We have a pretty clear, if incomplete, picture of international commerce involving Europeans in the early modern period. It centers on luxury trades, such as spices, tea and coffee, and fine cloth from the East and sugar, silver, and tobacco from the West, with naval stores as increasingly important non-luxury products from the initially disappointing northern colonies of the New World. One noteworthy feature of this sketch is that these were all European imports, the only large-scale import into the Americas being African slaves. To achieve balance as well as ballast, European export goods were welcome by shippers, and we shall see that one type, Madeira wine, could actually have negative shipping costs!

However, more mundane trades along the coasts of Europe were of at least equal quantitative importance. Grain, salt, fish, and wine, among many goods moved between the Baltic and the Atlantic, through the North Sea and into the Mediterranean. Though the distances were shorter and the unknowns fewer than for overseas routes, these flows still had to cope with all kinds of barriers, many man-made.

Two recent books examine aspect s of the wine trade in this period. Henriette de Bruyn Kops sets out to rehabilitate the less glamorous North-South trade and focuses on two lesser ports, Rotterdam and Nantes, during the first half of the seventeenth century. David Hancock examines the development of wine production and export from the Portuguese island of Madeira, and its distribution and consumption, principally in the North American colonies and the successor states. His work centers on the long eighteenth century. The books share the historian's trademark of being source-based rather than growing out of a problem or theory. And what sources! De Bruyn Kops' seven archives in two countries show evidence of assiduity, but pale in comparison to Hancock's primary sources, the list of archives alone covering 13 pages. [He does not even bother to list published sources, though the authors figure in the index.]

Of the two, the book on Nantes-Rotterdam trade in alcohol is the more quantitative. The author makes prodigious efforts to sort through the complexities and ambiguities of weights and measures, currencies, and scattered records to estimate prices and quantities. Unfortunately, all this work is in service to what remains a kind of footnote to a footnote in the history of early modern commerce. Yes, the Dutch did establish themselves in Nantes and there buy wine to send back to Holland or to distill into brandy for the same market. But neither in quantity nor in quality did this trade amount to very much. In fact, the account reinforces the point that the kind of wines we drink today, table wines grown in relatively temperate climates and more or less unmodified, were of little interest to early modern drinkers, with important exceptions such as claret (Bordeaux). The prized wines were heavy, sweet, highly alcoholic concoctions typically grown in warmer climates and/or resulting from heavy-duty modification of lesser wines. Much of the brandy distilled from poor wine went to fortify other wine, while sugar and other additives were used to sweeten, clarify, color, or flavor it.

In fact, the real interest of the story de Bruyn Kops tells comes from what her sources tantalizingly hint at rather than from the better documented nominal subject. It appears that the Dutch presence in Nantes was at least as much about trade between Iberia and the Low Countries as it was about marginal wine and ordinary brandy. By rights, such trade should have been nearly impossible. Not only were the two powers, Spain and the United Provinces, at war for much of the period, but many of the merchants active in the trade were “Portuguese,” a code word for more or less converted Sephardic Jews. In France, their name, religion, and perhaps nationality could be altered to provide protective coloring. Moreover, having ships pass through a French port might provide a buffer against various embargoes and prohibitions, just as embarking (desirable) Spanish wine in Bayonne allowed that commodity to pass for French. Finally, the indirect route and “cover” trades appears to have masked a regular northward flow of silver, which we know left Spain as fast as the galleons could convoy it from the mines of Potos to Seville. What may deter the reader is that the Nantes-Rotterdam wine trade covers up the more intriguing story in this book just as it did on the ground in the seventeenth century.

David Hancock begins his exploration of Madeira wine in a Braudelian vein, with the geography of the island and the agrarian system governing the growing of grapes. He then goes on to discuss the production and export of wines, and the relations of Madeira's English-speaking merchants with their Portuguese environment. But he really hits his stride when the wine reaches the shores of the colonies, principally the future Northeastern states. These became a major market along with the East and West Indies-where the relatively few overseas Europeans must have drunk a great deal-and to an extent Britain and the European continent. More than half the book is devoted to the distribution and consumption of wine in the nascent United States and its predecessor colonies, emphasizing the material and social culture of drinking. Propertied Americans, including the apostle of sobriety Benjamin Franklin as well as the more overtly sybaritic Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers, all apparently drank great amounts of wine, and Madeira represented three quarters of the wine imported into the colonies in the eighteenth century (p. 117). Nonetheless, it is curious to note that only about 10 percent of probated eighteenth century estates included a mention of glassware or bottles (p. 375).

By way of a theoretical armature on which to hang the description of the wine trade—400-odd pages of text and 158 pages more of small-print notes plus illustrations-Hancock offers us networks. These are not mere lines on the map but self-organizing conduits for information flows (he prefers to call these last “conversations”) as well as goods. The networks fostered the growth of trade along a variety of dimensions, including spatial extent, product variety and quality, and of course quantity. Although one hesitates to call this a theory, never mind a model, it is useful. For this reader, the power of such adaptive and intelligent networks comes from their ability to overcome the many obstacles that trade of any kind faced in this period. Capital equipment, from ships to wine barrels was primitive, navigation and communication slow and uncertain. None of the “languages” involved, from vernaculars to accounting methods, weights and measures, currencies, and legal systems, were standardized or unified. On the policy front, mercantilism not only tried to limit outflows of bullion and favor domestic (or metropolitan) production, but spun a web of regulations, exactions (duties, excises, embargoes), and preferences all of which got worse during the frequent wars and were enhanced by religious discrimination.

The eighteenth century saw increases in the volume of Madeira traded and also in the quality of the wines. Part of the quality enhancement came from compounding and aging, but a large part resulted from the counterintuitive practices of heating and agitating the wine. Casks might thus be shipped round-trip as well as to distant destinations, hence the earlier notion of negative transport costs. Hancock attributes the growth in Madeira quality to increased demand from prosperous colonials, notably in the British Empire. But what if product improvements simply made Madeira more desirable, in particular relative to alternative wines (as well as rum-based punch, etc.)?

Nonspecialist economic historians might well tend to overlook the two books under review. They deal with somewhat marginal topics and are not particularly easy going. Yet their wealth of concrete detail gives a wonderfully direct sense of what it meant to engage in long-distance commerce in the age of nascent capitalism. I take from them two inferences. One is that the profits must indeed have been considerable (when all went well) and the other is a heightened appreciation for Adam Smith's critique of state interference in trade.