ries, equipped if necessary with imported foreign
labour, to the importation of the products of such labour from abroad.
So far as England, in particular, is concerned, the attitude was
favoured by the political and religious oppression of the French
government which supplied England in the earlier eighteenth century
with a constant flow of skilled artisan labour. Many English
manufacturers profited by this flow. Our textile industries in silk,
wool, and linen, calico-printing, glass, paper, and pottery are
special beholden to the new arts thus introduced.

Among the economic barriers must be reckoned the slight development
of international credit, and of the machinery of exchange.

Sec. 4. These barriers, natural, political, social, economic, against
free international intercourse, throw important light upon the general
structure of world-industry in the eighteenth century.

In this application they determined and strictly limited not only the
quantity but the nature of the international trade. The export trade
of England, for example, in 1730 was practically confined to woollen
goods and other textile materials, a small quantity of leather, iron,
lead, silver, and gold plate, and a certain number of re-exported
foreign products, such as tobacco and Indian calicoes. The import
trade consisted of wine and spirits, foreign foods, such as rice,
sugar, coffee, oil, furs, and some quantity of foreign wool, hemp,
silk, and linen-yarn, as material for our specially favoured
manufactures. Having regard to the proportion of the several
commodities, it would not be much exaggeration to summarise our
foreign trade by saying that we sent out woollen goods and received
foreign foods. These formed the great bulk of our foreign trade.[15]
Excepting the woollen goods and a small trade in metals, leather is
the only manufactured article which figured to any appreciable extent
in our export of 1730. At that time it is clear that in the main
English manufacture, as well as English agriculture, was for the
supply of English wants. The same was true of other industrial
countries. Holland and France, who divided with England the shipping
supremacy, had a foreign trade which, though then deemed considerable,
bore no greater proportion to the total industry of these countries
than in the case of England. Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and even
Portugal were almost wholly self-sustained.

Regarding, then, the known and related world of tha