The Caribbean And The Atlantic World Economy

This collection of essays explores the inter-imperial connections between British, Spanish, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies, and the 'Old World' countries which founded them. Grounded in primary archival research, the thirteen contributors focus on the ways that participants in the Atlantic World economy transcended imperial boundaries.

Aims to intertwine the socioeconomics of the Caribbean with Atlantic history.

Collection of essays written by former students, colleagues, and friends to honor a preeminent economic historian of the Caribbean. Covering period 1650-1850, essays encompass a broad range of topics, with major focus on various aspects of slavery and imperial relations during those years. Excellent introductory essay on Sheridan's contributions to Caribbean economic history.

Written by one of the leading authorities on trade and finance in the early modern Atlantic world, these fourteen essays, revised and integrated for this volume, share as their common theme the development of the Atlantic economy, especially British America and the Caribbean. Topics treated range from early attempts in medieval England to measure the carrying capacity of ships, through the advent in Renaissance Italy and England of business newspapers that reported on the traffic of ships, cargoes and market prices, to the state of the economy of France over the two hundred years before the French Revolution and of the British West Indies between 1760 and 1790. Included is the story of Thomas Irving who challenged and thwarted the likes of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of essays focusing on the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the economy of the Atlantic basin—comprising parts of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thirteen essays, the contributors examine the complex and variegated processes by which markets were created in the Atlantic basin and how they became integrated. While a number of the contributors focus on the economic history of a specific European imperial system, others, mirroring the realities of the world they are writing about, transcend imperial boundaries and investigate topics shared throughout the region. In the latter case, the contributors focus either on processes occurring along the margins or interstices of empires, or on "breaches" in the colonial systems established by various European powers. Taken together, the essays shed much-needed light on the organization and operation of both the European imperial orders of the early modern era and the increasingly integrated economy of the Atlantic basin challenging these orders over the course of the same period.

DIVHow did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents? In On the Rim of the Caribbean, Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger story: how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character. Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution./div

For abstracts see: Caribbean Abstracts, no. 11, 1999-2000 (2001); p. 103.