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Reviews of Books
cially in such a short book, but as anyone who has tried
it will testify it is also a tall order. By 1640, there were
at least sixteen settlements we can call polities, and
there was a lot going on in each of them, never mind
events at home. All this detail can leave too little time,
and space, for careful analysis. This seems the case in
the first hundred pages, where Pestana sets the scene
and brings the story up to the regicide, the declaration
of the Commonwealth, and the passage of the navigation legislation of 1650 and 1651. Given Pestana’s insistence on telling the story in considerable detail, the
demands of narrative leave too few landmarks by which
the writer might have charted a clearer course.
Pestana’s thorough research has many virtues, however. She goes well beyond the conventional sources,
and virtually every paragraph is well annotated. Thus
this book will be treasured by scholars for some time to
come, and the weight of evidence does lead to important insights even for the civil war period, especially
concerning the religious conflicts which shaped the civil
wars between crown and Parliament. Given the newness and fragility of most colonies, troubles at home
would have increased the hazards of settlement anyway,
but the shape taken by these particular troubles heightened colonial uncertainty by highlighting divisions
within colonial populations and between colonies in
matters of religion and authority. As events in England
lurched along, Parliament’s coalition fragmented and
moved from one formulation (Presbyterianism) to another (Independency and toleration) in matters of religion. In almost every colony these changes threatened
and tempted those in and out of power, forcing them to
risk much whether from principle or opportunism.
Then, in 1649, the regicide and the proclamation of a
republic promised to replace the personal, contractual
relationship between each colony and the crown with
national and political policies to which all colonists, as
Englishmen, were subordinate. Some colonies rebelled,
taking a clear stand for the first time, and this in turn
forced a clarifying response from the new Commonwealth, the naval expeditions of 1651. By 1652, all colonies had—more or less grudgingly—accepted the new
order.
While things did not calm down much in the 1650s,
with wars with Holland and Spain and Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655, the defining events of
1649–1652 had rough-shaped a recognizably new empire, and Pestana happily shifts into a more analytical
mode. In the process, she transforms good history into
significant history. Chapters five and six (pp. 157–212)
stand out in particular: “Free Trade and Freeborn Englishmen” and “Lost Liberty and Laboring People” are
richly textured analyses of the ways in which several factors transformed the English Atlantic. New imperial
legislation, vigorous colonial production, emergent
trading patterns, and significant population growth
worked together to make elite colonists highly conscious of their rights as Englishmen, and equally well
aware of how heavily their continued prosperity was dependent upon their ability to use these rights to con-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
solidate their position, not only vis-à-vis the empire but
also through their power to secure and control dependent labor. Pestana confirms that the English empire
was already by 1660 a complex community of power and
impotence, rights and subjection, freedom and unfreedom.
Pestana’s excellent work has been ill-served by her
publisher, who delivered this review copy with six pages
missing from two valuable appendixes, one on colonial
populations, the other a survey of 125 pamphlets on
New England published in England during the 1640s.
ROBERT M. BLISS
University of Missouri,
St. Louis
PETER A. COCLANIS, editor. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. (The Carolina
Lowcountry and the Atlantic World.) Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xix, 377.
$49.95.
Perhaps because Atlantic history means different
things to different practitioners, its genealogy is in dispute. But to my knowledge, nobody has gone as far back
in time as Peter A. Coclanis, who traces the roots of
Atlantic history to the nineteenth century. Coclanis asserts that some would extend the genealogy back to
Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). It is hard to see, however, why Marx should be considered a pioneer here. Of
course, he identified a number of developments in the
New World and Africa (as well as the East Indies) as
constituting the dawn of capitalist production, but concluding that events on one side of the Atlantic bear on
the other does not make one an Atlanticist. Nowhere
did Marx come close to arguing that the Atlantic was a
coherent unit of analysis. His view was a global one.
The spirit of Marx is present in this volume, however,
in that the essays explore the economic foundations of
the Atlantic world. Based on papers presented at a 1999
conference, the thirteen contributions on the French,
Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires shed
light on both imperial trade and the cross-imperial linkages that defied mercantilist schemes. One wishes more
essays had been available on Africa, but a fine contribution by Ty Reese on free and bonded labor at Cape
Coast Castle at least acknowledges the role of West Africa. The only essay that does not fit in this collection
is that by Laura Croghan Kamoie on the domestic economy of the Chesapeake. The author does not even attempt to show the impact of the wider Atlantic world
on the Chesapeake, or vice versa.
Three authors deal with imperial trade. Jan de Vries
presents a thorough overview of the Dutch Atlantic,
distinguishing four stages of development after 1600.
While the Dutch failed in their grand design for the
Western Hemisphere, their share of Atlantic trade was
never insignificant, de Vries argues, although the marginal character of their presence in the Caribbean made
them vulnerable. British transatlantic trade, as R. C.
