The Early Modern Atlantic Economy

The Early Modern Atlantic Economy Edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011– 4211, USA www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarco´n 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Plantin 10/12pt [vn] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The early modern Atlantic economy/edited by John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan. p. cm. ISBN 0 521 78249 X 1. Great Britain – colonies – commerce – history – 18th century. 2. Great Britain – commerce – America – history – 18th century. 3. America – commerce – Great Britain – history – 18th century. 4. France – colonies – commerce – history – 17th century. 5. France – commerce – America – history – 17th century. 6. America – commerce – France – history – 17th century. I. McCusker, John J. II. Morgan, Kenneth. HF3093.E2 2000 382'.09182'1–dc21 00–028924 ISBN 0521 78249X hardback Contents List of Wgures page vii List of tables viii List of abbreviations x List of contributors xiii Introduction 1 john j. mccusker and kenneth morgan Part I The role of merchants and their connections 1 Risk, credit and kinship in early modern enterprise 15 peter mathias 2 Business networks in the British export trade to North America, 1750–1800 36 kenneth morgan Part II The development of trades 3 Property versus commerce in the mid-eighteenth-century port of London 65 henry roseveare 4 Irish businessman and French courtier: the career of Thomas Sutton, comte de Clonard, c. 1722–1782 86 louis m. cullen 5 ‘A revolution in the trade’: wine distribution and the development of the infrastructure of the Atlantic market economy, 1703–1807 105 david hancock 6 Law, credit, the supply of labour, and the organization of sugar production in the colonial Greater Caribbean: a comparison of Brazil and Barbados in the seventeenth century 154 russell r. menard v vi Contents 7 The revolutionary impact of European demand for tropical goods 163 carole shammas 8 The business of distilling in the Old World and the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the rise of a new enterprise and its connection with colonial America 186 john j. mccusker Part III Imperial economies 9 France, Britain and the economic growth of colonial North America 227 stanley l. engerman 10 Merchants and bankers as patriots or speculators? Foreign commerce and monetary policy in wartime, 1793–1815 250 patrick k. o’brien 11 America and the crisis of the British imperial economy, 1803–1807 278 franc¸ ois crouzet Part IV Colonial working societies 12 Emigration and the standard of living: the eighteenth-century Chesapeake 319 lois green carr 13 After tobacco: the slave labour pattern on a large Chesapeake grain-and-livestock plantation in the early nineteenth century 344 richard s. dunn Index 364 Figures 6.1 Richard Lignon’s map of Barbados, about 1650, when the dispersed method of organizing sugar production was still common on the island. (Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.) page 160 8.1 A small English distillery of the eighteenth century, as pictured in the frontispiece of George Smith, A Compleat Body of Distilling, Explaining the Mysteries of That Science, in a Most Easy and Familiar Manner. 192 vii Tables 3.1 From ‘An Account of all Tobacco Bonds standing out in the Port of London, Oct. 24th, 1747’ page 79 5.1 Departures from the island of Madeira, 1727–1807 110 5.2 Wine exports from Madeira, 1779–1807 (pipes of 110 gallons) 114 5.3 Top exporters of wine in Madeira 125 6.1 Estimated population of Barbados, 1640–1700 (in thousands) 155 6.2 Acreage and workforce on various Barbados plantations, 1641–4 157 7.1 Western European empires: approximate square mile distribution by geographical area c. 1775 (in percentage of square miles) 167 7.2 Western European empires: approximate population distribution by geographical area c. 1775 (in percentage of subjects) 168 8.1 Estimates of annual per capita consumption of spirits, 1600–1800 202 9.1A Estimated populations, major British and French Caribbean island colonies, 1680–1780 (in thousands) 236 9.1B Estimated populations, British and French Caribbean colonies, 1780 and 1790 (in thousands) 236 9.2 Caribbean populations, 1750 238 9.3 Estimated plantation output of the British and French Caribbean, 1770 (values in thousands of pounds sterling, fob Caribbean) 246 11.1 Re-exports from Great Britain 279 11.2 Imports of sugar in Britain (yearly average in million cwt) 280 11.3 Re-exports from Britain of raw sugar (including the equivalent of reWned sugar exports) (million cwt) 280 11.4 Re-exports from the United States (US$ million) 284 11.5 British imports and re-exports of sugar (million cwt) 286 viii Tables ix 11.6 Index of the