A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy
“We could have no better guide than Truxes explaining incisively how American colonial merchants enriched their communities through licit and illicit trade, and how this enrichment was the product of slavery and the slave trade.”—Nicholas Canny, author of Imagining Ireland’s Pasts
In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three-hundred-year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was possible only because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.
Thomas M. Truxes is clinical professor of Irish studies and history at New York University. He is the author of Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 and Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, among other books.
“Truxes successfully translates a field traditionally dominated by quantification and arcane terminology into a readable wide-ranging story. . . . Overseas Trade of British America is a significant achievement.”—Paul Musselwhite, Journal of British Studies
Recipient of The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York’s 69th Annual Distinguished Book Award
“Thomas Truxes demonstrates that trade was the essential element in the success of Britain’s American colonies—and of their revolution. He weaves together contemporary opinion and modern analysis in highly readable prose, always with the telling detail.”—Karen Ordahl Kupperman, author of Pocahontas and the English Boys
“A dazzling tour de force of erudition and empirical heft. This is an indispensable and extraordinary work, immediately the authority in the field.”—Trevor Burnard, University of Hull
“We could have no better guide than Truxes explaining incisively how American colonial merchants enriched their communities through licit and illicit trade, and how this enrichment was the product of slavery and the slave trade.”—Nicholas Canny, author of Imagining Ireland’s Pasts
“Sailing across four centuries and comprehending multiple perspectives, Thomas Truxes offers us a fascinating new understanding of a complex development that subjugated black laborers, strengthened white enterprisers and inhabitants, and ultimately facilitated an uneasy independence.”—David Hancock, University of Michigan
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