On the waterfront: wharfside spaces and economic culture in Britain’s Atlantic world

"In the past decade, early modern historians have drawn more often than before on space as an analytical tool. Identifying domestic, public, and sacred spaces as arenas of interaction, scholars have explored how natural and built environments are instrumental in our understanding of some of the major cultural and political developments of the era. Some have even identified this work as constituting a “spatial turn.” While a number of aspects of economic history, such as the growth of empires and the creation of consumer societies, have benefited from spatial inquiries, economic historians have been relatively slow to embrace the broader possibilities of space as an analytical category. Theoretically-driven discussion of the capitalist landscape by social scientists has done little to persuade scholars who have traditionally favoured quantitative analysis that spaces and places are important beyond their role as novel sites of middling and elite consumption. I want to argue for the importance of investigating the spatial aspects of the economy, especially when it comes to our understanding of early modern economic culture. Specifically, I am interested in how practice and space influenced the structures of the local economy. Of course, such influences are hard to quantify, and this may be what has led many economic historians to overlook them. However, in order to fully grasp the British Atlantic’s complex economic culture, and the ways in which its elaboration affected economic culture, I believe we need to grasp the nettle and look more closely at these “unquantifiables.”"