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Hello, I'm Bernardo Matislasso. Thank you for being with us again in New Books Network. Today we have Jeremy Land talking about his recent book, Colonial Ports, real trade and the roots of the American Revolution, 1700 to 1776, published by Brill. And Jeremy, thank you for being with us today.
Jeremy is a postdoctoral researcher in economic history at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki. He completed his PhD at the University of University in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, and has worked for various institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the University of Helsinki, University of Iowa, I'll be able to pronounce that one, and the Bletch State University. His research includes Global Maritime Trade and the Early World, Smoggling, Global American History, War and War Economy, and the Digital History and Network Development. He's also the, currently, the meeting coordinator for the Economic Association at Haskell, our, our, organizational post in a number of other learned societies.
He's currently living in Gothenburg's student with his wife and child. Again, Jeremy, thank you for joining us. And my first question would be, how do you become an academic, since you don't know this other work before or after? Well, frankly, it's me coming into contact with economic historians that are fantastic.
And I was initially going to school to become a teacher for history in high school, discovered that I really liked the research and writing aspect of things, and then I began my master's program. And that's when I ran into my former advisor, but also her colleague and co-author, Yari El-Ranta, who's now at Helsinki, but was at Appalachian State when I was working on my master's. And he made me fall in love with economic history, which is, you know, a tough thing to say. But sometimes you just have to find the right person in place and that he gave me a lot of sort of good advice and made it interesting to me.
And I think that's part of the struggle is finding something that you find interesting. And then after that, it was just a matter of getting into PhD programs and then finding the next job opportunity that comes with it, which is difficult coming from the history side of things with economic history. But, but I've had opportunities in Europe now and it's becoming seems, it seems, it seems bright. So good.
And since you have worked on both sides of the Atlantic, tell us a little bit about what we do give advice to other early career researchers on how to write a monograph or, you know, finding a publisher, or if it's really worth the hassle. As a historian, we tend to move towards monographs, especially with dissertations. And so my dissertation was written with the intention to eventually turn it into a publishable monograph. And that starting from that perspective sort of helped to get this ready for that process.
But even then, a dissertation is not a monograph. And so there takes, it takes a moment to really think about where you want to target, what's your target audience, what's your target publisher. And there's so many options available sometimes that it makes it sort of daunting task initially. But oftentimes it's just talking to the publishers who are at the conferences that you go to, or just even emailing acquisitions editors and just asking, is this research something that is published?
Well, monograph, but more importantly, are you interested in publishing this? And as an early career scholar, you have to think about a couple of things. One, is it going to be a good quality publication? Does it have the weight that you need to sort of get across the finish line on job applications, et cetera?
But the other thing is also about time to completion. And so some of the bigger publishers like Cambridge or Oxford will take quite a while. And whereas other publishers like Brill are very good, have a very strong peer review process, but the time to getting it to the end product is quite a bit shorter because they don't have a significant backlog of publications and press. And so I think that is something to keep in mind as you go forward with that.
So a practical device that is sort of theoretical advice, but I think that's, if you're thinking about getting a job and staying in the academic career, that you have to think about getting it done. That's important. And let me push this practical side for a moment. Since you have your PhD in the US and you have worked in Europe now for some a couple of years, how do you see the differences in organizational culture of universities and also in how they receive the type of publication in terms of career progression?
So there's two sides to this. In the United States, there's a, especially in history departments, there's a sort of reliance upon the monograph as the way to get tenure. And so that was the system that I was trained in. And so it was sort of the trifonographs are also still important in Europe as well, but they tend to sort of think about journal articles as sort of the main objective.
But I think it is ultimately a result of the sort of different types of university and academic systems that are on different sides of the ocean. In history departments, they tend to be a little bit more insular. They don't think about social, they get divided up from sociologists and from political scientists a bit more frequently. Whereas in this, the universities that I've been in at the University of Helsinki and at Gothenburg, there's a lot of different types of scholars that come in and there's actually economic history units, but they're often part of bigger departments.
