Portuguese and Amsterdam Sephardic Merchants in the Tobacco Trade

Portuguese and Amsterdam Sephardic Merchants in the Tobacco Trade is a history of the role of Portuguese and Sephardic merchants in the tobacco industry and trade of Amsterdam. It focuses on the contraband trade with Tierra Firme and Hispaniola in the early seventeenth century as documented in the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection.

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The book surveys the role of Portuguese and Sephardic merchants in the contraband tobacco trade in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Atlantic world. It offers a historical-geographic perspective linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the “Portuguese Nation,” examining the illicit trade in the context of rivalry between Spain and the Dutch Republic during the Eighty Years’ War.