Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

American woolens, the industry was still able to grow. In 1702, the Board
of Trade grumbled about English wool workers being "enticed" to America
to work at the more efficient and therefore higher-paying woolen firms
there. During the War of the Spanish Succession, a shortage in the available
supply of English cloth led Americans to manufacture their own woolens,
especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To escape the provisions of
the Wool Act, the colonists often drove their sheep to and from the place of
woolen manufacture, since carrying the wool itself out of a colony had been
outlawed.
In 1732, Parliament, under pressure of marginal and inefficient felt hatmakers
in London, moved to crush nascent hat manufacturers in the
Northern colonies. The Hat Act (1) prohibited the export of hats from
one colony to another; (2) restricted the people allowed to make hats to
those who had been apprenticed for seven years; (3) limited the number
of apprentices in each hat firm to two; and (4) prohibited Negro apprentices.
Fortunately, the act was only sporadically enforced. In fact, Martin
Bladen of the Board of Trade ranted that the colonies were "running into
all sorts of manufactures, which must be stopped." Bladen went so far
as to propose that people acquitted of violations in colonial courts be retried
in England, but, fortunately, this extreme suggestion was not followed.
During the same year, Parliament outlawed the export of hops from the
colonies to Ireland, in reaction to American hops competing successfully
with the English in the Irish market. Before this, in 1722, beaver skins,
furs, and copper had been placed on the enumerated list, thereby at least
partially crippling the New York fur trade, over a third of which exports
had been to the European continent. In 1736, four years after the Hat Act,
Parliament struck savagely at the growing colonial manufacture of canvas
(sailcloth), decreeing that all future ships built in the colonies must be
constructed with sails of British-made cloth only.
The Iron Act of 1750 was a compromise between two groups of English
manufacturers, each seeking a conflicting set of special privileges. The iron
industry, second only to the woolen industry in importance to the English
economy, was divided into two groups: the iron masters, who smelted pig
and bar iron from iron ore; and the finished-iron manufacturers, who
transformed pig and bar iron into nails, machinery, etc. The economic interests
of the two groups in public policy clashed squarely: the iron masters
were alarmed at the rapid emergence of bar-iron production in the
Northern colonies after 1735, and with bitterness they called for prohibitive
tariffs on the importation of pig iron and even the total suppression of the
American iron industry. In this demand they were joined by English ironmine
owners and by forest owners who sold charcoal as fuel in the iron-
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