Atlantic Perspectives on European Economic History, 1650–1850

Historians entered the globalization discourse rather late. Participants in the debates have correctly identified integration and hierarchy as the defining elements of current globalization. As historians come into the field, they need to pose specifically historical questions: how and when did we get here? For economic historians this means focusing on how local, regional, and national markets developed over time and became integrated to form a global market and a global economy. Inevitably, the investigation also has to encompass the issue of hierarchy and the attendant socio-political consequences.

            Atlantic world economic history offers a unique opportunity for this line of investigation, because the late fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and the subsequent colonization of the Americas provoked an expansive economic process which simultaneously impacted all the economies and societies of the Atlantic basin. For many decades, the link between various dynamic regions of the Atlantic basin was much stronger than the link between those regions and the rest of their national economies. How the import, export, and shipping activities of these dynamic regions, and their externalities in finance and even power politics, affected the commercializing process and the development and spread of the market economy in the major regions of the Atlantic is a subject that deserves the intellectual resources of global historians.            Though not explicitly focused on the subject, the work of several United States economic historians provides a helpful starting point for studying the process in the United States. The literature on the economic history of Spanish America and Brazil also offers a helpful starting point. But Atlantic perspectives are seriously lacking in European economic historiography. The early work of Davis and Crouzet pointed in that direction, but retreated under the tide of inward-looking scholarship of the 1950s-1980s. This essay attempts to invite a dialogue on the subject.