Introduction

This special issue of the Business History Review has as its theme the business of trade in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. It has as its purpose to highlight the rich and diverse work that is being accomplished by business historians, including people like the four authors—Kenneth Morgan, Silvia Marzagalli, Linda Salvucci, and Thomas Truxes—whose essays constitute the substance of this issue. The articles have a common focus but reveal very different aspects of their shared theme in delightfully instructive ways. While both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are represented and the northern and southern regions are discussed, and while France and Spain and their colonies receive nearly as much play as Great Britain and its colonies (and one-time colonies), almost by the very nature of trade, the stories told are more about links and connections than they are about the limitations imposed by national and imperial boundaries. My contribution, as editor—an otherwise unknown tract written in the 1780s by a minor but influential British civil servant, Thomas Irving, and edited and newly presented here—implicitly argues the case put forth by the other contributors: it was the limitless bounds of eighteenth-century business that defined the Atlantic World.