Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

By Yda Schreuder

This book surveys the role of Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the “Portuguese Nation,” conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the “Myth of the Dutch,” the “Sephardic Moment,” and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe’s primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319970615

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© The Author(s) 2019

Yda SchreuderAmsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97061-5_1

1. The Atlantic Sugar Trade: Amsterdam’s Sephardic Merchants in the Seventeenth Century

Yda Schreuder¹  

(1)

Department of Geography, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

Yda Schreuder

1.1 Introduction

Long-distance trade and merchant networks were important in the origins and development of particular metropolitan centers and specific staple colonies. In the geographic literature, we refer to the metropolitan urban system or merchant system describing how gateway or port cities connected areas of production (i.e. the staple producing colonies) with the major metropolitan centers in Europe in long-distance trade relationships.¹ As these systems emerged and developed, merchant capital and profitable markets were essential.² Merchant networks expanded westward across the Atlantic Ocean and sugar colonies developed serially with each new colony supplanting a predecessor and being replaced in turn. Increased economies of scale or new technological developments leading to greater efficiency of production and enhanced competition may have been the main reasons but other factors may have played a role as well such as shifting geopolitical circumstances, blockades, and embargoes, and mercantilist policies exercised by various colonial powers which provided differential access to commodities, labor, and markets. Soil depletion and overproduction may have been reasons for shifting production also.³

To understand the nature of overseas long-distance trade is to understand how exchange of goods is channeled through communities of immigrant merchants in port cities.⁴ These communities are often referred to as merchant colonies or trading diasporas, terms which connote mutual aid, kinship, solidarity, and resilience in what was sometimes a hostile environment.⁵ Immigrant merchants engaged in long-distance trade brought capital, credit, connections, and a commercial outlook on trade and exchange. Their significance in long-distance trade relates to their role as cross-cultural brokers, and they often functioned as diplomats in dispute between host societies and the home base negotiating the terms and conditions of trade.⁶ In the business world, trust and familiarity are key considerations and traders—such as merchants trading over long distances—count on family and ethnic networks to conduct their business.⁷ This was particularly important at a time when there was a limited financial infrastructure in place—as in frontier communities or newly established colonies—and when credit had to be provided to customers who had to be relied upon and counted on to repay. Under these circumstances, kin and ethnic connections were essential factors in business enterprise, and one could argue that specific merchant communities were important links in the development of specific production centers in various parts of the world.

In the context of colonial development in the Atlantic region, these vast and complex networks existed between Europe, the Caribbean region, North America, and West Africa.⁸ The network contacts affected the movements of people, trade goods, capital, and information and were channeled through commercial networks usually originating in Europe. Initially, the contacts were sporadic and intermittent, but in due time commercial outposts developed and more sophisticated commercial contacts were established. Transatlantic trade networks concentrated on European port cities, while tobacco and sugar plantations were developed in Brazil and the Caribbean. The need to expand the provisioning of ships and settlements led to import of supply goods and the development of local industries to outfit the frontier or colonial settlements. As trade became more organized, commercial companies developed provisioning and marketing systems and processing industries in European port or gateway cities. In West Africa, slave procurement systems and slave entrepots were established to provision plantations in the new colonies with labor. With the development of the Atlantic and Caribbean sugar plantation -slave economy and the development ofAntwerp, Amsterdam,Hamburg, and London as entrepots or staple markets, immigrant merchants were key players in the emerging colonial trade system.

Recognition of the formation of trading communities and the role they played in the Atlantic economy in the seventeenth century is now generally accepted and numerous historians have adopted a network approach to study how people, commodities, and institutions moved within and across empires.⁹ In the transfer of goods and services in the early modern Atlantic economy, the demands of long-distance trade and shifting geopolitical alliances encouraged business strategies that required merchants to cooperate and align with multiple partners in a constantly changing environment. In this environment, Portuguese New Christian and alongside them their compatriot Sephardic merchants were exceptionally well adapted and moved from place to place where they established and reestablished new networks of contacts that were extremely fluid.¹⁰ The networks that developed during the seventeenth century form good examples of how sugar was traded and how this fueled the economy of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and England a century later. By the mid-seventeenth century and during the second half of the seventeenth century, the Sephardic merchant network had a widespread geographical reach in the British, French, and Dutch sugar colonies in the Caribbean after it had first come into existence in the early seventeenth century in Northeast Brazil.

