These two books from the same publisher focus on the early modern maritime trade and shipping of Bristol, which in that period was England’s leading provincial port. In one, Richard Stone offers his first monograph, arising out of a University of Bristol Ph.D. thesis of 2012, in a study covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the other, Nicholas Rogers explores facets of Bristol’s maritime affairs in the eighteenth century with particular emphasis on the slave trade. Both authors explore sources that have been underdeveloped in many previous studies of Bristol’s foreign commerce. Stone demonstrates expert skill in systematically reconstructing Bristol’s overseas trade data from the Wharfage accounts kept by Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and from the Particular Customs accounts and Exchequer port books in the National Archives. Rogers draws upon Admiralty records and High Court of Admiralty papers from The National Archives and upon newspapers and manuscript sources mainly from Bristol and London depositories. In both books, the transatlantic dimension of Bristol’s early modern commerce is analysed in an illuminating way. Stone’s sources require the use of computer technology to cope with a vast amount of statistical data while Rogers utilizes material that can be assessed qualitatively.

One of Stone’s major themes is to show how rapidly Bristol’s overseas commerce acquired a transatlantic dimension in the mid-seventeenth century. North America and the Caribbean comprised only a very small portion of England’s trade in the first phase of English colonization of the Americas before 1640 but by the 1650s they provided three-quarters of Bristol’s imports. The transition from trade carried on mainly with Europe to commerce with new transatlantic colonies seems to have occurred rapidly as Bristol’s merchant community responded quickly to new business opportunities in North America and the Caribbean. Stone is the first historian to have identified this geographical reorientation of trade for Bristol in the mid-seventeenth century. Though statistics are only available for some years, his findings point to an earlier emphasis on the Americanization of trade at Bristol than previous historians have suggested. Besides this theme, readers will find interesting observations in Bristol and the Birth of the Atlantic Economy on manufactured exports produced in Bristol and its hinterland and the important markets for Bristol’s commerce in Ireland, France and the Iberian peninsula before the English Civil War. Stone claims that Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade was more significant in the late seventeenth century than previously thought, but that finding is belied by the fact that he has only identified around 10 slaving voyages from Bristol before 1700.

Rogers’ book is much more discursive than Stone’s volume; it comprises a set of chapters that are not specifically related to one another but which are illuminating on different aspects of Bristol’s eighteenth-century maritime history. Three chapters deal with Bristol’s slave trade. One of these examines slave ship mutinies, relationships between captains and crew and deaths through disease among both crew and captives. Another chapter discusses the age profile and recruitment of seamen for slaving vessels. And another describes the role of the shipwright Robert Barker on Bristol slaving voyages, drawing attention to his autobiographical book The Unfortunate Shipwright, which offers commentary on difficulties encountered by seamen during long seafaring voyages. The other chapters in Maritime Bristol cover the work of Pill pilots who oversaw the movement of ships along the River Avon from the port of Bristol to the Bristol Channel; mutinies and impressment in connection with long-haul voyages; privateering in the mid-eighteenth century; the activities of the Crugers of New York in Bristol in the American revolutionary era; and political aspects of slave trade abolition in Bristol.

Readers of this journal will want to know how both books are embedded in urban history. The answer is that some significant features of Bristol’s urban experience are addressed in both volumes but only on a very selective basis. Stone points to the growth of processing industries for transatlantic imports at Bristol in the later seventeenth century but does not provide much detail about this apart from noting that 400 people out of an urban population of 20,000 were engaged in tobacco processing. He also shows that Bristol was a significant diverse urban manufacturing centre for export goods: more than half of the freemen enrolled in the city’s Burgess books in the 1650s and 1670s were involved in some kind of craft and manufacturing occupation. Rogers’ main contribution to urban history in his book lies in the information and analysis he provides about the recruitment and contribution of common seamen to Bristol’s maritime affairs. Future researchers will want to extend these findings into a more thoroughgoing assessment of Bristol’s seventeenth-century manufacturing base in relation to the port’s participation in overseas commerce and to a more extensive appraisal of the human capital involved in the manning of Bristol’s shipping.