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Comparative/World
Nash relates, also took off around 1600, but commercial
expansion had to wait for extensive settlement in the
sugar and tobacco colonies. In a comprehensive discussion of trade and finance, Nash revisits the commission
system, which he claims came to account for around
eighty percent of British Atlantic trade. British merchants who remained outside this system as independent entrepreneurs dealt in tobacco produced by middling and lesser planters or Carolina rice, or were active
in the transatlantic slave trade. Contrary to the Dutch
and the British, cash crop production in the New World
for a long time had no priority for the Spanish, focused
as they were on harvesting precious metals. Although
she makes too much of the Dutch role in paving the way
for the sugar revolution in the non-Hispanic Caribbean,
Laura Náter convincingly argues that Spanish officials
deliberately avoided competition in sugar with English
and French colonies, inasmuch as easy access to capital,
high productivity, and low prices put their rivals at a
considerable advantage. Spain’s Caribbean crop par excellence was Cuban tobacco, which became popular
early on among foreign customers. Náter contends that
the blossoming of Cuba’s tobacco production provided
the basis for the island’s sugar expansion in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as it created
an infrastructure and brought in capital and manpower.
While the caliber of Cuban tobacco was never in dispute, planters of other crops struggled to produce a
high-quality product. S. Max Edelson reveals how indigo in South Carolina failed to match the expectations
of its growers. Environmental factors hindered its reputation, but perhaps even more important was the established taste for indigo from Guatemala and St.
Domingue, with which the Carolinian variety had to
compete in the London market. In his original contribution, David Hancock reconstructs how Madeira wine
became an important consumer item in the Atlantic
world and beyond. Its quality was the outcome of “epistolary conversations among growers, the distributors’
agents, wholesalers and retailers around the Atlantic,
and consumers in America, Britain, and the East” (p.
32). As a result of this correspondence, several innovations were introduced, including the fortification of
wines with brandy and the increase in the number of
grape varieties from four to twenty-four. Carolina rice,
by contrast, did not have many gradations. Nash explains that this meant that, compared to growers of
sugar or tobacco, “rice planters had few opportunities
to earn premium prices for higher grades by consigning
their rice for sale in British markets” (p. 109). Consequently, the commission system played a minor role in
South Carolina’s rice business.
In a model study of Atlantic history, Robert DuPlessis looks at the market in textiles, the single most
important consumable sent to the colonies. Comparing
consumption in four North American cities—Montreal,
New Orleans, Charleston, and Philadelphia—between
the late seventeenth century and the 1760s-1770s, DuPlessis shows that T. H. Breen’s thesis about the growing standardization of colonial consumer goods can be
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793
extended across the border of British North America.
By the end of the colonial regime, all four areas displayed a remarkable resemblance of three major kinds
of fabrics: linens, cottons, and woolens. At the same
time, variations occurred according to region, status,
wealth, and gender. More specifically, distinctive textile
markets developed in the eighteenth century for whites,
blacks, and Indians.
Apart from trade within the imperial framework, this
volume devotes much attention to inter-imperial (or, as
one author calls it, “supranational”) commerce. While
the often illegal transactions between subjects of different empires may have become more conspicuous
with the growth in scale of Atlantic trade generally, inter-imperial trade existed from the outset, as various
authors report. Náter notes, for example, that tobacco
smuggling became such a problem in early seventeenthcentury Spanish America that the authorities banned its
cultivation for several years in Santo Domingo, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Margarita, Cumaná, and Nueva Andalucı́a. Kenneth Banks privileges one type of smuggling,
suggesting that the illegal introduction of African slaves
to Martinique provided the foundation for all other
contraband trade. (The observation could also be applied to other parts of the New World, where all kinds
of contraband goods were introduced under the cloak
of the slave trade. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, for one,
documents this in his essay.) Banks also argues that
French officials in Martinique “used their positions to
foster an elaborate contraband economy,” as they exchanged metropolitan protection for colonial contacts
and support. Martinique thus resembled, once again,
numerous other American ports and colonies, where, as
Zacarı́as Moutoukias has written in a study of Buenos
Aires, metropolitan officials were coopted into informal personal networks that were the source of political
influence.
Coclanis rightly points out that an exclusive focus on
the Atlantic basin is at times too narrow. Similarly, as
he argues, it would be stretching the truth to claim that
transatlantic ties had a profound impact on all aspects
of all circum-Atlantic societies at all times. However,
the essays in this collection show that Atlantic history
can offer fresh perspectives, enriching our knowledge
of the past without sweeping other approaches under
the carpet.
WIM KLOOSTER
Clark University
DOUGLAS B. CHAMBERS. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2005. Pp. x, 325. $45.00.
On August 24, 1732, after a month-long illness, Ambrose Madison died at Mount Pleasant, his plantation
seat in Virginia’s piedmont backcountry. Within a week
three African slaves were accused of poisoning him.
Two of them, a woman named Dido and a man named
Turk, belonged to Madison; the third, a man named
Pompey, belonged to a fellow planter nearby. On Sep-
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