New Christian and Sephardic Jewish merchants were often granted special privileges to trade and were encouraged to take residence in gateway cities. Sometimes, aspiring imperial powers like the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century in their war with Spain and Portugal , known as the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), or the English under Cromwell in the westward expansion in the Caribbean in the 1650s with the Trade and Navigation Act (1651) in effect, granted special burghership or denizen rights to Portuguese merchants. In this study, I will detail on the role the Portuguese merchant community or the Portuguese Nation played in the sugar trade in the Atlantic world and how they integrated with their host country’s interest.¹¹ In the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, Portuguese merchants, including Old and New Christians, Crypto-Jews, and Sephardic Jews , engaged in trade through ports inPortugal, Brazil, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam and were granted special rights and protection. When first Antwerp, then Amsterdam, and still later Hamburg became important entrepots and distribution centers for sugar in Northern and Central Europe and merchants established trading relations with Portugal andBrazil, it was clear that the Portuguese Nation was indispensable.¹² Because of their widespread presence, Portuguese merchants could easily adjust to changing geopolitical circumstances and avoid or circumvent the impact of wars, blockades, and embargoes of European imperial powers and play off one against the other.¹³ And thus it is now generally recognized that the community of Portuguese merchants helped develop and sustain the Atlantic trade network in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁴

Long-distance trade in sugar from Brazil in the sixteenth century was conducted mostly through Lisbon and the port of Antwerp. As Portugal became part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire in 1580, the port of Antwerp came directly under Spanish rule and thus more vulnerable as a target in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic. In the course of the sixteenth century, Antwerp had become the major port of entry for the European market for spices from the Orient and sugar from Madeira and Brazil. Portuguese merchants participated in this trade, and had settled in Antwerp where they exchanged sugar and other colonial staples with Flemish and Dutch merchants.¹⁵ When the Dutch blockaded the Scheldt River and restricted access to Antwerp in 1585 as part of their effort to undermine Catholic Habsburg rule, Amsterdam became the main gateway city where many Portuguese merchants fromPortugal engaged in the sugar trade moved to and settled. Thereafter or at the same time, merchants from Antwerp also moved toAmsterdam.¹⁶ In Amsterdam, many Portuguese New Christian merchants reconverted to Judaism as the Dutch granted Jews special privileges to trade and allowed them to found and establish their own Jewish congregations.¹⁷ The term Port Jew in this context is particularly appropriate for the study of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam and in the seventeenth-century Dutch colonies of Recife in Brazil and Willemstad in Curacao, and for the study of Sephardic Jews of Barbados and Jamaica in the seventeenth century as we will see.¹⁸

1.2 The Portuguese Nation: Terms and Definitions

So far I have named Old Christians, New Christians, Sephardic Jews, and Crypto-Jews as members of the Portuguese Nation. In this list, Crypto-Jews stand out as a hybrid. Crypto-Judaism is the secret adherence to Judaism while publicly professing to be of another faith; practitioners are referred to as Crypto-Jews. The term is applied historically to Spanish and Portuguese Jews who during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries outwardly professed Catholicism but remained loyal to the Jewish faith. In the following discussion, Jew or Jewish is defined in terms of embracing rabbinic Judaism as a way of life.¹⁹ The term New Christian in this context can refer to Conversos or Marranos . The term " Converso refers to Jews who had been forcibly converted or chose to convert to Catholicism in Spain to avoid persecution during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the fifteenth century, under conditions of persecution or forced exile many moved to Portugal. The term Marrano usually refers to someone of Jewish descent who had converted to the Christian faith to escape persecution but who continued to practice Judaism in secret asCrypto-Jew. Marrano was a term of abuse and had a bad connotation among Jews who chose exile instead of conversion. Regardless of the terms used, New Christians were often suspected by the officials of the Inquisition of practicing Judaism in secret. In this study, we will use the term Converso to describe New Christians without referring to Jewish identity or aspiration to be considered Crypto-Jew. On the other hand, the term Marrano " will be used to refer to New Christians who did adhere to Jewish traditions in secret and identified themselves as Jews.²⁰

