Bristol and the Birth of the Atlantic Economy, 1500-1700

Bristol and the Birth of the Atlantic Economy, 1500-1700
Author: Richard Stone
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1837650535

Analyses data from the Bristol Port Books to rewrite the history of trade in Bristol, including the city's early involvement with the slave trade. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a transformative period for global commerce, with the principal focus of England's trade shifting away from trade with Europe, primarily in woollen cloth, to a new Atlantic system, with trade in a diverse range of commodities. Based on the fantastically detailed Bristol Port Books, previously thought impenetrable, and using new computer technology to analyse the vast amount of data, this book provides the first long duration history of a major Atlantic port in this period. It rewrites the history of Bristol's trade, overturning much established thinking, for example showing that trade flourished in the late Tudor and early Stuart period, demonstrating that Bristol was involved in the slave trade much earlier than was previously thought and charting the growth of commerce with North America and the Caribbean from nothing to three quarters of Bristol's imports in the short period from the 1630s to the 1650s. Overall, the book represents a major contribution to understanding how the Atlantic economy worked and how it developed in this crucial period.

Advancing Empire

Advancing Empire
Author: L. H. Roper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107118913

This book explores seventeenth-century English overseas expansion, offering a unique interpretation of the history of the early modern English Empire.

The Overseas Trade of British America

The Overseas Trade of British America
Author: Thomas M. Truxes
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300161301

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred–year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.

The Rise of Commercial Empires

The Rise of Commercial Empires
Author: David Ormrod
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2003-03-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521819268

A work of major importance for the economic history of both Europe and North America.

The Stuart Age

The Stuart Age
Author: Barry Coward
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317864263

The Stuart Age provides an accessible introduction to many major themes of the period including: the causes of the English Civil War, the nature of the English Revolution; the aims and achievements of Oliver Cromwell; the continuation of religious passion in the politics of Restoration England; and the impact on Britain of the Glorious Revolution. In it Coward also covers the relevant history of Scotland and Ireland and gives comprehensive treatment of economic, social, intellectual, as well as political and religious history.

On Demand

On Demand
Author: David Baker
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804772908

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. On Demand draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time . William Shakespeare satirized credit problems. Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade, and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.

Consuming Splendor

Consuming Splendor
Author: Linda Levy Peck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2005-09-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521842327

A fascinating study of the ways in which consumption transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. It reveals for the first time the emergence of consumer society in seventeenth-century England.

Dramatic Geography

Dramatic Geography
Author: Laurence Publicover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192529730

Focusing on early modern plays which stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays' connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this volume demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and how they responded to one another's plays to create an 'intertheatrical geography'. These strategies shape the plays' wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, Laurence Publicover brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; the book also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.