Much of the work published by scholars of the Atlantic world has focused on the impact of European expansion—including exploration, colonization, and trade—on the other areas bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Nonetheless, the experience of that expansion also affected Europe and European peoples in profound as well as mundane ways. Examining that experience reveals numerous links between events and developments in the Atlantic world and events and developments in Europe. The problem then becomes how best to examine those links.
One useful approach might begin with important aspects of European history and then move to their relationship with the Atlantic world. This approach would focus the analysis and allow for depth as well as breadth, whether dealing with one or more European countries or with Europe as a whole. There are many aspects of European history that might lend themselves to such an approach. For example, the social and cultural structures that evolved in ancient and medieval Europe helped to shape the later experiences of Europeans overseas.1 At the same time, the encounter with new peoples, cultures, and ecological systems overseas profoundly affected European thought and life, as did the new geographic and anthropological knowledge gained from those encounters. Experiences across the Atlantic—even if they came as hearsay rather than personal histories—inspired Europeans of all social levels to reimagine their own political and social possibilities. Many of them acted on that inspiration to emigrate to the New World, and the subsequent flows of people back and forth across the Atlantic also affected Europeans’ perceptions of themselves and others. Unfortunately, the diversity of European peoples makes it very difficult to generalize about the region as a whole in matters of society and culture. For example, although Christian evangelization was a strong component of the transatlantic activities of some European states—most notably Spain—it was much less important to others. Because of that diversity, this chapter will instead concentrate on matters related to political and economic developments that affected the whole of Europe and that were linked closely to the Atlantic world.
Deciding on the chronological limits of the analysis presents similar dilemmas. The Atlantic Ocean as a physical reality and a venue for human history can be traced back into geological time, just as Fernand Braudel so memorably demonstrated for the Mediterranean Sea.2 Traditionally, however, historians tend to focus on the Atlantic world from the voyages of Christopher Columbus, or his precursors in the earlier fifteenth century, to the end of the eighteenth century. With the political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—which are often dubbed the period of the “Atlantic Revolutions”—the relationship between Europe and newly independent lands in the Americas changed fundamentally. At the same time, the relationship between Europe and Africa also changed, moving toward increasing European dominance of African societies. For example, during the nineteenth century automatic weaponry such as the Gatling gun put even the strongest African monarchies at a serious disadvantage militarily and opened the way to European conquests in parts of Africa that had resisted European incursions in earlier times.3 Although the concept of an Atlantic world remains useful for understanding the nineteenth century and beyond, it was a far different Atlantic world from the one bracketed at one end by the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and at the other end by the era of the Atlantic revolutions. For that reason, this chapter will focus on the period from about 1450 to about 1825.4
Rivalries among European powers were present from the earliest days of Atlantic exploration. Rulers in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe sponsored voyages down the African coasts in hopes of finding a way eastward toward Asia and its legendary spices and other luxury goods. These Asian dreams gained in appeal after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During the late fifteenth century, the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile vied with one another in sponsoring voyages into the great “Ocean Sea” that bordered their western coastlines, with Asia as their ultimate goal. In the short term, however, those voyages had to turn a profit one way or another, or they could not continue. Decades before Columbus came on the scene, both monarchies sponsored expeditions that claimed islands in the Ocean Sea in their names—Portugal in the Azores, the Cape Verdes, and the Madeiras, and Castile in the Canaries. Both Castile and Portugal would develop sugar plantations on the islands that they claimed. Similarly, both powers vied for trading opportunities with Africa in fish, grain, gold, and slaves. Without understanding that long rivalry in the Atlantic, we cannot fully understand the hard-fought wars between Portugal and Castile in the fifteenth century.
The last of those wars, occasioned by a disputed succession in Castile, ended with the Treaty of Alcáçovas-Toledo in 1479 that temporarily sorted out their rival claims in the Atlantic. Portugal agreed to restrict future exploration to the area south and east of the Canaries; Castile agreed to restrict its efforts to the area west of the Canaries. That is one of the reasons that Columbus’s scheme to sail westward toward Asia had little hope of success in Portugal, where he first sought backing, and much better prospects in Castile, where Queen Isabel finally agreed to sponsor him. She and Columbus shared a vision of spreading Christianity to all peoples, as well as finding new markets and products to benefit Europe. When Columbus returned from his historic 1492–1493 voyage and was forced by a storm to sail into Lisbon, the king of Portugal carefully interrogated him to ascertain whether the lands he had found might possibly lie in the Portuguese sphere. Both Portugal and Castile subsequently appealed to Pope Alexander VI to adjudicate the matter, but the four papal bulls that he issued added to the uncertainty by responding alternately to pressure from one side or the other. The well-known Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494—the result of direct and indirect diplomacy rather than papal intervention—had more staying power and effectively regulated exploration and territorial claims in the Atlantic by the two Iberian powers. The Asian dimension of those claims need not concern us here, but it continued to shape Iberian diplomacy for several more decades.
Elsewhere in Europe, Atlantic exploration in the late fifteenth century also sprang from the desire of centralizing monarchs to enhance their prestige and diplomatic bargaining power and to develop new opportunities for production and trade. England’s Henry VII had a keen interest in exploration in the North Atlantic, but he had little luck in persuading English merchants and mariners to replicate the exploratory voyages by Bristol merchants in 1480–1481. Instead, the king backed the efforts of Italians such as John Cabot and his son Sebastian, and Portuguese such as João Fernandes, João Gonsales, and Francisco Fernandes. In the first few years of the sixteenth century two Englishmen who had worked with the Cabots—Hugh Eliot and Robert Thorne—collaborated with the Portuguese in further English voyages to North America. Thus began the English quest for a northwest passage to Asia that would last well into the twentieth century and consume thousands of lives in the process. The history of English efforts to explore and colonize lands across the Atlantic brought England into persistent and unavoidable conflict with Spain and France and—to a lesser extent—Portugal and the Netherlands. The political history of England from the times of Henry VII Tudor onward can hardly be understood without considering those Atlantic rivalries.5
Similarly, the political history of France had an important Atlantic dimension. The Habsburg-Valois wars during the first half of the sixteenth century pitted Francis I of France against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Habsburg—who also reigned as King Charles I of Spain. Although historians generally focus on the European battles during those wars, French voyages of exploration across the Atlantic, and French attempts to found colonies in areas claimed by Spain, carried that struggle across the ocean. As Charles V consolidated support for his tenure as emperor, he allowed German explorers and venture capitalists into Spanish America. Revenues from the Americas allowed Charles to keep his bankers interested in extending credit and loans to him as he fought the French, the Ottomans, and the German Protestants in the 1530s and 1540s. In a very real sense, Habsburg hegemony in sixteenth-century Europe rested on the foundation of Spain’s transatlantic empire; the emperor could not have maintained his ambitious and costly foreign policy in Europe without the promise of American revenues and taxes on transatlantic trade. Resistence to Habsburg power in Europe had a transatlantic dimension as well. Rival European rulers sponsored voyages of exploration, piratical raids, contraband trade, and other challenges to Spain’s American claims, forcing the emperor to expend resources to meet those challenges.
