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In modern economic discourse, to name an enterprise a "monopoly" carries no necessary moral implications, though many instrumental economic ones. In earlier days, before the emergence of economics as an autonomous intellectual discipline, the matter was far different. An accusation of monopoly was explicitly meant to condemn the monopolist for pursuing private gain at the expense of social good. Monopoly was deemed a crime against the very principle of community, antithetical to its ethical foundations and a threat to the stability of social life.
Writing in the 1 580s in a commentary on monopolistic trading corporations, a well-informed author defined monopoly as "an encrochment of . . . commodities into the hands of one or fewe whereby the sole buyinge and sellinge of the same is brought into fewe handes which ought to be free and comon to all the Citizens of the same Commonwealth." He "put it down for a Maxime that all Monapolies haue bin condemned by all politique men and in all well gouerned Comonweales, as a cause of all dearth and scarcitie. . . contrarie to the nature and kinde of all Societies, which first growe into Townes & Cities to lie in saftie and to leve in plentie and cheapnes." Exclusive trading privileges could be tolerated, he allowed, only if it could be demonstrated that their exercise was to the "aparent utilitie & profitt of the whole bodie of the comon wealth," something he thought highly unlikely. Otherwise their existence violated the spirit of community by causing "a small nomber to become riche and . . . a multitude poore" and subject to want, something all governors must seek to prevent. "For where there be fewe sellers and many buiers," our author says, "of necessitie must be highnes of price at the will of the seller." Hence he deemed monopolies generally "hurtfull & noisome to the publique good and benefit" in arbitrarily taking away the "comon right and the lawe vnder which we are borne, and [which] is our inheritance."1
By the last decade of Elizabeth I's reign, similar judgments abounded throughout England, not just among craftsmen and traders directly aggrieved by the existence of monopoly grants, but also in Parliament and the law courts. In the debates that...