38 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
India Company, of new chartered companies, such as 
the African and the Hudson Bay Companies, and of 
navigation acts. Trade overshadowed religion as the 
main driving force and the leading motive at work 
in the Empire, trade and sea power as at once the off- 
spring and the foster-mother of trade. The trade 
outlook in the Mother Country was all in the direction 
of uniformity, with its concomitant of domination and 
dependence, and the preamble of the navigation act 
of 1663 stated in so many words that the act was 
being passed * for the maintaining a greater correspond- 
ence and kindness’ between the Kingdom of England 
and the King’s plantations overseas, ¢ and keeping them 
in a firmer dependence upon it and rendering them yet 
mote beneficial and advantageous unto it . , ,’ 1 
Aninteresting illustration of the growing importance 
attached to trade was the publication of © England’s 
Treasure by Foreign Trade or the balance of our 
Foreign Trade the rule of our Treasure.” The 
author, Thomas Mun, who had died in 1641, had been 
a leading London merchant, a trader in Italy and 
the Levant, and a director of the East India Company. 
In 1621 he had published a * Discourse of Trade from 
England to the East Indies,” being at the time deputy 
governor of the East India Company. He wrote 
" England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade’ in or about 
1630, but it was not published until 1664, when his 
son, John Mun, published it ¢ for the common good,’ as 
he stated on the flyleaf. It was dedicated to the Earl 
of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer of England. 
Mun was very outspoken, which was possibly the 
‘15 Car. IL, cap. 7, 1663. An Act Jor the Encouragement of Trade.