America, the Atlantic, and Global Consumer Demand, 1500-1800

Abstract

The Atlantic migration of Europeans and Africans to America and the commercial activities associated with it created an economy that for the first time in history could be called global. For many years, historians have relied upon the word mercantilism to capture this international world. Over the last decade, as research has focused more intently on ties between early modern consumers, producers, and distributors in America, Europe, and Africa, the concept of an Atlantic world economic community has eclipsed the mercantilism paradigm. More re cently, scholarly voices have cautioned against portraying the commerce ofthe Atlantic as a separate economic world unto itself and ignoring the true globalism of trade in the pe riod. In discussing the evolving conceptualization of the early modern economy, it is important not only to recognize the com mercial growth that oc curred during the period, but also to take into account the demographic and envi ronmental changes that were consequences of that growth. The mercantilist explana tion for what kept the early modern economy running is quite straightforward. The kingdoms of Spain, Portu gal, Great Britain, and France as well as the Dutch Republic each sought to accumulate wealth through advantageous overseas trading arrange ments and colonies, while thwarting the ambitions of their rivals to do the same. America played the role of colony. When I use the term America here, I do not just mean the thirteen colonies that bolted from the British Empire in 1776, but rather the entire Western hemisphere. For nearly all of the period under consider ation, the area that became the U.S. had no separate identity. The thirteen colonies were neither the only colonies nor the only British colonies, and in the view ofthe rest ofthe world, none ofthe thirteen were considered as the most important in the New World. That honor would probably go to the sugar islands ofthe West Indies or, depend ing on the century, either the viceroyalty of Peru or New Spain, the main sites of silver mines. The scrappy, slave-trading, rum-running, smuggling-prone merchant communities that sprang up in towns like Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston might command center stage from the perspective ofthe national history of the U.S., but they contained just a small proportion of the cast of thousands who developed new markets in America. Though the mercantilist paradigm was a global one, the most common visualization of it in U.S. history textbooks fea tured a map of Atlantic com merce. This map [for an example see Figure i] illus trated the Triangular Trade whereby eastern American colonies furnished raw mate