In January 1682, William Culliford, a loyal and experienced officer in the King's customs service, began an extraordinary journey under Treasury orders to investigate the integrity and efficiency of the customs establishments of southwest England and south Wales as part of a drive to maximize the Crown's income from customs duties (on which it relied for much of its revenue). Starting at Bristol, Culliford eventually completed this daunting task in Cornwall over two years later in the spring of 1684. His report on each of the ports he inspected (the primary source for this book) revealed widespread smuggling and fraud in the context of a customs service both lacking in efficiency and riddled with corruption. The book documents the varied frauds and wide-ranging abuses uncovered and their facilitation by customs officers only too ready to collude with smugglers, dishonest merchants and seamen and to accept bribes to ignore tax evasion. It describes, too, Culliford's assessment of the administrative practices of each port inspected and his judgment on the levels of probity and efficiency of individual officers, detailing his recommendations for procedural improvements and the treatment of the corrupt and incompetent and, incidentally, of those suspected of political and religious dissent. Additionally, the book presents a body of statistical data on the customs revenue actually collected at individual ports in the 1670s and 1680s and surveys the extent and nature of the maritime trade of the ports Culliford examined. It thus not only throws light on the history of the customs service, but provides a rare insight into the interactions of economic, social and political issues in the later seventeenth century, and makes a valuable contribution to the particular histories of the ports and maritime districts visited by this energetic and tenacious investigator.

Analyses data from the Bristol Port Books to rewrite the history of trade in Bristol, including the city's early involvement with the slave trade. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a transformative period for global commerce, with the principal focus of England's trade shifting away from trade with Europe, primarily in woollen cloth, to a new Atlantic system, with trade in a diverse range of commodities. Based on the fantastically detailed Bristol Port Books, previously thought impenetrable, and using new computer technology to analyse the vast amount of data, this book provides the first long duration history of a major Atlantic port in this period. It rewrites the history of Bristol's trade, overturning much established thinking, for example showing that trade flourished in the late Tudor and early Stuart period, demonstrating that Bristol was involved in the slave trade much earlier than was previously thought and charting the growth of commerce with North America and the Caribbean from nothing to three quarters of Bristol's imports in the short period from the 1630s to the 1650s. Overall, the book represents a major contribution to understanding how the Atlantic economy worked and how it developed in this crucial period.

Information is power. For more than five hundred years the success or failure of nations has been determined by a country’s ability to acquire knowledge and technical skill and transform them into strength and prosperity. Leading historian Jeremy Black approaches global history from a distinctive perspective, focusing on the relationship between information and society and demonstrating how the understanding and use of information have been the primary factors in the development and character of the modern age. Black suggests that the West’s ascension was a direct result of its institutions and social practices for acquiring, employing, and retaining information and the technology that was ultimately produced. His cogent and well-reasoned analysis looks at cartography and the hardware of communication, armaments and sea power, mercantilism and imperialism, science and astronomy, as well as bureaucracy and the management of information, linking the history of technology with the history of global power while providing important indicators for the future of our world.