New Book | The Overseas Trade of British America

Posted in books by Editor on July 4, 2022

Thomas Truxes, The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 464 pages, ISBN‏: ‎ 978-0300159882, $40.

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy

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.

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.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
A Note on the Text

Introduction
1 Tudor Beginnings, 1485–1603
2 Emergence, 1603–1650
3 Shaping Atlantic Commerce, 1650–1696
4 Engines of Opportunity, 1696–1733
5 Testing the Limits of Empire, 1733–1763
6 Crisis, 1763–1773
7 Trade and Revolution, 1773–1783
Epilogue: The Empress at Sea
Conclusion

Appendix 1: The Balance of Payments of British America
Appendix 2: Statistical Tables

List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Notes
Index