This paper looks at the shifting economic condition of several Lower Danubian and Black Sea ports after the opening of the Black Sea to international trade and shipping in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Placed in a disputed inter-imperial (Russian, Ottoman and Austrian) borderland, the inland ports of Brăila and Galați, as well as the seaports of Sulina and Constanța became large grain exporters to Mediterranean and western Europe. In the 19th century their development was shaped by imperial forces, national policies, and an international organization, created in 1856 to clear the mouths of the Danube and to improve shipping conditions towards inland Danubian ports. This paper will present, based on quantitative and qualitative approaches, the stages of these ports' development, in a unified, transnational and transimperial perspective.

The export of forest resources, especially timber, from the Baltic during the early modern period has interested historians for decades. Timber was the main raw material for shipbuilding and no maritime nation of Western and Southern Europe could do without the adequate supplies of this strategic raw material. During my research under the ForSEAdiscovery project (http://www.forseadiscovery.eu/), I developed a method for estimating the volume of Baltic timber products exported through the Danish Sound. In this paper, I propose to estimate the volume of Baltic timber imported by Portugal and Spain from 1669 to 1857 and its importance for their shipbuilding industries. Additionally, this paper will also focus on two or three most important timber exporting ports in the Baltic and the most important timber importing ports in both Portugal and Spain.

This short note provides the first data series of beaver products price movements (not levels) in Canada that expands beyond the end of French rule. Linking with other available price series allows us to generate a price history of furs in Canada spanning from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Prior to independence from Britain, Philadelphia developed into a major port for not only British America, but for the entire Atlantic Ocean. This paper investigates how Philadelphia became a popular destination for goods, both exports and imports.The paper shows how Britain used Philadelphia as a center of imperial control following the end of the Seven Years’ War with France. Within the same decade, however, Philadelphia merchants and wealthy elites began to oppose what they viewed as oppressive imperial policies, and by 1775, Philadelphia was the political and geographical center of the fledgling United States. Examining individual merchant papers to fully explore how goods were imported and exported throughout the period, there is significant evidence to show that Philadelphia merchants were engaged in trans-imperial trade, both illicit and licit. Thus, I seek to show that expansion of trade networks expands the political capital that residents of port cities can utilize.

The Boston Tea Party (1773) has mainly been studied as an explosive mix of Enlightenment ideals, popular resistance against taxation and consumer-boycotts originating in the British colonies in the Americas. However, there might have been more global dynamics behind this event. This paper studies the symbol that brought tensions in the Americas to a boiling-point, namely long-distance trade in tea. The focus will be on the connection between events in Boston and commodity-chains of tea by the two main East India companies: the Dutch and English one. Moreover, it will go beyond the data of ‘company trade’ by looking at smuggling of tea in the Atlantic, European Empires and private trade in Asia, intra-Asian trade and Asian entrepreneurship in production of tea. By following the commodity-chain of this product to its origins, the Boston Tea Party comes to life as part of a larger history spanning the globe

Salem was the sixth largest city in the US in 1790 and the richest city per capita. This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach to maritime trade by combining geography and history with economics. It explores the global trajectory of Salem’s commercial maritime fleet in the final decades of the eighteenth century through the analysis of trade data obtained in the archives of the Peabody Essex Museum. Cape Town served as the fulcrum, hinge, or pivot to connect the North Atlantic economy with Asia while Mauritius served as their entrepot to the array of Asian commodities. East Indiamen from Salem were laden with cargoes from various port cities in North America and Europe and voyaged to Calcutta, Batavia, Manila, and Canton. This paper illuminates the flow of commodities on Salem vessels that circumnavigated the globe between the port cities of Asia and the North Atlantic economy during the “Age of Sail”.

The old Portuguese Empire had many ports and outposts all over the world, among all continents. But two had special importance, mostly for economic and political reasons: Lisbon, as the kingdom’s natural main center and hub, connecting all the oceans; and Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese Royal Court would be established between 1808 and 1820, pushed out of the country by Napoleon’s invasion and the French presence within the Iberian Peninsula between 1807 and 1815. The intent of this essay is to analyze some features of both ports and the interaction between them, through some trade and fiscal data. Moreover, to observe, within a logic of Portugal’s political-economic dynamics in a critical period, the establishment of a new balance of power in Latin America, a new economic diplomacy and the commercial networks’ rearrangement, from the Independence of former Spanish and British colonies, culminating with Brazil’s independence in 1822.

The Cuban ports, and especially that of Havana, which for many years was the main and only port of trade, were the points of contact with the Old Continent and the emerging neighboring power of the United States in the nineteenth century. Cuba, being an Island, and with a strategic geographical position in the Caribbean was conceived by the Spanish colonial metropolis as a maritime enclave between the two continents. The paper intends to analyze the interaction of the factors that influenced the port dynamics in the late nineteenth century, based on the following variables: Spanish protectionism, the emerging manufacturing takeoff in the main port cities of Cuba in the 1980s, Economic crisis of that decade and its responses, the positions of the Spanish shipping industry interested in accessing the triangular Europe-Cuba-United States trade, etc.