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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

John J. McCusker
John J. McCusker
Affiliation:
JOHN J. MCCUSKER is Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of American History and professor of economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.
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Extract

This special issue of the Business History Review has as its theme the business of trade in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. It has as its purpose to highlight the rich and diverse work that is being accomplished by business historians, including people like the four authors—Kenneth Morgan, Silvia Marzagalli, Linda Salvucci, and Thomas Truxes—whose essays constitute the substance of this issue. The articles have a common focus but reveal very different aspects of their shared theme in delightfully instructive ways. While both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are represented and the northern and southern regions are discussed, and while France and Spain and their colonies receive nearly as much play as Great Britain and its colonies (and one-time colonies), almost by the very nature of trade, the stories told are more about links and connections than they are about the limitations imposed by national and imperial boundaries. My contribution, as editor—an otherwise unknown tract written in the 1780s by a minor but influential British civil servant, Thomas Irving, and edited and newly presented here—implicitly argues the case put forth by the other contributors: it was the limitless bounds of eighteenth-century business that defined the Atlantic World.

Type
Special Section: Trade in the Atlantic World
Information
Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 4: Trade in the Atlantic World , Winter 2005 , pp. 697 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

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References

1 McCusker, John J., “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 110 (April 2005): 295–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For Irving, see McCusker, John J., “Colonial Civil Servant and Counter-Revolutionary: Thomas Irving (1738?-1800) in Boston, Charleston, and London,” Perspectives in American History 12 (1979): 314–50Google Scholar, as revised and updated in McCusker, , Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London, 1997), 190–221Google Scholar, quotation, p. 219.

3 The Office of the Inspector General was the antecedent of the modern statistical office of H. M. Customs and Excise. See Jarvis, Rupert C., “The Archival History of the Customs Records,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 1 (April 1959): 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The manuscript sources about this dispute are mostly to be found in three places: the Nelson Papers, Add. MSS 34902-34992, 36604-36612, British Library, London (hereinafter BL); Leeward Islands, Original Correspondence, 1784-86, CO 152/64, Public Record Office, The National Archives, London (hereinafter PRO/TNA); and Admiralty Correspondence and Papers, Letters from Captains, N, 1782-92, ADM 1/2223, PRO/TNA. Only a very few of these documents appear in The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, with Notes, ed. Nicholas [H.] Nicolas, 7 vols. (London, 1844-1846)Google Scholar. More are to be found in Nelson's Letters from the Leeward Islands and Other Original Documents in the Public Record Office and the British Museum, ed. Rawson, Geoffrey (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

5 Perhaps, like many papers generated in the customs administration of this period, the finished report was destroyed in the fire in the London custom house in February 1814. Carson, Edward [A.], The Ancient and Rightful Customs: A History of the English Customs Service (London, 1972), 131–32Google Scholar.

6 Craton, Michael John, “The Caribbean Vice Admiralty Courts, 1763-1815: Indispensable Agents of an Imperial System” (Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 1968), 125, 193, 227-28, 234, 249Google Scholar.

7 In writing this part of his report, Irving borrowed considerably from an earlier paper. Compare his “Observations on the Trade carried on between the British West Indies and the Spanish Colonies in America,” dated November 1786, in the Liverpool Papers, Add. MS 38345, ff. 208r.-213v., BL. There is a copy of these “Observations,” dated 28 Nov. 1786, in the Board of Trade Records, BT 6/75, pp. 743-64, PRO/TNA.

8 As was made clear by Wright, John from his “own Experience for many years when I was on the Spot… [working in] one of the greatest Houses in Kingston,” The West-India Merchant, Factor and Supercargoes Daily Assistant In the Disposal of a Cargoe of Merchandize at Jamaica, Mobille, Saint Augustine, The Musquetto Shore, Bay of Hondura, the Spanish Main, or Any Other Part of the Spanish West-Indies… (London: Author, 1765), vii, xi.Google Scholar

9 I develop this argument in my book, Mercantilism and the Economic History of the Early Modern Atlantic World (forthcoming).

10 The Spanish colonial trade with the British was a far more important issue for the Spanish government, which saw this trade as destructive of its empire. Contemporary modern discussions of the subject occupy whole libraries. I like one man's summation of the subject: “The general situation was… that the English would not stop the trade and the Spanish could not.” Christelow, Allan, “Contraband Trade between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Free Port Act of 1766,” Hispanic American Historical Review 22 (May 1942): 309–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation, p. 312.

11 [Long, Edward], The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government, 3 vols. (London, 1774), vol. 2, p. 197Google Scholar.

12 For this whole episode, see Armytage, Frances, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766-1822, Imperial Studies Series, no. 20 (London, 1953), 23–27Google Scholar.

13 The classic discussions of all this are Herbert Bell, C. [F.], “British Commercial Policy in the West Indies, 1783-93,” English Historical Review 31 (July 1916): 429–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bell, , “The West India Trade before the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 22 (Jan. 1917): 272–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For the text of these laws and others mentioned subsequently, see Great Britain, Laws and Statutes, The Statutes of the Realm. Printed…from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, edited by Luders, Alexander et al., 11 vols. in 12 parts (London, 1810-1828)Google Scholar; Great Britain, Laws and Statutes, 1649-60 (Commonwealth), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, edited by Firth, C[harles] H. and Rait, R[obert] S., 3 vols. (London, 1911)Google Scholar; and Great Britain, Laws and Statutes, The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Tomlins, T[homas] E. et al., 29 vols. (London, 1804-1869)Google Scholar.

15 Act of 3 George III, c. 22. Compare the Order in Council of 4 Oct. 1763, as printed in Great Britain, Privy Council, Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, eds. Grant, W[illiam] L. and Munro, James, 6 vols. (Hereford, 1908-1912), vol. 4, pp. 569–72Google Scholar.

16 Emphasis as in the original. Appears to have been added by a later hand.

17 Act of 27 Geo. III, c. 27.

18 The southern boundary of port-of-entry Passamaquoddy was Passamaquoddy Bay, the mouth of the St. Croix River, at the border between the United States and New Brunswick.

19 Inserted here from the margin as directed in the original text.

20 Emphasis as in the original. Appears to have been added by a later hand.

21 Inserted here from the margin as directed in the original text.

22 These extracts are not part of the document at hand.

23 Emphasis as in the original. Appears to have been added by a later hand.