| Overview | Seminars | Working Papers | Workshops |
| Newsletter | Other Resources | Photo Album | Site Map |
1999 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 1999 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "The Economy of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800." A copy of the program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
Eric H. Ash. " 'A note and a Caveat for Merchants': Mercantile Expertise in Elizabethan England"
This paper introduces a new character in the world of early modern expertise: the "mercantile expert," who collected information on markets and trade throughout the world, and made his unique, specialized knowledge available to patrons who required it. Several examples of the mercantile expert in Elizabethan England (including Sebastian Cabot and the elder and younger Richard Hakluyts) are explored, with attention to their interests and methods, as well as their impact upon the world-view of various Elizabethan patrons, including Privy Councilors and courtiers. [WP # 99003]
Paul Burton Cheney. "Mercantilism and Moeurs: Comparative History and Sociology in the Analysis of France's Overseas Trade, 1713-1748"
This paper explores the economic analysis brought to bear on France's competitive prospects in colonial commerce. It demonstrates the centrality of historical and comparative methods to this analysis, by highlighting how categories that would become fundamental for Montesquieu in his 1748 Spirit of the Laws were very much in use by economic thinkers by that time. In particular, it discusses how French economic writers, from diplomats to early Enlightenment men of letters, understood the role of moeurs (mores) and forms of government in shaping the successes and failures of the major European players (including England, Spain, Holland, and of course France) in the field of colonial commerce. The goal of this paper is to provide an alternative intellectual genealogy for eighteenth-century reform economics, one that goes beyond the traditional evolutionary line linking mercantilism to physiocracy and finally Smithian economics. [WP # 99002]
Gloria Ifeoma Chuku. "Women as Actors and Victims of the Slave Trade in Igboland, Nigeria"
The findings of this paper came out of research I carried out between 1991 and 1995 for my Ph.D dissertation, and from preliminary oral interviews and archival searches conducted in Nigeria which I complemented with relevant available literature. This paper is an attempt to redress the gender imbalance and male-centered approach of most literature on the African Atlantic slave trade. It attempts to examine the role of women as victims and actors in the Atlantic slave trade as well as in the internal trade in slaves in Igboland of Nigeria between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that although Igbo women than men constituted the greater number of the victims, some of them participated actively in the trade as owners and overseers, chief beneficiaries of slave labor and dealers in slaves. These women acquired so much wealth that they invested in more domestic slaves, married wives for their husbands, became female husbands and built houses for them and their children. However, such factors as bridewealth, polygyny, manumission processes, reproductive and productive functions of women worked against them and made them the worst victims of the trade. [WP # 99016]
Gail D. Danvers. " 'We must of course perish for want of subsistence': Iroquois Indians, Imperial Politics and the Atlantic Economy"
Iroquois Indians played an active role in the Atlantic world economy both as consumers and producers. This paper examines their experience during the tumultuous period of the mid-eighteenth century (roughly 1740-1770). Imperial warfare followed by a frenzy of white westward migration and the rapid commercialization of trade relations caused significant economic strain within Iroquois communities. As a means to supplement their livelihood, an increasing number resorted to various forms of paid employment. This paper traces out these themes of land, trade and labor, to demonstrate how the Iroquois became more firmly entangled in an Atlantic economy as the century wore on. Evidence of this trend includes the development of a new accumulation ethos, which, by the later part of the century began to hammer away at traditional values of redistribution and reciprocity. This paper posits the Seven Years War as a critical period in Iroquois history. Both the events of the war and its aftermath greatly diminished the ability of the Iroquois to isolate themselves from a larger capitalist world. [WP # 99006]
Michiel de Jong. "The Role of the State in the Expansion of the Dutch Overseas Trade Net-works, 1590-1630"
In the years 1590-1621 the Dutch swarmed out over the European, Atlantic and Asian seas and succesfully developed new overseas markets. This paper focuses on the active support of the Dutch state for the overseas trading operations of its merchant-entrepreneurs. The support program did not result in a decisive reduction of the equipment costs, but accelerated the equipment of ships in new, starting branches of trade and made quick reactions possible on changing market opportunities. Moreover, the build-up of a reorganized army and navy in the Dutch Republic stimulated the growth of a new infrastructure of arms trade and arms production, which provided an important condition for the expansion of Dutch overseas trade. [WP # 99008]
Marie Duggan-Julca. "The China Trade That Never Was: Lost Profit Opportunity for Spain, Loss of Freedom for California Indians"
