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The Atlantic Sugar Trade at the End of the Seventeenth Century

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

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Abstract

In their efforts to undermine Dutch hegemony in the Atlantic sugar trade, the British were only partially successful in channeling colonial trade from the West Indian and American colonies to England. In the last chapter, Schreuder documents and concludes that merchants and commodity brokers of Amsterdam and London (including Sephardic merchants) helped to sustain the Anglo-Dutch sugar reexport trade and Amsterdam’s sugar refining industry for most of the second half of the seventeenth century but, as direct supplies of sugar from the Caribbean diminished, the Sephardic merchant network lost part of its function. As Sephardic merchants had sojourned from port to port and island to island to sustain their network of trade, and had shown great flexibility and business acumen, they justifiably deserve the designation of Port Jew.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce, 1585–1817,” in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2003), pp. 385–446; David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism , 1650–1770 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 2003).

  2. 2.

    Daniel Swetchinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea’: The Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History, vol. 72, no. 2, 1982, pp. 212–240; pp. 232–235.

  3. 3.

    Measures were taken to facilitate the reexport of sugar by fiscal means. All or part of the import duties paid on colonial produce in England were repaid when they were reexported, provided they were shipped within a specified time (called the “draw-back”). In the eighteenth century, the “ware-housing” system was introduced where goods were stored and only charged with import duties when they were delivered for home consumption. See David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), p. 184.

  4. 4.

    C. Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange (Ashgate, Aldershot, Burlington VT, 2006).

  5. 5.

    The GDP per capita in the Dutch Republic peaked at around 1650 and declined gradually during the next 200 years. GDP per capita in the United Kingdom was much lower than in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century but doubled during the eighteenth century. Whereas the Dutch Republic retained a significant share of distribution within the European market, a good part of Great Britain’s economic growth derived from industrialization and import of colonial staples. The increased quantities of imported cotton for the textile industry and of sugar for home consumption are indicative of the economic development of Great Britain, whereas the lack of sugar consumption in the Dutch Republic and dependence on export of refined sugar on to the European market signifies the stagnation of the Dutch economy. See also Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy; Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), pp. 490–50; pp. 385–389.

  6. 6.

    N. Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990).

  7. 7.

    Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches; The Dutch Trade in the Caribbean 1648–1795 (KITLV, Leiden, 1998); See also Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce, 1585–1817,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 385–445; and, Victor Enthoven, “That ‘Abominable Nest of Pirates’; St. Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680–1780,” Early American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2012, pp. 239–301. As a Dutch colony, since 1667, Suriname became the major Dutch sugar colony in the eighteenth century but during the last few decades of the seventeenth century the colony did not significantly contribute to supplies of the Amsterdam sugar market. According to Enthoven, “That ‘Abominable Nest of Pirates,’” 2012, pp. 258–259, reexport of sugar from St. Eustatius exceeded direct transport from Suriname during most of the eighteenth century.

  8. 8.

    Wim Klooster, “Curacao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.) Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 203–218; pp. 204–205; See also Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World or Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Brill, Leiden, 2002), Chapter 16; and Jonathan I. Israel, “Curacao, Amsterdam and the Rise of the Sephardi Trade System in the Caribbean, 1630–1700,” in Jane S. Gerber (ed.), The Jews in the Caribbean (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford, Portland, 2014), pp. 29–43.

  9. 9.

    Jonathan I. Israel, “The Jews of Curacao, New Amsterdam and the Guyanas: A Caribbean and Trans-Atlantic Network,” in Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora (Brill, Leiden, 2002), Chapter 16, p. 532. Jeronimo Nunes da Costa had died in 1695 but his firm apparently continued to stay in business. See also Chap. 6 for a discussion about Nunes da Costa’s sugar trade via the Azores.

  10. 10.

    Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism , 1550–1750 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989), p. 155. For the period 1701–1755, 791 vessels sailed from Curacao to the Dutch Republic of which 682 or 86 percent cleared for Amsterdam. During war years, such as for instance the Seven Year War from 1756 to 1763, trade intensified as Curacao remained neutral among the warring parties. See Klooster, “Curacao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in, Postma and Enthoven (eds.) Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 219–258; pp. 206–207.

  11. 11.

    Wim Klooster, “Curacao as a Transit Center to the Spanish Main and the French West Indies,” in Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2014), pp. 25–51; Swetchinski, “Conflict and Opportunity,” 1982, pp. 212–240. See also, Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curacao in the Early Modern World (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA., 2012).

  12. 12.

    Wim Klooster, “Curacao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.) Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 203–218; 214.

  13. 13.

    We also have evidence that Governor Christopher Codrington sent cargo of sugar to Curacao for slaves in return. At times he allegedly used British naval vessels under his command to conduct trade with Curacao. See Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York University Press, New York, London, 2011), p. 187.

  14. 14.

    As discussed in previous chapters. See also, Stephen A. Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750, (University of Florida, Gainesville, 1984) p. 142, and, Klooster, “Curacao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 204–205.

  15. 15.

    See Isaac and Suzanne Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (American Jewish Archives, Cincinatti, 1970), p. 518; City Archives of Amsterdam, document 2209, dated September 1660. See also Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas (Gefen Publishing, Jerusalem, 2002).

  16. 16.

    Trade with the British island colonies topped the list of both incoming and departing vessels for St. Eustatius for the years 1744, 1762, and 1776, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the total number of vessels recorded; see Victor Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates’: St. Eustatius and the North Americans, 1680–1780,” Early American Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, Special Issue: Anglo-Dutch Revolutions (Spring 2012), pp. 239–301; see Table 4, p. 261. See also, Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2010).

  17. 17.

    Koot, Empire at the Periphery (2011), p. 127, pp. 182–188.

  18. 18.

    Enthoven, “That ‘Abominable Nest of Pirates’,” 2012, pp. 253–256.

  19. 19.

    Enthoven, “That ‘Abominable Nest of Pirates’,” 2012, pp. 239–301; pp. 242–252, 258. In 1701, the Surveyor General of English Customs, Edward Randolph, concluded that great quantities of sugar from Nevis, Antigua, and St. Christopher were sent to St. Eustatius. Between 1720 and 1780, sugar exports to the Netherlands increased sixfold and it is estimated that sugar shipped to Amsterdam from St. Eustatius in 1779 exceeded the amount shipped from Suriname.

  20. 20.

    See Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West India Collonies (1690). See also Koot, Empire at the Periphery (2011), pp. 136–138.

  21. 21.

    In 1723, there were five Sephardic Jewish families residing on the island who had come from Amsterdam; see Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates’,” 2012, p. 250, with reference to J. Hartog, The Jews and St. Eustatius (Aruba, n.p., 1976). Many more families lived in St. Eustatius by the time the American Revolution began in 1765. Early settlers included Abraham Issac Henriquez, David Seraiva and Daniel and Aron Cohen, Mozes Henriquez, Samuel Hoheb and Judah Cappe, as well as the Pinheiro, Obedients, and Nunes families. The community had a synagogue, Honen Dalim (founded in 1737). See Isaac Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles (Cincinnati, 1976), p. 518.

  22. 22.

    As suggested by the journey of Rowland Gideon in 1679 when he received endenization papers (July 1679 in Barbados) and in the same year traveled to Antiqua, another British colony. See Wilfred S. Samuel, “Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados, 1680,” in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, XIII, 1936. Gideon moved freely between Barbados, Nevis, and Antigua.

  23. 23.

    See also, Fortune, Merchants and Jews (1989), p. 127.

  24. 24.

    Gerard Nahon, “Amsterdam and the Portuguese Nacao of the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gerber, The Jews in the Caribbean (2014), pp. 67–83; Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean (2002).

