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Reviews of Books
They Were All Atlanticists Then
Gloria L. Main, University of Colorado, Boulder
| The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. Edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 383 pages. $85.00 (cloth).The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Edited by Peter A. Coclanis. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 400 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
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Readers will notice the similarity of the titles of the two volumes under review. Both postulate an Atlantic economy in place more than three hundred years ago. Essayists in both books contribute to the histories of localities, empires, and the Atlantic world and all are assiduously attentive to the importance of the economy in their development. |
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The earlier of the two, edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, honors the work of Jacob M. Price, a leading scholar in the field. The collection focuses heavily, but not entirely, on white men and on events within the British Empire. Topics range from the activities of a single cosmopolitan businessman to the operation of vast networks of traders; from the twists and turns in the evolution of a single branch of trade to a comparison of plantation production in Barbados and Brazil; from a comparative analysis of the effect of their Atlantic colonies on the economies of France and Britain to an evaluation of the health and welfare of European immigrants to the Chesapeake. |
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Published four years after the McCusker and Morgan volume, the collection edited by Peter A. Coclanis boasts a broader scope and more eclectic methodology. Reaching into this grab bag, one finds three essays on Dutch traders in the New World and one on Spanish regulations and Cuban tobacco growers; another examines the racial and gender makeup of laborers working at Cape Coast Castle in Africa and still another surveys Native American economic activities in South Carolina. Several essays look at conflicted identities such as those of planters, merchants, and smugglers. Coclanis helpfully aims to summarize the state of the field in an introduction to his volume. Factor and product markets on both sides of the ocean, he says, had become sufficiently closely linked by the middle of the eighteenth century to form a dynamically articulating system of exchange directed mostly by Europeans and Euro-Americans. The growth of consumer demand for warm-weather products including sugar, tobacco, tea, and cotton not only revolutionized agriculture in the New World but also fed the expansion of retail shopkeeping in the Old World. Supplying retail businesses in turn spurred the development of sophisticated financial tools and the creation of larger-scale, capital-intensive sites such as large sugar plantations in the West Indies and textile factories in England. |
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David Hancock contributes essays to both volumes on the Madeira wine trade. The earlier uncovers a most interesting narrative about how regional variations in consumer preferences gradually led to a transformation of the wine from a relatively cheap, undifferentiated beverage into a luxury potable prized by connoisseurs. In The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, he tries to make sense of that transformation by proposing a model for long-term economic processes in the Atlantic world as systems that were, in his editor's words, much more "open, adaptive, nonlinear, unpredictable, and contingent than scholars believe" (xiv). The outcome for the Madeira trade could not have been predicted in 1700, he argues, because it was the product of the unorganized operations of "protean men, working in an uncertain and porous environment, with an opportunistic approach to everyday business" (60). Hancock's notion of the Atlantic economy as highly contingent and dependent on multiple actors, from empires to individual investors, producers, laborers, and consumers, is borne out by studies of all these agents of economy and the diversity of locales and economic outcomes treated in the essays. |
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