Customer Reviews

Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Harvard Historical Studies)

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This is a "five star" book in every sense of the designation. Chaney exmaines and explores the emerging "poltiical economy" of global commerce and trade under the ancien regime in France. Using original sources and casting the facts, ideas and data into a modern "political economy" model, Chaney tests his hypothesis that maritime powers like Britain, Holland and France were innovative in developing wealth by markets and not just colonies and resource rape like Spain and Portugal. Chaney's discussion of the royal Caribbean sugar trade alone in the context of his framework is illuminating when looking at political documents of the time with the ledgers that made great fortunes for the metropol state before the Revolution.

Chaney writes is a clear and precise language that readers of all levels of interest can grasp his thinking and argument. Revolutionary Commerce is a "benchmark" study in originality because the author combines evidence with a fresh perspective to present a theory quite demonstrated in many 20th century studies of trading states whose empires or markets have earlier roots. This is a historian using political and economic language directly to political scientists and economists besides historians interested in political development and political economy. As a professional historian of 18th Century Europe and a political scientist of contemporary economic security, I highly commend this book to the widest audience interested in scholarship with penache!