Abstract

"Europe and the Atlantic Revolutions: Hamburg’s Atlantic Trade, c. 1785-1798"

Torsten dos Santos Arnold, Justus-Liebig University Giessen (arnold.torsten@gmail.com)

Torsten dos Santos Arnold evaluates the US-American trade with Europe by a case study on Hamburg, one of Europe’s main hubs for commodities at the turn of the 18th century. Merchants in Hamburg mainly imported colonial plantation crops through French ports throughout the 18th century. This paper aims to show the mechanisms of how US-American and Hamburg merchants adapted to the new trade opportunities that resulted from the Atlantic Revolutions and the shifts of commodities chains away from Bordeaux and Nantes towards Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia.