The Atlantic World: Trade Networks and Colonial Economies

The North Atlantic connected the societies of northwestern Europe at first with the fishing banks in Newfoundland and later with the settlements on the eastern coast of North America. The Spanish Atlantic connected Seville with the Caribbean and the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. Another Atlantic was the Portuguese or Luso-Atlantic that covered the space between Lisbon and Brazil and included the African coast. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the three Atlantic systems merged due to the global intensification of the slave trade. Thus, a black (African) and a white (European) Atlantics as well as an American indigenous Atlantic came into existence.

The Spanish Atlantic was characterized at first by the expansion in Mexico and Peru and by strategic alliances with the indigenous elites. While the indigenous population succumbed to imported European diseases, Spanish people migrated to the Caribbean and the colonies of New Spain and New Granada. Trade over the Atlantic was organized through the Casa de la Contratacion located in Seville, while commercial guilds (consulados) in Seville, Mexico City, and Lima organized commercial activities on the spot. The Carrera de Indias, the shipping over the Atlantic, consisted of two fleets.

The Tierra-Firme fleet sailed in August to Cartagena and later to Portobelo at the Isthmus of Panama. From there, the commodities were carried farther south by animals, porters, and ships. The second fleet, the New Spain fleet (flota de Nueva Espana), sailed in April via the Caribbean to Veracruz. In the following March, a year later, both fleets reunited at Havana, Cuba, to carry silver, cochineal, hides, sugar, and dyewoods to Europe.

The expansion of silver production in Mexico and Peru, as well as the Caribbean sugar boom, stimulated the slave trade from Africa over the Atlantic. This was especially important in the Luso-Atlantic, where the Portuguese colony of Angola supplied the workforce for Atlantic sugar production. Thus, a Portuguese triangular trade, centered in Lisbon, Luanda, and Rio de Janeiro, emerged. The African trading partners were paid with sugar, tobacco, rum, and smuggled Spanish silver, and the sugar was shipped from Brazil to Portugal, the Netherlands, and other European countries. Furthermore, Portuguese ships supplied Brazil with European industrial commodities and Asian spices. The Portuguese Atlantic gained new momentum after the discovery of gold in Brazilian Minas Gerais, which triggered the first gold rush in history.

The connections between the North and South Atlantic, and also between the Atlantic and the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, as well as the Indian Ocean, were maintained by Dutch ships and trading companies. The West India Company (WIC) was especially active in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Hudson Delta. Furthermore, the conquest of Recife and Olinda in Brazil gave the Dutch a short-term monopoly in the international sugar and slave trade. Although the Dutch returned their Brazilian possessions in 1661 for a payment of eight million guilders, the Dutch retained a superior role as bankers and suppliers (of slaves and tools) for the Portuguese, Spanish, and English planters.

Sugar was shipped on Dutch ships to the sugar refineries of Amsterdam, which controlled European consumption. Although the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the exchange of New Amsterdam to Suriname affected the Dutch position, Dutch shippers and merchants were still indispensable for supplying and financing Caribbean plantation production. Furthermore, the Dutch colonies remained multiethnic and multireligious. Dutchmen, Germans, Huguenots, and Jews cohabited here together with black slaves, mestizos, and indigenous populations.

In contrast to this situation, during the seventeenth century, England sent indentured servants and prisoners to the New World. The settlement attempts propagated by Richard Hakluyt and others at Roanoke Island (1580s), Virginia (Jamestown, 1607), and Bermuda (1609), and of the Pilgrims in New England took place in an unfriendly environment, where immigrants fought and struggled for survival. That is why the English colonies depended on continuous immigration. Approximately three million English people migrated across the Atlantic; however, most of them were recruited by Caribbean plantation owners and succumbed to the murderous climate there. Only in the late seventeenth century, with the foundation of the colony of Pennsylvania, did England maintain a number of viable colonies, which recruited their immigrants no longer exclusively from the motherland. Economically, the passage of the Atlantic initially provided the English only with fish and fur. With the production of cash crops and cattle breeding, however, the situation changed.

Fish, grain, and meat could be sold to the planters in the Caribbean in exchange for sugar. The major achievement was the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia that, along with rice production in the Carolinas, provided a new economic basis for the American colonies.

French migration over the Atlantic in the beginning was also focused on fish and fur in the North Atlantic. The focus, however, changed to the Caribbean Islands where French plantation owners expanded sugar, coffee, and indigo production and triggered a boom in the plantation economy that satisfied the growing European consumption and demand, and expanded the slave trade by the eighteenth century.