This paper integrates California history into the larger picture of Spain's economic (under)development of the Latin American Pacific, and in the process suggests a new explanation for the delay until 1769 for the incorporation of California into Spanish America. The sale of California otter skins to China would seem, at first glance, to be just the sort of market-driven development project that King Carlos III of Spain was attempting to foment in the late eighteenth century. Yet that for-profit development path was not taken in California. Instead, Franciscan priests were granted California as an economic concession. Market revenues were incidental to the economy they established, which involved relocating tens of thousands of Kumeyaay, Agjachemem, Tongva, Chumash, Salinan, and Ohlone peoples onto mission estates, where sedentary agriculture replaced nomadic hunting and gathering as the source of subsistence. This sedentary lifestyle facilitated thought control, which was the essence of conversion. I conclude that Spain may have lost profits by forgoing furs, but the native people probably lost more – fur hunting for entrepreneurs may have netted them little money, but it would have enabled native Californians to keep some of the culture that the Franciscans aimed specifically to crush. On the other hand, Spain may have gained something more valuable than profits from the Franciscan economy. It was not so much the 400 soldiers as the 20,000 native people allied with the priests who kept California for Spain through a turbulent period of international imperial rivalry. [WP # 99010]
S. Max Edelson. "Mastering the Market: Planters and Commodity Marketing in Charlestown, South Carolina, 1735-1785"
This paper explores lowcountry planters' working conceptualizations of and strategic responses to the often volatile commercial conditions that characterized the transatlantic trade in rice and indigo during the eighteenth century. Intensive investments in a transportation infrastructure centralized rice marketing in Charles Town, creating a forum in which planters sold their produce directly to factors and merchants. When planters brought commodities to Charles Town, they came into engagement with the broader Atlantic economy as consumers and disseminators of market information. They competed with merchants to establish scenarios of demand in an information-poor environment and manipulated the appearance and flow of commodities into town to alter local prices. As exogenous forces buffeted commercial plantation agriculture in the Lowcountry, planters forged marketing strategies that brought dynamics beyond their control into a local sphere of influence and expertise. [WP # 990019]
Malick W. Ghachem. " 'Between France and the Antilles': The Commercial Assimilation of the American Revolution in Saint-Domingue, 1784-1785"
This paper is an effort to approach the unwieldy concept of the "Atlantic Revolution" from the perspective of commercial relations between the United States and Saint-Domingue. A long and irrepressible tradition of illegal trade tied the region that became the New World's first independent republic to the Caribbean colony that would become its second. The conclusion of the American revolutionary war provided France an opportunity to recalibrate its deteriorating relationship with Saint-Domingue. The abandonment of mercantilism in 1784 served to immunize the French empire from a replay of the forces that had led to the dismemberment of its British counterpart. Locked in a public relations battle with the metropolitan chambers of commerce, the creole agitators of Saint-Domingue played into the monarchy's hands by assimilating the American Revolution as an essentially commercial rather than ideological event. But the colonists' bid to locate autonomy in a sense of economic community with the metropole collapsed into the even more paradoxical assumption that attacks upon the slave trade were consistent with the defense of plantation slavery. [WP # 99026]
Natasha Glaisyer. "London's Royal Exchange, 1660-1750: The Trading World in Miniature"
At the heart of international trading networks in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, London's Royal Exchange was a commercial and information entrepôt where metropolitan merchants and traders, and those from further afield, engaged in commercial transactions. This paper employs a cultural approach to explore both the activities the Exchange accommodated and textual and visual images of the building during this period of commercial and financial "revolution." The notion of the Exchange's reputation was keenly articulated and formed part of a larger rhetoric on London as a trading center. Moreover, as an icon of trade, the Exchange brought glory not only to the city, but to the nation as well. Visual depictions of the Exchange quadrangle indicated the various "walks" where merchants from all corners of the commercial world gathered; many contemporary travellers and satirists commented upon the diversity of the traders gathered there. This was the trading world in miniature. [WP # 99004]
Regina Grafe. "American Trade and the Cantabrian Economy, 1550-1650"
Between 1550 and 1650 the commercial sector of the Cantabrian coastal region experienced a significant transformation. Trading patterns moved from being closely integrated into a Northern Spanish commercial network with links to the Carrera de Indias, towards forming part of the emerging trade structures between England and the North American colonies. Based on Northern Spanish and British sources, the paper explores the impact of these changes on commercial specialization within the region and on the region's integration into the wider Spanish economy. In addition, the repercussions on the institutions governing trade and the mercantile communities involved are discussed. [WP # 99022]
