The Overseas Trade of British America

Book excerpt: 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 only possible 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.