In both Spain and Portugal, and later in Atlanticport cities or in the colonies, Conversos were often suspected of practicing Judaism but not all of them did and, in fact, many New Christians choose to remain faithful to Catholicism after their conversion. There were multiple reasons for this. For instance, in order to avoid being suspected of disloyalty or in order to keep their position in society or trade prospects intact, many choose to continue to adhere to the Christian faith.²¹ Conversos or converted Jews of Iberian descent had professed conversion to Christianity at various times since the twelfth century, and the given designations or identities became common inSpain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century when Jews or those suspected of secret Judaism were persecuted and forced into exile.²² Their identity at the crossroads between the Christian and Jewish worlds was often disputed among both religions, and often their position was vulnerable in not only the Iberian world but in many of the colonies or the lands of exile as well.²³ Graizbord, in Souls in Dispute (2004), thus refers to Judeoconversos in the context of the ambiguity of their allegiance as they moved from place to place and adopted either a Christian or a Jewish identity depending on the circumstances in which they resided.²⁴ The term Crypto-Jew suggests that they did in exile when it was safe to do so. Thus, Conversos sometimes reconverted to Judaism if circumstances permitted or as commercial interests dictated, although returning to the Iberian Peninsula reexposed reconverted Conversos or openly practicing Jews to the Inquisition and persecution again.

In the sixteenth century, many members of the Portuguese Nation in the emerging Atlantic world were merchants who had converted to Christianity in previous centuries and as New Christians they established trade networks throughout the Mediterranean and the Western Atlantic region including port cities such as Venice, Livorno, Bayonne, Bordeaux, and Antwerp.²⁵ Some of them became practicing Jews in residence in these port cities, and as a growing segment of them seemed ready or eager to return to Judaism in locations where religious freedom was tolerated and the Inquisition did not reach, Jewish congregations formed.²⁶ Culturally, this made the Portuguese Nation unique among trading nations of the period as they included both New Christian and Jewish merchants and reached across religious divides.²⁷ Following exile in the late fifteenth century, the Portuguese Nation became a term associated with a particular commercial tradition in which blood kin and Iberian cultural ties played an important role and in which adaptability and fluidity were key characteristics. This included shifting back and forth for some members of the Portuguese Nation from adhering to Christian and Jewish traditions.

The designation Sephardic Jew refers to descendants of Spanish or Portuguese Jews who may or may not have converted to Christianity but were adhering to the rules and traditions of Judaism including circumcision and were openly practicing Judaism in exile. The designation gained traction in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and seems to have been introduced as a term to describe Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent who as members of the Portuguese Nation distinguished themselves as distinct and different from Ashkenazim. Sephardic refers to cultural adherence to the traditions of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) but more specifically to the old Sephardim of the Mediterranean and North Africa who were descendants of fifteenth-century exiles from Spain who had never converted to Christianity. In Amsterdam, the community was also known as the Hebrew Nation.²⁸

In the following pages, I will discuss the Portuguese Nation in more detail as scholars of Sephardic Judaism use different terms to describe the intricate variation in the history of conversion and return to Judaism.²⁹ In this study, I will use the term Portuguese Nation to describe the Portuguese merchant community in general in port cities in the Atlantic world including New Christians and Portuguese or Sephardic Jews. I will use the terms Crypto-Jew , " Marrano , or Converso " when the designations are relevant in the context of the discussion or when reference is made to specific scholarly publications in which the author uses particular terms to describe the variation in the history of conversion and reconversion.

The term Port Jew referring to Sephardic Jewish merchants in port cities of the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic seaboard will also be used when appropriate.³⁰ The concept of the Port Jew was formulated by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin in the late 1990s and describes Jews who were involved in the seafaring and maritime economy of Europe, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³¹ The term gave a more specific identification, in their view, than the term diaspora and describes the trade networks that developed among Portuguese merchants in Atlanticport cities where New Christians and Jews often formed partnerships in trade and for whom cultural, historic, and linguistic identity mattered more than religious identity (Jewish or Christian).³² Sorkin (1999) restricts his definition of the Port Jew as a social type to apply only to a very specific group of Sephardic and Italian-Jewish merchants in the emerging Atlantic ports of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bordeaux, and London who were participants in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³³ Since then, many scholars have critiqued, refined, extended, or dismissed the term and a lively academic debate on Port Jews has emerged.³⁴ The term Port Jew implies mobility, flexibility, and business acumen.

