This special issue of the Business History Review has as its theme the business of trade in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. It has as its purpose to highlight the rich and diverse work that is being accomplished by business historians, including people like the four authors—Kenneth Morgan, Silvia Marzagalli, Linda Salvucci, and Thomas Truxes—whose essays constitute the substance of this issue. The articles have a common focus but reveal very different aspects of their shared theme in delightfully instructive ways. While both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are represented and the northern and southern regions are discussed, and while France and Spain and their colonies receive nearly as much play as Great Britain and its colonies (and one-time colonies), almost by the very nature of trade, the stories told are more about links and connections than they are about the limitations imposed by national and imperial boundaries. My contribution, as editor—an otherwise unknown tract written in the 1780s by a minor but influential British civil servant, Thomas Irving, and edited and newly presented here—implicitly argues the case put forth by the other contributors: it was the limitless bounds of eighteenth-century business that defined the Atlantic World.

This article considers the changing nature of remittance procedures in the eighteenth-century British slave trade. It explains why bills of exchange became the preferred form of making payment for slave sales, rather than specie or produce. It also indicates the legal and institutional practices that informed the circulation of bills of exchange in a notoriously risky form of long-distance trade. The growth and complexity of the British slave trade, which was conducted mainly by private merchants, led to procedures such as remitting bills “in the bottom” of ships that had supplied slaves to North American and Caribbean markets and the extension of lengthy credit periods to purchasers. Colonial factors played a role as well, acting as the agents for coordinating remittances, and secure British merchant houses were deployed as “guarantees” for payment by bills. The development of credit practices associated with the slave trade, including remittance procedures, helped to strengthen the British economy by providing sound, complex intermediary instruments for the realization of profits from international trade.

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao. From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg. Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty. This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.

An Atlantic approach to the history of early American trade challenges traditional British opinions and, indeed, much Anglo-American scholarship regarding the commercial prospects of the new United States. Contemporary Spanish observations, in contrast to the more familiar and widely cited ones in English, correctly predicted the post-Revolutionary War integration of American and Spanish imperial markets. As political, diplomatic, and economic upheavals broke down the old mercantilist system, U.S. merchants quickly succeeded in exploiting their comparative advantage in the expanding Atlantic economy. The debate over the “decline” of the British West Indies is amplified by examining the concurrent “rise” of the Spanish West Indies, particularly Cuba, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

U.S. shipping to Bordeaux, France, once minimal, increased dramatically after 1793, the year that marked the beginning of the French Wars. The conflicts compelled merchants to adopt new patterns of trade, as the policies of the belligerent parties increasingly determined the evolution of neutral shipping. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic strove for closer connections across political boundaries and tried to bypass the difficulties created by warfare. This examination of U.S. commerce with Bordeaux explores the impact of war on transatlantic trade and analyzes the strategies adopted by merchants of that period to minimize the impact of new risks. These merchants tended to rely on personal acquaintances, and they traveled frequently across the Atlantic in order to build and fortify relations of trust. Turning to older, established modes of doing business enabled them to respond rapidly to changes that occurred in the international situation and to anticipate the sudden shifts in policy that were inevitable in times of war.