ABSTRACT
In 1551, after exploring and trading along the coast of West Africa, Captain Thomas Wyndham returned to England with the first cargo of sugar to arrive in an English ship directly from its place of production. By the end of the seventeenth century, the traffic introduced by that single vessel employed over 400 British ships, with an average cargo of 150 tons of sugar. By then, however, most of that lucrative freight came from vast plantations in the New World. Africa supplied a different, though no less profitable cargo, slaves. Those ships, and the commerce they provisioned, comprised what historians have labeled the Atlantic System, just one part of the new world economy that developed after Europe’s “discovery” of the Americas. The integration of these new lands and their resources into global trade set the stage for Europe’s subsequent rise to the pinnacle of world power in the nineteenth century. Between 1450 and 1750, however, Europe was simply one of many players on the global stage. Indeed, without the accidental advantage that the introduction of Old World diseases gave them in Latin America, Europe’s military weaknesses confined them to small coastal outposts in Africa and Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, European slave traders could not merely seize slaves for transport to the Americas; they had to offer African traders merchandise of real value for the slaves they acquired. In China, some imperial advisors, feeling confident that Europeans were no match for strong ground forces, counseled a rejection of contact with these Western barbarians. Japan did just that in 1639, forbidding Japanese merchants from leaving the islands and closing all but one of its ports to Western traders; a small, closely regulated community of Dutch merchants remained on the island of Dashima in Nagasaki harbor. Outside of the Americas, then, European empires were chiefly commercial networks based around trading fortresses, not structures of direct domination.
