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Charles Davenant, 1656-1714.
English Mercantilist writer.
Charles Davenant (or D'Avenant) was a son of the English poet laureate, playwright and dramatist, Sir William D'Avenant, a famed royalist adventurer whom had at one point been served in the governments of Virginia and Maryland. Charles was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, until 1673, when he interrupted his studies to take over the management of his late father's theater in London. Although a bit of a playwright himself, Davenant's theatrical income was insufficient, and so he supplemented his income as a civil lawyer, having taken an LL.D from Cambridge. In 1676, finding that income still inadequate, he took up employment as Commissioner of Excise, a job which would subsequently absorb most of his interests and attentions.In 1685, Davenant was elected MP for St. Ives in James II's controversial parliament. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Davenant lost not only his job on the excise commission, but also a substantial loan he had made to the crown. Suddenly impoverished and unable to find successful employment in the new Williamite government, Davenant decided to advertise his expertise by publishing a 1695 tract on the financing of the War of the Grand Alliance that had raged since 1689. Decrying debt as detrimental to trade and land taxes as inequitable in incidence, he advocated financing the war entirely on a balanced budget derived from excise taxation. Davenant's tract did not go down well with the government, hitting out at every one of their new policies - the debt-financing annuities, the land tax reform, the Bank of England project, etc. But it stood well with the opposition. Later that year, he was commissioned by the Lords Justice to present his opinion on the project to remint the entire silver coinage of England. Davenant's Memorial not only denounced the proposal as unwise, it also pointed out the necessity to return to a more Mercantilist trade policy.
When the 'Junto Whigs' ministry took over in 1696, despite being the primary proponents of the recoinage Davenant had decried, they took on some of his proposals, like tightening the Navigation Acts and setting up a parliamentary Council of Trade. In an effort to curry favor in the new regime, Davenant published his Memorial on Credit (1696), in which he moderated some of his earlier positions (esp. on debt) which the Junto seemed to have favored. Alas, it too failed to land him a job. Davenant responded with his mean-spirited Essay on Public Virtue, a diatribe against the Junto Whigs and in support of the Tory leader Sidney Godolphin.
In 1696, Davenant composed his essay on East India Trade, where he defended the "unfavorable" balance of trade between India to England as consistent with Mercantilist "balance of trade" doctrines when seen in the wider context, e.g. imports from India had an import-substituting effect against imports from other more expensive countries, or enabled re-export at greater value. Davenant put the onus on critics to prove that a unfavorable balance with a particular country was also unfavorable for Britain's trade balance on the whole. He engaged John Pollexfen, of the Board of Trade, in a very acrimonious pamphlet debate.
Davenant's discourse coincided with the East India Company's own position, so his application for a job there should not have been surprising. But that too came to nothing, even though Davenant floated his willingness to personally move to India himself.
In 1697-8, as the war with France was winding down and the Junto Whigs were enveloped by scandals, Davenant published a discourse in two parts, the first on tax revenues, announcing his adherence to Petty's "political arithmetik" ("the art of reasoning by figures of things relating to government" (p.128)), reviewing the financial history (and scandals) of the previous years, crowing that his 1695 on the ills of debt-financing had been vindicated and proposing a means to pay the public debt back; the second part restated, in a more careful form, the aggregative balance of trade doctrine of his East India essay.
Davenant's 1699 Essay on Probable Means was meant as a follow-up to the East India discussion. Following up on the "political arithmetik" of William Petty, Davenant sought to provide estimates of the national wealth of England as the real foundation of her trade. It is here that Davenant famously derived the first demand schedule. Using data he claimed came from his friend Gregory King, Davenant traces the relationship between the price of wheat and the "defect in the harvest", tracing out thereby a demand curve. (see King-Davenant Law).
Despite Davenant's arguments, the East India Company's monopoly was revoked and a rival EIC chartered in 1698 and imports from India restricted in 1699. For his efforts, the (old) EIC offered him the job of ambassador to the Moghul Court. Davenant accepted the post, but postponed his departure given that he had just been elected MP for Great Bedwin.
Once in parliament, Davenant sided openly with Harley's Tories, producing pamphlets on the Irish act of resumption and then, in 1701, against the Partition treaties over the Spanish succession and Whig jingoism, which he believed would rope England headlong into a war it could ill-afford, double the size of the public debt and increase the tax burden on the landed interests the Tories represented. The Whigs, in turn, accused Davenant of being in the pay of France, which was not wholly inconceivable, given his financial straits (accentuated by the expenses of his son's appointment as consul in Frankfurt) and his suddenly close relationship with the French ambassador Poussin. A brief scandal surrounded his being caught dining with Poussin on the same evening Anglo-French relations were snapped by Louis XIV's recognition of the Jacobite pretender James III. This would cost him his parliamentary seat at the end of 1701.
The scuttling of the Junto Whigs after Queen Anne's ascension in 1702 brightened Davenant's prospects. Although he was not returned to parliament, he finally acquired, in 1703, a permanent government post as Inspector-General of Exports and Imports, a modest post but one which he imagined to turn into an economic policy vehicle. Perhaps as a way of ingratiating himself with the new order, he produced his Essays (1704) in which, in contrast to his earlier rabid Toryism, he presented a defense of Anne's 'no-party' moderation against High Tory activism.
In 1705, English pamphleteers had angrily turned their attention on the Dutch, allies of Britain in the War of Spanish Succession, but who nonetheless continued to trade with their common enemy, France. The common refrain was that the Dutch were profiting from a war that was being carried out at English expense. Davenant was sent on a fact-finding mission and produced a Memorial which, echoing the government's own position, concluded that this concern about the French-Dutch trade was much ado about nothing. Davenant had less good things to say about the Dutch in his 1709 treatise on the Africa trade. There he deployed his pen in the service of the restoration of the monopoly of the Royal African Company, claiming growing Dutch competition necessitated it.
In 1710, the Godolphin ministry collapsed and the High Tories swept into parliament. Unsurprisingly, Davenant changed his colors quickly, pushing out pamphlets that denounced his earlier politics of moderation, debt-financing and the Dutch-French trade. His two Reports to the Commissioners...on National Accounts (1712), chock-full of statistics, were in this line - the first geared to demonstrating the advantage to England of opening up trade with France, and the second to show the Dutch had been indeed profiting at English expense.
D'Avenant died shortly after the Hanoverian succession.
Nearly all of Davenant's works were printed anonymously during his lifetime. Many (but not all) were brought together in an edition of collected works edited by Charles Whitworth in 1771. The attribution of some anonymous works to Davenant have sometimes been contentious.
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