  25. 25.

    Jonathan Israel, “An Amsterdam Jewish merchants of the Golden Age: Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (1620–1697),” Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 18, no. January 1984, pp. 21–40, details on the transit trade via Curacao and the Azores. Jeronimo Nunes da Costa died in 1697 but he is still listed among Amsterdam firms trading with Curacao along with his eldest son Alexandre and Franciso and Duarte Nunes da Costa in a list of firms composed by Jonathan Israel in a table on p. 532, in Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora (2002). Enthoven, “‘That Abominable Nest of Pirates’,” (2012) documents the importance of the sugar trade for St. Eustatius (pp. 258–266). St . Eustatius’ reexports of sugar formed 72 percent of all the reexport trade for the island. See also, Klooster, Illicit Riches (1998), p. 191.

  26. 26.

    Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade (2010).

  27. 27.

    Daniel Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, London, Portland OR, 2000) Chapter 3, pp. 154–155. The Mocatto family were of Marrano background and had arrived in Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century. By 1670, Moses Mocatta moved to London, where he appears on a synagogue list of Bevis Marks in 1671. He lists his occupation as merchant and diamond broker in London and founder of a bullion bank.

  28. 28.

    Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010), p. 284, as discussed in Chap. 6, sheds some light on the London reexport trade but is not very specific on the sugar trade. Ormrod, in The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), Chapter 6: “The Dutch staple market and the growth of English re-exports,” pp. 181–206, devotes a lengthy discussion on the subject matter and refers to the tobacco and woolen trade but does not report or very little on the sugar reexport trade.

  29. 29.

    Henry Roseveare (ed.), Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century: The Marescoe-David letters, 1668–1680 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987), p. 68, with reference to, J.J. Reesse, De Suikerhandel van Amsterdam (1908), Appendix F, and Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740 (1958), pp. 158–159.

  30. 30.

    H. Brugmans, “Statistiek van den in- en uitvoer van Amsterdam, 1 ocktober 1667–30 september 1668,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 19, 1898: 125–183, Table 14.14, p. 438, in Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.) Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 385–446.

  31. 31.

    The suggestion has been made that a very large share of British imports was for domestic consumption, yet, customs records for 1698–1699 show that at least 40 percent of the sugar import was reexported. See further discussion at the end of this chapter.

  32. 32.

    Bristol became the major sugar import-export center in the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1993).

  33. 33.

    Public Record office, Customs 2/6, 1698–1699.

  34. 34.

    Roseveare, Markets and Merchants (1987), p. 68, with reference to Brugmans, “Statistiek van den in- en uitvoer van Amsterdam,” (1898), p. 175.

  35. 35.

    See also Violet Barbour, “Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. 67, 1949, pp. 1–171; pp. 92–93 with reference to Dalby Thomas (1690), An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Collonies, (1690, reprinted Arno Press, New York, 1972) See also, Sir Charles Whitworth, State of the Trade of Great Britain in its Imports and Exports, 1697–1773 (London 1776). Klooster, Illicit Riches (1998), pp. 90–91. The number of ships arriving from Curacao and St. Eustatius during the first decade of the eighteenth century, respectively, were 130 from Curacao and 120 (estimated) from St. Eustatius; see Victor Enthoven, “An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic Commerce, 1585–1817,” in Postma and Enthoven, (eds.), Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), Table 14.3, p. 406.

  36. 36.

    Barbour, “Capitalism in Amsterdam,” 1949, pp. 92–93. F.W. Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1917), pp. 166–167 makes reference to Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account (1690), who estimated that about 1500 hogsheads of sugar per year were sold to Dutch merchants by Leeward Islanders.

  37. 37.

    Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 2nd edition, 1694), pp. 22–23, referred to by Barbour, “Capitalism in Amsterdam,” 1949, p. 93.

  38. 38.

    Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (Leister University Press, New York, 1978).

  39. 39.

