The opening of Atlantic trade routes was a critical juncture, not a single moment with a predetermined outcome. It created new opportunities for wealth and power, but their consequences depended on the institutions already in place and on who could control the trade. In England, merchants who gained from overseas commerce became a force against royal monopoly; in other regions, European expansion imposed or reinforced arrangements that restricted local commerce and helped reverse development.

Background and Expansion

The Atlantic’s economic importance grew markedly after 1600, despite earlier European voyages across the Atlantic and around Africa. English colonization of North America began at Roanoke in 1585, the English East India Company was formed in 1600, and the Dutch company followed in 1602. The Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607; Barbados was occupied in 1627, while France established Quebec City in 1608 as the capital of New France. These ventures formed part of a much wider expansion of trade and colonization, with consequences shaped by differences among European political systems.

Those differences were visible before the trade boom. Around 1588, England, Spain, and France were all governed by relatively absolutist monarchs facing assemblies that sought greater rights and influence. The English Parliament and the Spanish Cortes could contest taxation, while the French Estates-General could not. Spain’s American empire, and the gold and silver flowing from it, gave its Crown an unusual degree of financial independence. Elizabeth I of England had less independent revenue and had to seek taxes from Parliament; in return, Parliament pressed her to restrict royal monopolies. It gradually won that conflict, while the Spanish Crown retained control over trade and the Cortes lost its comparable struggle.

England: Trade and Political Conflict

Because English monarchs could not monopolize all trade with the Americas, Atlantic commerce helped create a wealthy body of traders with relatively few ties to the Crown. These merchants resented royal control and demanded limits on the monarch’s prerogatives. The account connects their growing economic position to their important role in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. In England, opponents of absolutism were more likely to prevail than their counterparts in Spain and France because they were wealthier and more numerous.

The resulting change in political power had economic consequences. After 1688, Parliament rather than the king controlled state policy. Many parliamentarians had investments in trade and industry and therefore had a stake in protecting property rights, which Stuart monarchs had often infringed. Parliament also took responsibility for public spending: unlike the Stuarts, who resisted higher taxes and a stronger state, it was willing to raise revenue for purposes it valued, notably strengthening the navy to protect overseas commercial interests. This shift accompanied the end of absolutism in England and, after the 1707 union with Scotland, in Great Britain.

The new political order was more pluralistic, but it was not democratic by modern standards. In the eighteenth century, fewer than 2 percent of the population could vote, and voters had to be men. Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield—the cities where the Industrial Revolution developed—had no independent parliamentary representation. Land ownership determined voting rights in the counties, while small elites controlled many boroughs. In Buckingham, thirteen burgesses held the exclusive right to vote; in the so-called rotten boroughs of Old Sarum and Dunwich, just seven and thirty-two voters respectively elected two members of Parliament apiece. The opening of Atlantic commerce therefore helped alter who held political power without making political access broadly equal.

Uneven Consequences Beyond Europe

The expansion of European commerce did not produce the same institutional effects everywhere. In the Moluccas, Dutch efforts to monopolize the spice trade gathered force with the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The company had its own army and authority to wage war and colonize. After securing an exclusive clove agreement with Ambon’s ruler in 1600, the Dutch captured a Portuguese fort in 1605, removed other traders, and extended their control across the northern Moluccas. Rulers in Tidore, Ternate, and Bacan were forced to accept restrictions on growing and trading cloves; the Dutch could even destroy clove trees found in Ternate.

Dutch control intensified existing systems of tribute and forced labor on Ambon. The company tied households to the land, required them to cultivate specified numbers of clove trees, and obligated them to provide labor. More broadly, the book argues that Dutch colonialism changed Southeast Asian political and economic development: communities withdrew from trade and became more absolutist, leaving them poorly placed to benefit from later industrial innovations. The possible alternative paths of the region—continued commercialization or movement toward more inclusive institutions—remain counterfactuals, not outcomes the evidence can establish.

The wider colonial pattern included the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies, as well as the creation of extractive arrangements. In the Caribbean, the near-total collapse of native populations was followed by the importation of enslaved Africans and the establishment of plantation systems. In the Banda Islands, the Dutch East India Company’s violence extinguished prospects for indigenous development and helped push other Southeast Asian city-states away from commerce. The account contrasts these outcomes with England’s experience: the same broad era of European expansion that helped create challengers to royal power in Britain strengthened or imposed extractive institutions in many other places, obstructing commercial and industrial activity.

Critical Juncture, Not Historical Destiny

The opening of Atlantic trade routes exemplifies the book’s argument that critical junctures interact with pre-existing institutional differences. The opportunities created by trade did not benefit every group equally. In Spain and France, monarchies and their allies captured much of the profit from Atlantic commerce and colonial expansion. In England, the Crown’s inability to control all overseas trade allowed groups opposed to the monarchy to gain wealth and influence. Small earlier differences thus shaped who could take advantage of the new commercial opportunities, and those outcomes contributed to larger institutional divergence.

That divergence was consequential but not inevitable. The account presents institutional change as a contingent process: earlier arrangements shape the effects of a major disruption, while the disruption can alter the balance of political and economic power. It therefore treats England’s path as one historical outcome rather than a necessary result of European expansion. The Atlantic trade juncture could help foster pluralistic institutions where merchants gained autonomy from the Crown, while elsewhere the same expansion strengthened extraction and curtailed local development.