Under Charles’s son Philip II, that pattern continued—with variations. French rivalry became less important as France descended into civil war in the 1560s. English challenges, by contrast, became the most serious threat to Spanish claims in the Americas, as Queen Elizabeth I struggled to create a powerful state despite the divisions that resulted from England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. Challenging the power of Catholic Spain was far easier across the Atlantic, away from the European base of that power. The queen sponsored and profited handsomely from marauding ventures of men such as Francis Drake and John Hawkins that included piracy in peacetime and privateering and official naval actions in wartime. It is no exaggeration to say that the ill-fated armada that Spain sent to invade England in 1588 had its genesis in the raids of Drake, Hawkins, and other like-minded and daring Englishmen on the seas. Although not all the raids occurred in the Atlantic, their activities disrupted the Atlantic fleet system that held Spain’s empire together and that enabled Philip II to acquire even greater power than his father had exercised.
In short, the Atlantic world played a key role in the late-sixteenth-century struggle between Spain and England. The converse is true as well: Anglo-Spanish rivalty played a key role in the history of the Atlantic world in the sixteenth century. English raids in the Caribbean and England’s success in thwarting the 1588 armada helped the English population to define themselves as a nation and to unite in support of their charismatic queen. Whatever their differences internally, on the international scene the English nation became anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, and the struggle with Spain for colonies and trade in the Atlantic world was crucial to that self-definition.
As for France, her merchants and mariners had launched small expeditions to Brazil since the early years of its discovery, mostly to collect brazilwood, the source of a red dye much prized in Europe’s textile industries. Although Portugal’s monarchs repeatedly tried to oust the French from Brazil, the demands of Portuguese trade with Africa, India, and the Spice Islands in Asia left few resources to protect claims in the Americas. French logging interests therefore remained in northeast Brazil, which the French crown called “La France Antartique,” allying with Indian groups that were enemies of Portugal’s local allies. Farther north, the French tried to establish a presence in Florida, but Spanish forces under Pedro Menéndez Avilés ousted them in the 1560s and established the town of St. Augustine as a permanent Spanish settlement. French merchants and explorers had far greater success in Canada, attracted by the rich fishing grounds around Newfoundland that English, Portuguese, and Spaniards were also exploiting.
After the death of Portugal’s young, unmarried King Sebastian in an ill-fated expedition to Africa in 1578, the European political situation changed. Sebastian’s uncle, Philip II of Spain, had the strongest dynastic claim to the Portuguese crown through his own Portuguese ancestors. He had to back up that claim militarily, in addition to confronting a rebellion in the Netherlands and trying to thwart Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, he deemed the overlordship of Portugal and its empire important enough to make the effort. With Spain distracted and overextended, rivals such as France and the Netherlands expected less opposition across the Atlantic. Instead, Philip II grew even more determined to defend Iberian claims in the Americas. A Spanish fleet expelled the French temporarily from northeast Brazil in 1581, though they soon returned. Despite efforts by successive Habsburg kings of Spain and Portugal to thwart their incursions into Ibero-America, the French continued to work toward establishing an Atlantic empire of their own.
During the seventeenth century, the Spanish Empire continued to be firmly established in Central and South America, and the Habsburg monarchy claimed additional lands that extended far into North America. Spain’s rivals in Europe knew, however, that Spanish resources and manpower were stretched too thin to defend and colonize the whole area claimed across the Atlantic by the Habsburg monarchy. Even in Europe, those resources would reach the breaking point during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), as Spain’s kings Philip III and Philip IV poured men and money into efforts by the Austrian Habsburgs to defend their authority in central Europe and to bring Protestant Europe back into the Catholic fold. Although the major battles of the Thirty Years’ War occurred in Europe, English, Dutch, and—after 1635—French vessels carried out attacks in the Americas as well. For that reason, as well as for its strong religious dimension, the Thirty Years’ War is often called both the last European religious war and the first global war. In 1640 the start of a Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule separated the two Iberian empires and left Portuguese Brazil even more vulnerable to foreign incursions.
The upheavals of the seventeenth century in Europe provided an ideal opportunity for various European powers to amplify their presence across the Atlantic. English colonization in North America began in earnest in 1607 with the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, after repeated earlier failures. French colonization began with Port Royal (Nova Scotia) in 1605 and Quebec in 1608, which served as a base for the fur trade. In the following decades, both English and French adventurers would establish a presence in the Caribbean as well, eventually founding permanent settlements for trade and privateering on the fringes of Spanish America. Later in the century, religious dissidents would lead several successful English colonizing efforts—for example, the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland. The French government, by contrast, prevented religious minorities from settling in France’s American colonies. Like the Spanish and Portuguese governments before them, Catholic France feared that the introduction of beliefs heretical in their view could endanger the souls of the local inhabitants whom they hoped to convert to Catholic Christianity.
The English Civil War in mid-century gave an added boost to English colonization overseas. Under the Protectorate established after the execution of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design led to the English capture of the island of Jamaica in 1655. Strategically located in the Caribbean, Jamaica served as a base for further challenges to the Spanish Empire and for the development of English trade and colonization across the Atlantic. In the last half of the century, France also exploited new opportunities to develop its presence in the Americas, promoted by King Louis XIV and able bureaucrats such as the Count of Pontchartrain. Over the course of the seventeenth century, France effectively claimed a dozen Caribbean islands, the most promising of which became plantation economies producing for the European market.