    Jeronimo Nunes da Costa as agent of the Portuguese Crown had a license to trade Brazil diamonds. The family remained in service of the Portuguese Crown until the youngest son of Jeronimo died in 1738.

  40. 40.

    Askhenazi Jews had arrived in Amsterdam as refugees and were mostly poor peddlers in the 1630s, and a wide cultural divide separated the wealthy Portuguese Jews from the poor Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the newcomers earned their living as street vendors but they also found employment in the diamond trade or as domestic servants to Portuguese Jews. By 1675, the 5000 Ashkenazi Jews in Amsterdam outnumbered Sephardim two to one. In the second half of the eighteenth century, wealthy Ashkenazi Jews began to control the tobacco trade and the diamond trade. Both London and Amsterdam had Askhenazi merchant houses of which the House of the Prager Brothers in London and Amsterdam were among the most prominent.

  41. 41.

    Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978). See also Zahadieh, The Capital and the Colonies (2010).

  42. 42.

    Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), pp. 60–66. See also Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Second Series, vol. XLII, October, 1986, pp. 570–593; p. 584, who concludes that by the end of the seventeenth century, bullion export from Jamaica was in excess of sugar exports and in total Jamaican sugar exports were probably no more than one-fifth of all sugar exports from the English Caribbean.

  43. 43.

    To illustrate, he pointed out how important Jewish merchants were for the Dutch West India trade and Amsterdam’s sugar refining industry. In his treatise, Child (1693) explained why the Dutch had refused to grant Jews to leave Suriname when the territory became a Dutch colony at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1667). Like in Barbados, the Sephardic Jewish community had been established in Suriname in the 1650s with the expulsion of Jews from Brazil. Like the Barbados Sephardic Jewish community, the Suriname merchant community also had its primary ties with Amsterdam in the sugar trade and the refusal to allow members of the community to relocate to Barbados or Jamaica, Child thought, could be seen and understood in that light. See Josiah Child, The New Discourse on Trade (1693); See also Max J. Kohler, “Jewish Activity in American Colonial Commerce,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 10, 1902, pp. 47–64; and, by the same author, “A Memorial of Jews to Parliament concerning Jewish Participation in Colonial Trade, 1696,” in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 18, 1909, pp. 123–127; and Jonathan I. Israel, “The Jews of Curacao, New Amsterdam and the Guianas: A Caribbean and Trans-Atlantic Network (1648–1740),” in Israel, Diasporas in the Diaspora (2002), Chapter 16, pp. 511–532.

  44. 44.

    Swetchinski, “Conflict and Opportunity,” 1982, p. 230. See also, Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), pp. 26–27.

  45. 45.

    Suriname became the major source of sugar supply to Amsterdam’s refineries in the eighteenth century. The colony was shipping at average 10,000 chests of sugar every year during the mid-decades of the eighteenth century. See Johannes Postma, “Suriname and its Atlantic Connections, 1667–1795,” in Postma and Enthoven, Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 287–322.

  46. 46.

    Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989), p. 356, Table 7.18. According to Eddy Stols (2004), part of the reason of the decline of sugar refining capacity in Amsterdam was due to decentralization of the industry in the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands. See Eddy Stols, “The Expansion of the Sugar market in Western Europe,” in Stuart Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, London, 2004), pp. 237–288; p. 274.

  47. 47.

    Josiah Child, Discourse on Trade (1694), p. 37, referred to in Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies (2010), p. 218.

  48. 48.

    Gyorgy Novaky, “On trade, production and relations of production: The sugar refineries of seventeenth-century Amsterdam,” in Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, volume 23, no. 4, 1997, pp. 459–489. See also, Kenneth Morgan, “Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations in the Atlantic World, 1688–1783,” in Oostindie and Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections (2014), pp. 119–138, and in the same volume, Christian Koot, “Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733,” pp. 72–102 and Jonathan I. Israel, “An Amsterdam Jewish merchant of the Golden Age: Jeronimo Nunes da Costa (1620–1697),” Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 18, no. January 1984, pp. 21–40, referred to earlier, who details on the transit trade via Curacao and the Azores.

