Читать книгу The Temptations of Trade - Adrian Finucane - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

Before the Asiento

In 1679, a young surgeon named Lionel Wafer left Jamaica, ending a visit to his brother there for more adventurous company. Like many men leaving the island at the time, Wafer had joined the buccaneers. Over the next decade, he would sail through Spanish waters, annoying their ships and settlements, making note of the natural and human resources of that empire, and even living among a native group in modern-day Panama and learning their language. He acted as a surgeon on pirate vessels and spent time in a Jamestown prison. But more than a tale of exploration and misadventure, Wafer’s is a story of empire. After returning to the safety of England, Wafer published a book, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, encouraging his countrymen in England to move into the Americas in whatever ways they could in pursuit of glory and profit.¹ Early clandestine exploration into the forbidden territories of the Spanish empire fueled English interest in imperial expansion, and published accounts gave prospective voyagers details about what they might expect to encounter.

European empires in the Americas grew not only as projects of large-scale thinkers in London or Madrid, or even of the men and women who funded and organized expeditions across the Atlantic to conquer and claim land. Individuals who moved through these areas or lived there permanently, including merchants, seamen, travelers, and settlers, created the empires on the ground, shaping local realities that sometimes conflicted significantly with the hopes of those in the metropole. In this context, empire was not only a project of European nations, but a kind of strategy for some groups of subjects who could take advantage of the places that governments could and could not assert power over land and trade, making their own fortunes by valuing pragmatism over ideology.² Men like Wafer pushed for an expansion of empire through conquest or commerce into places few Englishmen had seen. The vision of success many Britons had for their empire ultimately relied on its ability to access the considerable markets of Spanish America; at the same time, Spanish American subjects could not thrive without a consistent trade such as that provided by the British. In the early eighteenth century, the empires would briefly find a way to benefit from a trade in slaves through the British South Sea Company. However, in the course of fulfilling this mutual need, tensions increased between the empires, making long-term peaceful trade a difficult prospect. In the early eighteenth century, the people who settled in and traded to British and Spanish America would create empires that were intertwined, reliant on one another in important ways, and always blurry at the margins. Imperial agents moving through these empires operated in competition with one another, to be sure, but they contributed to building as well as unmaking each other’s empires. On the ground, the creation of empires was messy, not following any one set of guidelines. Rather than being entirely at odds with one another, empires were interlinked, reliant on one another for trade and settlement in a way that could not ultimately be sustainable.³ Growth inevitably led to friction.

By the seventeenth century, Englishmen had long traded to Spain, but could not legally travel directly to the Spanish Americas except in very rare circumstances.⁴ Despite these restrictions, or perhaps in part because of them, English merchants and their government developed a strong thirst for knowledge about the Spanish colonies and access to their attendant wealth.⁵ In an attempt to fulfill this need, English travelers and privateers probed the edges of the empire, and circulated information about the little-known interiors of the Spanish territories. Despite the differences in government, religion, and demographic constitution of the British and Spanish empires, ambition was a trait shared by agents of both. Actors in each of these empires hoped to exploit local resources in order to enrich themselves, and when convenient, the metropole. As information accrued about the opportunities available in the Americas, the English government and its subjects turned to acquiring their own piece of the American continents. Wafer was one of a long line of Englishmen who had explored ways to profit from the adjacent Spanish empire, legally or illegally.⁶ While Wafer’s buccaneering was part of a larger trend in piracy in both peace and wartime that raised tensions between the empires, the information he collected also represented an opportunity for English expansion and mutual trade in times of peace.

