Business History Review

Special Section
Trade in the Atlantic World
Edited by John J. McCusker

This article considers the changing nature of remittance procedures in the eighteenth-century British slave trade. It explains why bills of exchange became the preferred form of making payment for slave sales, rather than specie or produce. It also indicates the legal and institutional practices that informed the circulation of bills of exchange in a notoriously risky form of long-distance trade. The growth and complexity of the British slave trade, which was conducted mainly by private merchants, led to procedures such as remitting bills "in the bottom" of ships that had supplied slaves to North American and Caribbean markets and the extension of lengthy credit periods to purchasers. Colonial factors played a role as well, acting as the agents for coordinating remittances, and secure British merchant houses were deployed as "guarantees" for payment by bills. The development of credit practices associated with the slave trade, including remittance procedures, helped to strengthen the British economy by providing sound, complex intermediary instruments for the realization of profits from international trade.

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao.  From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg.  Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty.  This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.

An Atlantic approach to the history of early American trade challenges traditional British opinions and, indeed, much Anglo-American scholarship regarding the commercial prospects of the new United States.  Contemporary Spanish observations, in contrast to the more familiar and widely cited ones in English, correctly predicted the post–Revolutionary War integration of American and Spanish imperial markets.  As political, diplomatic, and economic upheavals broke down the old mercantilist system, U.S. merchants quickly succeeded in exploiting their comparative advantage in the expanding Atlantic economy.  The debate over the "decline" of the British West Indies is amplified by examining the concurrent "rise" of the Spanish West Indies, particularly Cuba, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

U.S. shipping to Bordeaux, France, once minimal, increased dramatically after 1793, the year that marked the beginning of the French Wars.  The conflicts compelled merchants to adopt new patterns of trade, as the policies of the belligerent parties increasingly determined the evolution of neutral shipping. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic strove for closer connections across political boundaries and tried to bypass the difficulties created by warfare. This examination of U.S. commerce with Bordeaux explores the impact of war on transatlantic trade and analyzes the strategies adopted by merchants of that period to minimize the impact of new risks.  These merchants tended to rely on personal acquaintances, and they traveled frequently across the Atlantic in order to build and fortify relations of trust.  Turning to older, established modes of doing business enabled them to respond rapidly to changes that occurred in the international situation and to anticipate the sudden shifts in policy that were inevitable in times of war.

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Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. By Steven Fraser. Reviewed by Bruce J. Schulman.

Understanding the Process of Economic Change. By Douglass C. North. Reviewed by Stanley L. Engerman.

An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. By Craig E. Colten. Reviewed by Ann L. Buttenwieser

The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. Edited by Walter Johnson. Reviewed by David Eltis

Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. By Robert B. Outland III. Reviewed by Mark R. Wilson

The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. By William P. Jones. Reviewed by Eric Arnesen

Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. By Amy G. Richter. Reviewed by Margaret Walsh

The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. By Sharon E. Wood. Reviewed by Margaret Garb

Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883. By Jocelyn Wills. Reviewed by George D. Green

Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919. By Robin F. Bachin. Reviewed by Timothy B. Spears

The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929. By Elspeth H. Brown. Reviewed by Michael Kammen

Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. By Lisa Jacobson. Reviewed by Daniel Thomas Cook

It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography. By Susan Ware. Reviewed by Susan Smulyan

For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State. By Jennifer Klein. Reviewed by Kim McQuaid

Housing Segregation in Suburban America since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics. By Charles M. Lamb. Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. By Leslie Berlin. Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Yost

Cuba's Agricultural Sector. By José Alvarez. Reviewed by Ariel Ortiz Bobea

Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. By Jane E. Mangan. Reviewed by Jeremy Baskes

Politics and Urban Growth in Santiago, Chile, 1891–1941. By Richard J. Walter. Reviewed by J. Pablo Silva.

The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought. By Alessandro Roncaglia. Reviewed by Geoffrey M. Hodgson.

Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000.By Chris Howell. Reviewed by Andrew Taylor.

Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement. By Matthew Hilton. Reviewed by John Benson.

The Strictures of Inheritance: The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century. By Jan Luiten van Zanden and Arthur van Riel, translated by Ian Cressie. Reviewed by Karel Davids.

Building Plants: Markets for Technology and Internal Capabilities in DSM's Fertiliser Business, 1925–1970. By Arjan van Rooij. Reviewed by Kees Boersma.

Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950. By John E. Pollard. Reviewed by Peter J. Wosh.

Organizing Control: August Thyssen and the Construction of German Corporate Management. By Jeffrey R. Fear. Reviewed by Roman Köster.

Unternehmensstrategien zwischen Weltwirtschaftskrise und Kriegswirtschaft: Chemnitzer Maschinenbauindustrie in der NS-Zeit 1933–1945 [Business strategy between the depression and the war economy: The machine-building industry of Chemnitz in the Nazi period, 1933–1945].  By Michael C. Schneider. Reviewed by Peter Hayes.

Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age. By Thomas C. Owen. Reviewed by Susan P. McCaffray.

Un Outre-Mer bancaire méditerranéen: Histoire du Crédit foncier d'Algérie et de Tunisie, 1880–1997 [An overseas Mediterranean banking concern: History of the Land Bank of Algeria and Tunisia, 1880–1997]. By Hubert Bonin. Reviewed by Laure Quennouëlle-Corre.

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in Chin. By Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun. Reviewed by Kristin Stapleton.

Workers at War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937–1950. By Joshua H. Howard. Reviewed by Parks M. Coble.