  49. 49.

    Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy (1989), pp. 390–91. Production of the Dutch sugar colonies of Suriname , Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo had begun to produce sugar for export in 1750 in the amount equivalent to sugar production from Brazil a century earlier. See Charles Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1941, reprinted 1966), p. 9.

  50. 50.

    See Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), pp. 256–258 and the Prager Brothers correspondence, chapters 10–12.

  51. 51.

    Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), Chapter 11, pp. 209–210.

  52. 52.

    Amsterdam’s Jewish population (Sephardic and Ashkenazi) was around 4000 in 1650. By 1700, as a result of immigration from Germany, the Jewish population had increased to 8000. Most of the new immigrants were Ashkenazi, who were engaged in trade between the Dutch Republic and Germany, including the sugar trade. See Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, p. 154 , p. 164.

  53. 53.

    Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), pp. 265–266; see also H. Kellenbenz, Sephardim an der Unteren Elbe (Wiesbaden, 1958), p. 469. Ashkenazi merchants had better developed trade networks in East-Central Europe and the Baltic states and were able to distribute through these channels more readily than the Sephardic merchants could.

  54. 54.

    Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), Part I, pp. 31–99.

  55. 55.

    Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1989 ), pp. 178–179. See also Maurice Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews during the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions Jewish Historical Society of England, 24, 1973, discussed in the previous chapter.

  56. 56.

    Jonathan I. Israel, “The Dutch Sephardi Elite at the End of the 17th Century: The Observations of Gregorio Leti (1631–1701),” in Israel, Diasporas in the Diaspora, Chapter 15.

  57. 57.

    See quote in Charles Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966), p. 4.

  58. 58.

    Quote Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, p. 182, referred to in Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), p. 186, footnote 17, with reference to Ralph Davis, “English Foreign Trade 1660–1700,” in Economic History Review, 6, 1954.

    Kenneth Morgan, “Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations in the Atlantic World, 1688–1783,” in Oostindie and Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connection 1680–1800 (2014), pp. 118 ff. For the value of English reexports for the period 1700–1760, see Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), pp. 181–206; p. 182, p. 189.

  59. 59.

    Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Elisabeth Sifton Books, Viking, New York, 1985), p. 46.

  60. 60.

    Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), pp. 181–190; p. 182. See also, Nuala Zahedieh, “London and the Colonial Consumer in the late Seventeenth Century,” in The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 47, no. 2, May 1994, pp. 239–261. It is estimated that the Dutch took one-third of the British import of tobacco from the West Indies in the early eighteenth century: see Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce, pp. 9–16; p. 10.

  61. 61.

    Jonathan Israel in “Jews and the Stock Exchange: The Amsterdam Financial Crash of 1688,” Diasporas within the Diaspora (2002), pp. 449–487; explains the transition to brokerage in terms of the decline in the sugar trade with Brazil via Portugal which left Sephardic merchants with few options other than the brokerage and commodity trade . The number of Sephardic investors in both the West and East India Company increased dramatically in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  62. 62.

    Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 14. Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans (2002), pp. 143–148.

  63. 63.

    Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 15. For a look into the Amsterdam stock exchange and trade in colonial staple goods like sugar and coffee, see David Liss’ novel, The Coffee Trader, set in Amsterdam 1659. Lesger, in The Rise of the Amsterdam Market (2006), Chapter 6, pp. 214–257, devotes a chapter to explaining the importance of information exchange to successful enterprise and declares the Amsterdam Bourse as the nerve center of commerce.

  64. 64.

    Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), pp. 17–19.

  65. 65.