This sort of information would be critical in the decades that followed, particularly in 1713. In that year the British South Sea Company acquired the asiento contract from Spain, guaranteeing them a right to transport a predetermined number of enslaved African laborers into Spanish American territories for a thirty-year period and to bring a limited amount of goods to the annual Portobello trade fair. This contract brought with it a guarantee of residency in Spanish America for a small group of Britons, despite earlier restrictions on their travel. The opportunity for a degree of legal trade and residency in Spain’s territories also allowed the British to explore other avenues for profit, through expansion of their legal trade, contraband, and possible annexation of Spanish American land to the British Empire. The early, illegal explorations of men like Wafer convinced many among the British that moving into areas held by the Spanish would be both possible and profitable, and influenced the development of the British Empire for years to come.

Wafer began his American adventures in Jamaica, through this was far from the first voyage he had made in the wider world. By the 1670s, when he arrived on the island, he had already traveled extensively in the South Seas and in Southeast Asia. In Jamaica, which England finally wrested from the Spanish in 1655, settlers like his brother, unnamed in Wafer’s account of his life, were in the process of transferring the lessons of the tiny but economically successful island of Barbados onto more plentiful fertile soil. Jamaica provided the growing English empire a key entry point into the still strong Spanish Americas through trade and piracy.⁷ As steward general of the island Cornelius Burroughs wrote only a few years after the English conquest of Jamaica, the major attractive traits of the island were that “it is a very flourishing Island, and lyes very opportunely to annoy the Spaniard, both upon the Maine, and also in his trade by Sea.”⁸ During and after the seizure of Jamaica, buccaneers enjoyed English approval, sometimes tacit and sometimes official, to harass the Spanish on surrounding islands and the mainland.⁹ Success did not depend only on the opportunities for trade and cultivation enjoyed by the English. Because English presence of most kinds in the area was banned by Spanish law, English gains depended also on the failure of the Spanish, in both legal enforcement and colonization, as well as the limitation of the extensive seventeenth-century French trade to the Spanish empire.

After a short time in Jamaica, Wafer took to sea again, this time on what he described as a privateering vessel, to harass the settlements along the Spanish American coast. He provided little justification for becoming a buccaneer surgeon in his Voyage and Description, perhaps because of the shifting legality of the undertaking. Whatever his motivations, the decision brought him both pain and success. Wafer took advantage of the incomplete control of the Spanish empire over its claimed lands and waterways, traveling through the “Isthmus of America” and adjacent lands for much of the 1680s, collecting information about the area and constructing a “Secret Report” in order to inform English officials of the state of the Spanish empire.¹⁰ Wafer was not an official representative of England.¹¹ But as a buccaneer surgeon, he collected information that no English official could have through legal channels. Wafer traveled to the Spanish shores at a fortuitous time for the English. Their forces had recently sacked Portobello, and some of the English had made the trek across the Isthmus of Panama to attack the Spanish in their richest and usually unchallenged settlements along the Pacific Ocean.¹² Wafer’s own crossing was the source of both the information he collected in his book and a significant wound, which he suffered in a powder accident and which forced him to live among the native Kuna people for months while he healed.¹³

During his time among the Kuna, Wafer reported that he developed friendly relationships in the area and learned about his surroundings. The local peoples had previously encountered Spanish settlers, and a number were enslaved. Because of these contacts, some spoke Spanish, which made communication with Wafer’s group possible. Wafer made a great deal in his writings of his success among these indigenous groups, bragging that the “Indians … in a manner ador’d me,” and even that their leader had insisted that Wafer promise to marry his daughter when she was of age. Wafer suggested that his integration into the native groups of the area was nearly complete, noting that upon reconnecting with the expedition’s English sloop after a period of months, he was barely recognized by his friends. Sitting among the Indians, “‘twas the better part of an Hour before one of the Crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cry’d out, Here’s our Doctor; and immediately they all congratulated my Arrival among them.”¹⁴ While it is impossible to determine the truth of Wafer’s claims about his time among the natives of the isthmus, his positioning of himself as an ally of these groups and of the Spanish as their tyrannical enslavers suggests to the reader that the native peoples would welcome an alternative European imperial group, and that they were in no way under the control of or in alliance with the Spanish. The way was then open for the English, if they wished to move into the area.

