Fur Fashion And Transatlantic Trade During The Seventeenth Century

This book explores the development of the fur trade in Chesapeake Bay during the seventeenth century, and the wide-ranging links that were formed in a new and extensive transatlantic chain of supply and consumption. It considers changing fashion in England, the growing demand for fur, at a time when the Russian fur trade was in decline, examines native North Americans and their trading and other exchanges with colonists, and explores the nature of colonial society, including the commercial ambitions of a varied range of investors. As such, it outlines the intense rivalry which existed between different colonies and colonial interests. Although the book argues that fur never supplanted tobacco as the region's principal export, noting that the trade declined as new, more profitable sources of supply were opened up, nevertheless the case of the Chesapeake fur trade provides an excellent example of how different elements in a new transatlantic enterprise fitted together and had a profound impact on each other.

For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, historian Eric Jay Dolin shows its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history. He argues that the trade in animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier where global powers battled for control. From the seventeenth century right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world's appetite for fur made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible resource. The result was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into a powerful new player on the world stage. Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions--in New England, the Great Lakes, and in the expanding West. Fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests, and mountains, then soon pushed Native Americans off their lands as John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company attempted to monopolize the West.--From publisher description.

This book surveys the role of Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the “Portuguese Nation,” conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the “Myth of the Dutch,” the “Sephardic Moment,” and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe’s primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.

How did Britain emerge as a world power and later as the world's first industrial society? What policies, cultural practices, and institutions were responsible for this outcome? How were the inevitable disruptions to social and political life coped with? This innovative volume illustrates the contribution of economic thinking (scientific, official and popular) to the public understanding of British economic experience over the period 1688-1914. Political economy has frequently served as the favourite mode of public discourse when analysing or justifying British economic policies, performance and institutions. These sixteen essays, centering on the peculiarities of the British experience, are grouped under five main themes: foreign assessments of that experience; land tenure; empire and free trade; fiscal and monetary regimes; and the poor law and welfare. This is a collaborative endeavour by historians with established reputations in their field, which will appeal to all those interested in the current development of these branches of historical scholarship.

Drawing on a wide body of evidence, the book argues that the support of women was vital to the persistence of piracy around the British Isles at least until the early seventeenth century. The emergence of long-distance and globalized predation had far reaching consequences for female agency.

Commerce by a Frozen Sea is a cross-cultural study of a century of contact between North American native peoples and Europeans. During the eighteenth century, the natives of the Hudson Bay lowlands and their European trading partners were brought together by an increasingly popular trade in furs, destined for the hat and fur markets of Europe. Native Americans were the sole trappers of furs, which they traded to English and French merchants. The trade gave Native Americans access to new European technologies that were integrated into Indian lifeways. What emerges from this detailed exploration is a story of two equal partners involved in a mutually beneficial trade. Drawing on more than seventy years of trade records from the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, economic historians Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis critique and confront many of the myths commonly held about the nature and impact of commercial trade. Extensively documented are the ways in which natives transformed the trading environment and determined the range of goods offered to them. Natives were effective bargainers who demanded practical items such as firearms, kettles, and blankets as well as luxuries like cloth, jewelry, and tobacco—goods similar to those purchased by Europeans. Surprisingly little alcohol was traded. Indeed, Commerce by a Frozen Sea shows that natives were industrious people who achieved a standard of living above that of most workers in Europe. Although they later fell behind, the eighteenth century was, for Native Americans, a golden age.

This work examines a trade that covered the backs of sailors and soldiers, that shirted labouring men and skirted working women, that employed legions of needlewomen and supplied retailers with new consumer wares. Garments, once bought, returned again to the marketplace, circulating like a currency and bolstering demand. The agents in this trade included military contractors for clothing, female outworkers and dealers in used clothes. Each was affected by a changing demand for new-styled 'luxuries' and necessities in apparel.