Christine Laidlaw. The British in the Levant: Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century . New York: Tauris, 2010. Pp. 288. $96.00 (cloth).

empire” (227). It took about three decades and three wars, and would be disrupted somewhat during the wars with the French between 1689 and 1713, but it is clear that they belonged to the empire as much as any metropolitan policy maker. Koot’s research is strong, but his interpretations can be puzzling. Must the Anglo-Dutch trade links he has demonstrated be seen as proof that “access to Dutch goods” affected the “economic ideologies” of the British colonists? Was there really a “Dutch influence” on their “commercial culture” that made them appreciate “the benefits of a collaborative and multiethnic community because it had sustained them through the early decades of building colonies” (227)? Beginning the study before the Anglo-Dutch Atlantic trade connection existed, rather than at its inception, might help distinguish the Dutch connection from the colonists’ self-interested (and transitory) endorsement of free trade. The trajectory of Koot’s book describes a consolidation of center and periphery even as his analytical framework pits English colonists (the titular “periphery”) against the metropole. He is strongly affected by the colonists’ initial resistance, in word and deed, to the Navigation Acts. It is clear that English colonists preferred free trade when it profited them. Whether this is a story of needs and desires, as Koot insists, or simply wealth and power is uncertain. The Dutch connection may demonstrate that the British colonists were “pieces of an integrated cross-national and interdependent Atlantic community” and not just “cogs in a larger British Atlantic” (212). However, it also demonstrates that the English colonists needed power and desired wealth, and they would seize them whenever and however they could, in a world swirling with wars and revolutions. Koot rightly maintains, “the radical innovation in the middle of the seventeenth century was not colonists’ refusal to accept an exclusive empire, but rather was state builders’ attempts to impose this structure on a preexisting culture that prized cross-national exchange” (224). Nonetheless, he may underestimate the degree to which colonists prized cross-national exchange because it helped them build a British empire. Perhaps ironically, Koot ends his book with the colonists starting to turn against each other, not the metropole. In the 1710s West Indians began “calls for restrictions on foreign trade,” even as New Yorkers argued they “needed to export flour to Dutch, French, and Spanish colonies in order to” maintain their balance of payments with Britain (222). Both claimed the empire for themselves. Koot’s analysis can be perplexing when taken at the scale of the aggregate (colonists vs. metropole, Dutch empire vs. English empire, cross-national vs. exclusive). His particular case studies (Barbados, New York, the Leeward Islands) are impressive, however, and add to our understanding of how the British Empire emerged out of a world of competing empires, even as it was divided within and without.