Like for example, my own is the Department of Economy and Society where we have human geographers, entrepreneurship and then economic and business history, all sort of under the same roof and they're having conversations with one another. When you have coffee together, you tend to talk about things. I think that's an important distinction that you see between European institutional structures and the US. And so I think when it comes to whether or not the monograph is acceptable or not, I think they're quite acceptable in both arena.
The US is a bit more emphasis on it, whereas the Europeans tend to put more emphasis on the big time journal publications. But I also don't, they're also very much interested in the monograph as well, especially as we move more towards open access to the world where that becomes more readily available than it used to be. Great. Let's move on to the book itself.
And you make a very interesting and detailed introduction in setting where they see them going to ask you to expand on that in a moment. I just want to take what I think is the main argument or hypothesis of the work, which is to establish the current view and argue that Boston, New York, of Nadell, we are not really three different ports, but part of our larger ecosystem. That's the way to, you know, in a short term. So we'd like to tell us a little bit more about how you came to this argument and how then you unpacked it into the seven chapters that are in the book.
Yeah, absolutely. The way I came to this subject is actually, you know, in many ways, a similar way to I came to academic career, where having conversations with the scholars that were leading my or at least supporting my career and advising my career, when I sat down with my advisor at Georgia State University, William Nodry, I had initially intended to write something about the economic impact of the military occupation in Boston just before the revolution and through the first year or so of the revolution. And, and he sat back, listened to what I had in mind and then asked one very important and quite a question that I didn't really think about before. And that was, well, why Boston?
Why did the British occupy Boston? And when he asked me this question, I didn't quite know the answer to that. And I think that led me on many different paths as to, okay, well, why was Boston so important to the British? And why, why was it that this was a place of hotbed resistance, a hotbed of resistance?
And so why, why is it that the British were willing to spend quite precious military resources and naval resources for that matter in suppressing what has often been called backwater colonies, right? And so I started looking into a little bit more deeper and then I realized that these trade connections and this straightups flow, they're not just Boston, but New York and Philadelphia, which by the way, were also occupied at various points during the American Revolution. And, and I realized that these three cities had a quite outsized influence on North America and really the Atlantic economy as a whole. And so I was actually looking a bit more about why they even wanted to suppress this rebellion in the first place and that led me to this argument that I developed.
And I think it's important to also note that it was sort of the key point of the occupation to try to stamp down on this sort of economic growing economic power of Boston and also these ports as well. So I was sort of making an example to the other ports that, hey, this could, this could also happen to you. And so I think this was a key, key sort of reasoning for why I wanted to get into this. And, and it's not what I ended up thinking I was going to start to do, but ultimately you end up with something.
This is usually how it happens with dissertation research anyway, but this was a particularly strong question that he asked. It needs very much the case with most, most dissertation of everybody has that laser for, you know, beam focus to finish exactly where they wanted to. But certainly it's a very interesting story. It's somehow it reminded me, although I didn't see that much of the discussion on the industrial districts and into that discussion around international trade that, for example, by computer has adopted in that, you know, what is it that it's competing and I would like to explore and work with all of that.
If you mean, how are they competing with one another or is it more, how are they competing more globally? Because you do make a point both in the book and now that it is important, even in a framework of mercantilisms, how they are interlinking the metropolis with other parts that is not, it's not only that they are an entry point into the expanding frontier, but that they are also having this interconnection with other parts. And it's the imposition of a more, for lack of a better word, orthodox or restrictive, mercantilistic approach that it's where things kind of, you know, there's a number of pressures that are coming out and make things, you know, end up in the between an arms struggle. Yeah, so I think one of the most important things to note is that when you talk about these three cities, they are indeed part of at least what the British view as a mercantilistic empire where that empire is supposed to be self-sufficient trade within itself, not trade with other places.
And only the Metropole that is London or the Main Islands of the UK are to trade directly with foreign powers that be in France or Portugal or otherwise. But the reality is always more to a mercier than the law states it's going to be. I think we all know this to be the case. But I think in previous research, there's been a bit of a sort of an assumption that these rules and regulations tend to constrain the Americans to within the British Empire largely.
