In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks. Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.

In Merchants and Empire, Cathy Matson examines the economic ideas and behavior of New York City's commercial wholesalers, especially the middling merchants who, as a majority of active traders, affected the character of city commerce over its colonial years. Although less prominent in transatlantic dry goods commerce than the great traders, this middling majority spread dissenting economic ideas and flouted political authority time and again when the benefits to their interests were clear. Indeed, middling or lesser merchants fashioned a plausible alternative to mercantilism, and contributed significantly to the challenges Americans offered to British rule in the final colonial years.

Smuggling as Subversion is the first comprehensive account of the opium industry in western India during the colonial period, from its beginnings to the mid-19th century. This is an in-depth examination of the use of opium during colonial times, and at the same time the fascinating story of how Indian merchants developed a smuggling enterprise that subverted the East India Company's monopoly in the drug, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the first Opium War in China.

During the course of the eighteenth century, migration from Europe and Africa shaped the emerging consciousness and culture of the American Colonies. Whether free, bond servant, or slave, migrants brought skills and folkways from their motherlands, contributing to the agricultural and commercial development as well as to the peopling of North America. Emigrants from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, did all of this and more. Ulster exported an economy. This book tells the story of the transatlantic links between Ulster and America in the eighteenth century. The author draws upon a remarkable range of sources gleaned from numerous repositories in America and Ireland as he explores the realities of life and work for the merchants. The trading networks and connections established and the economic background to the period are examined in some detail. This volume provides fascinating insights into the connections between Ulster and Colonial America through the experiences of the Scotch-Irish merchants.

This book deals with three main aspects of the history of Indian business: The relationship between business and politics, the position of merchants and businessmen in the economy and society of late colonial India, and how particular merchant networks extended the range of their operations to the entire subcontinent and the wider world.

"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

Lightfoot examines the interactions between Native American communities in California & the earliest colonial settlements, those of Russian pioneers & Franciscan missionaries. He compares the history of the different ventures & their legacies that still help define the political status of native people.

Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java describes the vanished commercial world of colonial Java. Alexander Claver shows the challenges of a demanding business environment by highlighting trade and finance mechanisms, and the relationships between the participants involved.

According to widespread belief, poverty and low standards of living have been characteristic of India for centuries. Challenging this view, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, labouring groups in South India, those at the bottom of the social order, were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. The decline in their economic fortunes, the author asserts, was a process initiated towards the end of that century, with the rise of colonial rule. Building on revisionist interpretations, he examines the transformation of Indian society and its economy under British rule through the prism of the labouring classes, arguing that their treatment by the early colonial state had no precedent in the pre-colonial past and that poverty and low wages were a product of colonial rule. The book promises to make an important contribution to the economic history of the region, and to the study of colonialism.