Despite the richness of British American economic historiography, Thomas Truxes is correct to note that “the history of colonial trade has never been brought together in a single work” (ix). In The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History he provides this much-needed concise narrative. Truxes successfully translates a field traditionally dominated by quantification and arcane terminology into a readable wide-ranging story. His narrative, though, skirts some of the most fertile areas in the recent resurgence of scholarship on the history of British Atlantic capitalism. At its root, it is a US-centric “coming-of-age story” (12) about “Americans” who “prized open access in their commerce” (3), evading and ultimately escaping naïve, misguided, and sometimes venal British officials.

Aiming for a “strong human dimension” (12), Truxes makes entrepreneurial merchants the main protagonists of his narrative. He begins Overseas Trade of British America with a portrait of England as “weak” and “impoverished” (22) at Elizabeth I's accession, with English trade dominated by foreign merchants. For Truxes, it was “the merchants of London (not the English government)” who “took the lead . . . by trial and error” (38) in developing commercial opportunities and building the capital and experience for successful colonial projects. In the second chapter, Truxes explores the challenges of commerce in England's earliest colonial societies, emphasizing that the failure of corporate colonies left American trade uniquely unregulated and “open to enterprising traders” (90) of all ranks and nationalities. Truxes attributes this breaking open of American trade to the errors of colonial companies and to American settlers being “instinctively wary” (3) of commercial regulations, without referencing the vibrant debates about monopolies in contemporary England. The early freedom of American trade is crucial, Truxes argues, because it helped establish patterns that “remained in place until the American Revolution” (89), including the shipping of staple commodities on account for consolidating planters, the perfecting of New England merchants’ provisioning trade to the Caribbean and southern Europe, and the growth of trade in enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.

The wealth of this open Atlantic trade, though, attracted the interest of the English state and led to the Navigation Acts. Truxes narrates traders’ adjustments to mercantilist regulations in chapter 3, demonstrating that the interplay of wars and crises with the statutes themselves shaped commercial patterns after the Restoration. By the close of the seventeenth century, colonial merchants in England showed “a growing acceptance of the Acts of Navigation” (122), but New England and New York traders were developing “strategies to subvert” (123) the rules by trading with the Spanish, French, and Dutch Caribbean, setting up a transatlantic divide. The following chapters on the early eighteenth century rely upon the much-debated paradigm of “salutary neglect” (141) to explain why colonial aspirations for free commerce and Britain's commitment to protectionism did not immediately conflict. Nonetheless, these chapters represent the strongest part of the book. In them, Truxes lays out the mature routes and procedures for shipping commodities and people and the interconnected patterns of legal and illegal trade from logwood cutting in Campeche to rice marketing in Europe and smuggling through the Isle of Man.

In the book's final section, Truxes narrates the post-1763 crisis over commercial regulation. In Truxes's account, the Grenville ministry's imposition of new taxes and stricter customs enforcement demonstrated “Parliament's ignorance of the dynamics of the Atlantic economy” (238) and its “incompetence” (244), as well as the corrupting influence of the West Indian sugar lobby. The result was a “widening gulf” (244) with North American merchants who, Truxes argues, were not ideological but would not brook “meddling . . . that disrupted markets and interfered with the flow of commerce” (245). Truxes provides a clear overview of the economic recovery in the early 1770s, driven by merchants eager to get back to business. However, it was the meddling state's efforts to prop up the East India Company as a chartered monopoly that proved the final straw for American colonists. In the remainder of the book, Truxes explores American wartime trade, which built upon its smuggling heritage, and he recounts the huge human cost of trade disruption, particularly for the enslaved Africans of the British Caribbean.

As a synthesis, Overseas Trade of British America is a significant achievement. It ranges over three centuries and demonstrates how patterns of North American trade were influenced by the complex dynamics of local commodity production, the mundane details of shipping procedures and bureaucracy, and developments in foreign markets across the Atlantic. Truxes is effective at weaving the story of the African slave trade into the broader patterns of exchange, showing that “virtually every aspect of colonial commerce” (5) was tied to slavery.

If Truxes's vision of commerce is truly Atlantic in scope, though, his concept of identity remains parochial. North American colonists and merchants, termed “Americans” (3), are generally lumped together and pitched against British officials, elite white West Indians, and other commercial actors such as Newfoundland fishermen who (by implicit contrast) remained “British before everything else” (293). This British/American division leaves little room for the existence of a genuine and informed circum-Atlantic debate about political economy dating back as far as the Virginia Company, which much recent scholarship has explored. The binary argument struggles to explain why colonists seemingly so committed to free trade had vigorous debates about local currency manipulation and the establishment of corporations. There is also no discussion of Loyalist attitudes toward commerce or of British thinkers who opposed new commercial regulations in the 1760s for anything other than self-interested reasons. The sidelining of such debates also leads the narrative to end on a confounding note of consensus. Truxes's Americans emerge from the Revolution “forward-looking, bold, and enterprising” (298), with a unified commitment to free trade and international commerce, a depiction that sits awkwardly with the early US Republic's well-known debates about the nation's commercial future, which shaped a century of sectional conflict. Nonetheless, Truxes's rich narrative account of the realities of commerce, when read alongside recent work on political economy and mercantilism, can provide students with the broad perspective necessary to explore Britain and America's entangled histories of capitalism.