The authors address one of the key issues facing world leaders today, putting forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the pooorest countries.

In a model study Jacob Price illuminates the dynamic growth of Britain’s foreign trade in the eighteenth century through an investigation of the investment patterns and credit institutions that financed that expansion. Concentrating on the trade between Britain and the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland, for which a unique set of records exists, Price surveys the ways in which commerce developed and working capital was mobilized in Britain to support expanding overseas trade. Price develops the clearest picture ever of the financial environment within Britain as it affected Southern colonies in the preindustrial age. He does so by determining the kind of capital resources merchants in foreign trade actually commanded and measuring how much of their own wealth merchants brought to trade. In great and absorbing detail he discusses also the development of merchant-oriented banks in London and other ports, reinvestment of profits, long-term borrowing on bond, and the long-term credit provided to export merchants by wholesalers in textiles, ironmongery, and other industries. The relationship of debt to the coming of the American Revolution is also treated. Tobacco growers suffered more than others from a psychological unease caused by immense debt and were more revolutionary than farmers with less intensive capital needs and, hence, with lighter debt. This history will enlighten Anglo-American historians, economic historians, and historians of the American revolutionary era.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the merchants were dominant figures in the northern American colonies, powerful economically, politically, and socially. But in New England this preeminence had not been present in the first years of settlement; it had been achieved in the course of three generations of social development as the merchants often Puritans themselves, rose within the Bible Commonwealths to challenge the domination of the Puritan fathers. In lively detail Mr. Bailyn here presents the struggle of the merchants to achieve full social recognition as their successes in trade and in such industries as fishing and lumbering offered them avenues to power. Surveying the rise of merchant families, he offers a portrait in depth of the emergence of a new social group whose interests and changing social position powerfully affected the developing character of American society. The story of this group is the story of people and of their many-sided interests. The merchants were united by the demands of their common devotion to trade, yet they did not form a socially homogeneous unit. In fact their social differences--created in the confusions and dislocations of the early days of settlement came to play an important role in their business and political activities. Moreover, their commercial ventures, successes, and failures affected their social and political situation. Internationalists by occupation, they were deeply affected by personal relations with Europeans as well as by events in the Old World. Drawing on source material from many fields--business records, religious and political data, literary remains, and genealogical information--Mr. Bailyn has discovered much that is new about the merchants, and has brought it all together into a composite portrait of our economic founding fathers that is fascinating in itself and that will reorient our thinking about many aspects of early New England history.

Aid for trade is a fixture in the development landscape, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of total ODA, and is being positioned as a building block in the future development agenda beyond the 2015 expiry of the Millennium Development Goals. In The Right to Trade , Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton argue that aid for trade has not delivered on its initial promise. To create a genuinely pro-development trade liberalisation agenda, the authors propose that a right to trade and a right to development be enshrined within the WTOs dispute settlement system; and that aid for trade funds be consolidated into a coherent and predictable framework, where dedicated funds are committed by rich countries to a Global Trade Facility and dispersed through a transparent and competitive process. Together these proposals would help ensure that international trade works for developing countries and will help preserve a development-friendly multilateral trading system.