Question

f you were summarizing the history of the 18th century Atlantic world (i.e.: the century from 1700-1800) to a friend or family member, what would you highlight as being the 3 most critical events or developments of this era? As always, defend your choices with as much specific historical knowledge and analysis as possible.

Answer 1

The number of 'revolutions' raised by historians for this period — a sugar revolution, a consumer revolution and an informmatio revolution suggests that economic change in the Atlantic world was dramatic. British colonies on mainland North America existed across the entire Atlantic world of the eighteenth century remains debatable, but tastes undoubtedly grew tremendously, lifestyles were transformed, luxuries became necessities, and habits of consumption were fundamentally modified. Smoking tobacco was widespread;

Atlantic wines, coffee, chocolate, rum, and tea were common beverages, while spending on them was only a small portion of most household budgets; although pottery, clothes, jewellery, weapons, and metal goods were in great demand in all Atlantic colonies. The profits from Atlantic trade did not bring about the European industrial revolution, but the edibles and consumables of the Atlantic helped replenish European human 'energy resources,' enabling the continent to transcend Malthusian constraints and enabling African populations to survive the slave trade in the Atlantic

Integration was far from being solely economic or geographical. In the legal sphere, institutions such as prize courts emerged to deal with the growth of inter-imperial commercial competition; on the other hand, as planters struggled with the police of their slaves, they borrowed provisions of slave codes from neighboring empires in an inter-imperial emulation process. The dozens of scientific expeditions as well as hundreds of individual engineers, botanists, architects, artists, and urban planners who traveled across the Atlantic collecting and transmitting useful data experiencing, exploring, observing, and then regularizing, systematizing, and universalizing have greatly contributed to a circum-Atlantic exchange of knowledge.

Although warfare in some respects made the eighteenth-century Atlantic world a more interconnected place, it (and especially the Seven Years War, 1756–63, the first truly global war) also led to its re-splitting into multiple politics, and in two phases. First of all, this massive conflagration affected the majority of European nations, and violence spread to overseas territories as they were considered to contribute ever more dramatically, and in several different ways, to the prosperity of the states vying for European supremacy.Then all the Atlantic powers underwent a period of reorganization and restructuring in order to cover the costs of the debts that had accumulated during the war, and to defend territories that had been maintained and/or acquired.