Edges of Transatlantic Commerce in the Long Eighteenth Century

Book excerpt: Edges of Transatlantic Commerce in the Long Eighteenth Century re-evaluates the boundaries of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, with a focus on commerce. Commerce ranges from documented to undocumented encounters that invoke shared or conflicting ideas of value, affective experiences of the emerging global system, and the development of national economies as well as their opponents. This volume reimagines the edge as a liminal space of human interaction with a potential for an alternative historical and aesthetic knowledge through pirates and sailors of color, slavery of Africans and Native Americans, cure of tobacco, counterfeit currency in Jamaica, and credit in Cape Colony (South Africa).