Seasonality and illegality in the early modern North Atlantic with Dr. Anna Knutsson, Clare Hall College

This paper considers how illegal, and to a lesser extent legal, trade was affected by seasonality in the High North Atlantic. Both legal and illegal trade were deeply impacted by seasonality, particularly winter storms, but they were impacted in different ways; in this paper, I will discuss how and why this impact differed and what it can reveal about the connectivity of the North Atlantic during the winter months. The focus will be on the smuggling trade between the Faroe Islands and Scotland, which was endemic from the 1760s to the 1780s. It was brought on by inter-imperial rivalry, war, and domestic dissent and came to have a formative role in the economic life of the northern reaches of the Atlantic. The study draws on a wide range of sources from tax records to autobiographies which enables me to present both quantitative and qualitative data that sheds new light on the enduring interconnections between the islands and the formative power of the subarctic environment. This paper forms part of a new research project that explores the creation and repercussions of illegal trade across the High North Atlantic during the period 1760–1820.

Anna Knutsson is an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at Clare Hall College and a visiting scholar at the Centre for History and Economics and the Faculty of History in Cambridge. After doing an MA at the University of St Andrews and an MPhil at Cambridge University, she pursued a PhD in history at the European University Institute. She graduated in 2019 with a thesis about smuggling in Sweden during the eighteenth century. Since then, she has taken up an international postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University in collaboration with Cambridge University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her current research deals with illegal trade and its impact on northern European peripheries, particularly Greenland and the Faroe Islands, at the dawn of the modern era.

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