Huge deposits of gold and gems were discovered in Portuguese Brazil late in the seventeenth century, and Europe as a whole would eventually profit from the infusion of new wealth mined in Brazil. Here again, the history of Europe cannot easily be divorced from European endeavors across the Atlantic. Nowhere was that clearer than in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Although fought mostly in Europe, this global conflict arguably had Atlantic concerns at its center. On his deathbed in 1700, the last Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, wrote a will designating the teenaged Duke of Anjou, one of Louis XIV’s grandsons, as his successor, in the hope that French power would keep the Spanish Empire intact. An anti-Bourbon coalition feared that France would gain unprecedented access to that empire and went to war to prevent the Bourbon succession. The coalition members favored an Austrian Habsburg pretender, planning to divide up the Spanish Empire if he gained the throne with their support. The allies viewed Spain itself as little more than an additional pawn in the game. Against the odds, and despite the on-again, off-again participation of France in the war, the Duke of Anjou retained the Spanish throne as Philip V, the first of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty. Under Philip V (d. 1746) and his sons Ferdinand VI (d. 1759) and Charles III (d. 1788), the Spanish Empire remained intact and attained its greatest territorial extent at the end of the eighteenth century. This required close attention to defense as well as to the bureaucratic structures that administered more than 12 million square miles of territory in the Americas. The Bourbon monarchy in Spain asserted greater control in the American empire than their Habsburg precursors, even as colonial societies gained their maturity and began to chafe at control from Europe. That same evolution marked the British colonies in the Atlantic world, though they included far fewer people and far less territory.6 The French colonies remained more tightly linked to the mother country as political dependencies, which may have affected the evolving colonial societies they created in America.
The areas claimed by various European powers in North America and the Caribbean held a diverse mix of peoples and ethnicities, trading with one another across the indistinct and permeable borders between colonies. Modern approaches often stress the intertwined histories of those colonies, relegating their connections with one European power or another to secondary importance. Nonetheless, European states in the eighteenth century continued to project their rivalries across the Atlantic, working to undercut the authority of rival powers, and enticing settlers from outside their own colonies to shift their residence and their loyalties. This dynamic process characterized British, French, and Spanish territories in North America and the Caribbean through much of the eighteenth century. In the heart of the vast Spanish Empire, rivals were in no position to challenge Spain’s political authority, but commercially Spain’s rivals, especially Britain, came to dominate much of the trade to and from Spanish America.
In North America, the rivalry between Britain and France gained intensity as both countries grew in wealth, population, and power. Repeated skirmishes in what would become Canada, in the Ohio Valley, and in the Mississippi Valley, marked the first half of the century. In 1756 the global conflict called the Seven Years’ War in Europe, and the French and Indian War in North America, began with Anglo-French engagements in the Ohio Valley. When the war ended, Britain took over all of French North America, gained Florida at the expense of Spain, and ousted the French from India, half a world away, setting the stage for British hegemony in the nineteenth century. Some of the French colonists in Canada went to the Caribbean at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Others, captured and forced into exile, ended up in Louisiana, which France had ceded to Spain in 1762.
When Britain’s North American colonies rebelled in 1776, France supported the rebels and brought its treasury close to bankruptcy in the process. The French government’s financial embarrassment thereafter was a major precipitant of the French Revolution, which arguably affected all of subsequent European history. Spain also aided the North American rebels, both because of diplomatic alliances between the two Bourbon powers, and because both defined Britain as the enemy. Because Spanish forces won crucial engagements against the British in Florida and the Gulf Coast, Spain was able to demand the return of Florida by the terms of the treaty that ended the American Revolution in 1783. Spain’s Count of Aranda negotiated the treaty in Paris, but he nonetheless feared that the new American colossus would soon view Spain’s American colonies as likely candidates for takeover. Aranda was correct in the long run. In the short run, a more imminent threat loomed. The disruptions and wars entrained by the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte had an important transatlantic dimension, involving rival pretensions to islands in the Caribbean, Spanish Florida, and the huge Louisiana Territory. During those wars, Spain came to rely heavily on loans from New Spain (Mexico), a pattern that had begun several decades earlier.7 When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Spain had lost Louisiana and several Caribbean islands, and several political leaders in parts of Spanish America had declared their independence. Others would follow, disillusioned with the restored constraints of empire. Devastated politically and economically by decades of global warfare, Spain could not stem the rebellions. Britain, France, and other European countries watched the unfolding drama across the Atlantic with great interest, as did the United States, looking for ways to profit from the upheaval, or at least to prevent their rivals from profitting. In 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States, and by the 1820s nearly all of Spanish America had broken away, after more than three centuries of imperial rule. Eventually, some two dozen republics, with upwards of 15 million people, would take form in the former Spanish empire, politically independent but still linked in important ways to European politics and transatlantic trade and diplomacy.8
The colonial map of the Americas took shape with reference to the political and diplomatic map of Europe, along with its spatial contours. Spain and Portugal were ideally placed—geographically, politically, and historically—to pioneer in the exploration of the Central and South Atlantic. They got to the Americas first, defended their exclusive claims to the lands in the Southern Hemisphere, and managed to hold off rival claimants for more than three centuries. Their European rivals did not establish a serious presence in the Americas until the seventeenth century, and then only beyond the borders of the Iberian sphere. Little changed on the colonial map of the Americas until the colonies broke free from their European overlords.
This brief survey of the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the early nineteenth century has traced the connections between the Atlantic world and the political and diplomatic history of Europe. Although it has concentrated on the actions of a few major rivals for colonies in the Americas—Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain—the Atlantic world involved virtually every European state to one degree or another. The political and diplomatic history of Europe as a whole was linked inextricably to rivalries and conflicts in the transatlantic world.
From the earliest days of Atlantic exploration, trade generated the profits that allowed European colonial ventures to continue, even as they enriched the home economies. That was as true for Portuguese voyages down the Atlantic coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century as it was for later transatlantic voyages. Once regular contacts developed connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the trades related to the Spanish and Portuguese empires were far and away the most important to the Atlantic world as a whole. Virtually all of Europe participated in those trades to some extent, however indirectly. In other words, from decades before Columbus, the European economy was linked to ventures into the Atlantic world.
Three long periods of development in European economic history provide ideal cases in point: the unprecedented expansion of the sixteenth century; the depression of the seventeenth century; and the explosive boom of the eighteenth century. Although these developments have sometimes been discussed with minimal reference to the Atlantic world, transatlantic trade was intimately connected to all of them, and a new generation of scholarship is discovering the complexity of those connections. Europe’s economic history also includes the movement of peoples across the Atlantic, both as permanent migrants to the Americas and as temporary sojourners who brought their experiences across the ocean into the European consciousness. The transatlantic movements of goods and peoples shaped European economy and society as much as they shaped the evolution of America.
