This volume of essays provides a fresh and innovative look at colonial trade and its impact on economic development in Europe. It is unique in its coverage of countries that are usually ignored, such as Denmark and Sweden, while also including in its chronology more than the 18th century alone.

This is a cutting-edge collection of original essays on the connections and structures that made the Atlantic world a coherent regional entity.

The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals. In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.

This book explores the perspective of individuals, families and groups of interest in their daily strive to survive an European pursuit of empire.

Western Europe rose in global power during the early modern period as overseas expansion opened new trade routes. At the same time, intense rivalries pitted European states against one another in recurrent wars. Henning Hillmann examines the merchant community of Saint-Malo, Brittany, a key port in the French Atlantic economy, to shed light on the local networks that linked commerce and conflict in early modern Europe. Hillmann traces the development of Saint-Malo and the social structure of its merchant elite from the 1680s through the onset of the French Revolution. He pinpoints the role of privateering, showing how it enabled local merchant communities to secure their hold on established trades, seize new opportunities, and withstand the threats of armed conflict. In wartime, rulers commissioned ship-owning traders to fit out vessels as corsairs to raid enemy shipping. Within a mercantilist worldview, this state-sanctioned private war at sea aligned the interests of local elites and the royal government. Locally, within Saint-Malo, the partnerships that merchant elites formed in their privateering ventures gave rise to a cohesive network that held their community together amid outside conflicts. Combining rich descriptions of privateering campaigns with quantitative network analysis of partnership ties over more than a century, The Corsairs of Saint-Malo offers a new understanding of the local organizational foundations of early modern capitalist development.

From West Indian sugar and bottles of Southeast Asian arrack to French red wines, English felt cloth, and Mediterranean lemons, many global wares ended up in the Scandinavian borderlands during the late eighteenth century. This book explores how and why these goods came to be there and analyses what smuggling can reveal about the emergence of global trade, the formation of the nation state, and the development of consumer society in Europe’s northernmost outskirts. This book shows that the global underground was ubiquitous in the Nordic countries and fundamentally altered them, politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Through re-evaluating the role of smuggling the book complements and challenges established historical accounts about state building, market dynamics, consumer culture, and ideas and identity. It also offers a roadmap for how to think about illegal global trade and how to approach this notoriously difficult research field. By integrating illegality, the book aims to show how an illicit web entangled often overlooked ‘peripheral’ territories with traditional ‘portals of globalisation’ and proposes a novel take on early modern globalisation and the paths to modernity in the European hinterlands. To achieve this a wide variety of sources are used including court records, administrative sources, diaries, ambassadorial correspondence, and maps in various languages including Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English, and French. This book makes a significant contribution to the literature on economic history, the first wave of globalisation, the study of shadow economies, and Scandinavian history more broadly.

In this stimulating and highly original study of the writing of American history, twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries explore the impact of writing history from abroad. Six distinguished scholars from around the world add their commentaries. Arguing that historical writing is conditioned, crucially, by the place from which it is written, this volume identifies the formative impact of a wide variety of institutional and cultural factors that are commonly overlooked. Examining how American history is written from Europe, the contributors shed light on how history is written in the United States and, indeed, on the way history is written anywhere. The innovative perspectives included in Historians across Borders are designed to reinvigorate American historiography as the rise of global and transnational history is creating a critical need to understand the impact of place on the writing and teaching of history. This book is designed for students in historiography, global and transnational history, and related courses in the United States and abroad, for US historians, and for anyone interested in how historians work.

Slavery and coerced labor have been among the most ubiquitous of human institutions both in time - from ancient times to the present - and in place, having existed in virtually all geographic areas and societies. This volume covers the period from the independence of Haiti to modern perceptions of slavery by assembling twenty-eight original essays, each written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in their respective fields. Issues discussed include the sources of slaves, the slave trade, the social and economic functioning of slave societies, the responses of slaves to enslavement, efforts to abolish slavery continuing to the present day, the flow of contract labor and other forms of labor control in the aftermath of abolition, and the various forms of coerced labor that emerged in the twentieth century under totalitarian regimes and colonialism.

This anthology addresses and analyses the transformation of interconnected spaces and spatial entanglements in the Atlantic rim during the era of the slave trade by focusing on the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast and their Caribbean islands of Saint Thomas, Saint Jan and Saint Croix as well as on the Swedish Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy. The first part of the anthology addresses aspects of interconnectedness in West Africa, in particular the relationship between Africans and Danes on the Gold Coast. The second part of this volume examines various aspects of interconnectedness, creolisation and experiences of Danish and Swedish slave rules in the Caribbean. *Ports of Globalisationis now available in paperback for individual customers.

Guiding the reader through the many guises of global economic history, this book uncovers its key issues, debates and subjects. With contributions from leading scholars around the world, it delves into the economic histories of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas from the 16th to the 20th centuries. From the environment to The Great Divergence, finance, consumption, trade, industrialisation, commodities and labour regimes, it demonstrates the global nature of economic history, and highlights how indispensable it is and has been. Updated throughout, this new edition boasts an expanded introduction and four new chapters on capitalism and political economy, European empires and colonialism, North Africa and the Middle East, and the North American Economy. A comprehensive introduction to global economic history, this textbook provides students with a confident grasp of the field, its key debates and essential issues.