And this to a certain extent isn't true only insofar as you talk about sort of maybe within colonial sphere, not necessarily within that. But if you look at Boston, New York and Philadelphia and you start to dig deeper into the actual data, you start to see that there's a much more cosmopolitan type of trade going on. They're trading not just with British colonies, they're not trading just with the British Metropole, they're actually trading directly with other retropoles, namely Lisbon in particular. But you can talk about France, which is a bit more illegal to the British than say for the Portuguese.
I can talk about that a little bit more later if you'd like. But more importantly, these three cities were supposed to be supported fiscally, economically, militarily by the British. Well, that particular imperial capacity just didn't get, we just wasn't there for the British. And so Boston, New York and Philadelphia had to look elsewhere in many ways to find them underneath it and they were supposed to be importing from London and from the other merchants.
And so they couldn't just go through British merchants in order to be able to be economically successful. But simultaneously this puts them in conflict with the actual laws in which they're supposed to obey. And at the same time, it actually puts them in competition with the British merchants that they're supposed to be subservient to. And it ultimately puts them in not just conflict with the British state.
But by the time we get to the 1760s, you start to see an enormous number of petitions to the British government by British merchants, British base merchants that are saying, Hey, you got to really tamp down on these these American merchants. They're getting kind of they're really getting into my business here. So that's more of a it's really important to note that that it's not just a sort of imperial or colonial resistance to imperial rules. It's also colonial growth and economic growth coming into conflict with the actual subjects who are supposed to benefit from against the list.
And that's probably part of the fascination or or not you you mentioned in your chapter three specifically sugar and there has been or there is a strand of literature that uses sugar and another one uses cotton as measures of globalization. I don't know if you want to expand on it a bit of that because this is in the context of trading commodities and later on inter intercolonial. Yeah, I think if you look at these three cities in particular, you have to say that sugar is a core commodity for all three economies. But you also have to add fish and grain to that as well.
Because most of their trade really is with the West Indies and to the other parts of the colonies on the Western half of the Atlantic. Most of the ships that are going to and from Boston, or Philadelphia are going to places in the West Indies or along the coastal North America and sugar sort of and I don't know how to it's really there's a lot of different ways that sugar plays a place of role in these economies. There's actually surprisingly large amount of distillation that's occurring in New England in particular, but there's also some happening in Philadelphia, New York. They're importing sugar molasses, raw materials, then producing a refined product, which then increases its value.
And then they're also re-exporting. It's actually competing fairly well on the market with West Indian rum, for example. It's even the colonists though who were selling their old realm are saying, no West Indian rum is better, but still they could sell this for a little cheaper price. And for sailors, as long as they had Rome, they were happy.
And that really is an important thing to note. And I think when it comes to sugar, it also had a sort of extremely, what sort of symbiotic relationship with grain and fish. Because the West Indies did not produce enough food for its slave populations, for its labor supply, they had to import goods from areas north to be able to feed both slaves and the colonists themselves. And so grain shipments made sense to strip grain down, pick up sugar, take it back, or molasses, or any of the other byproducts.
And another sort of interesting thing that's happening in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, they actually have some sugar refineries developed by the 1760s and 1770s, mainly because there's actually such an enormous growth in the West Indian colonies. They can't just refine it all. And so there happened to be a market for as well. And this continues this symbiotic relationship between those three cities, especially and the West Indies.
This also is, I didn't really discuss it too deeply in the slave plantations and colonies for their south and North America. Charleston, Wilmington, and some Portland Virginicos have our important lot of grain and fish also for their slaves. So I think it's important, I think it's actually the plantation economy and these three cities really have this symbiotic relationship. And that helps to in case, I think it's really more ensure that this relationship continues to be less reliant on Britain for its economic survival and self-sustaining itself, these colonies.