In 1503, between Columbus’s third and fourth voyages, the Spanish monarchs founded the House of Trade in Seville to oversee all aspects of transatlantic commerce, migration, and communication to what they called “the Indies.” By the 1520s nearly a hundred ships each year carried cargoes and migrants to and from colonies in New Spain (Mexico) and Tierra Firme (South America). Together, the ships represented about 9,000 toneladas of carrying capacity, each tonelada being about 1.42 cubic meters. By the late sixteenth century, a yearly average of 150–200 ships participated in the Indies trade each year, with a total capacity of about 30,000–40,000 toneladas. In other words, the number of ships had doubled since the 1520s, and their average size had also doubled, leading to a fourfold increase in carrying capacity. For comparison, Fernand Braudel estimated that there were about 350,000 tons of shipping capacity in the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century, and 600,000–700,000 tons in the Atlantic for all maritime activities, including fishing.9
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a regular guard squadron of six to eight armed warships called galeones (galleons) usually accompanied the Tierra Firme fleet; the New Spain fleet had a smaller escort of two galleons. After a trade fair at Portobelo in Panama, the Tierra Firme squadron carried royal tax revenues back to Spain, escorting the previous year’s merchant fleet on that dangerous route and trying to evade the pirates and privateers that lay in wait at both ends. Although the system of convoys and escorts was not as all-inclusive as its planners intended, it still accounted for about 85 percent of the trade. Even when Spain abolished the convoys in the late eighteenth century, 85–90 percent of the trade continued to follow the same timing and trajectories, which had proven ideal for sailing conditions in the Atlantic.10
Spain’s Atlantic trading system was fed by production in the Indies, which the colonizers had reorganized from traditional patterns to suit the needs of international commerce. Livestock introduced from Europe multiplied easily in the New World, which had few domestic animals, and no cattle, horses, pigs, or sheep, before Spaniards brought them across the Atlantic. Soon hides and tallow became major exports for the transatlantic trade. Other important exports eventually included sugar, indigo (a blue vegetable dyestuff), cochineal or grana (a red dyestuff derived from small insects), exotic woods for construction and dyemaking, and a wide range of aromatic and medicinal plants, either native to the Americas or introduced there for export production.11
The total value of all European trade with the Spanish Indies is very difficult to quantify, because the volume of goods shipped could fluctuate widely from year to year as merchants tried to adjust supply and demand in a trade that required one to three years for a round trip. The volume of bullion and coinage shipped for the Spanish Crown and private individuals could also vary considerably from year to year. To provide a gross estimate of the volume and value of Spain’s transatlantic trade, the modern French historian Pierre Chaunu used figures for taxes on imports and exports. A generation after Chaunu, scholars in Spain such as Modesto Ulloa, Eufemio Lorenzo, and Antonio García-Baquero also relied heavily on those tax figures. They suggest a total value for the transatlantic trade of nearly 450 million maravedís a year in the early 1560s, rising to about 850 million in the early 1590s. To put the figures in context, the ordinary tax revenue collected by the Spanish Crown in Castile in the mid-sixteenth century was about 500 million maravedís a year.12 The merchandise, treasure, and foodstuffs shipped back and forth in Spain’s Atlantic trading system involved all of Europe and added an imporant component to Europe’s commercial life.
Official figures for individual products allow historians to document the trade from about 1550 on. By the early 1560s, the Caribbean islands and New Spain exported about 30,000 hides a year to Europe. By the early 1570s, the number had risen to about 83,000, and by the early 1580s, to perhaps 150,000, with an average value of 78 million maravedís a year. The imported hides ended up not only in footwear, saddlery, furniture, and other traditional manufactures, but also as wall coverings—tanned and intricately tooled. Exports of sugar from Spanish America at the same time were worth a bit more than half as much as hides—some 40 million maravedís per year. The exports of sugar from Spanish America in the 1580s show a yearly average of about 32,000 arrobas13 in 1581–1585, but only about 10,000 in 1586–1590, at a time when the Spanish colonies were under attack from pirates. Figures for indigo exports do not become available until the late 1570s, averaging between 1,000 and 2,000 arrobas each year until the end of the century, but they were worth nearly as much as sugar in an ordinary year—about 30 million maravedís. One of the most valuable single items exported from Spanish America to Europe was cochineal, estimated at about 125 million maravedís a year in the late sixteenth century, or nearly 42 percent of all the trade goods (not including treasure) shipped from the Indies. The price of cochineal varied from year to year, but the quantity sent to Europe rose fairly steadily, from about 1,800 arrobas in the late 1550s to about 8,000 in the late 1580s. The rapidly growing textile industries of Europe provided a ready market for the dyestuffs in Iberian America, from the brazilwood of Brazil and the Campeche wood of New Spain, to cochineal, indigo, and other plant-based materials. Some textile areas in Europe prohibited the import of these new products because they competed with traditional sources for textile dyes, but the market found a way around the prohibitions.
The most valuable, as well as the most famous, exports from the Indies were not trade goods, but the gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones that constituted the “treasure” of the Indies. Gold dominated treasure exports during the early sixteenth century, based at first on plunder during the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires and then on panning operations and mining. Several important goldfields were discovered in northern South America in the 1530s and 1540s, and exports of gold reached a peak in the 1550s, with a registered volume of over 4,200 kilos per year entering Spain and passing from there into the monetary system of Europe as a whole. Gold production and exports fell off sharply in the late sixteenth century. Some of the gold produced in the Indies stayed there to finance the growth of the colonies, but, judging from the large gap that scholars have found between estimates of production and figures for registered imports, considerable gold presumably was smuggled into Europe outside the official registers. By the nature of things, it is very difficult to estimate the magnitude of the smuggling, though generations of scholars have tried to do so.14
Along with gold, several deposits of silver were discovered in northern South America in the 1530s and 1540s, leading to registered exports of nearly 18,000 kilos per year in the early 1540s. Then in 1545, discovery of the mountain of silver at Potosí in the Viceroyalty of Peru (modern Bolivia) ushered in the silver cycle of Spain’s transatlantic trading system. The Potosí mines proved to be among the richest the world has ever known, although their location above 12,000 feet in the Andean highlands made mining extremely difficult for the miners and expensive for the mine owners. The initial flush of the Potosí discovery produced nearly 85,000 kilos of silver each year during the late 1540s, and production reached a peak of nearly 280,000 kilos in the late 1580s. Silver exports to Europe began modestly in the 1520s, rising to some 18,000 kilos per year in the 1540s, before the great boom. Once Potosí went into production, silver exports surged to 94,000 kilos, in the 1560s, 112,000 in the 1570s, and 271,000 in the 1590s, far outstripping gold in both volume and value.
About 20–30 percent of the registered bullion that crossed the Atlantic belonged to the Spanish Crown. The single most valuable source of royal income was the tax called “the royal fifth” on mining production in Tierra Firme, plus fees for assay and coinage, which together made up about 60 percent of the royal share between 1555 and 1600. Another 8 percent of the royal share came from ecclesiastical taxes that had been transferred to the Crown by the Roman Catholic Church. Penalties and condemnations for smuggling, the sale of offices, and various minor taxes made up the balance of the 20–30 percent of registered treasure that belonged to the Crown. The other 70–80 percent of the bullion crossing the Atlantic belonged to merchants and other private individuals.
