The Atlantic Staple Trade: Commerce and politics

The Atlantic Staple Trade: Commerce and politics

Author: Susan Migden Socolow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13:

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This two volume set reprints the most important standard studies and interpretations of the development of the crucial Atlantic trade.Taken together these two volumes provide the best possible foundation for the detailed study of the Atlantic trade in global expansion.


The Atlantic Staple Trade

The Atlantic Staple Trade

Author: Susan Socolow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-01-26

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1351546155

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This two volume set reprints the most important standard studies and interpretations of the development of the crucial Atlantic trade. The first volume, concerned with general trade and political economy, approaches the topic from the viewpoint of individual trading nations in the Atlantic - England, France, Ireland, Spain - whilst not neglecting the importance of regions like West Africa. Rivalry between the different national traders is also considered, as well as the vexed question of the relation of trade to the old colonial empires. The impact of administration, war and regulation as reflected by the contraband issue highlights the strong political element in the developing Atlantic commercial world. Case studies are provided of major staple and luxury commodity trades: rice, molasses, tobacco, cochineal, logwood, hides, cacao and the sometimes neglected whaling industry. These set the scene for quantitative and technical studies of the contribution of shipping to trade. Specific markets considered in more detail include a comparison of Philadelphia and Havana, the changing scale of business activity in the Chesapeake trade, and the impact of trade on port development in America. The volume closes with seminal studies by McCusker and Price on the central role of trade and the Atlantic economy. Taken together these two volumes provide the best possible foundation for the detailed study of the Atlantic trade in global expansion.


Clashing Over Commerce

Clashing Over Commerce

Author: Douglas A. Irwin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-29

Total Pages: 873

ISBN-13: 022639901X

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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year: “Tells the history of American trade policy . . . [A] grand narrative [that] also debunks trade-policy myths.” —Economist Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer. Douglas A. Irwin’s Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation—first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present. “Combines scholarly analysis with a historian’s eye for trends and colorful details . . . readable and illuminating, for the trade expert and for all Americans wanting a deeper understanding of America’s evolving role in the global economy.” —National Review “Magisterial.” —Foreign Affairs


Specters of the Atlantic

Specters of the Atlantic

Author: Ian Baucom

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-12-16

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0822387026

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In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.


Riches from Atlantic Commerce

Riches from Atlantic Commerce

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-11

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9004474773

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While it is generally recognized that the Dutch played a prominent part in the world economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most studies of Dutch long-distance shipping and trade have focused on Asia and neglected the Atlantic region. In this volume, eight scholars contribute their expertise on Dutch trade with Africa, the Americas and the West Indies, and demonstrate that Dutch trade in the Atlantic was far more extensive and valuable than has generally been assumed, and exceeded the trade with Asia at that time. Supported by extensive archival research and quantitative data, the study makes a strong appeal for a reassessment of Dutch maritime commerce of that period, and should stimulate further research of Dutch Atlantic trade. Riches from Atlantic Commerce has been selected by Choice as Outstanding Academic Title (2005). Contributors include: Christopher Ebert, Victor Enthoven, Henk den Heijer, Han Jordaan, Wim Klooster, Eric Willem van der Oest, Johannes Postma, Claudia Schnurmann, and Stuart B. Schwartz.


The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Author: Peter A. Coclanis

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2020-05-21

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1643361058

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The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of essays focusing on the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the economy of the Atlantic basin—comprising parts of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thirteen essays, the contributors examine the complex and variegated processes by which markets were created in the Atlantic basin and how they became integrated. While a number of the contributors focus on the economic history of a specific European imperial system, others, mirroring the realities of the world they are writing about, transcend imperial boundaries and investigate topics shared throughout the region. In the latter case, the contributors focus either on processes occurring along the margins or interstices of empires, or on "breaches" in the colonial systems established by various European powers. Taken together, the essays shed much-needed light on the organization and operation of both the European imperial orders of the early modern era and the increasingly integrated economy of the Atlantic basin challenging these orders over the course of the same period.


English Atlantics Revisited

English Atlantics Revisited

Author: Nancy L. Rhoden

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2007-08-09

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0773560408

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Ian K. Steele's pioneering work in imperial and early North American history was a pivotal contribution to the establishment of Atlantic history as a field. His study of a unified English - and later British - Atlantic challenged American exceptionalism and encouraged the current wave of interest in Atlantic studies.


The Taste of Empire

The Taste of Empire

Author: Lizzie Collingham

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0465093175

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A history of the British Empire told through twenty meals eaten around the world In The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire's quest for food shaped the modern world. Told through twenty meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became the best-fed people in the world. In The Taste of Empire, Collingham masterfully shows that only by examining the history of Great Britain's global food system, from sixteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries to our present-day eating habits, can we fully understand our capitalist economy and its role in making our modern diets.


The Hardest Job in the World

The Hardest Job in the World

Author: John Dickerson

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2020-06-16

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1984854526

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the veteran political journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent, a deep dive into the history, evolution, and current state of the American presidency, and how we can make the job less impossible and more productive—featuring a new post-2020–election epilogue “This is a great gift to our sense of the actual presidency, a primer on leadership.”—Ken Burns Imagine you have just been elected president. You are now commander-in-chief, chief executive, chief diplomat, chief legislator, chief of party, chief voice of the people, first responder, chief priest, and world leader. You’re expected to fulfill your campaign promises, but you’re also expected to solve the urgent crises of the day. What’s on your to-do list? Where would you even start? What shocks aren’t you thinking about? The American presidency is in trouble. It has become overburdened, misunderstood, almost impossible to do. “The problems in the job unfolded before Donald Trump was elected, and the challenges of governing today will confront his successors,” writes John Dickerson. After all, the founders never intended for our system of checks and balances to have one superior Chief Magistrate, with Congress demoted to “the little brother who can’t keep up.” In this eye-opening book, John Dickerson writes about presidents in history such a Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower, and and in contemporary times, from LBJ and Reagan and Bush, Obama, and Trump, to show how a complex job has been done, and why we need to reevaluate how we view the presidency, how we choose our presidents, and what we expect from them once they are in office. Think of the presidential campaign as a job interview. Are we asking the right questions? Are we looking for good campaigners, or good presidents? Once a candidate gets the job, what can they do to thrive? Drawing on research and interviews with current and former White House staffers, Dickerson defines what the job of president actually entails, identifies the things that only the president can do, and analyzes how presidents in history have managed the burden. What qualities make for a good president? Who did it well? Why did Bill Clinton call the White House “the crown jewel in the American penal system”? The presidency is a job of surprises with high stakes, requiring vision, management skill, and an even temperament. Ultimately, in order to evaluate candidates properly for the job, we need to adjust our expectations, and be more realistic about the goals, the requirements, and the limitations of the office. As Dickerson writes, “Americans need their president to succeed, but the presidency is set up for failure. It doesn’t have to be.”