Question: Explain the relationship between mercantilism, the Navigation Laws, and British efforts to create an administrative structure for their empire after 1696.

A close relationship existed between mercantilism and the Navigation laws. The British authorities embraced a theory called mercantilism which was the idea that the wealth of a nation depends on its possession of precious metals and that the government of a nation needs to take full advantage of the foreign trade surplus, and promote national commercial interests, the establishment of the colonies, so on and so forth. Mercantilists believed that wealth was power and that a country’s economic wealth could be measured by the amount of gold or silver in its treasury. In order for maximum accumulation of gold or silver, a country needed to export more than it imported. The London government discouraged buying goods from other countries; Americans were expected to provide products needed in the mother country such as tobacco, sugar. The control is evident. Britain didn’t want the Americans to even think about self-government. Parliament passed laws to control the mercantilist system. They were called the Navigation laws. They were a series of English laws that required the American colonies to trade primarily with England; set duties on some goods. I imagine this upset a few colonists. Adam Smith states, “To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Navigation Law of 1650 made all commerce flowing to and from the colonies to be transported only in British vessels.
Other laws required that European goods meant for America had to be landed in Britain where British middlemen could