Unregistered private treasure undoubtedly added to those totals. Private individuals were anxious to avoid taxes, but even more, they wanted to avoid the possibility of confiscation of their trading profits. From time to time in the mid-sixteenth century and thereafter, successive kings of Spain confiscated incoming treasure to pay pressing bills in wartime. The owners of the treasure were compensated with interest-paying government bonds, but that hardly made good the loss of their capital. Although this drastic action did not happen often, the threat was enough to make many private individuals risk dire penalties to avoid registration. The law-abiding citizens who dutifully registered their treasure were thus left to pay a larger share of taxes for defense of the Indies fleets. That inequity induced even more private citizens to become smugglers. The total of smuggled bullion and other valuables is ultimately unknowable, though many scholars have tried to estimate it for various periods. One careful investigation of fraud concluded that about 10 percent of the treasure that arrived in Europe in the late sixteenth century never appeared in the registers. Other estimates range far higher, and it is clear that the level of smuggling could vary widely, depending on changing circumstances. By the late sixteenth century, increasing amounts of treasure mined in Spanish America stayed there to fund both public and private needs in the growing colonies. Moreover, from the late 1560s, much American silver flowed toward Asia to finance the new trans-Pacific trade.15 With these points in mind, the estimate of a 10 percent underregistration for treasure remittances to Spain in the late sixteenth century seems plausible enough, but that generalization cannot be extended to other periods.
Spain’s ambitious foreign policy in Europe during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II would have been impossible to fund without revenues from the Atlantic world, even though they constituted less than 20 percent of the Crown’s total income. The enormous growth in the European economy during the sixteenth century was also related to the profits from transatlantic trade, but historians and economists continue to argue about the nature of that relationship. An earlier generation of economic historians credited the boom above all to infusions of bullion from the Americas, following the work of Earl J. Hamilton. Later research has complicated that picture considerably, in particular by considering the effects of population growth and production within Europe. Some historians have argued against any important role for transatlantic trade in fostering European growth. Nonetheless, the creation of the Atlantic world undoubtedly provided new venues for trade and colonization for Europe’s rising population, and American bullion undoubtedly added to the European money supply. During the sixteenth century, Europe experienced an unprecedented fivefold inflation (often called the “Price Revolution”), and it seems likely that American bullion enabled prices to rise that high in response to the pressure generated from increased population, production, and the intensification of markets in Europe.16
As for migration, the pioneering work of Peter Boyd-Bowman and others calculated that some 450,000 people registered to emigrate from Spain to Spanish America from the late 1400s to about 1650, with the highest rates occurring in the late sixteenth century. Some scholars estimate that unregistered emigration could bring the total several times higher, but the general consensus is that some 4,000–5,000 migrants each year crossed the Atlantic from Spain during the early colonial period. Most of the registered migrants came from the heartland of the Kingdom of Castile in the center, west, and south of the Iberian Peninsula.17 Spain had a population of about 8.5 million in 1600, and it is arguable that migration to Spanish America helped relieve some of the population pressure that had built up by the late sixteenth century.
The earliest migrants from Spain to Spanish America were almost exclusively male, most of them unmarried and relatively young, and many of them ecclesiastics, sent across the ocean to convert the Indians to Christianity as well as to serve the religious needs of Spaniards in the colonies. Nonetheless, contrary to persistent assumptions, women and families played a continuing and important role in Spanish migration across the Atlantic. From the earliest days, the Crown encouraged whole families to migrate and urged bureaucrats, in particular, to bring their wives and families with them. This policy not only fostered social stability in the colonies, but it also discouraged Crown officials from dividing their loyalties by marrying into local families. Women accounted for 5.6 percent of legal emigrants for 1493–1519, 6.3 percent for 1520–1539, 16.4 percent for 1540–1559, 28.5 percent (60 percent single) for 1560–1579, and 26 percent (59.5 percent single) for 1580–1600. There was considerable regional variation in these numbers; for example, in the seventeenth century, women accounted for 51 percent of registered emigrants from southern Spain.18 The large number of migrants, and natural increase among peoples of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African heritage in Spanish America, helped to offset the early catastrophic mortality in the Indian population due to conquest and disease.
Economic and migratory trends for Portuguese Brazil followed a somewhat different trajectory from Spanish America. Through much of the sixteenth century, Portuguese trading profits from Brazil centered on forest products such as brazilwood, but the total volume of that trade was minuscule compared to Portuguese trade with Asia for spices and other luxury goods. Moreover, very few permanent settlers migrated from Portugal to Brazil in the first few decades after 1500. In the 1530s, there were only about 2,000 Portuguese in Brazil, along with some 4,000 African slaves. As the sixteenth century progressed, the Portuguese began to use increasing numbers of African slaves in an expanding plantation economy, producing largely for the European market. By the late sixteenth century the total population of Brazil numbered about 57,000—some 44 percent of them Portuguese—but it is not clear how many—if any—native peoples figured in that count.19
As other Europeans expanded their presence in the Atlantic world, they participated in trade with the Iberian colonies through official channels in Seville and Lisbon; they also found ways to avoid the official channels through interloping into Spanish and Portuguese colonial trade. English and French explorers and merchants, with the support of their governments, tried to establish their own profitable ventures in both North and South America, despite having to contend with attacks from hostile Indians and from Spanish and Portuguese forces. By the late sixteenth century, ships from England, the Netherlands, and France made regular voyages across the Atlantic, and a few had managed to make their way into the Pacific as well, challenging the control claimed by Spain and Portugal over all contact with the Americas. However, very few Europeans from outside Iberia migrated as settlers to the Americas during the sixteenth century.
The first expansive phase of Atlantic trade lasted until about the first decade of the seventeenth century. Figures for Spain’s Indies fleets reached their peak in 1609; thereafter, the total size of the fleets and their cargoes entered a steep decline that lasted for much of the rest of the century. As bullion imports into Europe fell, a Dutch writer observed that combined plant and animal products from the Indies exceeded the more famous gold and silver in value.20 Nonetheless, the flow of silver from the Americas to Europe remained impressive. It continued to play a major role in Europe’s internal and external trade and in funding the periodic wars among European states.
The downturn in transatlantic trade coincided with what is often called the “seventeenth-century crisis” in the European economy. Scholars generally use the term “crisis” to mean a turning point, or a reversal of fortunes, and they seem to understand it as a temporary condition. Controversy about the characteristics of the seventeenth-century crisis—and even about its existence—is ongoing in debates that often center on the divide between economic (generally Marxian) and political historians.21 Political and economic realities were inextricably connected in the seventeenth century, however, and it makes little sense to exclude one or the other from the analysis. Depending on where we look in Europe, the crisis varied in magnitude and duration; some areas may have escaped its effects altogether, while a few others prospered as their neighbors faltered—for example, the northern Netherlands.
