ABSTRACT
Atlantic commerce was ‘a whole way of life’ for merchants such as Boardman, and in many ways it increasingly shaped and was shaped by the lives of all sorts of people from Western Europe to the coast of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.4 Commercial culture happened in the Atlantic World’s portraits, such as Boardman’s, and literature, such as Milton’s, and in its shops, coffee houses, counting of ces, manufactories, sugarcane elds, government halls and religious centres. This chapter follows the trading currents of the Atlantic as the ocean bubbled new practices, ideas, institutions and goods up into all of facets of life to help create a new network of commercial culture. It begins with a narrative that locates European activity in the Atlantic within larger processes of European imperial expansion that spanned the globe. Some of the cloth in Boardman’s portrait, for instance, most likely came from Britain’s possessions two oceans away in India. From Columbus’ stumbling upon the West Indies on his way to seek such goods from Asia, to the support of state apparatuses, to the everyday activities of individuals, global commerce paid for global empires, and these empires, in turn created opportunities for commerce. This narrative also suggests that the commercial culture of the Atlantic World stimulated and was in turn stimulated by new trading practices, habits, tools and institutions; religious, scienti c and political thinking; and mass forced and free migrations that provided new commodities and consumer markets. The three sections following the opening narrative, ‘Practice and Pro t’, ‘Faith, Morals and Markets’, and ‘Migration Based Production and Consumption’ consider these themes in turn.
