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Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe from Part III - Introduction: From Seventeenth-century Crisis to Long Eighteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2019
Seventeenth-century troubles spared no form of commerce, though intercontinental trade was least afflicted and for the shortest time. Already in the 1640s Asian routes began to recover, Atlantic a decade later. By about 1700 revival was general, including within Europe. Established products were central to renascent trade. Many, however, now came from new areas: the Caribbean replaced Brazil as premier sugar supplier, while Brazil became the world’s preeminent source of gold; Scotland, Ireland, and Silesia turned into important linens exporters. Novel items (such as potatoes, maize, tomatoes, and cotton textiles) were introduced or metamorphosed from curiosity to commonplace.
Many works listed at the end of Chapter 3 are pertinent to subjects covered here. For overviews of trade in the leading colonial powers see Zahedieh, Nuala, “Overseas Trade and Empire,” in The Economic History of Modern Britain, eds. Floud, Roderick, Humphries, Jane, and Johnson, Paul, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 2014), I: 392–420; and Daudin, Guillaume, Commerce et prospérité. France au XVIIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2011). Ormrod, David, The Rise of Commercial Empires. England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, UK, 2003), places Dutch trade within a regional context; see also van Tielhof, M., The “Mother of All Trades”: The Baltic Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late 16th to the Early 19th Century (Leiden, 2002). For Spain, see Sarrión, Guillermo Pérez, The Emergence of a National Market in Spain, 1650–1800. Trade Networks, Foreign Powers and the State (2012; London, 2016), and Grafe, Regina, Distant Tyranny. Markets, Power and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton, 2012). Fisher, H. W. S., The Portugal Trade. A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce 1700–1770 (London, 1971), covers more subjects than its title suggests. For Mediterranean trade, see Divisiis, Gigliola Pagano de, English Merchants in Seventeenth Century Italy (Cambridge, UK, 1997); and At the Centre of the Old World. Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, ed. Lanaro, Paola (Toronto, 2006). Scandinavian and Baltic trade are discussed in several chapters of The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. II.
For commerce with and within Asia, consult Jacobs, Els M., Merchant in Asia: The Trade of the Dutch East India Company during the 18th Century (Leiden, 2006); Liu, Yong, The Dutch East India Company’s Tea Trade with China, 1757–1781 (Leiden, 2007); Nierstrasz, Chris, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700–1800) (Basingstoke, UK, 2015); Chaudhuri, K. N., The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (Cambridge, UK, 1978); The New Cambridge History of India. II.5., European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India, ed. Om Prakash (Cambridge, UK, 1998). For chartered companies, see The East India Company, 1600–1857, eds. Pettigrew, William A. and Gopalan, Mahesh (London and New York, 2017); Bowen, H. V., The Business of Empire. The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, UK, 2006); Haudrère, Philippe, La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (2nd ed.; Paris, 2005); Wellington, Donald C., French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham, MD, 2006). Gottmann, Felicia, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism. Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke, UK, 2016), discusses licit and illicit trade; Gottmann, Felicia, “French-Asian Connections: The Compagnies des Indes, France’s Eastern Trade, and New Directions in Historical Scholarship,” The Historical Journal 56 (2013): 537–62, is an overview with bibliography. Essays in Goods from the East, 1600–1800. Trading Eurasia, ed. Berg, Maxine (Basingstoke, UK, 2015) discuss new consumption items and their significance.
Gervais, Pierre, “Neither Imperial, nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 465–73, propounds a wide conceptualization. Morgan, Kenneth, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 2000), is broader than its title signals. De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 464–81, is the best overview of Dutch Atlantic commerce; Emmer, P. C., “The Dutch and the Second Atlantic System,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Solow, Barbara (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 75–95; and Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, eds. Postma, Johannes and Enthoven, Victor (Leiden, 2003), are helpful updates. For the “sugar revolution” and its background, see Higman, B. W., “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53 (2000): 213–36; Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, ed. Schwartz, Stuart B. (Chapel Hill, 2004); Menard, Russell, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville, 2006). For Scottish trade, see Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Washington, DC, 2004); for Irish, Truxes, Thomas M., Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, UK, 1988); for Spanish, Lamikiz, Xabier, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks (Woodbridge, UK, 2010), and Brilli, Catia, Genoese Trade and Migration in the Spanish Atlantic (1700–1830), New York, 2016); for Italian, Tazzara, Corey, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World, 1574–1790 (Oxford, 2017). For retailing, Stobart, Jon and Bailey, Lucy, “Retail Revolution and the Village Shop, c. 1660–1860,” Economic History Review 71 (2018): 393–417; van den Heuvel, Danielle and Ogilvie, Sheilagh, “Retail Development in the Consumer Revolution: The Netherlands, c. 1670–c. 1815,” Explorations in Economic History 50 (2013): 69–87; Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe, eds. Blondé, Bruno, et al. (Tours, 2005); Alternative Exchanges: Secondhand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Fontaine, Laurence (New York, 2008); Fontaine, Laurence, History of Pedlars in Europe (Durham, NC, 1996).
The effects of foreign trade on European economies are treated in A Machina, Deus Ex Revisited. Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development, eds. Emmer, Piet, Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier, and Roitman, Jessica V. (Leiden, 2006); O’Rourke, Kevin, Escosura, Leandro Prados de la, and Daudin, Guillaume, “Trade and Empire,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 1, eds. Broadberry, Stephen and O’Rourke, Kevin (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 96–121; Palma, Nuno, “Sailing away from Malthus: Intercontinental Trade and European Economic Growth, 1500–1800,” Cliometrica 10 (2016): 129–49. Williams, Eric E., Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), set off modern debates on the relations of slaving, American plantation agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution; recent considerations include Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Solow, Barbara L. (Cambridge, UK, 1991); Eltis, David and Engerman, Stanley, “The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 123–44; Inikori, Joseph E., Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, UK, 2002); Daudin, Guillaume, “Profitability of Slave and Long-Distance Trading in Context: The Case of Eighteenth-century France,” Journal of Economic History 64 (2004): 144–71. For empire and mercantilism, see O’Brien, Patrick K., “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, II, The Eighteenth Century, ed. Marshall, P. J. (Oxford, 1998), 53–77; Magnusson, Lars, The Political Economy of Mercantilism (London, 2015); Mercantilism Reimagined. Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire, eds. Stern, Philip and Wennerlind, Carl (Oxford, 2013); Barth, Jonathan, “Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 73 (2016): 257–90.
Hobsbawm’s original essay was reprinted and updated in Crisis in Europe 1560–1660, ed. Aston, Trevor (London, 1965). The debate it sparked can be sampled in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Parker, Geoffrey and Smith, Lesley M., 2nd ed. (London, 1997), and in works listed after Chapter 1. de Vries, Jan, “The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40 (2009): 151–94, reconsiders and reinterprets Hobsbawm while surveying scholarship on the seventeenth-century crisis. Immanuel Wallerstein succinctly outlines his position in The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750, new ed. (Berkeley, 2011), 24–29. Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Short Economic History of the World (Princeton, 2007), provides a Malthusian explanation. Parker, Geoffrey, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013), presents far-reaching claims for the impact of the “Little Ice Age” on events around the world. For the most consequent conflict’s impact, see The Thirty Years’ War, ed. Parker, Geoffrey, rev. ed. (London, 1987). Alfani, Guido, “Plague in Seventeenth-century Europe and the Decline of Italy: An Epidemiological Hypothesis,” European Review of Economic History 17 (2013): 408–30, examines the dissimilar incidence and effects of disease on European economies.
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