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Communications and Trade: The Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In The first half of the seventeenth century the northern mercan-Itile nations of Europe followed Spain and Portugal in flinging their Ncommercial frontiers westward to the New World. By the end of the century they had surpassed the Iberian nations in western trade and made of the Atlantic basin a single great trading area. Their economic enterprises created not only a crisscrossing web of transoceanic traffic but also a cultural community diat came to form die western periphery of European civilization. The members of this community were widely separated, scattered across three thousand miles of ocean and up and down the coasts of two continents. But the structure of commerce furnished a communication system mat brought these far-flung settlements together. The same structure proved to be a framework upon which certain important elements in colonial society took form. My purpose is to sketch certain characteristics of the Atlantic colonies in die seventeenth century which relate to these social consequences of commercial growth.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , Fall 1953 , pp. 378 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1953

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References

1 Newton, Arthur P., The European Nations in the West Indies, 1493–1688 (London: A. and C. Black, 1933), p. 149Google Scholar.

2 Samuel Winthrop, Fayal, to Winthrop, John, January 10, 1648, Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929-1947), V, 196Google Scholar.

3 Samuel Maverick, A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Tou/nes therein, together with the Present Government thereof ([ca. 1660]; reprinted in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ser. 2, I), pp. 243, 245.

4 The Journal of Madam Knight (New York: Peter Smith, 1935), p. 40Google Scholar.

5 Calendar of Stale Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1712–1714, 520.

6 Diary of Samuel Sewall, April 13, 1686; June 15, 19, and October 3, 1688; December 8, 1690 (Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Ser. 5, V, 132, 217, 228, 338).

7 Reich's, Jerome R.Leisler's Rebeclion: A Study of Democracy in New York., 1664–1720 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar came to my attention after the writing of this paper. The information it contains bears out the above interpretation. See especially pp. 37–40, 44, 50–51, 58–59, 70, 71–73, 87, 98, 126, 138–41, 143, 160–66.

8 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951.