Following his time among the natives, Wafer continued upon various buccaneers’ sloops for several years, visiting parts of the Americas and harassing Spanish ships. These Englishmen found that the Spanish had taken steps to discourage settlement by other European groups in the area. They culled the animals on several islands near their own settlements, particularly on the Pacific islands of Santa Maria and Juan Fernandez. On the latter island, Wafer reported, “the Spaniards had set Dogs ashore … to destroy the Goats there, that we might fail of Provision.”¹⁵ The local Spanish settlers were clearly aware of the danger posed by the possibility of English settlement near their vulnerable colonies.

Perhaps tiring of the wanderer’s life, in 1688 Wafer arranged passage to Virginia, where he reported he “thought to settle.” Instead, he was imprisoned in the Jamestown jail, his goods were seized, and he was accused of piracy along with two accomplices. The men denied acting illegally, but eventually petitioned to be pardoned under the royal proclamation offering amnesty to former pirates. Though their goods remained in custody for significantly longer than they were, they were eventually released, and Wafer made his way to England in 1690.¹⁶

In England, Wafer turned his attentions to encouraging the expansion of the English empire into the Spanish territories. He was in good company. While in the Caribbean, he had sailed with the famed circumnavigator William Dampier, whose Voyage Round the World brought news of Spanish wealth to English-speaking readers. During his travels, Dampier managed to consult people with extensive knowledge of the areas in which he sailed, including “Spanish Pilots, and Indians bred under the Spaniards.”¹⁷ Working with these informants, Dampier determined that there were many rivers and tributaries on the Isthmus of Panama that had not yet been navigated by the Spanish, suggesting that they might be open to claims by the English. His writings stressed that Spanish lands were desirable, necessary, and even pragmatically possible to take over. This sort of information was critical to the expanding English empire.

In their books, both Wafer and Dampier described their travels through the Bay of Panama and detailed the flora, fauna, and trade of the area, as well as the local method of government. Dampier observed also that the city had been reconstructed with stronger buildings since it was burned by Sir Henry Morgan decades before. Providing English readers with this information, Dampier simultaneously suggested the gains that were to be reaped by controlling this area and warned of the difficulties that a military attack on the area would face. He made clear the attractive possibilities present in the area for foreign trade, citing the success of the French, who “at present make very great and profitable Voyages; and now that they find the sweet of it, they will be sure, if they can, to settle a firm and lasting Trade here.”¹⁸ Diplomacy leading to peaceful commerce could help the English against their French enemies at the same time that they gained access to Spanish lands. If the English could intervene and become the primary suppliers of European goods to the Spanish empire, this suggests, they might both deal a blow to French profits and enjoy their own rewards.

If this opportunity did not by itself convince the English to move into the area, the mistreatment of their own subjects might do so. While Dampier appears to have had extensive contact with subjects of the Spanish empire during his time along the coasts, and this seems to have been for the most part friendly and productive for him, other Englishmen did not fare as well. Dampier brought aboard a man named William Wooders, for example, a sailor from Jamaica who was captured by the Spanish and lived as a prisoner in Mexico City for many months.¹⁹ Wooders, whose knowledge of the area and its waters kept Dampier’s ships out of danger, was but one of many Englishmen who had been imprisoned by defenders of the Spanish empire. Trade could not be expected to flourish in the area as long as the Spanish had such a degree of power over members of other European empires in such a great swath of the Americas. This threat provided an additional argument for hurting the Spanish empire by taking its lands; moving into South America was both an opportunity and a means of defense for the small but growing English empire.

