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The principal aim of the research has been to investigate the geography of trade in the Shetland Islands during the period from the mid-sixteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. The evolution of island trade is traced through a series of historical phases characterised by the several types of organisation and control to which Shetland trade was subject during the periods this squeeze commenced, with the itinerant merchants, who held the initiative in trade development from the early sixteenth century until the Union of Scotland and England. Subsequently, in the early eighteenth century, a distinctively insular organisation of trade began to evolve in which the course of economic development was shaped by local enterprise, provided first by landowners, and then by local merchants. This growth was paralleled by that of locally-owned shipping and the development of communications, notably the mail service, upon which trade depended. After the mid- nineteenth century, the demand of the market became increasingly dominant, and the individual commodity trades became separately organised, while externally-owned shipping took the major share in provision of transport and communications. From the historical analysis, it emerges that the development of trade in Shetland has been governed both at internal and external scales by a complex of physical factors, which have closely moulded the locational patterns of both production and trade Itself, while strongly conditioning the primary production nature of the economy. Meanwhile, the general pattern of economic development was closely related to the-organisation of trade. Throughout the period, the growth of Shetland trade had much in common with overall British trends, in those parts of Britain where commercial development depended upon organisation and initiative of landowners and merchants. Nonetheless, Shetland's insular trade organisation was maintained, while island enterprise directed the course of trades expansion, until the middle of the nineteenth century In the final phase of development, prior to 1914, this Insular organisation and. control was slowly eroded as the Shetland economy because -increasingly dominated by large-scale commercial organisation based outwith the islands.