Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

• Main Author: Schreuder, Yda (Author, http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut)
• Corporate Author: SpringerLink (Online service)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
• Edition: 1st ed. 2019.
• Subjects: Europe-History-1492-.; World history.; Imperialism.; Judaism and culture.; History of Early Modern Europe.; World History, Global and Transnational History.; Imperialism and Colonialism.; Jewish Cultural Studies.
• Physical Description: XVI, 287 p. 6 illus. online resource.
• ISBN: 9783319970615
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97061-5

This book surveys the role of Amsterdam's Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the "Portuguese Nation," conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the "Myth of the Dutch," the "Sephardic Moment," and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe's primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.