The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the United States from the perspective of trade. The author traces the roots of the American commercial economy from mid-sixteenth-century Tudor England through the early years of the American republic at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The trade of colonial America is notable for the access it offered a wide range of participants. Open access (real or illusory) remains a dominant theme of the American economy to the present day. Colonial trade is notable as well for its readiness to e ... More

The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the United States from the perspective of trade. The author traces the roots of the American commercial economy from mid-sixteenth-century Tudor England through the early years of the American republic at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The trade of colonial America is notable for the access it offered a wide range of participants. Open access (real or illusory) remains a dominant theme of the American economy to the present day. Colonial trade is notable as well for its readiness to exploit opportunity wherever it lay, and many of those opportunities lay across international borders in violation of the British Navigation Acts. The most significant feature of colonial trade is its intimate links to chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Virtually every aspect of colonial commerce bore some connection—direct or indirect. Most obvious is the slave trade itself, which carried roughly 3.5 million African captives to British America between 1619 and 1807. It was enslaved Africans who produced colonial America’s leading exports — tobacco, sugar, and rice. And enslaved Africans were a conspicuous presence on the docks and in the warehouses of northern colonial ports. This book is an account of opportunity-seeking, risk-taking producers, merchants, and mariners converting the potential of the New World into individual livelihoods and national wealth. The history of colonial trade is part of something much larger: the creation of the modern global economy.