The Acts against Manufactures.—­The second group of laws was deliberately aimed to prevent colonial industries from competing too sharply with those of England.  Among the earliest of these measures may be counted the Woolen Act of 1699, forbidding the exportation of woolen goods from the colonies and even the woolen trade between towns and colonies.  When Parliament learned, as the result of an inquiry, that New England and New York were making thousands of hats a year and sending large numbers annually to the Southern colonies and to Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, it enacted in 1732 a law declaring that “no hats or felts, dyed or undyed, finished or unfinished” should be “put upon any vessel or laden upon any horse or cart with intent to export to any place whatever.”  The effect of this measure upon the hat industry was almost ruinous.  A few years later a similar blow was given to the iron industry.  By an act of 1750, pig and bar iron from the colonies were given free entry to England to encourage the production of the raw material; but at the same time the law provided that “no mill or other engine for slitting or rolling of iron, no plating forge to work with a tilt hammer, and no furnace for making steel” should be built in the colonies.  As for those already built, they were declared public nuisances and ordered closed.  Thus three important economic interests of the colonists, the woolen, hat, and iron industries, were laid under the ban.

The Trade Laws.—­The third group of restrictive measures passed by the British Parliament related to the sale of colonial produce.  An act of 1663 required the colonies to export certain articles to Great Britain or to her dominions alone; while sugar, tobacco, and ginger consigned to the continent of Europe had to pass through a British port paying custom duties and through a British merchant’s hands paying the usual commission.  At first tobacco was the only one of the “enumerated articles” which seriously concerned the American colonies, the rest coming mainly from the British West Indies.  In the course of time, however, other commodities were added to the list of enumerated articles, until by 1764 it embraced rice, naval stores, copper, furs, hides, iron, lumber, and pearl ashes.  This was not all.  The colonies were compelled to bring their European purchases back through English ports, paying duties to the government and commissions to merchants again.

The Molasses Act.—­Not content with laws enacted in the interest of English merchants and manufacturers, Parliament sought to protect the British West Indies against competition from their French and Dutch neighbors.  New England merchants had long carried on a lucrative trade with the French islands in the West Indies and Dutch Guiana, where sugar and molasses could be obtained in large quantities at low prices.  Acting on the protests of English planters in the Barbadoes and Jamaica, Parliament, in 1733, passed the famous Molasses Act imposing duties on sugar and molasses imported into the colonies from foreign countries—­rates which would have destroyed the American trade with the French and Dutch if the law had been enforced.  The duties, however, were not collected.  The molasses and sugar trade with the foreigners went on merrily, smuggling taking the place of lawful traffic.