This book consists of 13 essays originally presented at an international conference organized in 1999 on “The Emergence of the Atlantic Economy.” Its contents are as fluid, dynamic, and nuanced as the Atlantic World evoked in the editor's introduction.

April Lee Hatfield, Claudia Schnurmann, and Jan de Vries each discuss aspects of the Dutch presence in the Americas. De Vries' chapter is an outstanding reappraisal of Holland's failure to establish an Atlantic empire. A stout defender of the much-maligned institution of patroonship, he attributes the loss of New York to political factors (the need for English support to resist Louis XIV) rather than internal weaknesses. Despite this setback, de Vries argues, the Dutch continued to prosper in the New World until, by the 1770s, commercial revenue from the Americas exceeded that of the Indies—a remarkable finding and an important corrective to received wisdom.

David Hancock's and R. C. Nash's chapters address mercantile innovation. Hancock's analysis of Madeira wine eschews conventional models of product innovation in favor of self-organized complexity. Innovations resulted from “highly verbal, often contentious epistolatory conversations” (p. 32) held between growers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and customers. In several respects, the development process Hancock painstakingly documents has an affinity with the social shaping of technology literature. The chapter concludes by discussing the emergence of wine rituals and luxury consumption patterns—territory also covered by Robert S. DuPlessis, who seeks to demonstrate T. H. Breen's “process of material standardisation” (p.72) spread beyond the Thirteen Colonies. DuPlessis's methodology, however, relies on percentage breakdowns of different textile fabric types in probate inventories of merchant dealers located in four colonial cities. The small numbers of merchants sampled means that the point estimates must have large standard errors, making it difficult to conclude anything definitive about distinctive categories of consumption. Nash's impressive contribution adopts an expansive chronology extending to 1830, enabling him to analyze both the rise and fall of the commission system and the cargo trade. On the accumulation of capital and credit generation in Atlantic trade, he concurs with the findings of Richard Pares and Jacob M. Price, emphasizing the importance of ploughed-back profits in the Caribbean and short-term manufacturers' credits in the tobacco trades. However, the chapter raises a major conundrum, which it struggles to resolve. During the later seventeenth century, slaves were sold on credits of six to nine months, saddling the Royal Africa Company with debts of more than £160,000, c.1700 (pp. 122–23). By 1740, credits of 12 to 18 months had become the norm, underpinning a dramatic expansion in the scale of the slave trade. This unprecedented credit extension occurred decades after the principles of commission trading were instituted and some years before the effects of the financial reforms that Nash ends his chapter with were felt.

Ty M. Reese provides a thought-provoking study of relations between the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa and local Fante elites. Caboceers assisted European traders in procuring slaves, conducting negotiations, and obtaining the labor needed to stop the company's forts falling down. Reese reveals that instead of a single dominant labor system, a combination of slaves, pawns, and wage labor were used to maintain operations at Cape Coast Castle and Annamaboe.

Laura Croghan Kamoie draws on a case study of Virginia planters within the Northern Neck. She sees planters as promoters of diversity within the domestic economy as well as leaders of the export sector. The chapter argues that blacksmiths' shops and grist mills functioned as neighborhood business centers, which formed the basis of more complex collaborative activities, including investment in iron works. A notable feature is Kamoie's prosographical research into Jackson T. Main's “one hundred wealthiest Virginians of the revolutionary era” (p. 330). Of the 65 individuals in this listing whose economic activities can be documented, she reports that no fewer than 58 owned or operated businesses in addition to tobacco.

Laura Nater, Kenneth J. Banks, and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert each examine aspects of the political economy of the Spanish and French colonial empires. Studnicki-Gizbert analyzes the contributions of Portuguese merchants to Olivares's reform program prior to their suppression by the Inquisition during the 1630s. The counterfactual on which the chapter is based—a world in which Spanish commercial policies were liberalized by Jewish financiers—ranks as a fairly spectacular “what if?” but, nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution to the arbitristas literature.

Max Edelson's chapter is an interesting essay in cultural history, which investigates the contrasting commodity reputations of two staple crops. South Carolina's rice enjoyed high standing on world markets, encouraging positive conceptions of the colony as an advancing and refined society. In contrast, indigo was poorly regarded, evoking images of backwardness and a social wasteland.

Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss's study of native American economic behavior forms part of their project to construct Early American national accounts. New estimates of the size of the native communities of the Carolinas are presented. The authors argue that the reduced population “did not abandon all hope and collapse into life-ending misery and depression” (p. 299); nor were Amerindians reliant on the deer trade and subsistence cultivation. Drawing on records of official colony transactions, the chapter documents the fencing of land, crop diversification (flax and cotton), and the development of domestic manufactures (spinning).

Peter A. Coclanis must be congratulated on an excellent editorial job in bringing such a diverse and high quality volume to press. The book is full of ideas and insights—in all, it is a most stimulating read.