Many economic historians who think there was a seventeenth-century crisis, or at least some sort of economic downturn, have sought its explanation in bullion flows and price differentials. The long European inflation of the sixteenth-century, fueled in part by bullion flows from the New World, meant that the relative value of silver in Europe declined. As silver lost value, New World mines eventually became less profitable to operate, and production declined. Other historians focus on trade rather than bullion as the crucial variable, seeing prices largely as reflections of shifts in trade. According to this argument, the migration of Europeans around the globe encouraged long-distance trade to take advantage of global price differences. Once regular trade was established, price differences tended to even out. That created a situation in which the diminished value of silver in Europe discouraged transatlantic exchanges. Explanations based primarily on bullion flows and prices can be misleading, given the complexities of the Atlantic world as a whole. There is little question, however, that the volume and value of trade between Europe and Spanish America suffered a decline in the early seventeenth century, and that many areas in Europe experienced an economic crisis at more or less the same time. It is reasonable to conclude that the two phenomena were related, though historians continue to debate the issue, focusing on themes as diverse as climate change and consumer preferences.
Economic developments in Europe related to Brazil followed a somewhat different path. During the period of Spanish-Portuguese union (1580–1640), Brazil was effectively developed as a colony and linked by intensified trade to Europe and Africa.. Portuguese bureaucrats viewed outward migration with great misgivings, because the total population of Portugal numbered only about two million in 1600. Nonetheless, they encouraged permanent settlement, especially of family units, to develop the colony. Recent scholars estimate that some 100,000 Portuguese migrated across the Atlantic in the period from 1500 to 1700, and nearly all of them settled in Brazil. Unlike the Portuguese luxury trades to Asia, the Brazilian trade continued to feature high-volume, low-priced goods, especially brazilwood and various aromatic woods and construction timber. Settlers developed sugar production on large plantations during the late sixteenth century, and sugar rapidly became the most valuable item among Brazil’s exports, even more valuable than gold. Sugar production had a multiplier effect on the development of the colony as a whole, because it required capital investment for mills and slave labor. Ordinarily, labor is considered an expense, not a capital investment. In the case of a slave economy, however, the labor force is owned like other capital goods. In addition to profiting from the labor of slaves in Brazil, Portugal held the contract (asiento) for supplying slaves to Spanish America on and off from 1573 to 1676, which generally produced profits for the contractors.22
In Europe, speculation based on sugar prices generated profits and new plantations in Brazil. Although individual plantations were not always profitable, the trade in sugar provided a bright spot in a transatlantic economy that was generally depressed in the middle third of the seventeenth century. As their Brazilian colony developed, the Portuguese increased their domestic production of salt, fish, wine, and oils to keep up with rising demand at home and abroad, and financed purchases to cover shortfalls in their wheat and meat production with the profits from imperial trade. In other words, the Portuguese domestic economy became closely linked to the world of Atlantic exchanges.
Portuguese control of Brazil did not go unchallenged, however. The Dutch captured and held important sugar-producing areas in the northeast from about 1624 to about 1654, exporting some 48,000 arrobas23 annually in 1631–1635 and about 298,000 arrobas annually in 1641–1645. Dutch exports of sugar from Brazil fell abruptly to about 40,000 arrobas in 1646–1651. In the areas remaining under Portuguese control, production and exports likely declined as well, but the data are too sparse to be sure. Nonetheless, the figures available suggest that the profitability of Brazilian sugar production and trade in general were affected by the crisis in the European economy. For the most part, early Dutch settlements in the Americas were commercial enclaves rather than permanent colonies, and they were treated as interlopers by Spanish and Portuguese authorities. The Dutch presence in the Atlantic world never surpassed 15,000 settlers, even at its peak, and only 10,000 of those settlers came from the Netherlands.
The cultivation of tobacco in Brazil followed many of the same patterns as sugar, although it began later. Seventeenth-century Europeans quickly developed a liking for tobacco, which Columbus and his men first encountered in Cuba. In the seventeenth century, tobacco fetched a good price in Europe, as well as in the West African slave trade, then dominated by the Dutch. As long as the Dutch remained in northeast Brazil, they took full advantage of their position, producing for the European market, preying on Portuguese and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, and importing slaves from their bases in West Africa. These efforts seem to have been repaid by handsome profits in the short term, but they could not be sustained in the face of revolts, rising costs, and pressure from Spain and Portugal. When the Dutch left Brazil in 1654, they carried their sugar and tobacco operations with them to the Lesser Antilles.24
France, in addition to having its own ambitions in Brazil, was the most important trading partner of Portugal for most of the seventeenth century, especially in the 1670s. Although Portugal and France exported many of the same products, for a time their bilateral trade prospered. France sent grain and hides south in exchange for salt and exotic re-exports from Brazil and the Far East. Once France established tropical colonies of its own in the Caribbean, it had no further need for Portugal’s colonial production, and their bilateral trade declined. Portugal then turned to other countries, especially England, for the cloth, hides, and agricultural products formerly supplied by France. English support for Portugal’s rebellion against Habsburg rule (1640–1668) laid the groundwork for increasing English influence in the trade with Brazil, and an increasing influence in Portuguese affairs as well.
By about 1670, the growth in colonial production by other European states seems to have had a downward effect on prices in Lisbon. Sugar prices fell by more than half between 1650 and 1688, and tobacco prices fell by almost three-quarters. Although European prices in general were falling at the same time, the declines for sugar and tobacco were much steeper. Portugal’s trade also suffered because of the general downturn in Spanish–American trade. With less silver entering Seville, less went to Lisbon as well, and Dutch vessels made fewer stops in Lisbon and Setúbal than before. The Portuguese government had little success in trying to keep foreign goods out of Lisbon. Efforts to stimulate internal manufactures were more effective, and a devaluation of the currency made Portuguese goods cheaper for foreign buyers. The Portuguese also founded a company in 1685 for the purchase of slaves, one of the few still-profitable aspects of their transatlantic trade in that period.