If we accept the definition of Port Jew to identify with the Portuguese Nation as merchants, sojourners and intermediaries between (often) warring imperial powers, and purveyors of products from faraway places than we accept that commerce rather than geography defined the social type as Klooster (2006) and others have argued.³⁵ Whereas the term diaspora connotes ideas of forced expulsion, dislocation, geographic segregation, and discrimination, the term Port Jew describes a Jewish merchant who is recognized as beneficial for the conduct of trade in new markets or frontier regions.³⁶ This is not to say that other merchants—Dutch or English merchants for instance—welcomed their participation and competition in the Atlantic trade, but legal status was often granted Jewish merchants in their quest for recognition and as they were rewarded for their trading skills and usefulness in solving diplomatic disputes. The term trading diaspora is sometimes used by historians who emphasize the role cross-cultural trade played in long-distance exchange.³⁷ The term can be used with respect to any ethnic or national merchant group that trades in distant locations with other groups of merchants. So, for instance, one can refer to the Huguenot, Armenian, or Jewish trading diaspora or to the Portuguese trading diaspora.³⁸

1.3 A Historical-Geographic Perspective

In the explanation of the development of the Atlantic trade network and the emergence of immigrant merchant communities, historical geographers have applied a perspective in which aspects of space and time interact and where place and event form a complementary and interdependent relationship. Whereas historians tend to emphasize events in place through time, geographers consider events in relationship to conditions and events elsewhere or in spatial relationships. More specifically, in the search for patterns and explanations, historical geographers look for, analyze, and try to explain historical events in relationship to geopolitical, economic, and demographic conditions and events in locations geographical removed but connected through trade or other exchange (Fig. 1.1).

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Fig. 1.1

Atlantic triangular trade. (Source: D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (Yale University Press, New Haven, London, 1986), p. 73. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press)

The Atlantic studies approach developed in the last few decades has offered fertile ground for historical geographers as they seek to analyze the network of nodes and links that channel movements of people, goods, and information relative to supply and demand. This is not to say that historians are not aware of the broader spatial contexts as some excellent studies within the Atlantic framework have shown, but historians have often cast their nets from a state-centered perspective and have more often than not traced a national imperial-colonial trajectory.³⁹ The narrative that historical geographers employ is usually more inclusive of interimperial and intercolonial relationships.⁴⁰ In recognition that social relations are interconnected on a global scale, space and place no longer appear as static platforms but rather as historically produced, reconfigured, and transformed over time.⁴¹ From this perspective, Atlantic history is not just the study of a different geographic region but it reflects a different style of inquiry or approach.⁴² In my narrative it may strike the reader that I switch back and forth between Amsterdam and Brazil, or Barbados, and London, but that is on purpose in order to illustrate how events and conditions in one place affect events or a particular response elsewhere. The pattern that emerges derives from interactions of people across imperial and cultural-religious boundaries toward a more inclusive global or at least transatlantic or circum-Atlantic perspective.⁴³

The relationship between the British and Dutch merchants and Sephardic merchants as go-between in the mid-seventeenth century forms a good example. As the British Trade and Navigation Acts were gradually implemented in the 1650s and 1660s, this dependency relationship persisted.⁴⁴ Obviously, some partners in trade had more power than others and capital investment and settlement was encouraged by the imperial powers in Europe in order to establish colonial rule, even so, and in particular in the early stages of colonial development cooperation with other trading nations was essential. As Britain provided capital and settlers for its colonies, Amsterdam merchants, among them Sephardic Jews who had established themselves in Amsterdam, supplied slaves and goods to outfit and service the plantations and provided export markets for staple goods like sugar. In the early modern era, at the end of the sixteenth century, Europe’s reach across the Atlantic expanded rapidly by means of trade conducted by chartered companies, private merchants, and planter confederates but in the course of the seventeenth century, guided by European national or imperial interests, the relationships changed and institutions developed that exercised imperial control over markets and supplies.⁴⁵ In the following chapters, I hope to illustrate the implications of this kind of approach for explaining colonial patterns of development with a focus on the sugar trade. By applying a historical-geographic approach, I hope to contribute to a further discussion about the role of Jewish merchants in the Amsterdam economy of the Golden Age and the sugar trade of emerging English colonies in the mid-decades of the seventeenth century.⁴⁶