average quarterly and yearly prices of ‘Jamaica brown’ sugar on the London market (customs duties excluded). Average yearly price of 1806 = 100 287 11.7 Exports from the United States to the British West Indies 294 11.8 Britain’s East India trade: indices of oYcial values (volume), 1806 = 100 299 11.9 Tonnage of merchant ships registered in Great Britain, Ireland, Isle of Man, the Channel Islands (000 tons) 302 11.10 Tonnage of merchant ships built in Great Britain (000 tons) 302 11.11 The American merchant Xeet 305 11.12 Total number of entries and clearances in British ports of ships coming from or going to the United States 306 12.1 Chairs and tables in Chesapeake and English inventories, householders only, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 330 1 Risk, credit and kinship in early modern enterprise Peter Mathias This contribution to a volume honouring Jacob Price and celebrating his work takes as its themes risk, credit and kinship in the early modern period, exploring the ways in which they interacted to condition business strategies and the day-to-day conduct of business. It seeks to survey and assess generally rather than to add to research.1 Considerations about kinship, credit, risk and the avoidance of risk have suVused all of Jacob Price’s investigations into transatlantic trade and Wnance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, either explicitly or as a structural feature of the context. Indeed, because uncertainty and risk were almost univer- sally present to so much greater an extent in ‘normal’ trading activities in that period than in conducting equivalent transactions in the twentieth century they conditioned the operation of the business system in an elemental way. Nor can risk be easily distinguished from uncertainty in the commonly assumed modern conceptual sense – where risk can sup- posedly be quantiWed (a precondition for commercial insurance) and uncertainty not. Many categories of risk had uncertainties also built into them and were in large measure open ended. Focusing attention on avoiding or minimizing risk may imply taking too negative or too defens- ive a view about the conduct of business in this period. It takes for granted other aspects of business which are emphasized in the literature of entrepreneurship in historical settings – the motivations of businessmen for expanding the scale of their operations, increasing their proWts, pioneer- ing innovations, making their personal fortunes, enhancing their social status with the accumulation of wealth. But one set of determinants does 1 This chapter draws on, and adds to, my paper ‘Strategies for reducing risk by entrepreneurs in the early modern period’, in C. Lesger and L. Noordegraaf, eds., Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Early Modern Times: Merchants and Industrialists within the Orbit of the Dutch Staplemarket, Hollandse Historische Reeks, 24 (The Hague, 1995). For the general debate see O. E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies (New York, 1975); J. March and H. Simon, Organisations (Oxford, 1958); W. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge, 1989); A. Godley and O. Westall, eds., Business History and Business Culture (Manchester, 1996). 15 16 Peter Mathias not exclude the other. Entrepreneurship had to be exercised within the parameters of high risk, which made demands of their own, while diVer- ent phases in the evolution of a business, diVerent stages in a person’s business career and diVerent circumstances at a particular point of time would determine varied responses. This was particularly the case in circumstances of intense, occasional short-term Xuctuations in trade and Wnancial liquidity. The central theme argued in the following pages is that the context of risk emphasized the importance of face-to-face personal relationships and kinship in business, in particular concerning access to credit.2 Within the general parameter the family matrix was so often central to the operations of business, whether in structural relationships (patterns of ownership, succession, the identiWcation of ownership with management authority and the like) or in everyday dealings.3 A major dimension of such a matrix was demographic – and the demographic dynamic added risks and uncertainties of its own, as well as opportunities, which could not be antici- pated. These demographic indeterminacies – as with economic and W- nancial indeterminacies – are often subsumed and articulated (in the terms in which they were perceived) as ‘luck’. The greater the degree of indeterminacy in a situation, the greater the role often put down to ‘luck’ – which is acknowledging the same reality through diVerent perceptions and articulations.

Load more