African-Produced Raw Materials and Industrial Production in England.

AS IS WELL KNOWN, THE PRODUCTION of woollen cloth overwhelmingly dominated industrial production in England for several centuries. It was stated in Chapter 2 that raw wool export was to medieval England what crude oil export has been to Saudi Arabia in the modern world. The woollen industry thus developed initially as an import substitution industry on the basis of a domestically produced raw material. For as long as industrial production in England remained dominated by one product – woollen cloth – imported raw material was marginal to the growth and development of manufacturing in the country. Hence, English overseas trade in the early decades of the modern era was not seriously concerned with the supply of raw materials for industrial production in England. Manufactures for domestic consumption and tropical and Oriental products for re-export and domestic use dominated imports into England for many decades. This was to change gradually following the establishment of a wide range of import substitution industries in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as mentioned in Chapter 2. The growing importance of imported raw materials for the development of industrial production in England is reflected by the over time change in the structure of England's imports between 1699 and 1846: As these figures show, raw materials and foodstuffs were already about onethird of total imports, respectively, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the remaining one-third being made up of manufactures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]