INTRODUCTION

Well before 1670, European merchants had assimilated once separate networks of exchange and nearly autonomous economies into a loose world trading system. Shortly before 1670, the international trading system ceased its century-and-a-half-long expansion and began evolving anew, deepening existing trade links and creating new trade opportunities. Three features imparted a new dynamism to trade: the intervention of merchants attuning production to markets, the replacement of bilateral by multilateral exchanges, and the reduction of transactions costs. French merchants had played an insignificant role during the preceding period of European international trade and did not play an important role in the new financial and commodity trading system which arose under the United Provinces of the Netherlands and England. Religious persecution that drove French Protestants to flee France just before William III introduced the Dutch financial system to England helped unite London and Amsterdam, and international warfare on an unheard-of scale between 1688 and 1713 fostered the creation of international capital markets as states spent far beyond their means. Persecuted religious minorities, both Jews and French Huguenots, circulated in northeastern Europe spreading new financial capitalism from which France remained largely excluded. The questions to be answered then are How were French overseas possessions and their colonial trades merged into the new system, and How did the slow integration affect the elusiveness of empire?