Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at discovering what challenges the Board of Trade, as well as the people and groups they corresponded with, faced when they had to interpret and understand situations, opinions and viewpoints that had to cross the Atlantic.

Paper long abstract:

The British domains overseas demanded much attention from the metropole, especially in the formative years at the end of the 17th Century. For the British Caribbean colonies the place to turn to for answers and direction, especially after the Revolution of 1688, was the Board of Trade. The Board started out as a prolonged arm of the Privy Council, but by the end of the 1690s it had taken on a more information-gathering and directory role. Its main tasks became the compiling of reports for the direction and advice of Parliament, as well as offering and asking advice for better managing the British overseas trade from people considered to have necessary expertise. Through looking at the Board's correspondence and minutes, as well as its various members and their backgrounds, it is the hope of this paper to be able to contribute to our understanding of the exchange of information, knowledge, direction and advice across the Atlantic in this period. This becomes especially relevant when we take into account the challenges that the Board faced when they in the early eighteenth century took on a mediating role between the separate trader interests and the Royal African Company. These debates would inevitably mean the involvement of different communities, societies, trading groups, networks and geographical spheres. The question of how to manage early modern British commerce in the Atlantic was to a large extent answered through intense long-distance lines of correspondence, with the Board of Trade headquarter at Whitehall as its hub.