Portuguese and Amsterdam Sephardic Merchants in the Tobacco Trade : Tierra Firme and Hispaniola in the Early Seventeenth Century

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.