CrespoDynCoopNet DATA Collections

Abstract

This database contains information on Atlantic trade with data on agents, commercial activities, maritime routes, freights, ships, monopolistic commercial companies, businesses, goods, and, above all, events, actions and relationships of cooperation among trade networks. These data fall within the chronological framework between 1648 and 1778 and a wide geographic expanse with place names and cartographic data from Africa, Europe and America during the First Global Age – 16th-18th centuries. This database has been adapted to a GIS-oriented conceptual model (GIS – Geographic Information System). The right choice of sources for the immense amount of information collected by the database has been crucial. As we were conscious that not all the information from the sources could be gathered, especially from archival sources, only the information that is relevant to this investigation has been selected – here quantity does not necessarily mean quality. Information has been harvested from a great variety of sources, whether bibliographic and archival. The common ground of all this information is that it refers to commercial agents and their activities along the maritime routes that were linked to the European Atlantic System during the above mentioned chronological period. The information contained is on legal trade, commercial monopolies, smuggling, illicit trade, trade undertaken by European commercial companies operating under on behalf of merchant nations such as Holland, France or England, and, above all, information on the shipping carried out within the Spanish commercial system with America or Indies Trade, i.e. registers of the outbound and inbound fleets, passenger lists bound for the Indies, traders’ licences, dictionaries on seafaring and shipping, etc.

In order to select the sources to be used, advice was sought from specialists in this field. Also the NACOM bibliographic catalogue was consulted. This catalogue consists of a bibliographical list on merchant communities in the Modern Age and is regularly updated. It has been compiled as part of the project MICINN (2006-HUM-01679) under the Spanish Plan Nacional de Investigación programme. The criterion for the selection of sources was, firstly, that they contain information on relationships between merchant networks and communities, and secondly, that the data contained was either biographical or professional of the agents that were part of those communities or were otherwise related to them. A part of information has been sourced on other databases available on the internet.