The Early Modern Atlantic Economy

by Edited by John J. McCusker , Kenneth Morgan

• ISBN13: 9780521782494
• ISBN10: 052178249X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book throws new light on the interlocking commercial relationships of the Atlantic trading world during the centuries ending with the American and French Revolutions. Grouped under four themes - the role of merchants and their connections; the development of trades; imperial economies; and colonial working societies - and written by an international team of thirteen celebrated economic historians, these essays add to our knowledge and understanding of the transatlantic economy. Contributions range from studies of individual businessmen, labour patterns, port cities, and branches of trade, to comparative studies of trading nations. They consider the role of the British and French empires as well as the imperial endeavours of other European powers in the Atlantic, drawing attention to the wider implications. This book throws new light on commerce and the early modern Atlantic economy, and will be a valuable resource for economic historians at all levels.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii
List of tables	viii
List of abbreviations	x
List of contributors	xiii
Introduction	1	(14)
John J. McCusker
Kenneth Morgan
Part I The role of merchants and their connections
Risk, credit and kinship in early modern enterprise	15	(21)
Peter Mathias
Business networks in the British export trade to North America, 1750--1800	36	(29)
Kenneth Morgan
Part II The development of trades
Property versus commerce in the mid-eighteenth-century port of London	65	(21)
Henry Roseveare
Irish businessman and French courtier: the career of Thomas Sutton, comte de Clonard, c. 1722--1782	86	(19)
Louis M. Cullen
`A revolution in the trade': wine distribution and the development of the infrastructure of the Atlantic market economy, 1703--1807	105	(49)
David Hancock
Law, credit, the supply of labour, and the organization of sugar production in the colonial Greater Caribbean: a comparison of Brazil and Barbados in the seventeenth century	154	(9)
Russell R. Menard
The revolutionary impact of European demand for tropical goods	163	(23)
Carole Shammas
The business of distilling in the Old World and the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the rise of a new enterprise and its connection with colonial America	186	(41)
John J. McCusker
Part III Imperial economies
France, Britain and the economic growth of colonial North America	227	(23)
Stanley L. Engerman
Merchants and bankers as patriots or speculators? Foreign commerce and monetary policy in wartime, 1793--1815	250	(28)
Patrick K. O'Brien
America and the crisis of the British imperial economy, 1803--1807	278	(41)
Francois Crouzet
Part IV Colonial working societies
Emigration and the standard of living: the eighteenth-century Chesapeake	319	(25)
Lois Green Carr
After tobacco: the slave labour pattern on a large Chesapeake grain-and-livestock plantation in the early nineteenth century	344	(20)
Richard S. Dunn
Index	364