NICOLL (John).
The Advantage of Great Britain Consider'd in the Tobacco Trade.
"ENCOURAGING HIS MAJESTY'S PLANTATIONS IN AMERICA, AND OUR NAVIGATION, AND HANDY CRAFTS AT HOME"
OCLC records seven physical locations in the USA. John Carter Brown has a unique copy of John Nicoll’s single sheet petition to Parliament for his proposal. Only two copies recorded in Rare Book Hub: the most recent in 2005 and before that in a 1966 Francis Edwards catalogue.
A wide-ranging proposal to amend the duties and taxes paid on imported tobacco from Virginia and Maryland to mitigate the losses when the coarse stalks are removed from the tobacco plant. The author argues that the cheaper tobacco produced from the stalks (“that pernicious Commodity call’d Old Spanish”) contains other ingredients such as colouring and “small-coal dust…mill’d thin to deceive the Unwary” which could be harmful to consumers and which are sold clandestinely without being taxed and could instead be used domestically to make potash for the lime and woollen trade.
A John Nicoll is listed as a director of the Bank of England in 1727 and from the present pamphlet it appears that he may well have been involved in sea trading (a John Nicoll is also listed as a director of the South Sea Company in 1721). This privately printed account of Nicoll’s proposal to Parliament (which he admits at the end has been deferred to a later hearing) examines various details of the tobacco trade in England from the role of the colonies (specifically Virginia and Maryland), the impact of duties and taxes on tobacco importation the threat of smuggling and the impact of poor quality tobacco on the market, the recreational use of tobacco (“for Amusement and Health”) and the adulteration of the product with cheap ingredients. Nicoll writes of the American colonies:
“All Colonies are design’d and settled for Trade, with Intent to Increase the Wealth and Power of the Native Kingdom; and to Employ themselves for their own Support; to live by their own Labours, and to apply the Gifts of God to their own Benefit; and in order to it, to make the best of their Soil, and when such Commodities are raised, or made, they ought to be taken off their Hands” (p.11)
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