This article traces the patterns of sugar consumption in seventeenth-century New England, from port to countryside, and the way in which economic exchange between New England and Barbados shaped the development of both regions. It deepens understanding of the rise of slavery-based tropical commodity production and consumption in the Atlantic world and examines the ways in which the emergence of capitalism and global imperialism was connected to the primacy of sugar as one of the most widely distributed early modern commodities.

Using evidence from 25,250 records of vessels entering and clearing the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, this article demonstrates that intercolonial trading captains and crews significantly reduced the number of days their vessels spent in port in Virginia between 1698 and 1766. This contraction reflected a quantifying ethos in shipping that emerged during the early age of sail as the result of mutually reinforcing legal requirements and management practices. Responding to these productivity pressures, captains embraced practices that limited sailors’ freedom and turned to enslaved sailors to guarantee their maritime labor force. Embracing unfreedom aided captains to realize the dispatch goals that helped guarantee their investors’ returns.

This paper builds on a body of multi-disciplinary literature to analyze and compare the emergence of the prêt-à-porter industry in France and the ready-to-wear industry in Italy from their founding to their growth stages in the mid-twentieth century. The comparison demonstrates the significant impact that the French Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dame, and the National Chamber of Italian Fashion had on the trajectories of the fashion industry for each country. The article focuses on foundational entrepreneurs within the industry such as Giovanni Battista Giorgini, Jean Patou, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and others. It analyzes how these chambers supported the emergence of differentiated firms within the fashion industry, and how the industry responded to the business conditions in the international economy of the post-World War II period through the global recession of the 1970s.

This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.

Considering the 1500+ pages making up the 39 chapters of this work on Chinese economic history from ancient times to the present, this review essay suggests ways The Cambridge Economic History of China contributes new perspectives on economic history more generally and on plausible connections between the pathways of Chinese economic change that begin in the distant past and point toward the future. The essay addresses specifically Chinese elements in its economic history and identifies the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement with Westerners contributed to the Chinese economy’s future development but in no comprehensive manner explain how modern Chinese economic change took place. Among the highlighted features of Chinese economic history that chapters of this work make visible are the persistent presence of state efforts to manage and shape economic activity forming a distinct tradition of political economy and the long-standing awareness of many of the relationships between population, agriculture, and the natural environment.