For about 200 years, from 1651 until 1849, the so-called Navigation Acts were in force.
These English laws in essence ruled that England and its dominions and colonies could only trade using English shipping. The purpose was to stop the Dutch under-cutting English merchants, in which it succeeded admirably. There were benefits in that it encouraged the merchant navy to grow and drawbacks, notably that everything cost more. The Navigation Acts are also often cited as an underlying cause of the American Revolution, although this is debatable.
This protectionism seems quaint today and even Little Englanders, as far as I’m aware, don’t campaign for them to be re-introduced. So it is interesting that this is precisely what the US did in 1920. Its official name is the Merchant Marine Act but it is always called Jones Act. It says that goods may only move by sea in US registered, owned and crewed vessels. This drives up costs to the extent that it is cheaper to fly cattle from Hawaii to the US mainland than move them by sea.
The NE states have been having extremely cold weather recently and if you are shivering there you have no cause to like Jones Act. Although there has been, as in Europe, a switch to gas there are still about 20% of homes using heating oil. This is typically supplied from US Gulf Coast refineries sending the oil up the NE seaboard through the Colonial Pipeline. When the weather is very cold there is not enough capacity but Jones Act makes it prohibitively expensive to move the oil by sea. In fact US refineries make more money exporting oil products by sea to destinations in Europe and the Far East where Jones Act does not apply. There have been frequent political debates but Jones Act looks as if it will still be in place to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2020.
I can, however, offer a remedy for feeling frozen and here is how it came about.
In 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III ordered one million cans of beef to feed his troops. The task of providing all this beef went to a Scotsman living in Canada named John Lawson Johnston. Large quantities of beef were available across the British Dominions and South America, but its transport and storage were problematic. Therefore, Johnston created a product known as ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’, later called Bovril, to meet the needs of Napoleon III. (Wiki.)
I can attest that a mug of Bovril, preferably laced with vodka or dry sherry, is an excellent winter warmer.
A dangerously addictive habit. I remember our old colleague Peter Pannell in our early commodity days in New York adding ‘a drop’ of sherry in about anything from a soup to a gravy for which purpose he had a small bottle in both his office desk drawer and his sailboat readily at hand……….
On a particularly cold day I find that a little sherry AND vodka hits the mark very satisfactorily