Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: The Many Scales of Merchant Profit: Accounting for Norms, Practices and Results in the Age of Commerce
- Part I Understanding Merchant Transactions
- Part II The Credit Nexus and its Pitfalls
- Part III Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework
- 5 The Transatlantic Flow of Price Information in the Spanish Colonial Trade, 1680–1820
- 6 Product Quality and Merchant Transactions: Product Lines and Hierarchies in the Accounts and Letters of the Gradis Merchant House
- Part IV Diversification and Risk Management
- Conclusion: Reorienting Early Modern Economic History: Merchant Economy, Merchant Capitalism and the Age of Commerce
- Notes
- Index
5 - The Transatlantic Flow of Price Information in the Spanish Colonial Trade, 1680–1820
from Part III - Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: The Many Scales of Merchant Profit: Accounting for Norms, Practices and Results in the Age of Commerce
- Part I Understanding Merchant Transactions
- Part II The Credit Nexus and its Pitfalls
- Part III Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework
- 5 The Transatlantic Flow of Price Information in the Spanish Colonial Trade, 1680–1820
- 6 Product Quality and Merchant Transactions: Product Lines and Hierarchies in the Accounts and Letters of the Gradis Merchant House
- Part IV Diversification and Risk Management
- Conclusion: Reorienting Early Modern Economic History: Merchant Economy, Merchant Capitalism and the Age of Commerce
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The eighteenth century witnessed a significant growth in the commercial exchanges between the European metropolises and their American dominions. One crucial feature that helped trade to expand was the increasing flow of commercial information across the Atlantic. However, this development has been studied primarily in the context of the British Atlantic, where the commercial press played a major role, as John McCusker and others have shown in great detail. In stark contrast, the flow of information that made Spain's trade with its American colonies possible remains for the most part shrouded in mystery. There are three main reasons for this: first, a Spanish commercial press did not appear until very late in the century, and even then it offered very little information on prices; second, very few early modern private business records have survived in Spain and Spanish America; and, third, historians working on the Spanish colonial trade do not seem to have shown much interest in studying the mechanisms of underlying price formation and information flow.
By using a cache of confiscated letters and documents belonging to Spanish merchant ships intercepted by the British navy in the eighteenth century, this chapter tries to answer important questions about the flow of commercial information across the Spanish Atlantic, such as: how much did Spanish merchants trading with America know about prices in the colonies?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Merchants and Profit in the Age of Commerce, 1680–1830 , pp. 95 - 114Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014