    Herbert I. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam (The Bayard Press, Williamsport PA, 1937), p. 183. Of the 300 brokers in Amsterdam in 1612, 10 were Jewish; in 1645, there were 30 Jewish brokers of a total of 430, and from 1657 to 1720, approximately 50 Jewish brokers were active in the commodities trades.

  66. 66.

    See Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 42. For example, correspondence from M. and B. Harrison—a London merchant house—to the de Neufville trading company in Amsterdam, reporting on prices for sugar and coffee from St. Domingo, sugar from Barbados, and coffee, cacao, and sugar from Martinique (October 8, 1756) stated that the merchant house expected prices to decline as the Scandinavian and Baltic markets had ended for the year because of frost expected for the winter months. The letter ended by predicting that prices would be considerably lower and that in case “you should think it proper to speculate in any of those articles, we beg the favour of your commission.”

  67. 67.

    The year 1689 marked the “Glorious Revolution,” which was the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch “stadhouder” William III, Prince of Orange, after which ties with the Dutch Republic increased and Anglo-Dutch trade recovered. Ralph Davis, “English Foreign Trade, 1700–1774,” in The Economic History Review, New Series, volume 15, no. 2, 1962, pp. 285–303, and David Ormrod, “The Demise of Regulated Trading in England: The Case of the Merchant Adventurers, 1650–1730,” in C. Lesger and L. Noordegraaf (eds.), in Early Modern Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship Times (Hollandse Historische Reeks, 24, 1993), pp. 253–268; pp. 262 ff. In 1689, London withdrew the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers which had held control over regulated trade to and from England. Foreign merchants had been participating in the Adventurers’ commerce as interlopers and reports were made that foreign merchants from the Dutch Republic and Germany were buying colonial commodities directly from England.

  68. 68.

    Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (1795 ed.) pp. 110–111, referred to in Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 4.

  69. 69.

    Temple, Observations on the United Provinces (London 1673), p. 124, referred to in Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 16.

  70. 70.

    Kenneth Morgan, “Anglo-Dutch Economic Relations in the Atlantic World, 1688–1783,” in Oostindie and Roitman (eds.), Dutch Atlantic Connections (2014), pp. 119–138; in the same volume, Christian Koot, “Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733,” pp. 72–102.

  71. 71.

    Tjalling P. van der Kooy, Hollandse Stapel Markt en Haar Verval (H.J. Paris, Amsterdam, 1931), pp. 36–45; pp. 52–57. Van der Kooy presents evidence that during the eighteenth century most of the reexport from London to Amsterdam was distributed to Germany.

  72. 72.

    Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), pp. 20–27. By the mid-eighteenth century, Hamburg’s trade with France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy was growing rapidly, and it was reported that three times as much sugar, coffee, and indigo were shipped to Hamburg from France as compared to Amsterdam (Wilson, Anglo Dutch Commerce (1966), p. 44). See also Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), pp. 307–333.

  73. 73.

    Ormrod, “The Demise of Regulated Trading in England,” 1993, pp. 253–268.

  74. 74.

    In Roseveare, Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century (1987), we gain a glance into this market from correspondence between a merchant house (Marescoe-David) in London and various merchants and agents in Europe. Only one Sephardic merchant (Aboab) from Amsterdam is mentioned and listed in the index suggesting that the Dutch merchants and Sephardic merchants in Amsterdam operated in separate market relationships. From the business letters exchanged between 1664 and 1678, sugar is the principal export commodity in value; see Appendix C, p. 578, and Hamburg is the principal destination.

  75. 75.

    Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003), pp. 197–208; see also, Tjalling P. van der Kooy, Hollands Stapelmarkt en haar verval (H.J. Paris, Amsterdam n.d), pp. 37–39; pp. 42–44.

  76. 76.

