The English Civil War and the politics of economic statecraft

Edmund Howes Richard Baker immigration manufacture trading companiesChapter four explores the influence of the English Civil War on approaches to economic history. From the 1640s onwards, the monarchical management of commerce and, even more importantly, finance became highly politicised and divisive issues, which received detailed commentary from historians. The main body of the chapter looks at how these ideas were dealt with by the Parliamentarian historians Anthony Weldon and Arthur Wilson, and the Royalist, William Sanderson. Despite their political differences, each of these writers, it will be shown, employed a moralistic analysis of James' financial management rooted in Livian ideas of exemplary virtue and honour. The final section of the discussion investigates how these ideas were developed in the 1690s by the historian and political economist Roger Coke.