During the eighteenth century, spectacular fortunes were gained and lost in the West Indian colonial trades. European powers, chiefly Britain and France, competed for control of Caribbean islands and shipping routes in a series of naval conflicts. And more than six million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to be sold into plantation slavery. This book examines commercial success and failure in the British transatlantic nexus by analysing the activities of the Yorkshire-based Lascelles family and their associates over three centuries. It is thus a micro-history, in which Henry Lascelles emerges as a paragon of success, while his business partner Gedney Clarke exemplifies a certain type of failure. The rationale underpinning this volume is that detailed analysis of these and other case studies enriches understanding of the processes shaping the course of history.

In the pages that follow, hypotheses or conjectures regarding these historical processes are advanced based on surviving sources documenting the activities of the Lascelles. Some of these conjectures are related to previous research; others are more original in the sense that they emphasise aspects of the past that feature less prominently in existing accounts. The first of the hypotheses argues that a new framework for business association was established by mercantile communities based in London, Barbados, and North America between the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The second thesis argues that a key element of this framework lay in control of complex credit networks, crucial for the success (or failure) of Atlantic commercial ventures.