The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy

Circuits of trade, money and knowledge, 1650-1914

Adrian Leonard, D. Pretel, Adrian Leonard, D. Pretel, Adrian Leonard, D. Pretel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137432728
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

1

Experiments in Modernity: the Making of the Atlantic World Economy

A.B. Leonard and David Pretel

‘The Atlantic was a European invention’, declared David Armitage in his opening chapter of the 2002 edited collection The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. He argued that Europeans were the first to connect the four sides of the Atlantic into a single entity, both as a natural place, and as a system. Echoing Braudel, he explained how they ‘integrated’ disparate physical parts to ‘invent’ a geography, one in which most of the action happened on land, but which was bestowed an identity based on the ocean – itself a contemporary unification – which links together its components on terra firma.¹

In much the same way, over the past three decades, historians have invented the Atlantic World. They have drawn together diverse but connected histories, from imperial to maritime, to invent a new field of historical study which includes something for almost everyone. The outcome has been a cascade of academic work in almost all branches of history which can now be identified as Atlantic History. The results have been positive: the Atlantic World as an applied historical creation has led to genuine new insights into a broad range of historiographical subjects, from state formation and the reach of empires, to ideas of place.² It has cast a new, sometimes critical light onto some established and widely accepted historiographical principles. Increasingly, Atlanticists have achieved this by adopting the approach advanced by historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly, who have stressed the necessity of rooting out and exposing the unity and interconnection within macrohistorical processes. Such an attitude towards history is particularly fruitful when applied to the study of the development of the Atlantic World economy and its evolving global circuits.³

This way of ‘doing’ Atlantic history is a relatively recent advance, and is only just taking hold. Earlier research into the Atlantic World typically interpreted the interactions between expanding European naval powers and their Atlantic colonies as largely intra-imperial, and often traced their evolution as a simple extension of European imperial rivalries. Developments and exchanges – commercial, social, cultural, or otherwise – between the ‘new’ areas of the new Atlantic were largely ignored. The Atlantic World was seen as a by-product of European imperialism, to be investigated in a simplistically applied context of metropolitan centres and new-world peripheries. Today, Atlanticists have begun, tentatively, to usurp this approach through comparative, regional, and sectoral Atlantic histories which, like many new Atlanticists themselves, fail to respect imperial boundaries. As a result of this broader analytical approach, the discipline now offers new understandings of what was happening not only on the ground in the American and African Atlantic World, but also in the western European coastal nations which invented it.⁴

Peter Coclanis has declared that Atlantic history is ‘now sitting with the grown-ups’. Findings such as those of Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla in this volume are clearly the product of this new, less empire-focussed, Eurocentric treatment. Such work follows the methodological approach demanded by Craig Lockard of world history in the early 1980s, one which takes on board poststructuralist and multicultural criticisms, similarly called for by Bruce Mazlish in the early 1990s.⁵ Coclanis has argued repeatedly that Atlantic history ignores too much of the rest of the world, and his trenchant criticism has helped to drive forward a broader Atlantic history, but it could be levelled against any branch of the discipline. If we are ‘all Atlanticists now’ (another assertion of Armitage, one with which many historians would disagree with strongly), it is perhaps equally valid to say we are all world historians now. Clearly we are not, but we can benefit from the approach they have embraced. In so doing, Atlantic history opens doorways to deeper understandings of broader events, albeit by passing through doors opened much earlier by historical sociologists such as Wallerstein, Tilly, Mintz, and others in the field of world history.⁶ For today’s Atlanticists, the improved dialogue between theory and empirical evidence is much improved.

What of economic history, which we have bound together in this volume with Atlantic history? The field is perhaps less sexy, but is nonetheless thriving. As a bridge between political and social histories, and a subject area which could and probably should be drawn down in many other genres of enquiry, its importance is increasingly widely acknowledged, even as the regression analyses and formulae of economics employed by cliometricians and others frighten away undergraduates. At the heart of the economic historian’s field lies the desire to discover the causes of economic growth, divergence, and inequality. Extending from this question are others which lead to those larger questions. Why did the industrial revolution happen in England? What caused Western Europe to diverge, economically, from the rest? What is the role of institutions in fostering commerce, innovation, and industrialisation?