Not all the information these men collected about the Spanish Americas was intended for wide publication. Perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself to the officials in London in the face of accusations of piracy, in 1698 Wafer constructed his “Secret Report,” providing the English with key information about the Spanish empire. He was enthusiastic about trade and especially settlement in large parts of the continents. He noted that the Rio de la Plata was particularly well situated to allow trade into the rest of the Spanish empire, writing that “Hear a factory wold be of great Use to us.”²⁰ If English merchants could live near the Rio de la Plata, they might do business with local Spanish subjects in need of an alternate source of European goods to the sporadic trade fairs at Portobello. They might also begin to expand English knowledge of the Spanish empire, possibly creating an opportunity for a more permanent expansion into Spanish holdings, as well as damaging Spanish trade and weakening their position on the American continents. Drawing on his knowledge of the native peoples in these areas, Wafer assured the duke of Leeds, to whom the report was addressed, that they would be eager to join with the English against the Spanish threat.²¹

Though this “Secret Report” was not widely published at the time, many of Wafer’s observations about the benefits of specific Spanish ports also appeared to one degree or another in his Voyage and Description, published the following year. In the first edition, he assured his readers that he intended mainly to describe the Isthmus of Darien. In his preface to the 1704 edition, written after the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession, Wafer became bolder. He explicitly argued for the creation of an English “establishment” in the area, which he insisted to readers “might be very easily effected.”²²

The publications circulating in the English-speaking world gave readers and hearers of these tales a sense of the immense possibilities for riches in the Americas. Along with this, the writers inculcated their audiences with the sense that only English settlement could properly control these areas; anywhere the Spanish held, they argued, they would spread Catholicism, cruelty, and bad management. The extent, climate, and topography of these lands, along with the entrenchment of the Spanish presence, however, made full-scale seizure of the continents impossible. The English merchants and colonizers instead had to pursue a number of complementary as well as competing approaches in order to secure American profits for themselves, both allowing the creation of small settlements, some quite close to Spanish shores, and moving toward an increasingly close trade with the Spanish Americas.²³ These attempts to encroach on Spanish trade and territory were undertaken on the part of the English government, independent traders, other individuals, and eventually, the British South Sea Company. Both governmental and nongovernmental actors made important efforts toward securing Spanish American profits, and unofficial acts could often influence the development of official policy. While it still faced challenges from the Spanish, the British navy had undergone growth, and government ships shared the ports with a significant merchant fleet.²⁴ Along with the experience of Spanish trade made possible by the diplomacy of an earlier age, this positioned the English well to take advantage of Spanish American trading opportunities in the early eighteenth century.

While he did not voyage far from home again, Wafer continued to promote the expansion of colonists and trade from what would soon become Great Britain into the Spanish Americas in other ways. In 1697 and 1698 he acted as an advisor to the Company of Scotland, which created a brief Scottish settlement at Darien, in modern-day Panama.²⁵ He encouraged the venture, giving the company more detail than was available from any other source about the landscape, dangers, and native inhabitants. The settlement’s location near one of the quickest land routes between the Atlantic and the Pacific made it particularly strategic if the emerging and ultimately unrealized Scottish empire wished to engage in large-scale trade from the Americas. Landing on the coast in 1698, the small group of twelve hundred Scottish settlers encountered a group of native Kuna Indians, who they called Dariens. This group had a long history of interaction with Europeans, including English buccaneers who raided the coast, but the Kuna were not living under Spanish rule.²⁶ A Scottish pamphleteer explained that despite controlling many of the lands around Darien, “the Spaniards cannot pretend a Title to that Country by Inheritance, Marriage, or the Donation of Prince and People; and as to Conquest it would be ridiculous to alledge it, since the Dariens are in actual possession of their Liberty, and were never subdued, nor receiv’d any Spanish Governour or Garrison amongst them.”²⁷ If the local Indians owned the area, the Scots could contract with them directly to settle on the land without Spanish interference. Those wishing to expand European empires did not only have to consider other Europeans when choosing locations and making connections; the loyalties of the Darien Indians would remain an important consideration for at least the next half-century.²⁸ By advising the Company of Scotland and publishing his book in London only a year into their settlement, Wafer simultaneously supported the two linked nations’ attempts on Spanish territories, offering his support to those who would pay for it.²⁹ Like many of his buccaneering and smuggling counterparts, Wafer privileged his purse over any strict allegiance to his country of birth.

