Seafaring Sailors And Trade 1450 1750

This second volume of articles by G.V. Scammell offers new insights into the history of British and European shipping in the centuries of Europe's penetration into the oceans of the world, from the 15th to the 18th century. It examines the building, ownership and operation of merchantmen in the context of economic and social developments of the period, combining this with the investigation of the vital, but still comparatively neglected, subjects of the lives, working conditions, beliefs, skills and behaviour of seamen. This is the basis for discussion of the means and methods by which British shipping and merchants established themselves in oceanic trades, including those of other powers, considered in relation to the growth of British maritime and commercial supremacy. The final studies then examine the causes and consequences of European and British seaborne expansion, particularly in Asia.

Investigates the lives of common sailors engaged in commerce, exploration, privateering and piracy, and naval actions during Tudor and Stuart periods.

Overturns the generally held view that the press gang was the main means of recruiting seamen by the British navy in the late eighteenth century.

This book has been nominated for The Mountbatten Award for Best Book in the Maritime Media Awards 2021. The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400‒1800 explores early modern maritime history, culture, and the current state of the research and approaches taken by experts in the field. Ranging from cartography to poetry and decorative design to naval warfare, the book shows how once-traditional and often Euro-chauvinistic depictions of oceanic ‘mastery’ during the early modern period have been replaced by newer global ideas. This comprehensive volume challenges underlying assumptions by balancing its assessment of the consequences and accomplishments of European navigators in the era of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan, with an awareness of the sophistication and maritime expertise in Asia, the Arab world, and the Americas. By imparting riveting new stories and global perceptions of maritime history and culture, the contributors provide readers with fresh insights concerning early modern entanglements between humans and the vast, unpredictable ocean. With maritime studies growing and the ocean’s health in decline, this volume is essential reading for academics and students interested in the historicization of the ocean and the ways early modern cultures both conceptualized and utilized seas.

Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.

Shipping was the most dynamic sector of the economy of Europe from the fourteenth into the nineteenth century. Europeans who moved goods by sea dramatically improved their efficiency, laying the foundations for greater economic growth to come and for domination of the world’s oceans.

From the time of Cook, the British and their Canadian successors were drawn to the Northwest coast of North America by possibilities of trade in sea otter and the wish to find a 'northwest passage'. The studies collected here trace how, under the influences of the Royal Navy and British statecraft, the British came to dominate the area, with expeditions sent from London, Bombay and Macau, and the Canadian quest from overland. The North West Company came to control the trade of the Columbia River, despite American opposition, and British sloop diplomacy helped overcome Russian and Spanish resistance to British aspirations. Elsewhere in the Americas, the British promoted trans-Pacific trade with China, harvested British Columbia forests, conveyed specie from western Mexico, and established the South America naval station. The flag followed trade and vice versa; empire was both formal (at Vancouver Island) and informal (as in California or Mexico). This book features individuals such as James Cook, William Bolts, Peter Pond, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie. It is also an account of the pressure that corporations placed on the British state in shaping the emerging world of trade and colonization in that distant ocean and its shores, and of the importance of sea-power in the creation of modern Canada.

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred–year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.