Andrew Hamilton. "Atlantic Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Anglo-American theories of Trade and Empire in the 1780s"
This paper seeks to resolve some of the problems in traditional intellectual history's tendency to historicize economic attitudes toward "mercantilism" and "liberal political economy" into distinct historical periods. Rather, it is my contention that a better approach is to see the different attitudes toward international trade in the early modern period as distinct strands or discourses which, aggregated together, make up the language of free trade. After tracing the two main strands--the vocabulary of laissez-faire and the strand that we might label reason of state--I want to suggest that various economic theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may best be understood in light of these aggregated strands of discourse, and especially in regard to what has become known as the rich country-poor country problem. It is my working hypothesis that when this model is applied to the writings of Benjamin Vaughan and John Adams in the 1780s, it will reveal why Vaughan remains unflinching in his cosmopolitan vision, while Adams retreats from a similar stance to a position of defensive nationalism. [WP # 99027]
April Lee Hatfield. "Mariners, Merchants, and Colonists in Seventeenth-Century English America"
Seamen, ship masters, and merchants created networks that allowed North American and Caribbean colonists to live in worlds extending far beyond their individual colonies. Through commercial exchanges, temporary employment, informal socializing, and participation in legal proceedings, mariners became enmeshed in local societies. The time required for lading and repairing ships and awaiting favorable weather often forced long stays in particular locales, facilitating the formation of economic and personal relationships between mariners and colonists. In seventeenth-century English American societies commonly pressed for labor, sailors easily participated in local economies, particularly through activities relating to preparation of their ships' cargoes. During ships' lading periods, taverns and the ships themselves became centers of social interaction and information exchange between mariners and residents. Ships' movements thereby created networks connecting residents of the Atlantic world to one another mentally as well as economically. [WP # 99013]
Brooke Hunter. " 'The Whole System Hangs like a Cobweb': The Grain Trade in an Era of Revolution"
The lower Delaware River Valley area of the mid-Atlantic region in North America was one of the largest grain exporters in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. While the provision trade to the West Indies had been a staple of the mid-Atlantic economy since the late 1600s, the growth of that market plus new demand from Britain and Europe around mid-century led to significant changes in the organization of the grain trade. Part of a larger process of commercial development, the system of networks governing the grain trade became more intricate between 1750-1800. To meet the needs of an expanding marketplace, people increasingly specialized in the processes of production, distribution, and marketing of flour. A flour merchant emerged as one of the new specialties. This individual brokered the exchange of flour and grain between millers and provision traders, between the countryside and transatlantic markets. Examining the career of Levi Hollingsworth, one of the first to specialize in Philadelphia, illustrates the activities of a flour merchant, reveals the complexity of trading networks, and shows how an individual and a sector of trade met the challenges of an era of revolution. [WP # 99018]
Folasade Ifamose. "The Indigenous Aristocracy, the Atlantic Trade, and the Gunpowder Economy"
The whole region between the Volta and Niger area was acutely convulsed and destabilized by the direct involvement in the gun and gun powder trade across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1800. The desire to capture cities with precious metals as well as those with direct access to the Atlantic coasts directly affected and influenced the attempt of the kings to participate actively in the trans-Atlantic trade. The ultimate desire of the traditional rulers was to acquire, among other things, firearms from the triangular trade through the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and the American traders at the Coast. This study examines the prevailing conditions of the institution of kingship among the tribes that occupied the region between the Volta and Niger area. It evaluates the copious authority embedded in the institution and how such authorities were altered by the advent of guns and gunpowder through the Atlantic. The study offers an analysis of the gradual but progressive drift away of the kingship from the very basis of their existence – promotion of commerce, defence and protection of the traditions, cultures and values of their communities. The effects of these activities on the entire political economy of the aristocracy shall be adequately examined. The study highlights the complete erosion and subsequent decay of the authority bestowed on the kingship institution. The result was across-the-board anarchy and total disintegration of an established political and economic system. The study relies heavily on primary source materials made up of oral interviews, archival materials, and written records of early European visitors to the Coast. These materials will be supplemented by published works in history, sociology, anthropology, and other relevant disciplines. [WP # 99017]