The Atlantic sugar trade is viewed by historians as one of the dominant drivers in the accumulation of wealth and imperial prosperity in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁴⁷ Exactly how this occurred and who participated and benefitted is still somewhat of a mystery. Through this research study I hope to shed more light on the question of wealth and prosperity generated from colonial trade by focusing on the Dutch Golden Age during which Amsterdam emerged as the major European staple market. During that era, consumption, production, and processing were linked by merchants who formed trade networks that expanded across the Atlantic world and throughout continental Europe. But, first, a brief discussion of Amsterdam as the emerging metropolitan center of Western Europe.

1.4 Amsterdam: The Emerging Metropolitan Center of Europe

When studying metropolitan urban systems and merchant network systems in the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century, it is important to understand the function and reach of port cities. In the geographic literature, we make reference to gateway cities when it concerns entry to specific geographical trade regions. The early modern port city emerged from a medieval urban tradition in which the immediate hinterland provided trade goods and, for the most part, local merchants conducted the exchange. As long-distance trade developed and gateway cities accessed largerhinterlands and /or overseas regions which supplied a larger variety of goods for trade, migration and exchange occurred more frequently among local and foreign merchants.⁴⁸ The reach of the hinterland of a gateway city was an important factor in determining the position of a specific port in the Atlantic economy and over time a hierarchy of gateway cities developed in which Amsterdam took the lead in the course of the seventeenth century.⁴⁹ The more ports brought in from their hinterlands, the more they were able to expand and connect to other gateway and trade centers. In gateway cities that achieved a high level of interconnectedness, a growing range of goods and capital became available and merchants, new technologies, capital, and information exchange occurred, contributing to a more and more complex port-hinterland network system.⁵⁰ For Amsterdam, this development is well analyzed and described by Lesger in The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006).⁵¹

Lesger (2006) describes how after Antwerp had been the main gateway in the Low Countries (i.e. Holland, Zeeland, Brabant, and Flanders) to the Europeanhinterland in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century Amsterdam took over that role. In the mid-sixteenth century, Amsterdam’s role in the gateway systems had not differed much from that of other gateway ports in the Low Countries except for Antwerp.⁵² Relative to neighboring regions, the Low Countries had developed urbanized and relatively prosperous regional economies and a series ofhinterlands had developed which centered on Bruges, Middelburg, Dordrecht, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.⁵³ Of these, Antwerp was the most important gateway city during the second half of the sixteenth century after the Bruges trade had declined.⁵⁴ Antwerp’s trade was for a large part with Cologne in the Rhine Land and via Cologne with Frankfurt, Nuremburg, and Leipzig in South-Central Germany. This trade included sugar from the Atlantic Islands of Madeira, São Tomé, and Brazil, then under Portuguese colonial rule.⁵⁵ Antwerp’s export goods included mostly semi-finished textiles from the Low Countries hinterland and England , and sugar and spices for reexport . Trade with the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) depended for 70 percent on imports and about 15 percent on export.⁵⁶

Antwerp’s trade with Northern Europe, England, and the Baltic region was via Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Middelburg, and other Scheldt delta ports. Although some of Antwerp’s export trade with the Baltic region was via Amsterdam, it only accounted for about 5 percent of all its overseas exports in the mid-sixteenth century. For Amsterdam, the reverse was the case as grain and wood products derived from the Baltic region formed the main share of its trade in the mid-sixteenth century and accounted for one-third of all exports to Antwerp.⁵⁷ This illustrates that Antwerp’s overseas trade, and in particular its colonial trade, was much more lucrative than Amsterdam’s gateway trade at that time. On the other hand, 19 percent of Antwerp’s reexport trade of sugar and spices went to Amsterdam, which laid the basis for what in the seventeenth century became Amsterdam’s main colonial trade.⁵⁸ Antwerp’s other export goods included semi-finished textiles from the Low Countries hinterland and England.