Many chapters in this volume draw on and build upon existing contributions from economic world history, supported by the theoretical and methodological insights advanced by historical sociology, to provide clues to the answers through the lens of Atlantic economic history. After all, the invention of the Atlantic by early modern Europeans was driven primarily by the quest for financial gain, whether on the part of individual adventurers, or the monarchs (and later, governments) that backed them. Enormous flows of treasure from first the Spanish and then the Brazilian Atlantic had an undeniable impact on European economies. While the contention that this influx was the cause of the great European inflation of the sixteenth century seems logically to be overturned by the reality of the century’s robust population growth (David Fischer argues convincingly that ‘the price revolution came first, American treasure followed’,⁷) the quest for precious metals and their import into the Old World did impact upon local economies, as well as upon foreign relations in a period of great dynastic rivalry. The trade routes, colonies, and plantations which comprised the early Atlantic World were a product of mercantilism, but it was in the Atlantic where the strict proscriptions of the defining early modern economic approach were whittled away, first on a de facto basis, and much later on a de jure basis, too, as the Spanish, French, Dutch, and finally the English abandoned increasingly moribund trading systems.

Thus the distinctly early modern Atlantic World phenomenon was a key element of Europe’s transition from a medieval to a modern economy. This development was a product of collaboration between old and new world actors. As evolving European polities made the relatively rapid shift to enlightened modernity, as they first launched into, then ultimately abandoned, imperial mercantilist systems in favour of a more modern, open system of commerce, they discovered in the Atlantic something of a testing ground for new approaches. Unique pressures and risks in distant colonies, and the enormous time-lag which affected every communication with the metropolitan centre, made essential a change of approach. In this way the Atlantic World was a vanguard of modernity, driven not just by geography, technology, demographics, and resources, by also, and critically, by political and economic rivalries, and by human agency.

This is especially true in the arena of Atlantic World trade, commerce, finance, and agricultural and industrial production. The opening of newly discovered lands to Europeans from 1492 increased the land endowment per European capita sixfold.⁸ This dramatic change in the supply of land triggered a global economic rebalancing which spawned the first era of globalisation. The completion, by about 1890, of the incorporation of this new land into the Atlantic economy marked the end of that era. The economic exploitation of this massive injection of one of the three factors of production required labour on a massive scale. In combination, new land and immigrant labour (both free and coerced – the latter constituting just one great Atlantic World economic experiment) led to a layered convergence, the moving together of international wages, prices, and national incomes, which was to delineate gainers and losers. O’Rourke and Williamson report a ‘really big leap to more globally integrated commodity and factor markets’ between 1850 and 1914, as foreign markets influenced local prices. They attribute convergence to the ‘open economy forces of trade and mass migration’. US per capita GDP was $2,482.50 in 1870, compared to $3,342.00 in the UK. By 1910 the figures were $5,015.00 and $4,7114.00 respectively.⁹

Economic historians have long discussed the origins of the uneven material development in the Atlantic World, and the economic bifurcation that manifested in the late eighteenth century. Between then and the later nineteenth century, the Atlantic World became divided between economically advanced, industrial territories and so-called ‘backward’ ones. However, the origins of the late nineteenth century’s asymmetric Atlantic economy have remained poorly understood. Any global analysis of the modern, polarised Atlantic economy must seek the answer in a number of complementary explanations, rather than in a single cause (such as slavery) or grand theory (such as entrepreneurial spirit). Demographic and geographic explanations should be conjoined with material explanations which take into account the nature of mercantile cultures and the location of useful knowledge at particular sites. Each of the contributions to this volume, discussed below, have sought such a multifaceted understanding.

