NORTH, SIR DUDLEY (1641-1691), English economist, was 4th son of Dudley, 4th Lord North, who published Passages relating to the Long Parliament, of which he had himself been a member. He was born on May 16, 1641, and in his youth was carried off by gipsies and recovered with some difficulty by his family. He engaged in foreign trade, especially with Turkey, and spent many years at Constantinople and Smyrna. During the Tory reaction under Charles II. he was one of the sheriffs forced on the city of London with an express view to securing verdicts for the Crown in state trials. He was knighted, and was appointed a commissioner of customs, afterwards of the treasury, and again of the customs. Under James II., "he took," says Roger North, "the place of manager for the Crown in all matters of revenue." After the Revolution he was called to account for his alleged unconstitutional proceedings in his office of sheriff. He died on Dec. 31, 1691.
His tract entitled Discourses upon Trade, principally directed to the cases of the interest, coinage, clipping and increase of money, was published anonymously in 1691, and was edited in 1856 by J. R. M'Culloch in the Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce printed by the Political Economy Club of London. In this emphatic assertion of the free-trade doctrine
against the prevailing system of prohibitions, North shows that wealth may exist independently of gold or silver, its source being human industry, applied either to the cultivation of the soil or to manufactures. The export of money in the course of traffic, instead of diminishing, increases the national wealth, trade being only an exchange of superfluities. Nations are related to the world just in the same way as cities to the State or as families to the city. North emphasizes more than his predecessors the value of the home- trade. With respect to the interest of capital, he maintains that it depends, like the price of any commodity, on the proportion of demand and supply, and that a low rate is a result of the relative increase of capital, and cannot be brought about by arbitrary regulations. In arguing the question of free trade, he urges that every advantage given to one interest over another is injurious to the public and that no trade is unprofitable to the public.
North, Locke and Petty are named by Wilhelm Roscher as the "great triumvirate" of English economists of the period.