This introduction looks at the rise of the American economy from its colonial and frontier beginnings. What made the United States an attractive testing ground for entrepreneurs? How did the United States come to have the largest business enterprises in the world by the early twentieth century? Why did business organizations gain a central place in American society?
With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past
Examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York & the Caribbean & Dutch traders in the Netherlands & in the Dutch colonies in North America & the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade.
The British and the Spanish had long been in conflict, often clashing over politics, trade, and religion. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, these empires signed an asiento agreement granting the British South Sea Company a monopoly on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic, opening up a world of uneasy collaboration. British agents of the Company moved to cities in the Caribbean and West Indies, where they braved the unforgiving tropical climate and hostile religious environment in order to trade slaves, manufactured goods, and contraband with Spanish colonists. In the process, British merchants developed relationships with the Spanish—both professional and, at times, personal. The Temptations of Trade traces the development of these complicated relationships in the context of the centuries-long imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. Many British Merchants, in developing personal ties to the Spanish, were able to collect potentially damaging information about Spanish imperial trade, military defenses, and internal conflict. British agents juggled personal friendships with national affiliation—and, at the same time, developed a network of illicit trade, contraband, and piracy extending beyond the legal reach of the British South Sea Company and often at the Company's direct expense. Ultimately, the very smuggling through which these empires unwittingly supported each other led to the resumption of Anglo-Spanish conflict, as both empires cracked down on the actions of traders within the colonies. The Temptations of Trade reveals the difficulties of colonizing regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.
Modern political science is based upon the fundamental proposition that the state is an organic entity. Consequently its history, like that of any other organism, is twofold in nature, - internal and external. Its internal development finds expression in the constitutional, economic, and social systems, and in ultimate analysis is merely a succession of compromises securing a temporary equilibrium between the claims of the individual to complete freedom of action, and the opposing efforts of society to force the individual to subordinate his own particular interests to those of the commonwealth. The state, however, is not an isolated unit, but lives in an environment of other political organisms, and its external activity is conditioned by this fact. Internal development and external growth react mutually upon each other, and a period of marked successful readjustment of the social forces within the body politic is usually followed by years of quiet in internal affairs, and of corresponding activity in outward expansion, and so on in a regular series. Though at all times profoundly influenced by the course of internal development, the colonizing activities of the state are naturally primarily a part of its international history...
