Of codfish, cane, and contraceptives: Early modern commodities in Atlantic perspective

This review article discusses three recent books on the production and circulation of commodities within the early modern Atlantic world. It focuses on the rise of that Atlantic world as a field of historical enquiry, and upon the importance of goods such as sugar, codfish, and medicinal plants within that world in both historic and in historiographical terms. The three titles under review deal with commodities in very different ways and on very different scales. Taken together, however, they present a rich and varied picture of the production and consumption of commodities in both the North and South Atlantic, and of the meanings which both producers sand consumers attached to these goods.