A Plan of the English Commerce

Daniel Defoe

A Plan of the English Commerce: Being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of This Nation, As Well the Home Trade As the Foreign is perhaps chief among Daniel Defoe's tracts dealing with economic issues. In it he argues that the employment of labour on the working up of domestic produce, particularly wool, would be the true path to prosperity.^[1]

In the tract Defoe describes how the Tudors, Henry VII and Elizabeth I, developed England’s woollen manufacturing industry, by use of policies which would now be described as

• subsidies
• distribution of monopoly rights
• workers rights
• government-sponsored industrial espionage.^[2]

References

1. Tribe, Keith (1990) Defoe, Daniel in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
2. Chang, Ha-Joon (2007) The Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World, Random House

Editions

Defoe, Daniel (1728). A Plan of the English Commerce: Being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of This Nation, As Well the Home Trade As the Foreign, Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc; 2 Reprint edition (June 1967) ISBN 0-678-00316-5, ISBN 978-0-678-00316-9