The Political Economy of Competition, Collaboration, and Emulation in the early modern Atlantic

Was intra-European competition the driving force of extra European expansion in the first globalisation? National(-ist) European historiographies since the 19th century and more recent works on the political economy of emulation among European early modern polities suggest this, as do most accounts of economic historians who see competition between Europe’s trading powers as the deus ex machina of European extra-European trade. Using the comparative history of the Spanish carrera de Indias and the English Navigation Laws as a prism, this paper challenges both the primacy of intra-European competition in the first globalisation and the methodologies that have underpinned the analysis. Section I offers a revisionist account of the historiography of the two most important regulatory systems in the Atlantic, the Spanish and the English. Section II seeks to offer a methodological alternative to those narrative accounts. It uses the notion of the “market for institutions” developed in Grafe (2015) to zoom in on the regulatory tools employed by each system. The result allows us to see the similarities and divergences in the two regulatory frameworks in a completely new way. Section III concludes.