The British had an empire to run. The way that they kept their economy healthy was through a system called mercantilism. Mercantilism was a popular economic philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this system, the British colonies were moneymakers for the mother country. The British put restrictions on how their colonies spent their money so that they could control their economies. They put limits on what goods the colonies could produce, whose ships they could use, and most importantly, with whom they could trade. The British even put taxes called duties on imported goods to discourage this practice. This pushed the colonists to buy only British goods, instead of goods from other European countries
They wanted to encourage more profitable imports for their nations as their economy was bad. However, other nations economies were bad as well, staunching the world economy even more.
