Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/108

106 after some fighting, that they removed in 1687 from Hooghly to Sootanutty, a place twenty-three miles lower down, and situated on the opposite or cast bank of the same river. From this village has sprung the magnificent modern capital of Calcutta.

There remains to be shortly noticed a comparatively new branch of commerce, which was already rising into importance,—that carried on with the settlements in North America, commonly, in those days, called the Plantation Trade. Davenant tells us that, according to "an account from such as have formerly perused the Custom House books with great care," the average annual value of exports from England to America, in provisions of all kinds, apparel, and household furniture, in the six years from 1682 to 1688, was about 350,000l.; while that of the imports, consisting of tobacco, sugar, ginger, cotton wool, fustic wood, indigo, cocoa, fish, pipe-staves, masts, furs, &c., together with fish from Newfoundland, was not less than 950,000l. Of the imports he calculates that about the value of 350,000l. might be retained for home consumption; so that there would remain about 600,000l. worth to be exported.

It was the new direction given to trade on the one hand by the East India Company, on the other by the interchange of commodities thus carried on between the mother-country and her Trans-atlantic colonies, to which is chiefly to be ascribed the eager agitation that now began of many of the principles of what has, in more recent times, been termed the science of Political Economy. It is hardly correct to state that the birth of this science in England is to be dated from the present period; for it had in fact been a subject of occasional speculation for at least a century before, in proof of which we need only refer to the very remarkable tract entitled "A Compendious or Brief Examination of certain ordinary Complaints of divers of our Countrymen in these our Days, by W. S.," (said to mean William Stafford,) which was published in 1581, and which discusses, with a great deal