A Spirited Exchange ― The Wine and Brandy Trade Between France and the Dutch Republic in Its Atlantic Framework, 1600-1650

Kops (history, Georgetown U.) believes it is time to reassess the attitude that only the Baltic and trans-oceanic grain trade were important in the early seventeenth century. She intends to give the coastal wine and brandy trade in France and the Dutch republic its due, in part because its economic value at least rivals that of the more prestigious grain trade and it provided ready cash, without which other commercial enterprises would have been impossible. She focuses on how trade between Nantes and Rotterdam developed and those cities' function as distribution points. She examines the impact of the imports and exports within Dutch, French, Jewish and Atlantic regional trade history, noting especially how success in trade affected minority cultures such as the Dutch in Nantes and the Sephardim in Rotterdam, and closes by describing how the coastal trade impacted the regional Dutch-Atlantic economy. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Henriette de Bruyn Kops, professional name: Henriette Rahusen, Ph.D. (2005) in History, Georgetown University, is Research Associate in the Department of History and Lecturer in the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University. Her article, "Not such an 'unpromising beginning': the first Dutch trade embassy to China, 1655-1657", appeared in Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 3 (2002). The author's doctoral thesis won the Glassman Dissertation Award in the Humanities at Georgetown University, 2006.