One of the early comprehensive analyses of the seventeenth-century crisis—the Marxian interpretation of Eric Hobsbawm—defined a key role for the transatlantic context and for the long-term importance to the European economy of profits from colonial trade and exploitation. As settlers in British America increased both their own population and its integration into transatlantic trade, merchants and entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic prospered, but especially those in England.25 In addition to trade with her own colonies, England benefited from both official and clandestine trade with Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil. According to Hobsbawm, the combined profits from colonial trade allowed England to emerge from the crisis of the seventeenth century—which he defined as a crisis in “feudal production”—strengthened and ready to industrialize.26
Following Hobsbawm’s lead, André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein developed models of a coercive and extractive relationship between Europe and other areas around the globe. According to those models, immense profits flowed into European hands, providing the capital that led in the long term to European industrialization, and locking areas overseas into a pattern of dependency and underdevelopment.27 Although such all-inclusive models held a certain appeal among scholars for a decade or more, they also attracted a steady barrage of criticism for their broad generalizations. More recent work has used a variety of statistics and other concrete evidence to analyze the profitablility of European empires and the role that imperial profits played in European economic development. Scholars now recognize that imperial profits must be examined in their full context, particularly during difficult periods such as the seventeenth-century. With regard to the start of industrialization in Britain, in 1982 Patrick O’Brien took the extreme view that transatlantic profits played a minor role in the industrializing process, whereas Kenneth Pomeranz and others later reverted to the older notion that Britain derived substantial benefits from colonial production all over the Americas. As for the Spanish Empire, the available figures suggest that, although Spain clearly benefited from empire over the long term, the level of profits was far lower and more erratic than historians used to assume.28
The issue is further complicated by the ups and downs of the European economy and the volume of transatlantic trade, both of which turned upward again toward the end of the seventeenth century. The two phenomena were presumably related, though here again historians continue to debate the precise nature and timing of that relationship. Properly speaking, European economic expansion in the eighteenth century related more to global trade than to transatlantic trade alone, though the eighteenth century saw particularly important changes in the Atlantic world. One such change was the discovery of gold and diamonds in Brazil in the 1680s and 1690s, notably in the district that would become Minas Gerais.29 The development of mining production in Brazil had immediate and far-reaching consequences for the Atlantic world, one of which was to increase the market demand for slaves from Africa. The rapid development of Brazil in the eighteenth century also attracted a greatly increased flow of migrants from Portugal. Scholars estimate that as many as a half million Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the eighteenth century. Even allowing for exaggeration, the quickened pace of emigration may help to explain why the Portuguese population rose from two million in 1700 to only two and three-quarter million by 1800, while populations in other European countries soared.
In addition to Brazil, the plantation economies elsewhere in North and South America and the Caribbean also increased their demand for slave labor in the eighteenth century. As a consequence, the transatlantic trade in slaves rose enormously, integrating West Africa more fully into the Atlantic world, but at a terrible human cost. Efforts to analyze the volume and impact of the slave trade have occupied generations of scholars. Current estimates for the forced migration of Africans to the Americas range from about five million to ten million or more in the period before 1800, the vast majority of them in the eighteenth century.30 European merchants reaped much of the benefit from that dismal traffic in human beings, and their profits flowed toward further expanding the slave economies in the Americas and the agrarian and manufacturing economies in Europe.
The volume of shipping traffic in Lisbon provides clear evidence for the expansion of overall trade in the eighteenth century, when Portugal’s capital served as an emporium for all of Europe, and indeed for the world. In the early 1720s, an average of 609 ships a year visited the port; in the early 1730s, an average of 945 ships sailed in and out of Lisbon each year. Although the Portuguese benefited from the trade that passed through their capital city, they were by no means in sole control of it. In a typical year, at least half of the ships frequenting Lisbon were English, and English merchants acquired an estimated two-thirds of the gold that arrived in Portugal, in exchange for cloth and other trade goods.31
Brazilian gold also flowed into Amsterdam and Seville to finance trade, and from there to the rest of Europe, altering the relative value of gold and silver in the process. In 1703 alone, imports of Brazilian gold surpassed the total that the Portuguese had ever obtained in Mina and Guinea in West Africa, or that Spain had obtained annually from its American colonies in the sixteenth century. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, Brazilian gold far surpassed all of those sources combined. At the peak of the gold trade in 1741–1760, Brazil sent an average of 14,600 kilos of gold to Europe each year.32 This enormous influx of bullion would continue from 1695 to about 1770, when it entered a half-century of depression. The imports of Brazilian gold presumably helped to fuel the expansion of European production and trade in the eighteenth century.
The benefits that Europe derived from the output of mines, agricultural and manufacturing production, and trade to and from America varied greatly from country to country. For example, although the Spanish Empire in America was huge, by the late eighteenth century far less tax revenues and profits from production were sent to Spain than remained in Spanish America, where they supported the economic development of colonies that by then included some 15 million people. By contrast, exports from the single French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue were worth nearly as much as the exports from all of Spanish America, because Saint-Domingue was a slave economy producing almost exclusively for the European market.33
In the French Caribbean, slaves from Africa and their descendants made up some 90 percent of the population by the late eighteenth century, and their production had fueled an eighteenfold increase in French colonial trade. Given the huge population of France—some 22 million in 1700—French migration to the Americas presumably had little effect on demographic development in France, except perhaps to slow the effects of rapid growth in the eighteenth century. When Great Britain took over French Canada at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, there were perhaps 60,000 people living there, a population that had grown fourfold since 1700. Very little of that growth came from migration, however, but instead resulted from the natural increase of a resident population willing to adapt to the harsh climate. On the French islands in the Caribbean, by contrast, tropical diseases took such a high toll that only a steady stream of new arrivals allowed the European settler population to grow. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were perhaps 50,000 French settlers in the Caribbean, though as many as 200,000 French may have immigrated there in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Migration to the Americas from Great Britain and other areas in Europe showed a similar disparity between mainland and island destinations. Mainland destinations in British America were farther to the south and much more hospitable to European migrants than French Canada. With abundant land, the population in British America, as in Spanish and Portuguese America, grew largely through natural increase, with a small infusion of new migrants from Europe and a much larger infusion of migrants from Africa. Overall, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some 425,000 migrants left the British Isles for North America—an average of about 2,000 per year, plus smaller numbers from elsewhere in Europe, notably the Germanies (103,000).34 By the end of the eighteenth century, the fledgling United States included about 3.9 million people, over half of British ancestry. Considering that the British Isles held about 6.25 million people in 1600 and 16 million in 1800, the out-migration of a few thousand people each year presumably did not have much effect on the sending areas. The economic importance of migration lay, rather, in the formation of a lucrative and growing market that linked both sides of the Atlantic.35
In the last half of the twentieth century, Hobsbawm, Frank, Wallerstein, and a host of others argued that the first three centuries of transatlantic trade funneled extraordinary profits into European coffers, laying the groundwork for European industrialization, first in Britain and then elsewhere in western Europe. Others denied the importance of transatlantic profits for European economic development. Few scholars today would agree with either of those unnuanced views, arguing instead for the complexity of transatlantic exchanges, and the active participation and profit-making of peoples in the Americas and Africa, as well as in Europe. At this juncture, most scholars seem to accept the notion that the Atlantic world was important for the political and economic development of Europe in the early modern centuries, though they continue to debate the magnitude and character of that importance. It seems fair to say that many of the changes in European political and economic development in the extended period between 1450 and 1825 were linked to overseas exploration, colonization, trade, and the international rivalries they fomented. In other words, the creation of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European voyages of discovery had profound repercussions on both sides of the ocean.36
1. See Carla Rahn Phillips, “The Organization of Oceanic Empires: The Iberian World in the Habsburg Period,” in Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären E. Wigen, eds., Seascapes, Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2007), pp. 71–86.
2. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
3. See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
4. Helpful discussions regarding definitions and chronology appear in Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20, 1 (1996): 19–44; and Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741–757.
5. For comprehensive overviews of Atlantic exploration in its global context, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ed., The Times Atlas of World Exploration (London: Times Books, 1991); and David Buisseret, ed., The Oxford Companion to World Exploration 2 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. See the magisterial comparison of the two empires by J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), as well as Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
7. Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars Between Spain, Britain, and France, 1760–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. Articles by James Epstein, Rafe Blaufarb, and Eliga Gould, with a commentary by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, explore the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the AHR Forum, “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112, 3 (June 2007): 710–799.
9. Pierre Chaunu and Huguette Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique 1504–1650, 8 vols. in 12 (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1955–1960), vol. 6, part 1, pp. 168, 337; Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 1, pp. 445–448.
10. The following discussion of the volume and value of transatlantic trade relies on Chaunu and Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique; Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, Comercio de España con América en la época de Felipe II, 2 vols. (Valladolid: Diputación Provincial de Valladolid, 1980); Antonio García-Baquero González, Cádiz y el Atlántico (1717–1778), 2 vols. (Cádiz: Diputación Provincial, 1976); Modesto Ulloa, La hacienda real de Castilla en el reinado de Felipe II (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1977); Michel Morineau, Incroyables Gazettes et fabuleux métaux: Les retours de trésors américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal, le Brésil et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670) (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983). For overviews of transatlantic trade to and from various areas of Europe, as well as Africa, see the “Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23, 2 (1999): 48–173.
11. In addition to the works cited above, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Green-wood, 1972); and Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
12. The Spanish maravedí in these centuries was a money of account, as was the ducado, or ducat; the real was a silver coin. Monies might be issued in multiple reales, such as the peso de ocho, known in English as a “piece of eight.” Each real was worth 34 maravedís, and each ducado was worth 375 maravedís, or 11 reales. To give some idea of the relative value of these sums, a sailor on Spain’s Indies fleets in the late sixteenth century earned 44.1 reales a month, the equivalent of 1,500 maravedís. His monthly food ration, supplied by the government, cost slightly more than that—about 1,800 maravedís.
13. The Spanish arroba weighed about 25 pounds.
14. The classic work on the issue of bullion imports to Europe is Earl J. Hamilton American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934; repr. New York: Octagon, 1964). The discussion of mining production is based on Peter Bakewell, “Mining in Colonial Spanish America,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 105–151; and Richard L. Garner, “Long-term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review 93, 4 (October 1988): 898–935.
15. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, eds., Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1997); and Dennis Owen Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, 2 (Fall 2002): 391–427.
16. Hamilton, American Treasure, pp. 42–45, 283–306. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 55–68, provides a useful summary of the debate over bullion and inflation in the sixteenth century.
17. Magnus Mörner, “Immigration into Latin America, Especially Argentina and Chile,” in European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the Intercontinental Migration from Africa, Asia, and Europe (New York: Bert, 1992), pp. 211–243.
18. Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies, 1579–1600,” The Americas 33, 1 (1976): 78–95. Boyd-Bowman’s pathbreaking work with the official passenger registries in Seville established a whole subfield of inquiry and has produced a wealth of published work. See also Antonio Eiras Roel, “Introducción: Consideraciones sobre la emigración española a América y su contexto demográfico,” in Emigración española y portuguesa a América: Actas del II Congreso de la Asociación de Demografía Histórica (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil Albert, 1991), pp. 9–32. See also the pioneering work of C. R. Boxer, Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas 1415–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). The best entry point into modern scholarship on this theme is Ida Altman and James Horn, eds., “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
19. H. B. Johnson, “The Portuguese Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 268–275.
20. Willem Usselincx, cited in C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 2–3.
21. Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); Geoffrey Parker and Leslie M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
22. For Portugal and its overseas empire, as well as broader concerns, see the monumental work of Vitorino de Magalhães Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 4 vols., 2d ed. rev. (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1981–1982). See also Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
23. The Portuguese arroba weighed about 32 pounds.
24. Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 277–290; Pierre Verger, Bahia and the West African Trade, 1549–1851 (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970), pp. 5–6. See also Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: Koninklijk Institut voor Taal-Land en Volkenkunde, 1998).
25. For the increase in population in New England, see Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 47, 4. (October 1990): 477–502. For trade, see Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615–1753 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
26. E. J. Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” Past and Present no. 5 (May 1954): 33–53, and no. 6 (November 1954): 44–65.
27. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-system, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1989).
28. Patrick O’Brien, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery,” Economic History Review 25 (1982): 1–18; Patrick Karl O’Brien and Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “The Costs and Benefits of European Imperialism from the Conquest of Ceuta, 1415, to the Treaty of Lusaka, 1974,” in Clara-Eugenia Núñez, ed., Debates and Controversies in Economic History (Madrid, 1998), pp. 9–69; Kenneth Pomeranz,The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
29. In addition to the sources on Brazil cited above, see A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil: The Gold Cycle, c. 1690–1750,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 547–600.
30. For comprehensive overviews of the field, see David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM Set and Guidebook (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A History and Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998).
31. Virgilio Noya Pinto, Ouro brasileiro e o comercio anglo-português: Uma contribução aos estudos da economia atlantica no seculo XVIII (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1979), pp. 248–252, 296; Frédéric Mauro, “Portugal and Brazil: Political and Economic Structures of Empire, 1580–1750,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 461–463.
32. Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, “Le Portugal, les flottes du sucre et les flottes de l’or (1670–1770),” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations (April–-June 1950): 184–193; Morineau, Incroyables Gazettes, pp. 190–197.
33. D. A. Brading, “Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 426.
34. For migration to British America in the eighteenth century, see Bernard Bailyn and Barbara DeWolfe, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986).
35. See David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
36. The study of transatlantic interactions is a vast and growing field. The notes to this chapter provide an indication of that literature, as do the articles in two recent forums in the American Historical Review: “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” American Historical Review 104, 2 (April 1999): 426–500; and “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 112, 3 (June 2007).