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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Peter A. Coclanis, editor. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. (The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World.) Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xix, 377. $49.95.
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| Perhaps because Atlantic history means different things to different practitioners, its genealogy is in dispute. But to my knowledge, nobody has gone as far back in time as Peter A. Coclanis, who traces the roots of Atlantic history to the nineteenth century. Coclanis asserts that some would extend the genealogy back to Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867). It is hard to see, however, why Marx should be considered a pioneer here. Of course, he identified a number of developments in the New World and Africa (as well as the East Indies) as constituting the dawn of capitalist production, but concluding that events on one side of the Atlantic bear on the other does not make one an Atlanticist. Nowhere did Marx come close to arguing that the Atlantic was a coherent unit of analysis. His view was a global one. |
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The spirit of Marx is present in this volume, however, in that the essays explore the economic foundations of the Atlantic world. Based on papers presented at a 1999 conference, the thirteen contributions on the French, Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires shed light on both imperial trade and the cross-imperial linkages that defied mercantilist schemes. One wishes more essays had been available on Africa, but a fine contribution by Ty Reese on free and bonded labor at Cape Coast Castle at least acknowledges the role of West Africa. The only essay that does not fit in this collection is that by Laura Croghan Kamoie on the domestic economy of the Chesapeake. The author does not even attempt to show the impact of the wider Atlantic world on the Chesapeake, or vice versa. |
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Three authors deal with imperial trade. Jan de Vries presents a thorough overview of the Dutch Atlantic, distinguishing four stages of development after 1600. While the Dutch failed in their grand design for the Western Hemisphere, their share of Atlantic trade was never insignificant, de Vries argues, although the marginal character of their presence in the Caribbean made them vulnerable. British transatlantic trade, as R. C. Nash relates, also took off around 1600, but commercial expansion had to wait for extensive settlement in the sugar and tobacco colonies. In a comprehensive discussion of trade and finance, Nash revisits the commission system, which he claims came to account for around eighty percent of British Atlantic trade. British merchants who remained outside this system as independent entrepreneurs dealt in tobacco produced by middling and lesser planters or Carolina rice, or were active in the transatlantic slave trade. Contrary to the Dutch and the British, cash crop production in the New World for a long time had no priority for the Spanish, focused as they were on harvesting precious metals. Although she makes too much of the Dutch role in paving the way for the sugar revolution in the non-Hispanic Caribbean, Laura Náter convincingly argues that Spanish officials deliberately avoided competition in sugar with English and French colonies, inasmuch as easy access to capital, high productivity, and low prices put their rivals at a considerable advantage. Spain's Caribbean crop par excellence was Cuban tobacco, which became popular early on among foreign customers. Náter contends that the blossoming of Cuba's tobacco production provided the basis for the island's sugar expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as it created an infrastructure and brought in capital and manpower. |
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