Commodity price convergence, easily illustrated through grain prices, was another product of the Atlantic World economy. The Anglo-American wheat price gap fell from 54% in 1870 to nothing in 1913. Intra-European commodity markets also experienced integration, where permitted by trade policies. For example, British barley prices were 42% higher than Danish prices in 1870, but the gap was zero by 1913. Overall, however, as Atlantic World land became increasingly productive, grain markets within Continental Europe became more balkanised, since ‘globalization was not a universal phenomenon, even during the comparatively liberal late nineteenth century’.¹⁰ Jeffrey Williamson denies ‘commodity price convergence between Asia and Europe over the three centuries following 1492’.¹¹ However, convergence arising from Atlantic World grain imports was nothing new at the turn of the twentieth century. Recent work by Paul Sharp shows that in the trade in grain between America and Britain, ‘US and UK prices almost perfectly follow each other in the long run’ since 1700, especially when relative peace made extensive trade possible, even before the ‘transport revolution’.¹² In the case of wheat trading, modern convergence was fostered in the Atlantic World economy during the eighteenth century, long before the repeal of Britain’s corn laws.

Another clear example of the move through the Atlantic World toward economic modernity lies in the shift away from the preponderance of exclusive trading companies with monopoly rights. Such organisations – whether guilds, companies of chartered adventurers, or early joint-stock entities – had held sway across Europe and the ‘known’ world for centuries, controlling the production, distribution, import, and export of almost everything, from foodstuffs to playing cards. The jury is out on the question of the efficacy of such controlling institutions, although some recent scholarship is challenging the historiographical notion that guilds encouraged economic growth.¹³ However, it is clear that the Atlantic World was a great testing-ground for the operation of commerce outside the context of such restrictive, medieval institutions. The bulk of Atlantic World trade was entirely open to private venturers relatively early on. Exceptions such as the Royal African Company (RAC) often constrained trade; Britain’s slaving trade flourished only after the RAC lost its monopoly. The French Mississippi Company offers a similar example, as does Spain’s slave asiento, which was typically placed in the hands of foreign monopolists.

Meanwhile most of Western Europe’s trade to the East was tied to the hands of monopoly East India companies, whether English, Dutch, French, or Swedish. For British consumers, Atlantic World tobacco was produced and sold by competing private traders, while tea was sold by the double monopoly of Canton’s cohong and the British East India Company. Competition made tobacco almost uneconomically cheap for producers. Tea, in contrast, and despite its widespread consumption in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century, was and remained expensive, even when heavy taxes are discounted, and could be afforded only through adulteration, or when smuggled to avoid both monopoly and taxation: Parliament found in 1745 that for each pound of tea legally imported, three were smuggled.¹⁴ Open trade in all these areas, both Atlantic and Eastern, ultimately smashed the monopolies, following the early Dutch Atlantic example.¹⁵

Colonisation itself was an experiment in economics on a transoceanic scale, one which was sometimes structured and planned to a greater extent than may initially meet the historian’s eye. Historical circumstances such as legal systems and institutional designs always affected the political economies of empires, but in the long r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Experiments in Modernity: the Making of the Atlantic World Economy: A.B. Leonard and David Pretel
• 2 From Seas to Ocean: Interpreting the Shift from the North Sea-Baltic World to the Atlantic, 1650–1800: David Ormrod
• 3 On the Rocks: a New Approach to Atlantic World Trade, 1520–1890: Chuck Meide
• 4 Commerce and Conflict: Jamaica and the War of the Spanish Succession: Nuala Zahedieh
• 5 Baltimore and the French Atlantic: Empires, Commerce, and Identity in a Revolutionary Age, 1783–1798: Manuel Covo
• 6 Modernity and the Demise of the Dutch Atlantic, 1650–1914: Gert Oostindie
• 7 From Local to Transatlantic: Insuring Trade in the Caribbean: A.B. Leonard
• 8 Slavery, the British Atlantic Economy, and the Industrial Revolution: Knick Harley
• 9 Commodity Frontiers, Spatial Economy, and Technological Innovation in the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783–1878: Dale Tomich
• 10 From Periphery to Centre: Transatlantic Capital Flows, 1830–1890: Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla
• 11 Baring Brothers and the Cuban Plantation Economy, 1814–1870: Inés Roldán de Montaud
• 12 Circuits of Knowledge: Foreign Technology and Transnational Expertise in Nineteenth-century Cuba: David Pretel and Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo
• 13 Afterword: Mercantilism and the Caribbean Atlantic World Economy: Martin Daunton
• Index