The Low Countries’ mid-sixteenth century gateway trade system or spatial economy illustrates the importance of Antwerp for Western and Southern European trade goods and colonial staples and the emergence (or onset) of Amsterdam as a center in the sugar and spice trade. This sketch demonstrates that Antwerp’s trade was detached to a large extent from the regionalhinterland economy of the Low Countries and had emerged as a staple market for colonial goods besides a wide array of goods from other parts of Europe.⁵⁹ This difference in structural conditions of Amsterdam and Antwerp continued until the early 1580s when two-thirds of all goods delivered and warehoused in Amsterdam still derived from the Baltic region and most of its exports were with northern coastal regions in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Eastern Baltic region.⁶⁰ But, instead of reexporting warehoused goods, Amsterdam and its surrounding area consumed an increasing amount of its imports in its immediate, relatively prosperous, increasingly urbanized hinterland and its exports derived increasingly from trade goods processed or produced in nearby towns and cities.⁶¹ In addition, a growing share of the sugar and spice trade entered the Amsterdam market via Antwerp as Brazil developed into a major Portuguese sugar colony and the Asian spice trade expanded. Amsterdam’s favorable geographic location with access to major rivers and inland waterways and its traditional trade relationships with the Baltic certainly were contributing factors to the emerging and rapidly developing gateway function of the city. Lesger (2006) sees in this situation one of the main differences between Amsterdam and Antwerp, which continues to serve as the primary staple market of the Low Countries under Habsburg rule but proves to be vulnerable when the geopolitical situation changed after the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648).⁶² Antwerp and the surrounding countryside had been the scene of plunder and murder during the Spanish Fury in 1576 and following years and had caused a dramatic decline in industry and in population. By the end of the 1580s, Antwerp’s population was halved from 90,000 in the 1560s to 42,000 in 1589.⁶³

The commercial expansion of Amsterdam at the expense of Antwerp became evident after 1585 with the blockade of the Scheldt River after the reconquest of the city by Spanish forces (the Spanish Fury), which triggered the accelerated pace at which Amsterdam developed into Europe’s major gateway city.⁶⁴ An important aspect of the blockade was that an increasing number of Portuguese and Antwerp merchants relocated their business to Amsterdam, which gave a boost to the expansion of Amsterdam’s trading network as the new merchants brought capital and network connections that proved crucial in the trade of colonial goods like spices and sugar. Among these merchants were Portuguese merchants, who set up trade networks in Amsterdam and Hamburg in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.⁶⁵ The increasing importance of the trade in sugar and spices was the direct result of the transfer from Antwerp but another contributing factor was the urban and commercial infrastructure that had developed.⁶⁶ This infrastructure included both physical structures like harbors, wharves, warehouses, weighhouses, and a social infrastructure like a thriving shipbuilding industry, markets as well as legal structures and various forms of organizations, charter companies, financial services, the Exchange or Bourse, and information. These structural conditions facilitated transfer of merchant capital and relocation of merchant networks and provided a dynamic and productive commercial environment which was crucial to the development of Amsterdam.⁶⁷ From this perspective, historical geographers refer to cumulative causation, a term first introduced by Myrdal (1957) and later advanced by Vance (1970) in his groundbreaking study of merchants and the geography of wholesale trade.⁶⁸

Cumulative causation is a term which describes multicausal variables and linkages as the key to understanding economic and social development. Cumulative causation is often credited for the multiplier effect that creates conditions for rapid development and future economic growth. In light of this, Lesger (2006) views the economic development of Amsterdam and the hegemony of the Dutch Republic in world trade in the first half of the seventeenth century as a combination of factors that reinforce each other and act as a magnet for new enterprises and entrepreneurs which in turn stimulate productivity and new technological and organizational developments. A form of self-sustaining continuity is the result. In the course of the next few chapters, we will see several examples of self-sustaining continuity in the sugar trade and industry in the seventeenth century Dutch economy (Fig. 1.2).⁶⁹

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Fig. 1.2

Dutch Republic and Southern Netherlands. (Source: Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2003), Map 2.1, p. 20. Reprinted with permission of the map designer, Henk den Heijer, Professor Emeritus in Maritime History at the Leiden University Institute for History)

