On the whole this is a useful and stimulating collection of essays on Europe’s long-distance trade with the rest of the world during the entire early modern era. The essays included were originally written for discussion at an international conference, “The Rise of Merchant Empires,” hosted by the Center for Early Modem History at the University of Minnesota in October 1987. The organizers are to be congratulated on bringing together such a range of distinguished historians and some contributions on unfamiliar aspects of world trade—including separate essays on the trans-Saharan and central Asian caravan trades.
The emphasis is firmly international, as for a change the English role is not overemphasized. Plenty of room is allotted for the roles of the other European nations, yet the volume is not particularly well balanced. The Dutch do well, receiving coverage in one whole and two half contributions, as well as shorter sections in other contributions. However, too little space is given to French maritime and colonial expansion, and what space is assigned to this dimension is too much focused on the Caribbean. We are given no sense of France’s expanding role in Europe’s overseas commerce generally. Moreover, Scandinavia and northern Germany are almost entirely ignored. It is also a pity that the Spanish and Portuguese transoceanic empires were not given more extensive, and separate, treatment rather than lumped together in one contribution by Carla Rahn Phillips. Generally, this volume is of value to the Latin Americanist less for the specific discussions of Latin American trade than for the wide-ranging perceptions of European maritime expansion in general propounded by such historians as Herman van der Wee, Niels Steensgaard, Frédéric Mauro, and Ward Barrett, who makes a useful contribution with “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” a critical survey of the recent literature on the subject.
In her contribution on the Spanish and Portuguese trade empires, Phillips makes no attempt to assess the importance of Spanish and Portuguese colonial products in European commerce or the relationship between Hispanic America and Europe as a whole. Worse still is her lame analysis of the general downturn in trade between Spain and Spanish America in the decades after 1620. To explain this in terms of a European economic crisis supposedly "spreading outward from the agrarian economy” without referring to the clear and systematic evidence indicating that the general European recession of the 1620s was the result of embargoes and war shows an amazing insensitivity to the last fifteen years of debate about Spain’s transoceanic dilemmas in the seventeenth century. But only two or three of the essays can be described as weak. The general level is rather impressive.
