Abstract

"Contingent-Sea: Mariners' Responsiveness in the British Atlantic"

Hannah Knox Tucker, Copenhagen Business School (htu.bhl@cbs.dk)

This paper exposes the adaptive and flexible practices ship captains used to make trades happen in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. It traces the late seventeenth-century business pressures that facilitated captains increasingly taking on the trading functions that a separate agent, the supercargo, previously performed. It then explores how captains used their autonomy to respond to tumultuous trading environments and adapt their employers’ visions into actionable realities. Using John Ramsay’s 1741 trading voyage to Kingston to frame the paper, I unravel the contingent practices captains engaged in to find sailors, make repairs, locate advantageous markets, negotiate freights, trade goods, and load their vessels.

Using Ramsay’s logbook and other illustrative letters, depositions, and receipt books, this paper reconstructs captains’ movements in port on behalf of their ship owners. Captains’ activities in port reveal their efforts to develop trading opportunities in the face of geopolitical and market uncertainty and resistance from sailors and enslaved people. Despite the chaos of this world, scholarly studies of the Atlantic economy have often focused on the ways traders tried to create and impose systems of order. Studies of networks, merchant culture, newspapers, letters, finance, and insurance have revealed the ingenious ways merchants worked to create a coherent Atlantic trading system. By focusing on quotidian responsiveness, this paper provides a valuable complement to studies focused on stationary merchants’ systemic risk management by exposing the chaotic uncertainty underneath.