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Book Review
| The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Edited by PETER A. COCLANIS. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 377 pp. $49.95 (cloth).
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In "The Dutch Atlantic Economies," the opening essay of this fine collection, Jan de Vries shows that by the 1770s the Dutch imported more from the West Indies than from Asia, a "point [that] will surprise even specialists in the economic history of the early modern period" (p. xiii), notes Peter Coclanis, the editor. European trade with Asia had been expanding at about 1 percent per annum, and at 2 percent in the Atlantic basin, which the Dutch shift reflects. In Asia, the Dutch entered a centuries-old economic world, while in the Atlantic they participated in creating one. Yet the "organization, operation, practice, and personnel" of that economy, as distinct from the internal economies of societies around the Atlantic, is understudied. This collection of essays helps fill that gap, and in its entirety makes two striking and complementary contributions. First, commercial networks crisscrossed the Atlantic like a "spider's web" (p. 31), rather than in a linear fashion as envisaged by mercantilist conceits or scholarly models of triangular trades. Second, these complex and "self-organizing" (p. 31) networks were integral to the rapid and often chaotic growth of the Atlantic economy. |
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Attention to networks allows scholars to study the permeability of empires, which were not self-contained units. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert's analysis of Iberian commercial controversies shows the tension between conservative Spaniards connected to the royal court and Portuguese merchants and bankers who operated in Spain's empire after the union of the crowns in 1580 and espoused more liberal trade policies. In essays on seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch relations, Claudia Schnurmann and April Lee Hatfield document the extensive integration of the Dutch into English America. Hatfield shows that inVirginia they muted their national identities by anglicizing their names, speaking English, and associating with coreligionists. Schnurmann reconstructs Anglo-Dutch networks to question the nature of religious, regional, and national identities in the Atlantic world. "Supranational trade" (p. 196) networks, she suggests, often reflected regional identities, for example ties between Massachusetts and Dutch Surinam, which conflicted with national objectives. |
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