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792 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. JUNE 2006 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 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- JUNE 2006