The Rise Of The Atlantic Economy And The North Sea Baltic Trade 1500 1800

These conference proceedings from the XVth World Economic History Congress discuss the economic relationship between the Atlantic World and the North Sea/Baltic region in the pre-industrial period. Yet, the relationship is not seen only in terms of commodity and capital flows. Different patterns of trade and political economies of early modern states come into focus, too. The individual contributions pay attention to institutional conditions of trade, as well as cross-cultural entrepreneurship. The role of Atlantic colonial commodities for the transformation of the Baltic and North Sea trades is examined. Economic policies are stressed as crucial for a more thorough understanding of such phenomena as the shift of Scotland's trade from the east to the west, and for the success of Danish and Swedish shipping businesses during the period. In this way the editors hope that the volume will act as a trigger for further studies on a topic that has been hitherto neglected vis-�-vis an ever-growing body of literature on the early modern Atlantic economies: An impartial and comprehensive understanding of the Atlantic can only be achieved by factoring the Baltic into the picture.

Drawing on an impressive range of archival material, this monograph delves into the careers of two businessmen who worked for Nordic chartered monopoly trading companies to illuminate individual entrepreneurship in the context of seventeenth-century long-distance trade. The study spans the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, examining global entanglements through personal interactions and daily trading activities between Europeans, Asian merchants and African brokers. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals and their networks within the great European trading companies of the early modern period. This unique book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of economic history, business history, early modern global history and entrepreneurship.

While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.

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.

Seafarers were the first workers to inhabit a truly international labour market, a sector of industry which, throughout the early modern period, drove European economic and imperial expansion, technological and scientific development, and cultural and material exchanges around the world. This volume adopts a comparative perspective, presenting current research about maritime labourers across three centuries, in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to understand how seafarers contributed to legal and economic transformation within Europe and across the world. Focusing on the three related themes of legal systems, labouring conditions, and imperial power, these essays explore the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between seafarers' individual and collective agency, and the social and economic frameworks which structured their lives.

The title of Beyond the Line refers to the imaginary "Line" drawn between North and South, a division established by the Peace Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. This is an early modern time and Eurocentric construction, according to which the southern oceanic world has long been taken as symbol of expansionist philosophies and practices. An obvious motivation for changing this "Line" division is the growing influence of the "Global South" in the contemporary economic and political setting. However, another motivation for changing opinions in regard to the "Line" is equally important. We observe an emergent consciousness of the pivotal role of the oceanic world for human life. This requires the reformulation of former views and raises numerous questions. A diversity of connections comes to the mind, which demands the composition of a catalogue of case studies with an oceanic horizon. Through this operation, different problems are being linked together. Which problems encounter historians with their research on fishes in the archives? How to trace records about pirates of non-European descent in the Indian Ocean? Which role play the Oceans as mediators for labor migrations, not only of the Black Atlantic but also of people moving from Asia to Africa and vice versa? What do we know about workers on the oceans and their routes? When considering oceans as "contact zones," with which criteria can their influence in different literary texts be analyzed? Is it possible to study nationalisms taking into account these transoceanic relationships? And how do artists address these questions in their use of the media? Against the background of this catalogue of oceanic questions, "old" stories are told anew. Sometimes, their cultural stereotypes are recycled to criticize political and social situations. Or, in other cases, they are adopted for elaborating alternative options. In this sense, the contributions concentrate on countries like India, Kenya, Angola, or Brazil and cover different academic fields. A variety of objects and situations are explored, which have been and still are determinant for the construction of cultural narratives in view of the modified relationship with the geographically southern oceanic regions.

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.

Between 1756 and 1840, philanthropy in the British world grew from the domain of small, associational committees to a vast enterprise of philanthropic and humanitarian societies with global reach. British Philanthropy in the Globalizing World tells the story of this movement, from its inception in small networks of mercantile and religious entrepreneurs to its signal projects and achievements in the abolition of slavery, in evangelical missionary societies, Bible societies, and in the early indigenous rights movement. It traces the lives and networks of hundreds of philanthropists across four generations, showing how their social, religious, economic, intellectual, and cultural worlds intersected to foster philanthropic innovation through organisational models, transnational networks, and the creation of a unique formative culture. It shows how groups such as the Clapham Sect -- including William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Hannah More, James Stephen, and others -- emerged in an intergenerational context, and how they sought to effect social and cultural change across multiple spheres. For every headline achievement, there were many failed experiments, inner wrestlings, and long-running intellectual collaborations that left a wide and deep imprint on the cultural and political landscape of the English-speaking world. Drawing on the separate historiographies of metropolitan philanthropy, associational culture, anti-slavery, moral reform, Evangelicalism, colonial missions, and economic thought, the study unites into one analytical frame both the imaginative and organizational realities of philanthropy, offering a dual focus on individual philanthropists -- their inner lives, daily practices, and participation in collaborative communities -- and on mapping the networks that bound philanthropic societies and projects together in metropolitan London and at the far reaches of the British world. In doing so, it offers a very human portrait of these entrepreneurs and evangelicals, as they pursued a philanthropic global vision.