I think that's also as further to the division that you see later in 1770s. And in these divisions and in this self-efficient that you've mentioned the trade with, what you call the trade with Liz, but I don't know if you want to retake that now? Yeah, again, we have another symbiotic relationship, especially with Philadelphia and with Lisbon. Philadelphia is exporting an enormous amount of grain and most of it is now in flower by the time you get to the 1740s and 50s.
And so along with this continued, and I wouldn't say exponential, but almost exponential growth in the amount of flower production that's coming out of Philadelphia, you see a million initiatives sort of develops locally, which is it's not industry, but it's sort of proto-industrial development that sets the stage for harnessing the rivers that are in the area for later steel production, which they do have a bit of iron production that goes along with it, but that's less important than grain. But Lisbon was a fantastic market, not just for that grain, but also for the fish that was coming from Boston. For Catholic nations like Portugal and Spain, fish was an extremely important part of the diet, mainly not just because of length on Fridays or for fish Fridays, but I think it's also just sort of part of their overall cultural inheritance, is that fish is an extremely important part of their diet. But to sort of get that insulted cod is a particularly important commodity here.
To get the salt that they need, however, they also needed to trade with Lisbon and Portugal. There's one of the best sources of salt. In fact, there's multiple cases where I found in merchants, little slips of paper that basically say, hey, can you send me Lisbon salt? I don't want the other stuff.
I want Lisbon salt. Lisbon salt is the best for cooking. And you see this multiple times over and over and over again. So consumer preferences have a role in this as well, but there's also wine in Portugal.
My favorite port happens to also be an extremely important, and Madeira also off the coast of Portugal. And all these things work together because the grain and the fish had a huge market in Portugal and Spain. They were not as huge. There were not as many.
There's not much of a market for it in Britain where they're supposed to trade these things. So it made natural sense to just cut the middleman out to go directly to Spain and Portugal, trade their fish and their grain for the wine and the salt and bring that back. They're also picking up other manufacturers as well, but they can't necessarily talk about it as much as they can the salt and the wine. There's a bit of a gray area when it comes to that, whether it's directly legal or over legal or if it's been sort of allowed because it does show up in the official customs records.
There's a lot to be said about Britain's relationship with Portugal, but that's another book that I'm supposed to be writing later. And these are all things that are sort of leading into this situation. But when you actually put the numbers together and you start to look at both sides of the records, you find out that according to the British, we have so many ships coming from Philadelphia over here, but according to the Portuguese, it seems to be almost double the amount, which completely puts a different spin on this. And if we are to able and better able to accurately track this and make it better, that's the only thing is we're going to have a total trade for these cities.
And that's I think something I wish I could have given better numbers for in the book, but it also gives me something to look forward to beyond this. But if we can grasp all of that, that then makes it more sense as to why these British were much more willing to be like, hey, we got to stop this now, we got to put the clamps down, and this is it. And I need a question. How do they pay for that trade?
So that's actually sort of a re-emerging debate, a Farley Grub and some others have really started to bring into this discussion about currency and how that's really being developed in colonial and into the early republic period of the United States. And what I have found is that money is less, the actual currency itself is less important than the goods themselves. They are really the key component for the colonial. They just didn't have enough currency at any given time to really be able to pay for shipment outright.
They tended to rely on bills of credit or bills of exchange. But that's another reason why these colonies were extremely interested in trading with Spain and Portugal and others, because if they can just sell their stuff there, then buy what they need there, there's actually not a whole lot of stuff they have to really exchange. They're essentially a barter economy, but at the same time, it's all being kept in book credits and things are moving from one side of the ledger to the other side of the ledger. And that's another component of this that is why there's a chapter two about merchants.
And this is where you have these very intricate networks that are built on trust, but then there's also sort of pushing the edges of risk, like being a little bit riskier with their new partnerships. And this does have some shortfalls. Sometimes people do get burned in this, but there does seem to be a willingness to have credit with one another. And I have found oftentimes a lot of these debts don't get paid until the merchant does, and it's just a matter of them.