Despite the initial problems the Scottish adventurers encountered with the nearby Spanish settlers, the news that filtered back to Scotland and England was not entirely negative. The Darien colony did fail in 1699, due to a combination of internal divisions and external pressures, but interactions with local peoples suggested that the idea of incursions into the area might be profitably revisited.³⁰ In particular, Darien settler Francis Borland and others noted that the native people living near Darien welcomed the Scottish colonists and encouraged their plans. Reports indicated that “the chief Indians here being friendly to them, welcomed them to settle in their Countrey, and consented to a Grant unto them of that Place and Lands adjacent.”³¹ Native peoples from Panama would not only tolerate, but in fact welcome the Scots, preferring their alliance to the poor treatment they received from the Spanish. Those who supported English colonial expansion took this as evidence that the English too might benefit from settling in the area, given the limited success that the much smaller Scottish empire had enjoyed. This hope would persist for decades, through the union of the countries.

The Spanish government in Madrid had long been anxious about the persistent English presence within what they considered to be their own sphere. The records of the Spanish empire reveal a marked concern with the location of English settlements, their fortifications, and their status with regard to native groups in the borderland areas, information similar to that recorded by English travelers. Though initially quite small, the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 sparked debate in Spain about appropriate responses to what seemed an obvious challenge to Spain’s claims on the Americas. The Council of War attempted to increase their forces at Saint Augustine in Florida, the nearest Spanish fortifications. In addition, the Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Zúñiga, relayed information about England’s colonial efforts to his king, warning of the threat to Spain’s holdings and the possibility that the English could launch piratical attacks from the North American coast.³² The anxiety expressed by the Spanish at the Jamestown settlement suggests the reality of the new threat posed by English expansion.

As Wafer, Dampier, and their fellow writers suggest, merchants, privateers, adventurers, settlers, and thinkers of England did not, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have any single agreed-upon approach to the creation of what might be called empire. They hoped to be able to take advantage of the riches that the Spanish had found in their American holdings, though no one model existed for transferring these riches into English hands. Some expected that taking land directly from the Spanish would do the most to benefit themselves and their nation while doing damage to their rivals in the Americas. Others were content to allow the Spanish to do the hard work of extracting silver and gold from the ground, intending to collect it later through trade. Many with plans for the Americas took the most pragmatic approach on the ground; they would whittle away at Spanish lands where they could, and trade with the Spanish where supplanting them seemed impossible.³³

If English access to the Spanish empire was to be had peacefully, the most lucrative inroad would be through trade. Opportunities for trade to the Spanish empire had grown piecemeal during the late seventeenth century, with treaties in 1667 and 1670 offering legal if limited trade to Old Spain within certain conditions and delineating appropriate channels for members of each empire to claim redress against the other.³⁴ It did not allow Englishmen any extended residency in Spanish American lands, a necessity if they were to conduct a long-term trade. Until 1713, very few English subjects could hope to have extensive contacts with members of the Spanish empire in the Americas while maintaining close affiliation with and loyalty to their country of origin.³⁵

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century the nations of Europe clashed over the future rule of Spain and its colonial dependencies. The Spanish king Charles II died late in the year 1700, leaving the throne to the French Louis XIV’s grandson. The succession of Philip V to the throne had the effect, troubling to the rest of Europe, of transferring control over the Spanish throne from the House of Habsburg to Philip’s own House of Bourbon. The new possibility that the same person might hold the French and Spanish crowns, with the concomitant threat of divisive international alliances for and against this possibility, incited a twelve-year war. England particularly dreaded the potential for strengthened national connections between the French and Spanish monarchies, given the country’s long history of conflict with Catholic powers. If these two enemy nations were to unite, English power in the Old and New Worlds would be unable to stand against the Catholics in Europe and the Americas. Opportunities to trade to Spanish territories might be wholly swallowed up by competition from the French, who had been so successful in the Spanish American trade in previous decades. Given the Bourbon threat, England and its allies, including Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire, united against the Spanish succession and waged war against the possibility of Philip’s rule. The war not only extended through Europe but included battles in areas as diverse as the English North American frontier in Massachusetts Bay and the harbors of the Caribbean Sea.³⁶

