428 Tradesman and Merchant — Commercial Population 



Leeds' cloth was shipped abroad.^ Some private merchants pro- 

 cured an Act of Parliament for making the rivers Aire and Calder 

 navigable at their own expense. By this means Leeds and Wakefield 

 were put in communication with York and Hull. Hereafter mer- 

 chants from Holland, Bremen, Hamburgh and the Baltic bought Leeds 

 products through commission agents at Leeds and shipped them from 

 Hull.- Hull became the recei\dng and distributing point for all the 

 commerce of the Humber system — of the Trent, Don, Idle, Aire, 

 Calder and Ouse.^ Defoe was of the opinion that ''in proportion to 

 its dimensions" there was "more business done in Hull than in any 

 town in Europe."'* 



Lynn Regis resembled Hull in location with respect to rivers, and in 

 handling corn, and in being a receiving and distributing point.'^ 



Other groups of towns made comparatively little advance in trade 

 and commercial population after 1700. One such was York, Exeter, 

 Nottingham, Derby, Shrewsbury, Gloucester and Worcester.^ By 

 1750 some had actually retrogressed. The decline of the manufac- 

 turing districts of the east and west of England was most marked. 



The movements of the general population and of the manufacturing 

 and commercial populations are, of course, one. Under exceptional 

 circumstances a town may have had a large mercantile class although 

 it had a small population and commerce itself. It has, for instance, 

 been remarked above that the merchants of the Newcastle coal- trade 

 came at one time principally from Ipswich. But as a general premise 

 manufacturing is both cause and effect of a dense population, a large 

 fraction of which is commercial. The EngHsh people became one- 

 tenth metropoHtes during the seventeenth century, and until the 

 Industrial Revolution a large fraction of the remainder were agricul- 

 turists. It has been shown above that after 1720 especially there was 

 an urbanization toward the outports and the industrial towns of the 

 north and the northwest. The fraction at agriculture decreased. 

 These movements were decentralizing and provincializing portions of 

 the trade and commerce that centered in London. Less unity and more 

 variation, more entrepots and more directions, characterize the organi- 

 zation that was arising after 1720. The factory system was working a 

 reorganization in the mechanism and technique of English business. 



1 Anderson, III, 459. 



- Defoe, Tour, III, 93; "Atlas Mar. et Com.," 4, 109. 



3 Defoe, Tour, III, 147; .\nderson. III, 459-60. 



4 Defoe, Tour, III, 144. 



^ Defoe, Tour, I, 83-4 contains an excellent account of the trade. 



* See their numbers as estimated by Macaulay, I, 316, about this date. 