We just reset and everybody fixes their books and we move it from there. And it's really kind of an interesting and complicated system. But at the same time when currency was necessary, and sometimes it was, they used a mix of currency. Spanish dollars were the favorite, of course, they were the best quality.
But oftentimes they would use whatever they can get their hands on. There were a couple of invoices where they were about, I think there was one in particular, John Hancock, if the famous John Hancock was dealing with, had eight different currency types from about three different empires. And so there's a whole lot of mess. I mean, he's putting value to it and everything.
And it's actually kind of an interesting story. But I think it's a really, I think that's, it's just really interesting. And I guess I'm a little bit nerdy in that sense. I find all these different ways in which they did business fascinating.
And hopefully other readers will find it fascinating too. Yes, we do. We do. And thank you for the insight.
UN chapter six with a salutatory neglect and the sparks of revolution. Why drawing the line? Well, you explained why it started salutatory neglect and why draw the line at the start of the revolution. Every book needs an end.
I think that's part of it. The other part is I think you have a changing system. It's once you get past the American Revolution, they can trade with whoever they want. There's really nothing that stops them, except, you know, maybe the war itself.
But I really wanted to focus on what I see as a, it's hard to call it a myth so much as it's sort of over emphasizing this idea that the British just sort of let the call do. Well, it was just, we're like, no, maybe we should probably not be. And I think that's an incorrect view of things because at all times the British were trying to stop the smuggling or what they perceived as smuggling to stop this transit period of trade to sort of put the clamps on these three cities in particular, but in general, all of the North American colonies. And the more I've read and the more I've done research into this, I realize that they're really trying very hard.
They just don't have the capacity to really control the empire as big as they have. In many ways, the British, for lack of better words, were just lucky and holding on to what they had. They just happened to be stronger than the other empires. And I think there's been a lot of really good research on Antoinette Burton is really the one that started thinking about how this actually functions by talking about how this local resistance from indigenous and from local colonists.
There was a constant interplay between the colonies and the empire. And there's this constant negotiation has to be done over and over and over again, every generation, every year for that matter. There are many times there's a couple of instances where the British actually sent a naval blockade to islands in the West Indies to try to get the governor to actually do what they wanted them to do. And the more I read, the less impressive the British imperial stake becomes.
This isn't necessarily surprising because usually when you get a little closer, there's always a bit more gray area. But I think it's actually important to note this because there's this idea that the colonies do their own thing. And I don't want to say that they're wrong, but I think we need to pull that emphasis back and say that the British just couldn't quite get there. And that's really what it was.
And it wasn't just about imperial control. It was also about actually having the financial and economic capacity to have a mercantilistic empire. You have to ask the question, was this even possible? Like the idea is great, okay?
But how do we actually do this? Can we actually buy all the things that all the stuff that the colonies produce and then resell it someplace else? I think that's I think if we don't ask that question a bit stronger of the historical record, I think we're missing a huge. Huge part of the discussion.
And I think having that discussion at the very end of this book helps me, I think, answer that question that my advisor asked me was why Boston? Why the occupation in Boston? That was essentially my answer to the chapter. But you'd have the previous five chapters to really get a sense of why that answer is that way.
And we've talked about historical record, but we haven't really talked about what sources have you used to rebuild the story. I mean, there's clearly a secondary link or there is a discussion out there that you've drawn. And then what sort of sources do you use and there are any opportunities for innovation in terms of use of sources or combining different discussions or where you see yourself innovating or contributing to the discussion, other than to be able to put this argument forward? Yeah, I think if I would say I was innovative in any sense, it was that I was innovative out of necessity.
When you don't have a massive amount of funds to go and do the research you really need to do, you have to get what you can when you can. And so what I did is instead of really counting secondary compilations of data were wrong so much, I really just kind of took it and then said, is there a way that we can reorganize this to sort of answer more questions? To be able to pose more questions. And then after that, I realized there's more questions to ask and then it allowed me to go into this doorquark.
