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Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British E.

AbstrsctThis article uses a comparative perspective to consider the role that English governors played in facilitating inter-imperial trade with the Dutch in New York City and the ports of the English Leeward Islands, including Bridgetown, Barbados, during the seventeenth century. As governors struggled to establish viable colonies these men worked to supply needed trade goods, often allowing their colonists to turn to Dutch colonies and the Netherlands as trading partners, understanding the ways in which these executives negotiated between imperial policies, primarily the Navigation Acts, and the needs of their charges is crucial to understanding how colonies developed. Further, investigating the ways in which governors fostered, regulated, or prevented inter-imperial trade with the Dutch illustrates how governors and colonists implemented and adapted mercantile policy in different colonies, places that depended upon the transfer of culture, goods and entrepreneurial activities across imperial boundaries. Complementing recent scholarship describing the extent of inter-imperial and cross-national trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, this article examines the impact English governors had on local merchant communities and their efforts to trade with the Dutch.