The English of the sixteenth century were a rural and an agricultural people, with no town of any size outside London, and no industry of more than local consequence except the making of woollen cloth. Though England was by no means self-sufficient, and its cloth industry depended heavily on foreign markets, its trade inward and outward was still mainly in valuable goods; the need had not appeared to bring in, and the opportunity had not arisen to export, large quantities of the cheap bulky goods which are the support of a great shipping industry. There was, it is true, a growing tendency to import corn; but this import trade was characterized by such violent fluctuations that it could provide no secure occupation for a specialized shipping, and most of it was handled by the Dutch and German ships which regularly distributed corn along all the western coasts of Europe. The shipping industry was, therefore, as yet of little significance in the English economy. It performed limited services (which foreigners would gladly have undertaken) and employed little capital and few men; it neither absorbed any important share of the nation's resources nor performed any very essential task. A good deal of such importance as it had was provided by the fishing fleets, which employed in the fishery and in the distribution of its product a large proportion of the total of English ships and seamen.

The growth of the industry in the following century has been described; it was based principally on a growing need to transport coastwise or overseas bulky goods of basic importance - coal and timber - and on colonial developments which so cheapened such goods as tobacco and sugar that a mass demand for them was created which made it profitable to bring great and increasing quantities of them three thousand miles across the Atlantic.

Between 1560 and 1689 shipping emerged from its earlier insignificance, becoming one of the fastest-growing of English industries. The statistics reveal that the tonnage of ships was multiplied nearly seven-fold, during a period in which population was certainly no more than doubled, and in which it is hard to believe that national income showed anything like a seven-fold increase. The shipping industry's demands on the country's manpower were beginning to be considerable in the later decades of the seventeenth century.