Ralph Davis of Leicester University has contributed a most interesting volume to the new economic history series edited by Charles Wilson of Cambridge. His scope is nothing less that the economic history of the “Atlantic World” from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century: Britain, France, Holland, Spain and Portugal, and their colonies in America. While there have been elementary economic histories of Europe published before, no one to my knowledge has attempted quite the task essayed by Davis. He does not confine himself to the “Atlantic economy” narrowly conceived, that is to the transoceanic trade between the various European countries and their American colonies. Rather he has attempted to describe the economy of each west European country in its entirety, giving to that country’s colonial trade only its proportionate share of attention. Similarly he tries to see the colonial economies in the round, though their external orientation of necessity attracts more attention.
Davis’s is, I believe, now the best general survey available in English of early modern west European and colonial economic history. I think it will be particularly useful for university students starting the study of colonial history (whether North American or Ibero-American) with out previous training in economic history. Such a student will find here not a hack textbook account but a fresh rethinking and reworking by an imaginative and scholarly author who has himself made important contributions to the study of international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Davis’s new work is well thought out, well organized, lucidly written, and rarely technical. Most important of all, it is up-to-date. That is, Davis has assimilated much (if not all) of the current monographic literature and gives a synthesis and interpretation reflecting the current state of scholarship, with all its limitations.
The very strengths of this work are its weaknesses. It is inevitable that in a work attempting in 352 pages to cover so many countries and so many centuries there should be emphases and points of detail that will offend the expert. For example, the account of the world coffee trade on p. 261 omits Java, from which the Dutch were obtaining substantial supplies from the 1720s. Nor do I know where he got the figures for the Chesapeake tobacco trade on p. 264. They are quite different from the figures that the reviewer published in the Historical Statistics of the United States (1960 ed.), and they tend to convert a three-fold increase between 1700 and 1775 into a ten-fold increase. A few other minor slips were noticed, but they detract little from the broad, imaginative sweep and utility of this book.
At a more general level, however, I wonder if the plan of this work, impressive as it is, is quite ideal. The omission of central and eastern Europe leaves out areas that were important markets for colonial produce and that supplied cheap linens, one of the most important commodities sent to America. More fundamentally, I missed some sort of epilogue that would try to draw together the themes developed in the separate chapters and assess the importance of the international “Atlantic economy” in the economies of its constituent parts. This valuable book will surely have a second edition, and I hope that the author then will be able to give these points some further attention.
