England's Trade Boom Didn't Break Its Elite

📌 What the study asks

This study assesses how England’s dramatic 17th-century expansion of overseas trade affected who sat in Parliament and whether new commercial actors displaced the existing political elite.

📊 A two-century roll call of MPs (c.1550–1750)

• Uses an original dataset of Members of Parliament covering roughly 1550–1750.
• Tracks MPs’ occupational ties to commerce, connections to incumbent parliamentary families, and links to the hereditary aristocracy.

🔎 Key findings

• Only a modest share of Parliament represented the commercial sector despite the large expansion in overseas trade.
• Overseas traders never made up a majority of those identified as commercial representatives.
• Entry of trading interests into Parliament occurred mainly through investors in trade rather than through active, hands-on merchants.
• Growth of the Atlantic economy coincided with little turnover in MPs’ social and family backgrounds; elites remained broadly continuous.

⚖️ Why this matters

These results indicate that the political elite largely persisted across major economic change in the long 17th century and were well positioned to capture early commercial gains for themselves, limiting wholesale elite renewal even as England’s global trade expanded.