The distinguished historian of maritime commerce Silvia Marzagalli devotes this work to examining the development of trade relations between the United States and the principal French port on the Atlantic seaboard, Bordeaux. She offers a portrait of commerce in rich archival detail, exploiting all general trade statistics—including a substantial revision to previously published statistics (for example, see p. 174)—and most, if not all, surviving firm-level documentation to describe her subject.

The book has two overarching ambitions. First, Marzagalli takes issue with a tendency in Atlantic studies “to marginalize the weight of politics and to privilege a kind of spontaneous autogenesis founded on the free choice of individuals more or less conscious of the role they play within the system” (p. 18). War and peace, in particular, shaped this trading relationship from beginning to end. Second, the author underscores the constraints of time and space that she claims “economists often forget in their explanatory models, no doubt because the acceleration of communications in our century has led them to erase the importance of space and time” (p. 240). Accordingly, she emphasizes how slow communications conditioned every aspect of business life in the period.

The first part of the book offers a macroeconomic picture of trade relations between the United States and France, with special attention to the evolving position of Bordeaux in this commerce. Trade initially flourished during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), when France supplied material aid to the new nation. There followed a period of doldrums in commercial relations, conditioned in part by incompatible political economies, but more profoundly by a lack of mutual demand for each other's commodities. The author offers an amusing anecdote in which Thomas Jefferson, as minister to France, cultivated a taste for French wines. Would his fellow Americans follow suit? He was especially enthusiastic about white Sauternes. Upon returning to the United States, he reported, “I persuaded our President, General Washington, to try a sample”—but alas, the sober Washington, like the austere citizens over whom he presided, was not eager to drink French wines (p. 42). It was the start of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 that really launched trade relations between the two nations. In the face of British blockades, the United States provided neutral shipping services to the French, becoming an entrepôt for the lucrative produce of French colonies in the Caribbean and even playing a role in cabotage along the French coast. Marzagalli's shipping graphs move in almost comical sympathy with the intensification or abatement of blockades, demonstrating that war could indeed be a crucial factor in commercial patterns during the twilight of the ancien régime. The Atlantic World was more than the triangle trade or the productive relationships associated with it; it was also a series of networks conditioned by state-level decisions about war and peace.

For many readers, the second part of the book will contain its most engaging (and controversial) material. It examines the creation of mercantile networks from a microanalytic perspective: from the level of firms, whose records survive in abundance in the eastern cities of the United States. The author's primary aim is to examine how firms established trust with one another; the socially embedded nature of market information; the tentative, cautious, and uncertain means by which they explored opportunities in poorly known markets; and the complicated methods merchants employed to ship their goods aboard ships whose neutrality was often contested. She argues that there was not a single market. Price formation was strongly conditioned by a merchant's positionality in the trading network (p. 246). She finds a strong advantage in being at Bordeaux early—or, to put it in Marzagalli's terms, to be near the center of a growing commercial network. Such prime movers benefited from the best information, the strongest commercial trust, and better prices. Her other major finding is that trading networks continued to be structured largely along ethnopolitical lines: firms had a marked tendency to engage in contractual agency relations only with their co-nationals. The mobility of individual agents was crucial in making possible trans-Atlantic commerce—in this case, the migration of French colonists to the United States and the settlement of American merchants in Bordeaux (p. 385).

Marzagalli frames much of part 2 as an empiricist polemic against the “virtual reality” of economists, while acknowledging that their interest in information management opens up fruitful avenues for historical research (p. 239). This is a hasty and unfair characterization, in my view. Information management has long been a central matter of debate among economic historians interested in long-distance trade, from Kirti N. Chaudhuri on the East India Company to Avner Greif on the Cairo Geniza (which she does not cite) to more recent work on the conduct of cross-cultural trading networks (which she does cite in passing on p. 359). A more careful discussion of the relationship between information flows and commercial management might have sharpened the book's theoretical edge. In particular, connecting the theme of part 1 of the book—the impact of war on trade—to the patterns of commercial organization examined in part 2 raises interesting questions that Marzagalli does not fully address.

Despite this criticism, Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis offers a magisterial account of trade relations between the French port and the nascent United States. It is difficult to imagine that Marzagalli's archival work will ever be superseded (most of her dataset has been published online at navigocorpus.org). The book's findings raise many possible avenues for further research—regarding not only the ongoing debate about commercial organization, but also broad questions about how to conceptualize ancien régime commercial life. As a historian of the long seventeenth century, I kept wondering, when did war and peace become a determinative factor in commerce? What does that say about the nature of state power? How did commercial organization in the Mediterranean differ from that in the Atlantic sphere? And from the other side of the nineteenth century, one might wonder when the commercial order of the ancien régime finally came to an end. Marzagalli's own emphasis on information flows suggests that the coming of the telegraph had a critical role in introducing commercial modernity by divorcing the speed of information from the speed of human beings.