In this period, states strove for more control over their international trade routes. However, this was a matter of ideology and planning rather than a reality. Trades were still mainly supervised by chartered companies. States increasingly aimed to restrict exports of their colonial goods to other countries. However, their ‘mercantilist’ approaches did not yield the results that were expected. In attempts to reduce smuggling, private trade became acknowledged more. An aim of consolidating and perfecting colonial trade had more impact in Asia than in the Caribbean. There, geopolitical contexts as well as features of crops precluded strict control. Compared to the previous period, international trade law consisted mostly of treaty law. Some clauses, such as the most-favoured-nation clause, could be opted for in many treaties. Legal borrowing happened, for example, with regard to governance structures in colonial territories, but there was no harmonised law of international trade. Domestic legislation was combined with treaties. Ius gentium doctrine mainly focused on a right of trade. In the later eighteenth century, views of this type were combined with ideas of self-reliance of the economy. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, financial markets had become a factor that policy-makers had to take into account. Because of the growing intertwining of state finance, colonial trade and speculation at stock markets, the risk of bubbles rose.

In the period of the Renaissance, trade became a matter of legislation and policy. Municipal governments and princes aimed to facilitate trade. International trade relations became increasingly supervised by states. This came in tandem with more treaties. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, specialized institutions were created and they increased control over foreign merchants. As a result of growing government intervention, the rules relating to trade were found in bylaws, charters and statutes. Besides those there were customs of trade, which were mostly local. New mercantile techniques, becoming widespread in this period, were maritime insurance, bills of exchange and partnerships of merchants. Insolvency became regulated in the sixteenth century. From the 1500s onwards, rights of hospitality for traders and a right of trade were developed in ius gentium writings. However, due to the mostly local customs and legislation, trade across European countries was far from harmonised. Gerald Malynes proposed a universal custom of trade, but he struggled with the combination of ius gentium ideas with the more factual customs of trade. His views nonetheless laid the basis for later categorisations of commercial law as being customary and transnational.

This chapter covers the two decades from the first minuted meeting of the Commissioners of Longitude in 1737. During this time, small groups of Commissioners were called together sporadically for ad hoc meetings, principally to agree funding for specific projectors, notably clockmaker John Harrison and longitude veteran William Whiston. Over this initial period, relations with Harrison were cordial and supportive. Despite these promising developments, it was a period in which public opinion gradually reverted to mockery of those seeking the seemingly impossible longitude dream. The chapter seeks to emphasise in addition the value of looking at some of the schemes that more recent authors have dismissed as invalid. This has occurred not only when proposals seem unlikely to modern eyes but also when their authors were partly or wholly motivated by factors such as religion or financial need, and overlooks the reception of those proposals. The books published by Jane Squire are a particular focus, since they contain some of the best records of the Commissioners’ activities and thoughts during the earlier decades.

This chapter details the creation and management of the Nautical Almanac, one of the Board of Longitude’s most important concerns. Appointed Astronomer Royal and thus a Commissioner of Longitude in 1765, Nevil Maskelyne oversaw its publication and that of associated texts, directing the work of a group of mathematical computers overseen by comparers. Hierarchical organisation and increasing costs preoccupied much of the Board of Longitude’s subsequent affairs. Calculated up to a decade in advance, the Nautical Almanac became a symbol of the Board’s repute among foreign academies and observatories, although its accuracy was later subject to satire and criticism. After Maskelyne’s death, work seems to have suffered and its management was overhauled by the Longitude Act of 1818 that brought it under Thomas Young’s management. Controversy wracked the Board’s direction of the Nautical Almanac for the next decade. Its assignment from 1831 to the astronomer William Stratford as superintendent was a major element of the aftermath of the Board’s abolition.

This chapter offers a survey of the ways in which the British Board of Longitude handled the range of schemes and projects that were presented by mathematicians and mariners, inventors and entrepreneurs during its final decades to 1828. Labels of impracticality, eccentricity and derangement have long been assigned to many of these proposals, notably in the classification scheme imposed by Astronomer Royal George Airy in his reorganisation of the Board’s archives from the 1840s. This chapter favours close reading of the ways in which schemes were assessed and managed at the time. In the bulky correspondence received, schemes for new devices, calculation methods or navigation techniques were mixed with projects for squaring the circle or endless mechanical power. The Board distinguished between those projects reckoned impossible or unsound, and those it judged irrelevant or beyond its scope. It is shown how much discretionary power the Board exercised, and how its accumulated papers preserve a wide range of protagonists’ technical and scientific interests.

This chapter scrutinises the British Longitude Act of 1714 and its immediate aftermath. It shows, first, the extent to which the wording of the Act drew on precedents from the previous century. Second, it argues that the Act was never intended to create a ‘Board of Longitude’ as a formal, standing committee with regular meetings. Rather, it nominated a number of individuals – by name or by virtue of their official role – seen fit to judge potential ideas. This is a powerful example of the way in which longitude legislation was revisable and open-ended. With this in mind, the chapter shows that the Act did indeed foster considerable activity and discussion around longitude matters over the next two decades. This activity was marked by considerable continuity in the persistence of schemes already being discussed before 1714: eclipses, lunar distances, artificial timekeepers, magnetic variation and dip, signalling, and dead reckoning.

Focusing on the period from the early 1760s to the resolution of the John Harrison affair in 1773, this chapter argues that it was only in this period that the ‘Board of Longitude’ came into being. This was largely in response to the debates surrounding the sea trials of Harrison’s fourth marine timekeeper (H4) and two other longitude schemes – Tobias Mayer’s tables and method for lunar distances and Christopher Irwin’s marine chair for observing Jupiter’s satellites. The transformation into a standing board manifested in regular rather than sporadic meetings and the appointment of a secretary to keep the Board’s papers in order as the Commissioners, for whom astronomer Nevil Maskelyne would become a central figure, sought to defend their decisions over the allocation of monetary rewards. The debates with Harrison, which focused on questions of adequate testing and the judging of trials, disclosure and replicability, and accusations of self-interest, would see the Board harden its stance through the use of legislation to ensure resolution. The Harrisons and their supporters, by contrast, sought to bolster support through lobbying and publication of their claims.

This chapter explores the long- and short-term roots of the British Longitude Act 1714, highlighting the degree of continuity with earlier precedents. It first explores the nature and impact of developments in navigational techniques and instruments, astronomy, timekeeping, the finding of longitude on land and the judging and funding of longitude proposals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It then delves into the chain of events and written and verbal discussions which gave rise to the new British rewards in 1713–1714. These saw the self-interested lobbying of two projectors gain momentum through a confluence of national and political interests, before becoming enshrined in law as rewards open to all comers.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

As Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, he thinks, “the land a maze of dark cunning nets … Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersman and master mariners. Human shells” (3.154–57). This thought evokes Ireland’s complicated position as an island nation and its entanglements with fellow colonized peoples. For Ireland’s cultural mariners of the twentieth century, navigating such currents requires a knowledge not only of sea but also of sky. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, a chapter where the city of Dublin is the prominent star, the sections are separated by a series of three asterisks also known as a dinkus. As a writer for the Paris Review explains, a dinkus is “used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.” Asterisms serve as a striking intervention into the textual groundswells of Joyce’s Ulysses that ultimately connect to Derek Walcott’s own navigations in Omeros as a means of paternal inheritance and transatlantic affiliation.