Introduction
Historians of the early modern Atlantic have long recognized the connection between commerce and colonies—“unthinkable each without the other,” wrote Charles McLean Andrews, the great historian of colonial America. The bond between commerce and colonies is nowhere more plain than in the overseas tra...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | unknown |
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Yale University Press
2021
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300159882.003.0001 |
| Summary: | Historians of the early modern Atlantic have long recognized the connection between commerce and colonies—“unthinkable each without the other,” wrote Charles McLean Andrews, the great historian of colonial America. The bond between commerce and colonies is nowhere more plain than in the overseas trade of British America. The centrality of trade is evident in the blueprint for an English America that Richard Hakluyt laid before Queen Elizabeth I in 1584; in the commercial potential of Newfoundland cod; in the transformative impact of tobacco on the first permanent English New World settlement at Jamestown early in the seventeenth century; in how the Georges Bank fishery and West Indian trade rescued the Massachusetts economy in the 1640s; and in the consequences of sugar production on England’s fragile colonial settlements in the eastern Caribbean. Trade built British America; trade enriched it; and a dispute over trade in the third quarter of the eighteenth century led to its breakup and the birth of the United States of America.... |
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