James Muir. "The Strange Case of the Schooner Seaflower: Law and Business in Colonial Halifax, 1749-1764"
This paper explores the ways in which owners, masters and workers went to court in the eighteenth-century British colonial world through an in-depth study of a series of cases in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from 1749 to 1765. The paper follows in particular cases involving a schooner named the Seaflower. Using records from various civil courts, it draws attention to the ways in which the court played a role in both day-to-day and exceptional relations between the colonial state, business and labor. [WP # 99024]
Laura Náter. "Cuba and Tobacco in the Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
Due to its international prestige, Cuban tobacco was the Spanish Crown's option to compete in the European market. The strategy concentrated in two axes: 1) Seville, as elaboration, distribution and exportation center; and 2) Cuba, as the main raw material supplier for Seville's factory. Since the 1680s, different measures were experimented in reiterated attempts of achieve the way to implement the strategy. This achievement was finally obtained in 1760 with the Havana Factoría. But the success of the Factoría in fulfilling its objectives lasted less than two decades. Its extreme dependence upon Mexican silver provoked its early decline and eventual collapse. [WP # 99021]
Marcy Norton. "The Business of Tobacco in the Spanish Empire, 1590-1636"
This paper considers how the actions and interactions of the Spanish Crown and diverse commercial groups (English, Dutch, and Portuguese traders, Spanish settlers, Seville merchants, Granadan guild members) contributed to tobacco's entrance into the Atlantic economy and the Habsburg fiscal apparatus. Tobacco's trajectory into the Spanish fiscal regime illuminates facets of state formation, showing how the state grew from the "outside" of various interest groups as much as it did from the "inside" of royal bureaucracy. This study also highlights the importance of transnational alliances in giving rise to trans-Atlantic trade. [WP # 99020]
Gustavo L. Paz. "Between the Atlantic and the Andes: Trade and Transportation in Late Colonial Argentina"
From the development of Potosí in the late sixteenth century, the economy of the Rio de la Plata (Argentina) pivoted around the production and circulation of silver. The cities between Buenos Aires and Potosí supplied the urban and mining centers of the Andes with both raw and manufactured goods. Among those products sent to the Andean markets, mules raised and finished in various parts of the Rio de la Plata figured prominently. Mules and silver were the two key commodities involved in a long-distance trade route that linked the Atlantic to the Andes in an encompassing economic space that collapsed only in the nineteenth century. [WP # 99014]
Lawrence A. Peskin. "Liberty and Protection: Popular Mercantilism in the First British Empire"
This paper examines the connection between protectionism and liberty in the first British empire by focusing on three protectionist incidents on both sides of the Atlantic. The first of these episodes, the Spitalfields Weavers' riots of 1765-1769, accompanied the Wilkite disturbances in London. The second, the American nonimportation movement, was an important component of the American Revolution, and one in which urban artisans played a crucial role. The third, the Irish Volunteer movement of the 1780s, paralleled American nonimportation both in the involvement of artisans (at least in Dublin) and in its anti-English protectionist rhetoric. In all three cases artisans wanted to protect themselves from imported manufactures through voluntary action (nonimportation agreements) and regulations by the English and Irish parliaments and the emerging American governments. [WP # 99011]
Ty M. Reese. "Toiling in the Empire: Labor in Three Anglo-Atlantic Ports—London, Philadelphia, and Cape Coast Castle, 1750-1783"
This work redirects studies of the slave trade by focusing on the missing element of indirect participants, especially laborers. The slave trade's direct participants form our current understanding of its dimensions in the Atlantic world, but an examination of indirect participation reveals new aspects. Studying the laborers, and labor systems, that indirectly contributed to the slave trade reveals its true extent and illustrates the economic connections and interactions of the Atlantic world. By examining the slave trade's indirect participants in London and Cape Coast Castle, this paper reveals the large number of laborers whose toil contributed to the slave trade's success and profitability. Lastly, this paper demonstrates, using Philadelphia as an example, how this model can be used for ports throughout the Atlantic. [WP # 99012]
Sharon Rodgers. "Boston and the Atlantic World: One City's Dilemma"
The increasing interconnections among the distant economies of the Atlantic trading world produced problems as well as benefits. In Boston, the city's often inadequate food supply had to satisfy the demands of an active overseas wholesale trade as well as the needs of local consumers. The dual function served by the public markets led townsmen to perceive them as a threat. These perceptions were fostered by the chronically abusive practices among merchants and farmers intent on maximizing their profits in the blossoming overseas trade. The ingredients for conflict were present. [WP # 99025]
Claudia Schnurmann. "Atlantic trade Via Supranational Networks in the Seventeenth Century"
