The title of this book is well chosen. This is about Scottish trade with German ports, not with Germany (although whether a text so generously laced with graphs and tables and concluding with a statistical appendix that runs to nearly 30 pages can be labeled a “sketch” is another matter). The unknowable quantity of German goods that passed through intermediate ports en route for Scotland (and vice versa) is of necessity not considered. Defining Germany is anyway a troublesome business. The author opts to consider only those places that lay within the 1,648 boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus a port like Altona, which was ruled by Denmark-Norway and whose trade with Scotland was classified as non-German from a Scottish perspective, is included within the analysis; ports like Danzig and Königsberg that might be seen as “German” in socioeconomic or cultural terms but which lay outside the empire are excluded. In practice, this makes little difference to the conclusions drawn, for Scottish trade was focused on just two north German ports in the eighteenth century: Hamburg and Bremen. Scottish trade with Germany's Baltic ports, which had been of importance in the seventeenth century, declined in the eighteenth, not least because Pomeranian harbors under Swedish control post-1648 became increasingly focused on the export of cereals to grain-short Sweden.

Scottish Trade with German Ports is a companion volume to the same author's Scottish Trade in the Wake of the Union (1700–1760): The Rise of a Warehouse Economy (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005). Both derive from Rössner's 2007 Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh. The earlier volume took a “bottom-up” approach, studying individual merchants; the volume under review here takes a “statistical or top-down viewpoint” (p. 21). This is done with great thoroughness thanks to the exceptionally complete customs accounts on the Scottish side. Not only are Scotland's customs records preserved in an unbroken run from 1742, they are uniquely comprehensive. Details of every shipment in and out of Scottish ports were kept regardless of whether the commodities were liable to duty. The corresponding data for Hamburg and Bremen are not as full or informative, but they are sufficient to allow a remarkably detailed reconstruction of Scottish-German exchange.

Scottish trade with Germany was not extensive—it was dwarfed by Anglo-German commerce—but Scotland was, Rössner argues, a strategically important supplier of certain goods, most notably tobacco. There were also short-lived spikes in the export of other commodities like South Carolina rice, which was routed via Scottish ports when French privateering activity during the wars of the mid-eighteenth century made navigation in the English Channel unacceptably hazardous. As for imports, Scotland was of some significance as a market for German linens; or rather, Scotland was significant as a conduit through which linens were reexported into the wider Atlantic world. As these examples suggest, it was reexports that were the dynamic element in Scottish commerce. Exports of a limited range of domestically produced goods, some of which had been present on German markets since the sixteenth century, did continue. Salt was one of these, and Rössner provides an excellent analysis of how the grubby Scottish commodity, produced in coal-fired pans, fared in competition with the high-grade marine salts of France and Portugal and German rock salt. Be that as it may, it was the reexport of nondomestic goods at which Scottish merchants excelled.

The rise of Scotland's “warehouse economy” followed the Act of Union of 1707, which, by allowing Scots to trade legitimately with England's American colonies, opened up a rich transatlantic hinterland for Scotland's business community. As is well known, Scottish merchants enjoyed particular success in the Chesapeake, where they forced their way into the tobacco trade. Rössner sets out the German dimension to this with care and analytical clarity. Indeed, these are commendable features of his work throughout. Yet the author is reticent about drawing out the wider historiographical implications of his work. This “warehouse economy” was also a precociously early industrializer. What, if anything, was the connection? Scottish Trade with German Ports is, Rössner states, intended as “a model study of how eighteenth-century intra-European trade worked as part of a larger historical context that might be labeled an 'Atlantic economy”' (p. 21). That Scotland acted as a hinge between north-central Europe and the broader Atlantic economy can be readily accepted. It was not alone in that. As other scholars have suggested, German textile producing districts were closely linked to Atlantic markets via German merchant houses in ports such as Cadiz and Bordeaux. (See, for instance, K. Weber, “The Atlantic Coast of German Trade: German Rural Industry and Trade in the Atlantic.” Itinerario 26, no. 2 [2002]: 99–119.) But how does the existence of Germany's “Atlantic shore” affect our understanding of “Atlantic History?” Over the last quarter of a century, the Atlantic, defined as an early modern trading world, has been so extended and stretched that “Atlantic History” seems to many critics to have lost conceptual tautness. As a result, the rival claims of “global history” or “hemispheric history” now intrude upon it. This is a problem that might usefully be broached at the conclusion of a meticulous and accomplished empirical study.