A Deus Ex Machina Revisited ― Atlantic Colonial Trade And European Economic Development

The stereotype is that in exchange for a few trinkets, European traders were able to rob Africans, Asian, and Amerindians of their wealth and use it to establish the dominant economic position Europe now enjoys. European historians offer countervailing views from global, regional, and national perspectives. Their topics include traditions of meta-narratives from Adam Smith to Karl Pomeranz, intra-European coastal shipping from 1400 to 1900, Spanish colonial trade and development in the 18th century, Britain s exports and their markets 1701-1913, and whether Danish/Norwegian modernization was financed by slaves and sugar on the Africa/Caribbean axis 1660-1917. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Pieter C. Emmer, Ph.D. (1974), University of Amsterdam, is professor in the History of the Expansion of Europe at the University of Leiden. He has published extensively on migration and on the Dutch slave trade, including Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580-1880 (Aldershot, 1998) and De Nederlandse slavenhandel, 1500-1850 (Amsterdam, 2000).Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau, Ph.D. (1994), University of Rennes, is a professor in modern and contemporary history at the University of Lorient (France) and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has published ten books since 1995 mainly devoted to the history of Nantes, of the French maritime economy, of the colonial expansion of Europe and of the slave trades. His most recent work is the critically acclaimed Les traites negrieres: Essai d’Histoire Globale (2004), which has received the Prix de l’Academie Francaise and the Prix du Senat.Jessica V. Roitman is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of European Expansion at the University of Leiden. Her work focuses on Sephardic trade networks in the Portuguese and Dutch Atlantic. She has forthcoming publications in Migration, Integration, Minorities, a European Encyclopaedia to be published by Cambridge University Press and the Portuguese Studies Review.