As the war drew to a conclusion, Britons continued to move through the West Indies and the Americas and to collect information from diverse sources in order to assess the possibilities for British profit in the area. The cartographer Herman Moll, for instance, published his observations on the “Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South-Sea Company” in 1711, anticipating the trade that would be possible with the imminent peace. He based his information concerning the fortifications of the Spanish and the state of their mining of precious metals on the existing publications and manuscripts on the subject in Britain.³⁷ The details of Moll’s maps suggest that they influenced Daniel Defoe, the propagandist whose support for the South Sea Company and general British settlement in the Americas helped kick-start the trade in the succeeding years.³⁸ Printed and reprinted throughout the early eighteenth century, Moll’s maps would provide some of the best and most public information on the Spanish Americas and encourage Britons to take advantage of this knowledge.

In addition to maps, the printers of London published numerous encouragements for Britain to engage with Spanish lands, including a reprint of Wafer’s book in 1705, just a year before his death. In a letter to Parliament in 1711, an anonymous pamphleteer sang the praises of the Spanish American holdings, noting that “South America is indeed the only inexhaustible Fountain of those Treasures, and from its first Discovery and Possession by the Spaniards, immense Sums have been from Time to Time brought from thence, in Returns of the Goods of Europe.”³⁹ If the English could take over the area, their superior naval capabilities and considerable trading network could move into parts of the Spanish Americas, enriching the metropole and providing an important outlet for excess manufactured goods and idle population. If the Spanish Americas were not at the moment producing stupendous riches for their owners, the pamphleteer suggested, this was not the fault of the colonies, but of the Spaniards themselves. He argued that “the Spaniard from their Slothfull Temper, and from their innate Pride, or from an inaptness to Manufactures, have not had the Advantages that they might have had, by the Possession of those Treasures.”⁴⁰ If the English possessed these lands, this suggests, they could easily leverage their situation in order to place themselves in control of the majority of trade to the Americas. This opinion would persist for decades. In 1731, British captain Fayrer Hall echoed this sentiment, noting that wealth made the Spanish “supine, indolent, careless and inactive” and that the Church made them weak. Though they held extensive and potentially productive lands, they did not make full use of possessions like Puerto Rico.⁴¹ Controlling the Americas, it was hoped, would also allow the English to halt further conversion of the native peoples to Catholicism, and to weaken Spain’s control globally.

In 1713, with the success of anti-Bourbon forces, the contending parties agreed to the Peace of Utrecht. In addition to ending the threat of the union of the French and Spanish thrones under a single monarch, this treaty had significant consequences worldwide. Great Britain largely controlled the details of the peace, and the treaties were written very much to their advantage. In addition to breaking down the growing power of the House of Bourbon in Europe, Britain won Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain and in the New World forced Spain to concede trading rights to its formerly closed American empire. The treaty created a defensive alliance of sorts between Britain and Spain: Spain was forbidden to allow other nations to take control of its own American colonies, and Britain pledged to defend those colonies from foreign encroachment.⁴² One of the most important concessions that the British forced in the formulation and signing of the Peace of Utrecht related to the slave trade, especially the highly coveted asiento. The economic and political importance of this trade has been well established by historians, but to this point there has been little attention to the effect of the asiento contract, the consequent sustained individual interaction between members of the British and Spanish empires, and the influence of the trade on the formation of the empires.⁴³