And especially in Boston and Philadelphia to say, okay, and there's not a very fancy way of saying what I'm saying, but it really just took a lot of time looking at a lot of different documents, taking photos and then looking at them from plane ride to plane ride, looking at everything and just honestly go urging myself on this historical archive so that I could understand because there were two questions that came up when I started doing this research. It's like, okay, what's the record? What kind of data do we have now? Okay, so you look to the regular places, you look at the Leonard Williamson stuff, you look at the the the the the the the customer Menard book, you look at the Shepherd and Walton book and these are all things.
And in many cases what I found was that the Shepherd of Walton book is essentially the source of data for everybody else. And it's fantastic. There's nothing wrong with this data. It's the most complete record we have for colonial trade and it's only for essentially five years 1768 to 1772.
And then I asked the question, okay, what does the archive itself have and that allowed me to just go right into grab every merchant paper. So I could get my hands on what time I had available. I copied everything. I photographed everything.
I could get my hands on. And honestly, the next question that comes up was, okay, well, how did they do business? It was a similar to your question. How do they do it?
How do they actually do this? And you know what? There's not really a great article out there or book out there that explains this in very good detail. And so I had to do it myself by looking at the records, talking with scholars about what they've seen in the record.
And I don't want it. And I really want to make it very clear. There's a part in my knowledge where I say that this is no such thing as a single author book. There's really not because these conversations with other scholars, especially at all the conferences that I organized and taken part in, which I've been very lucky to be able to do, has really shaped my thoughts on this because it's ability to ask, okay, what did you see when you went to the archive?
Okay, what did you find here? And it's not just asking about archives in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, it's about archives in general in the 18th century. It's like, what's there? And then I moved beyond that and said, okay, what's the digital archives say as well?
Because the digital archive is beginning bigger and bigger and bigger. But there's a fundamental problem with that. And that is they're all very decentralized. There's nothing that says this is here, there, there, and there.
And so newspapers became extremely important. This is where I was able to recompile the entries and clearances from Philadelphia because there's great compilations in the past, but they don't show me their work. And I needed it divided down to actual specific locations so that I could reorganize them into transimperial destinations, intercolonial destinations, and then to Britain so that you could really see the comparison between how many of these ships are flowing to these different places. And I would be, it sounds sort of, it sounds a bit boasting, but I most certainly looked at tens of thousands of documents throughout this entire process.
And I still look at these things and I still find stuff that I didn't see before. And I think if economic historians were to be a bit more bold, I think is the word, and to actually go into these archives a bit more, I think we could probably put a more of a human face to these numbers from time to time. And I think that's an important distinguishing is what I try to do is try to, yes, this is an economic history book, yes, this is going to have a very analytical structure to it, and yes, there's going to be an argument to it. But there's also people that are actually moving these things around.
There's actually something behind it. And it doesn't always come through in the book, I realize this, but I always want to make sure that the documents that I used have a human history to it. And that's something that I'm trying to do with my future research is try to think about how we can create digital sources and database that reflect that very thing, that reflect the source where it came from, and not just pull the data out and say, this is data that I found in this place. But really try to reflect how they perceived it, because if you don't understand exactly why they wrote the invoice in the format that they did, you might actually miss the fact that they're doing it for a reason.
There's a practical reason why they're doing it in this way. You also can understand a little bit more as to why Bostonians would trade more frequently, would say Lisbon or with Portuguese, then a chum chum chum. But also if you think about the way that they organize themselves, and even just the way ships are loaded themselves, just having the understanding of the goods occurred and why they have it that way. Yes, you can have a bigger argument at the end of it, but you can also have a bit more practical reasons for why they're trading with, say, Haiti instead of, say, Jamaica.
There's really good reasons, usually. Great stuff. Well, during Milan, it's been a pleasure to have you here at New Books Network today. You've told us also on what your plans for the future are, and I do envy you having to spend time in Portugal looking at some of these records and wish you all the best and to have you back when you got the monograph is out.
Be happy to be back. Thank you, Bruno.