This paper concentrates on the commercial connections between Dutchmen and Englishmen, on the one hand, and inhabitants of selected Dutch and English colonies in America on the other, as elements of a supranational network stretched across the Atlantic world during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By taking a prosopographical approach, commercial techniques as well as the trade's organization and routes will be considered. The main purpose of this study is to trace the correlations among Atlantic trade on a supranational-styled, colonial self-assurance, and the conduct of the European authorities. [WP # 99009]
Juan Carlos Sola Corbacho. "Home Markets in Spain and New Spain at the End of the Eighteenth Century"
This work is a comparative study of the mercantile sectors of Madrid and Mexico City at the end of the eighteenth century, which held the most significant concentration of capital at that time in the Hispanic world. Drawing from notarial records, I have found information about more than one thousand merchants in Madrid and almost eight hundred in Mexico City. These documents include detailed inventories of their goods, shops, and property; bills, payment agreements, designation of proxies, and wills. They provide information about the structure of these two economic sectors and help us identify how merchants invested their capital, the commercial networks they used to trade within the home markets, and the rationale which determined their economic strategies. A study of the activities of the merchants from Madrid and Mexico City will provide some crucial elements to compare the main characteristics and the structure of the domestic markets of the two main parts of the Empire. [WP # 99023]
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. "1640 Revisited, or, How the Party of Commercial Expansion Lost to the Party of Political Conservation in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1620 – 1650"
Under the reformist government of the Count-Duke of Olivares (1621-1643), the decline of Spain provided a unique opening for the reconfiguration of its commercial system. Among the most prominent allies of the Count-Duke were the merchants and bankers of the Portuguese trading community. The paper concentrates its attentions on the members of this group, examining how their social experience in the world of overseas trade was translated into public arguments over the place of commerce in the Spanish Empire. Attention is also paid to the intellectual frameworks undergirding both the Portuguese writings and those of their critics. [WP # 99001]
Elvira Vilches. "Caribbean Exchanges and Colonial Economy, 1492-1510"
This study focuses on a close reading of Columbus's writings on his four voyages through the parameters dictated by the contrast existing between the transactions described in the Journal of the First Voyage and the documents of discovery. I argue that Columbus's writing translates the transactions taking place between Caribbean peoples and Spaniards into an ideation of a holy gift that only Columbus himself, as the royal envoy, can retrieve for Ferdinand and Isabella. This conversion runs through Columbus's career and pursuits and serves as the ideological basis of colonial enterprise: gold for God. I suggest that Columbus unifies two-way exchanges sought by both groups into the absolute ideation of the holy gift so that he can justify his error and fulfill the colonial expectations of his sponsors. Thus the holy gift of free gold stands as a conceptual measure of boundless wealth to compensate for what this resilient mariner hopes will be just a brief obstacle to extraordinary gains. [WP # 99005]
David John Weiland III. "Chinese Silk and European Textiles: Transatlantic Trade and the Parallel Crises of Europe and Mexico, 1571-1670"
The discovery of silver in Spanish America during the mid-sixteenth century had a profound impact on the conduct of international trade and the pursuit of wealth. As a result of the rapid rise and sudden fall of this source of bullion, the peoples of the Atlantic world were drawn into contact with a wide series of commercial and productive networks. The early successes and failures of the participants set in motion a series of events that would ultimately pave the way for industrialization. Before this could take place, however, bullion production and the seventeenth-century crisis would force older powers to the sideline and draw new powers to a rising prominence in the economic interactions between Europe and the rest of the world. [WP # 99015]
Nuala Zahedieh. "The Meaning of Mercantilism and the Working of the Navigation Acts in the Seventeenth Century"
This paper uses the Navigation Acts to examine mercantilism in theory and practice. It looks at the ideological convictions that shaped the ambitions of the architects of the Navigation Acts and draws on extensive research on England's seventeenth-century colonial commerce to assess how far these aims were realized. Success was in large measure owing to unforeseen and contingent circumstances that reduced the costs of compliance to a similar level to the costs of evasion. The shipbuilding resources of the American frontier and a competitive advantage in violence in the Caribbean played an important part in enabling English merchants and shippers to compete with their Dutch rivals. Finally, the paper looks at some unintended consequences of the Acts that flew in the face of all that mattered to the mercantilists.[WP # 99007]
| Overview | Seminars | Working Papers | Workshops |
| Newsletter | Other Resources | Photo Album | Site Map |
© 1999 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created December 9, 1999.