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Robert Kayll, ?-?.
Mysterious Mercantilist author from London, about whom nothing is known.
An author, merely identifying himself as "J.R., Lond.", published a controversial tract The Trades Increase in 1615. Historians of economic thought have puzzled over his identification. Schumpeter assigns it to "John Roberts", but Jacob Viner, following Samuel Johnson's Harleian Miscellany, attributes it to Robert Keale (or Kayll). Economists since have since customarily preferred to attributed it to "Robert Kayll".
The title of tract refers ironically to the name of the East India Company's great ship that floundered so spectacularly off Bantam in 1613. The author provides his two cents to the debate on the ideal method of organizing long-distance trade, as had been previously debated so vociferously between Milles and Wheeler. The author seems to approve the new (1612) joint-stock corporate organization of the EIC (as opposed to other more traditional systems, like the Society of Merchant Adventurers's single-journey stock and the Staple system). However, the author is also extremely critical of the EIC's trading activities themselves, deploring the EIC's special right to export bullion, railing against the trading restrictions, the company's near-criminal waste of sailors' lives, ships and investors capital, and accusing the EIC of diminishing, rather than improving, England's naval strength overall.
Kayll opens the tract in a charming manner, claiming to have been so shocked by a recent Mercantilist pamphlet, that "I resolved to go fishing". And that is when he realized the poor state of English fishing industry - from English ships, sailors and capital being expended in India, while the profitable herring fisheries and trade nearer to home were neglected, and being taken over by the Dutch.
The violence of the author's attack prompted the EIC to seek government action to track down the author and put him on trial for treason in the Star Chamber. But EIC director Dudley Digges preferred to set out a tract publicly refuting the charges of this "vknowne busie Person" directly.
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