to work for a fixed period (typically 7 years) in exchange for passage to the colonies. By the 1660s, plantations were increasingly worked by **enslaved African people**, who were cheaper, more controllable, and served for life (as did their children). The Restoration decades saw the explosion of the African slave trade and the rapid growth of enslaved populations in the English Caribbean and American colonies.
The slave trade
England's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade — the forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas — grew dramatically under Charles II. The Royal African Company (RAC), chartered 1672, was given a monopoly on the English slave trade. The Duke of York (later James II) was the company's governor. Between 1672 and 1713, the RAC transported approximately 100,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
The slave trade was embedded in the economic logic of the Navigation Acts: the sugar and tobacco that generated English colonial wealth required enslaved labour; the slave trade was the mechanism that supplied that labour; and the profits of the trade enriched English merchants, the crown (through duties), and the shareholders of the RAC — including members of the royal family.
The moral dimension of the slave trade was not ignored in this period: Quakers, in particular, were among the earliest systematic critics of slavery, arguing from religious principles that enslaving human beings was wrong. But these objections were marginal — the trade was legally sanctioned, commercially profitable, and politically uncontroversial in Restoration England.
Institution
The East India Company
The **East India Company** (EIC), founded in 1600, expanded dramatically under the Restoration. It traded in spices, silk, cotton textiles, and tea with India, the East Indies, and the Persian Gulf. Charles II's marriage to **Catherine of Braganza** (1662) brought Bombay (Mumbai) as part of her dowry — transferred to the EIC in 1668 for £10 a year. By the end of the seventeenth century, the EIC was the largest commercial operation in the world and the foundation of what would become the British Empire in India. Its story illustrates how English commercial expansion under Charles II laid the foundations for eighteenth and nineteenth century imperial dominance.
New York and the colonial acquisitions
Charles II's Restoration brought significant territorial expansion in North America. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (see page on Dutch Wars) ended with the Treaty of Breda (1667), by which the Dutch ceded New Amsterdam — renamed New York — to England. The colony had been captured in 1664 and granted to the Duke of York (James).
Other colonial acquisitions of the period:
- Carolina (1663) — a grant to eight Lords Proprietors, named after Charles I
- New Jersey (1664) — separated from New York
- Pennsylvania (1681) — granted to Quaker William Penn (settled after the period, but chartered under Charles)
By 1685, England had a continuous chain of colonies along the American eastern seaboard from Maine to the Carolinas, plus the Caribbean colonies (Barbados, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands) and the East India Company's growing presence in Asia.
Why this matters for the exam
The foundations of empire
AQA questions on trade and empire often ask about the significance of the Navigation Acts or England's colonial expansion. Key arguments: the Restoration period marks the moment when England's empire became commercially systematic — not just exploration and small settlements but a regulated mercantilist system designed to extract profit; the slave trade was central to this system, not incidental to it; the acquisitions of the period (New York, Jamaica) laid the foundations for later British imperial power. A sophisticated answer connects the commercial ambitions of the Restoration to their human cost — the enslaved Africans who worked the plantations — and notes that the Navigation Acts' restriction on colonial trade would eventually contribute to the American Revolution a century later.
Revision checklist
Before moving on, make sure you can answer:
- What was mercantilism? How did it shape English commercial policy?
- What were the Navigation Acts? Give at least two specific rules they imposed.
- Why were the Navigation Acts directed partly against the Dutch Republic?
- What was the plantation system? What crops did English plantations produce?
- What was the Royal African Company? What was its role in the slave trade?
- What was the East India Company? What did Catherine of Braganza bring as a dowry?
- How did England acquire New York?
- What were the long-term consequences of the Navigation Acts for the colonies?
What's New snippet
Article slug: gcse-history-restoration-england-trade-empire-navigation-acts
Title: Sugar, slaves, and the Navigation Acts — how Restoration England built its commercial empire
The Navigation Acts of the 1660s were England's declaration that colonial trade existed to benefit England — and no one else. Sugar from Barbados, tobacco from Virginia, all had to pass through English hands. The East India Company extended that reach into Asia; the Royal African Company extended it into the transatlantic slave trade. By 1685, England had a continuous chain of American colonies and was becoming a serious commercial power.