1.1 Introduction
Long-distance trade and merchant networks were important in the origins and development of particular metropolitan centers and specific staple colonies. In the geographic literature, we refer to the metropolitan urban system or merchant system describing how gateway or port cities connected areas of production (i.e. the staple producing colonies) with the major metropolitan centers in Europe in long-distance trade relationships.1 As these systems emerged and developed, merchant capital and profitable markets were essential.2 Merchant networks expanded westward across the Atlantic Ocean and sugar colonies developed serially with each new colony supplanting a predecessor and being replaced in turn. Increased economies of scale or new technological developments leading to greater efficiency of production and enhanced competition may have been the main reasons but other factors may have played a role as well such as shifting geopolitical circumstances, blockades, and embargoes, and mercantilist policies exercised by various colonial powers which provided differential access to commodities, labor, and markets. Soil depletion and overproduction may have been reasons for shifting production also.3
To understand the nature of overseas long-distance trade is to understand how exchange of goods is channeled through communities of immigrant merchants in port cities.4 These communities are often referred to as âmerchant coloniesâ or âtrading diasporas,â terms which connote mutual aid, kinship, solidarity, and resilience in what was sometimes a hostile environment.5 Immigrant merchants engaged in long-distance trade brought capital, credit, connections, and a commercial outlook on trade and exchange. Their significance in long-distance trade relates to their role as âcross-culturalâ brokers, and they often functioned as diplomats in dispute between host societies and the home base negotiating the terms and conditions of trade.6 In the business world, trust and familiarity are key considerations and tradersâsuch as merchants trading over long distancesâcount on family and ethnic networks to conduct their business.7 This was particularly important at a time when there was a limited financial infrastructure in placeâas in frontier communities or newly established coloniesâand when credit had to be provided to customers who had to be relied upon and counted on to repay. Under these circumstances, kin and ethnic connections were essential factors in business enterprise, and one could argue that specific merchant communities were important links in the development of specific production centers in various parts of the world.
In the context of colonial development in the Atlantic region, these vast and complex networks existed between Europe, the Caribbean region, North America, and West Africa.8 The network contacts affected the movements of people, trade goods, capital, and information and were channeled through commercial networks usually originating in Europe. Initially, the contacts were sporadic and intermittent, but in due time commercial outposts developed and more sophisticated commercial contacts were established. Transatlantic trade networks concentrated on European port cities, while tobacco and sugar plantations were developed in Brazil and the Caribbean. The need to expand the provisioning of ships and settlements led to import of supply goods and the development of local industries to outfit the frontier or colonial settlements. As trade became more organized, commercial companies developed provisioning and marketing systems and processing industries in European port or gateway cities. In West Africa, slave procurement systems and slave entrepots were established to provision plantations in the new colonies with labor. With the development of the Atlantic and Caribbean sugar plantation -slave economy and the development of Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London as entrepots or staple markets, immigrant merchants were key players in the emerging colonial trade system.
Recognition of the formation of trading communities and the role they played in the Atlantic economy in the seventeenth century is now generally accepted and numerous historians have adopted a network approach to study how people, commodities, and institutions moved within and across empires.9 In the transfer of goods and services in the early modern Atlantic economy, the demands of long-distance trade and shifting geopolitical alliances encouraged business strategies that required merchants to cooperate and align with multiple partners in a constantly changing environment. In this environment, Portuguese New Christian and alongside them their compatriot Sephardic merchants were exceptionally well adapted and moved from place to place where they established and reestablished new networks of contacts that were extremely fluid.10 The networks that developed during the seventeenth century form good examples of how sugar was traded and how this fueled the economy of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and England a century later. By the mid-seventeenth century and during the second half of the seventeenth century, the Sephardic merchant network had a widespread geographical reach in the British, French, and Dutch sugar colonies in the Caribbean after it had first come into existence in the early seventeenth century in Northeast Brazil.
New Christian and Sephardic Jewish merchants were often granted special privileges to trade and were encouraged to take residence in gateway cities. Sometimes, aspiring imperial powers like the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century in their war with Spain and Portugal , known as the Eighty Yearsâ War (1568â1648), or the English under Cromwell in the westward expansion in the Caribbean in the 1650s with the Trade and Navigation Act (1651) in effect, granted special âburghership â or âdenizen â rights to Portuguese merchants. In this study, I will detail on the role the Portuguese merchant community or the Portuguese Nation played in the sugar trade in the Atlantic world and how they integrated with their host countryâs interest.11 In the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, Portuguese merchants, including Old and New Christians, Crypto-Jews, and Sephardic Jews , engaged in trade through ports in Portugal, Brazil, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam and were granted special rights and protection. When first Antwerp, then Amsterdam, and still later Hamburg became important entrepots and distribution centers for sugar in Northern and Central Europe and merchants established trading relations with Portugal and Brazil, it was clear that the Portuguese Nation was indispensable.12 Because of their widespread presence, Portuguese merchants could easily adjust to changing geopolitical circumstances and avoid or circumvent the impact of wars, blockades, and embargoes of European imperial powers and play off one against the other.13 And thus it is now generally recognized that the community of Portuguese merchants helped develop and sustain the Atlantic trade network in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.14
Long-distance trade in sugar from Brazil in the sixteenth century was conducted mostly through Lisbon and the port of Antwerp. As Portugal became part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire in 1580, the port of Antwerp came directly under Spanish rule and thus more vulnerable as a target in the Eighty Yearsâ War (1568â1648) ...