The 1786 “Act for raising a Revenue in this Province” established one of the first comprehensive systems of provincial taxation in New Brunswick, creating a customs and tariff regime to fund the new colony’s government. It imposed specific duties on imported distilled spirits (rum) and malt liquors, assessed by cask size, and required ship masters to submit sworn cargo manifests at the treasurer’s office before entry at the imperial customs house. The Act also levied ad valorem duties on a wide range of imported goods—excluding those commodities arriving from Great Britain and Ireland—while exempting certain staples such as lumber, livestock, and British grain. In addition, it regulated the retail sale of alcohol through licensing requirements and quarterly excise payments, established procedures for bonding and deferred payment of duties, mandated enforcement mechanisms and penalties for false entries, and authorized the appointment of local revenue officers. Revenues collected under the Act were to remain in the provincial treasury pending legislative appropriation, underscoring the Assembly’s claim to fiscal authority.
For my work on the Saint John Customs House Index, this Act, and its legislative successors, provides the legal and administrative framework that generated the very records I am transcribing. It explains why detailed cargo manifests, sworn declarations, cask measurements, and valuations appear in the treasurer’s accounts and legislative returns. The emphasis on duties for imported spirits and foreign goods—particularly those not from British ports—helps contextualize patterns I am identifying in Saint John’s trade, including the fiscal importance of Caribbean and American commodities. In short, the Act illuminates how customs revenue functioned not merely as a commercial tally, but as a foundational instrument of provincial state formation, making your dataset essential for understanding how New Brunswick financed governance through Atlantic trade.
The 1786 revenue act makes clear that customs and excise duties were designed explicitly to fund the machinery and infrastructure of government in New Brunswick. By directing that all monies collected “remain in the treasury” until appropriated by the Governor, Council, and Assembly, the legislation tied maritime commerce directly to public expenditure. Duties on imported spirits and foreign goods, licensing fees from tavern-keepers, and excise payments on retail sales created a steady stream of income that could be mobilized for roads, bridges, courts, public buildings, militia expenses, and other essential services in a newly established colony such as the construction of lighthouses. The Act’s detailed enforcement mechanisms—sworn manifests, bonded payments, penalties, and appointed revenue officers—underscore how seriously the province treated the collection of these funds. In effect, it demonstrates that New Brunswick’s early public infrastructure was underwritten by customs revenue generated at ports such as Saint John, linking Atlantic trade to the fiscal foundations of colonial governance. Similar patterns and connections have already been well-established in recent scholarship about Nova Scotia.
In her article “Importing the Plantation: The Greater Caribbean Trade and Loyalist Nova Scotia’s Public Revenue, 1789–1835,” published in the Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Shirley Tillotson demonstrates that a substantial share of Nova Scotia’s provincial revenue derived from customs duties on slave-produced goods imported from the greater Caribbean. Drawing on Halifax customs house records, she shows that trade taxes—especially on sugar, rum, molasses, and coffee—generated roughly two-thirds of provincial revenue, and that in some years between 38 and 73 percent of impost and excise income came specifically from slave-made commodities. These revenues financed roads, bridges, public buildings, the militia, education, and poor relief, tying the colony’s fiscal foundations to plantation slavery despite its predominantly white, smallholder economy. Tillotson argues that this dependence on slavery-derived revenue also had cultural consequences, reinforcing racial hierarchies within Nova Scotia’s governing and professional classes. The data I am collecting from the Saint John Customs House promises to reveal comparable fiscal and commercial entanglements in New Brunswick, while also allowing for more granular analysis of connections to particular ports in the Caribbean and the United States, thereby situating Saint John and New Brunswick within the wider Atlantic networks that linked public finance, commodity flows, and enslaved labour.
Relevant blogs and short essays
A shorter, but great analysis from Tillotson’s article in the Journal of the RNSHS is available on NiCHE.
American Independence as a Supply Chain Crises: The Case of Nova Scotia, 1783-94
Patrick Callaway
This essay argues that Nova Scotia’s reliance on American grain both predated and survived the American Revolution. Despite imperial efforts to redirect trade within the British Empire, the colony’s limited agricultural capacity and the post-1783 influx of Loyalists made imported flour and corn from ports such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia indispensable.
Faced with recurring shortages and the threat of unrest, colonial officials repeatedly relaxed trade restrictions to permit American provisions. The persistence of this commerce—even during wartime—demonstrates that food security and political stability ultimately outweighed mercantilist ideology, revealing the resilience of regional supply networks across revolutionary rupture.
In the years 1788 and 1789 currently available in the Saint John Customs House Index, 53 of the 88 non-British ships that arrived to that port came from the United States. Almost all of these ships brought with them bread and foodstuffs, demonstrating that New Brunswick had a very similar reliance on American grain in the post-revolution years.
Relevant New Brunswick trade legislation
Below are the Acts pulled from the British North America Legislative Database