Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T21:12:35.824Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

“Credit, Risk and Reputation in Late Seventeenth- Century Colonial Trade”

from CONTRIBUTIONS

Nuala Zahedieh
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh.
Get access

Summary

“Credit is the value raised by opinion,” observed Nicholas Barbon, “it buys goods as money does; and in all trading cities there's more wares sold upon credit than for present money.” Credit in the sense of belief, confidence, faith, trust, the estimate in which a character is held, reputation, was the elusive but fundamental key to success in early modern commerce. A brief look at the intricate workings of seventeenth-century colonial trade, the nature of the risks involved, and the role of reputation in risk reduction strategies show the overwhelming importance of “credit” and suggest ways in which it shaped the structure of the enterprise.

England's colonial trade was well established by 1660, by which time its people had settled permanent plantations on the American mainland in the Chesapeake and New England and, in the Caribbean, in St. Christophers, Barbados, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat and (as yet precariously) in Jamaica which had been seized from the Spaniards in 1655. The southern plantations produced valuable cash crops for exchange including tobacco, sugar, indigo, ginger, cotton, and dyewoods; New Englanders provided fish, timber, ships, and shipping services to the southerners; the mother country provided the colonists with manufactured goods, food, and labour (first white but, increasingly, black slaves taken in Africa). In the period down to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 England consolidated and extended settlement in the middle colonies and the lower south and, with the aid of the Navigation Acts streamlined after the Restoration, ensured that an increasing share of the expanding commerce remained in its hands, concentrated on London which emerged as the hub of the system. The precarious figures which survive suggest that the value of London's imports from the colonies more than doubled between the 1660s and the end of the century, with similar growth in exports (table 1). Colonial trade accounted for about twenty percent of London's overseas trade but, on account of the long distances involved, a far higher proportion of the shipping and related services. Trade was particularly buoyant in the peace years between 1674 and 1689 with a reported peak in 1686 and many of the figures given here are taken from a computerized survey of the port books for that year.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×