The 14 essays, revised and integrated for this volume, share as their common theme the development of the Atlantic economy, especially British America and the Caribbean. They first establish the strengths and weaknesses of the sources available for understanding that economy and then exhibit by example how such materials can be put to use to analyze some of its key elements. Topics treated range form early attempts in medieval England to measure the carrying capacity of ships, through the advent in Renaissance Italy and England of business newspapers that reported on the traffic of ships,...

By the American Revolution, the farmers and city-dwellers of British America had achieved, individually and collectively, considerable prosperity. The nature and extent of that success are still unfolding. In this first comprehensive assessment of where research on prerevolutionary economy stands, what it seeks to achieve, and how it might best proceed, the authors discuss those areas in which traditional work remains to be done and address new possibilities for a 'new economic history.'

The handbook explains how money and exchange functioned as elements of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it also provides sufficient technical and statistical information to allow the reader to convert a sum recorded in one currency into its equivalent in another. McCusker combines this with a compilation of exhaustive tables that give the commercial rate of exchange between London and the major cities of Europe and the British colonies.