    Charles Wilson, Anglo Dutch Commerce and Finance, pp. 116–117, lists over 30 Amsterdam Jewish brokers and agents working in London for Amsterdam correspondents between 1720 and 1780. Most all of them were Sephardic Jews and many of the family names were familiar from the Wiznitzer , Shillstone, and Notarial Freight Records used in this study. Wilson suggests that in the reexport Anglo -Dutch trade, London Jews (or Marranos) dealt with Amsterdam Jews, and London Christian with Amsterdam Christians. Records of Procurations for the period analyzed by Wilson from the Notarial Archives in Amsterdam (Appendix B, C, and D, pp. 206–224) support the observation that in exchange between buyers and sellers in Amsterdam and London, Jewish merchants trade within their own cohort and separate from the London-Dutch merchant cohort; see Roseveare, Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century (1987).

  77. 77.

    The reader is referred to the Preface and Chap. 5 for more detail. Here, I will give only the references to the source materials from which the family history was reconstructed. For a detailed biography of Moshe Gideon Abudiente, see Marian Sarrag and Ramon F. Sarrage, “The Poet Moses Gideon Abudiente and His Family in Amsterdam and Hamburg: Echoes of 1666 Sabbatian Polemics in Hamburg Epitaphs,” Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 214–240. Moseh Gideon Abudiente (1580–1600) was buried in the Altona Sephardic cemetery in Hamburg. See Michael Studemund-Halevy (ed.), Die Sefarden in Hamburg, Part II (Buske, Hamburg, 1997) English Edition, p. 680; also see website of the Jewish Encyclopedia. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/691-abudiente#anchor1, accessed, December 7, 2015. Abraham ben Gideon Abudiente. In England, the family discarded the name Abudiente and called themselves Gideon. Rowland Gideon was born Rehiel Abudiente in Gluckstadt but anglicized his name when he moved to the British West Indies. The name Rowland Gideon appears on a list of Barbados planters in 1692; see Wilfred Samuel, “A Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados in the Year 1680,” pp. 37–38. See also Lee M. Friedman, “Rowland Gideon, an early Boston Jew, and his family,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 35, 1939, pp. 27–37. Rowland received endenization papers in July 1679 in Barbados.

  78. 78.

    Yogev, Diamonds and Coral (1978), pp. 51–53. Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans (2000), p. 154.

  79. 79.

    Another London financier was Joseph Salvadore, who served as agent for Isaac de Pinto from Amsterdam. De Pinto seems to have served as the issuing house for British loans at Amsterdam. Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce (1966), pp. 116–118, see also pp. 160–163. For a discussion about the emergence Sephardic brokers in Amsterdam, see Jonathan I. Israel, “Jews and the Stock Exchange: The Amsterdam Financial Crash of 1688,” in Israel, Diasporas within the Diasporas (2002), first published under the title “The Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the English Revolution of 1688,” in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis no. 103, 1990, pp. 412–40.

  80. 80.

    See, for instance, Jeronimo Nunes da Costa consignments via the Azores discussed earlier in Chap. 6.

  81. 81.

    See Christopher Ebert, “Dutch Trade with Brazil Before the Dutch West India Company, 1587–1621,” in Postma and Enthoven (eds.) Riches from Atlantic Commerce (2003), pp. 49–76, p. 66–67, 72–73; most of the Brazil trade in colonial products (sugar and brazilwood) took place via Portugal. See also, by Christopher Ebert, Between Empires: Brazilian sugar in the early Atlantic Economy 1550–1630 (Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2008).

  82. 82.

    Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora (2002). See also, his article, “Curacao, Amsterdam and the Rise of the Sephardi Trade System in the Caribbean, 1630–1700,” in Gerber (ed.), The Jews in the Caribbean (2014), pp. 29–43. And in the same volume, Noah L. Gelfand, “To Live and to Trade: The Status of Sephardi Mercantile Communities in the Atlantic World during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” pp. 45–64.

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    Yda Schreuder

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Schreuder, Y. (2019). The Atlantic Sugar Trade at the End of the Seventeenth Century. In: Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97061-5_7

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