1.5 The Merchant Network System

Whereas we can trace the rise and fall of gateway cities by using statistical information on commerce and trade, we know far less about how trade was conducted and how individual merchants, and more specifically foreign merchants, engaged in commercial activities in the early modern Atlantic world and interacted with local merchants. In other words, how the networks of long-distance merchants connected with local commercial networks. To understand commercial or merchant networks, James Vance in The Merchant’s World (1970) advanced the idea of agents of trade.⁷⁰ According to Vance , agents of trade were merchants’ networks of contacts through which information about supply and demand were exchanged, which created the motivation to produce surplus goods for the market and expanded trade opportunities beyond the local area. The agents of trade familiarized and informed consumers about new products available in urban markets and familiarized producers with demand that urban markets created. These networks of information and transaction, subsequently, dictated where merchants resided or preferred to trade and where urban growth occurred.⁷¹

Many of the networks involving merchants in long-distance trade and local merchants operated both inside and outside imperial boundaries as illustrated by recently published studies emphasizing the self-organizing, cross-cultural, multireligious, and transnational nature of these networks which transcended official or institutional trade and which proved to be remarkably resilient over time.⁷² Some of the trade generated through merchant networks was illegal trade as imperial powers vied for territorial control, control over sea lanes, and, institutional or mercantilist control. The frequent occurrences of blockades and embargoes that accompanied the seventeenth-century trade wars attest to that and often resulted in a realignment of merchant networks or the emergence of new and contesting networks.⁷³ The result was what Antunes (2004) refers to as the globalization in the early modern world which often engaged European, African, Euroafrican, Indian, Mestizo, and Creole merchants as free agents.⁷⁴ Of course, these alliances played themselves out against the institutions of empire which included state-sponsored trading monopolies (as in the case of Spain and Portugal) or chartered trading monopolies like the Dutch and British East India Companies and the Dutch West India Company which assigned rights of trade, settlement, and military rule and superseded and sometimes eliminated individual merchants or merchant networks. Subsequently, merchants as free agents often operated on the margins and across borders and sometimes against perceived or real national interests.⁷⁵

A case in point of shifting alliances on the part of individual merchants or merchant networks is the relocation of merchants from Lisbon to Amsterdam or Antwerp to Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lesger (2006) describes this process in Schumpeterian terms in which existing merchant elites are replaced by a group of entrepreneurs including merchants from the Southern Netherlands (i.e. Antwerp) and Portuguese Conversos or Jews , although in his analysis he concentrates primarily on entrepreneurs of the Southern Netherlands and dismisses the contribution of Portuguese Jews as they had only a modest share in the city’s trade in the first few decades of the seventeenth century.⁷⁶ However, alongside the large influx of merchants from the Southern Netherlands, merchants of the Portuguese Nation (New Christians or Conversos fromPortugal and likely relocating merchants from Antwerp) began to trade in Amsterdam in the 1590s.⁷⁷ New Christian Converso merchants first arrived in Amsterdam toward the end of the sixteenth century but ultimately made up the majority of Portuguese merchants, and many began to practice Judaism and joined a rapidly growing Jewish community in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century.⁷⁸

Schumpeter (1942) argues that old elites rarely lead in introducing new ways of doing business as vested interests resist change.⁷⁹ Lesger (2006) uses this idea to explain why newcomers were the impulse for Amsterdam’s rapid development toward the end of the sixteenth century. As the position and function of the existing merchant elite based on the older established circumstances diminished and became marginalized, newcomers took their place, among them several who took the lead in Dutch voyages to Asia and the Caribbean in the 1590s, establishing a tradition of long-distance trade. In addition, newcomers, including merchants from Antwerp and merchants from the Portuguese Nation, brought with them new network contacts and formed new trading relations as they expanded their reach and engaged in new forms of trade including colonial long-distance trade. Many of the new merchants were young and were likely junior partners in existing merchant houses and family members of well-established merchants residing elsewhere including Lisbon, Oporto, and Antwerp.⁸⁰

Members of the Portuguese Nation began to trade and reside in Amsterdam toward the end of the sixteenth century when the Scheldt blockade hampered trade with Antwerp. In the sugar trade their main contacts were with Portugal and via Portugal with the sugar colonies of the Atlantic Islands and Brazil. Sugar production in Brazil had been expanding toward the end of the sixteenth century and Portuguese merchants were seeking new markets, while Portugal began to become more and more dependent on import of grain which supplies the Dutch controlled via the Baltic trade. Notary Public records documenting freight contracts of Portuguese merchants of the period and an extensive array of studies conducted by scholars of Jewish history illustrate the extent of trade withPortugal, Brazil, and the wider