Search Results

This chapter argues that the American presence in the Mediterranean that surged after the Peace of Paris in 1783 was not the beginning of American involvement in the region, but rather a revival of a pre-existing one. It accomplishes this by exploring the history of American maritime activity: analysing the commerce between the British Continental Colonies and Southern Europe from early colonial settlement up to the American War of Independence. It explores both the visible and invisible components of the colonial balance of payments system, and suggests a financial advantage to Americans far higher than previous estimates have offered. It also considers trade between American and Britain after the 1783 Treaty of Paris; the fluctuating rates of trade goods including tobacco, sugar, and fish; and the threat of North African pirates. It concludes that American willingness to go to war for independence was linked to the profitability of their existing trade links in the Mediterranean.

Between the 1690s and 1721, the East India Company, English woolen and silk spinners and weavers, English Atlantic pirates operating out of colonial ports, and Parliament debated the implications of Indian calicoes, leading to new developments in the imperial structure. The government eventually united behind the Calico Acts, legal compromises which traded a prohibition on dyed, stained, and printed cottons in the domestic British market for a regulatory and enforcement system that expanded and entrenched the East India Company’s monopoly over the supply of Asian goods for the British Atlantic. The acts shifted the emphasis away from American colonists as cultivators of Indian raw materials such as silk and cotton wool and towards colonists as consumers of Indian goods.

In this essay Mayra Rosario Urrutia explains how policy toward Puerto Rico became part of a regional approach, not only militarily but also in economic and social policies. During the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, colonial possessions in the Caribbean posed political, economic, and military demands to the United States and Great Britain. The response formulated by both metropolitan governments regarding these needs was shaped by their colonial policies, the effects of the Great Depression, the newly configured strategic and military importance of the Caribbean during the Second World War, and the grievances voiced throughout the islands in the form of uprisings and public protests.

This chapter provides a history of the pre-1914 period in British shipping. It determines and summarises the four factors that led to British domination of the ocean as the extent of their colonial activity; the speed of industrialisation; population growth; and the advantages of establishing trade routes, posts, and ports earlier than other nations. It then explores the extent of the British dominance in relation to the rest of the world; world trade in relation to British trade; national shipping policies; navigation laws; and the response of the rest of the world to the Navigation Acts. It concludes that Britain retained dominance in this period but saw an increase in world competition, particularly from Germany and Japan, and that British trade grew at a slower pace than world trade, which meant shipowners needed to keep their vessels larger and faster than those of upcoming rivals.