The innovation here was in allowing British subjects long-term residency in Spanish American trading posts and the right to a limited legal trade, but a limited contact in the form of contraband had long flourished between the empires. The writings of Britons such as Robert Allen make clear that the official status of Anglo-Spanish trading in the West Indies sometimes had little to do with the actual trade that occurred in the Americas. Allen, who had survived the Darien settlement, based his observations on the authority of his having lived in Panama and Quito for several years.⁴⁴ Allen had an unusually broad experience of the Spanish empire, given the usual limits to travel by non-Spaniards; after the Darien experiment failed, he reported, he was captured while on a raiding expedition on the Isthmus of Panama and became a secretary to a high-ranking official in the region that eventually became Ecuador.⁴⁵ Having made his way back to his own empire, he encouraged the expansion of foreign trade. Allen noted that trade from England to the Spanish lands in America had for a very long time been conducted through Spanish agents living in Cádiz, creating an extra step in selling merchandise and subtracting significant Spanish duties from the profits of the British.⁴⁶ After the 1655 takeover of Jamaica, though, Englishmen living in the area “became acquainted with the Spaniards of those Parts, and continu’d to keep a Correspondence and small trade with them, and they with us for Provisions mostly, and some few dry Goods and Negroes by stealth.” Far from mainland Europe, this clandestine trade could flourish, and with it, the repeated interaction of Spanish and English subjects. Even those safeguards that had been put in place by Spanish officials on the European continent and in the colonies did little to discourage this interaction and trade; Allen conceded that Spanish penalties for contraband trade were “very severe,” but reported that nonetheless a number of Spanish guards had themselves come to British ships to conduct a private trade.⁴⁷

The asiento contract allowed for open, though limited, trade, and would meet Spain’s needs. The links between the Spanish and English empires in the early eighteenth century centered on a mutual interest: the slave trade. The Spanish empire in the Americas relied on slave labor. While Spanish Americans made wide use of native coerced and tribute labor in the early years of settlement, the empire still required an outside source of forced labor to meet all its needs on the Caribbean plantations, in urban household service, and in the silver mines in areas such as Potosí. The Spanish turned to the large-scale importation of enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century.⁴⁸ Spanish merchants lacked a strong foothold on the African coast, and relied on other nations to supply them with slaves; the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English, in particular, had obliged their need for a steady supply of laborers from 1518, when the Spanish first permitted a monopoly on importing slaves into the Indies, to the turn of the eighteenth century.⁴⁹ The asiento was coveted among the nations of Europe. It guaranteed the holders a significant market and source of revenue in Spanish America, the possibility of trade in other goods, and access to the specie that flowed from the Spanish mines, as well as an opportunity for the ships of that nation to access Spanish ports, where they might engage in the significant contraband trade to the area.

Throughout the Caribbean and the North American mainland colonies, the English had long had access to enslaved African laborers, and even before they secured the official trade to the Spanish empire, they were important suppliers for Spanish slave agents. As their American settlements expanded, the English became increasingly enthusiastic about securing a steady source of enslaved labor. In 1672 the English government granted the Royal African Company a monopoly on the trade to the African coast, where they established a source for the slaves that would go to the English colonies, and many of those who would eventually end up being sold to the Spanish.⁵⁰ With the support of James II, the Royal African Company created trading posts known as factories in West Africa, where they had access to slaves as well ivory, hides, dyewood, and other commodities. There they formed diplomatic relationships with African leaders who could provide them with slaves, securing an English foothold amid the other European nations trading to the area.⁵¹ The Royal African Company, James hoped, would supply the growing colonies in the Americas with slaves sufficient to meet their labor needs, expand plantations, and secure the land for England. Here, as with the later development of the South Sea Company, the attempt to involve government in a profitable trade meant that private traders who operated under previous systems were sometimes displaced.

Figure 1. Map of Spanish and British territorial claims in 1713. Spain’s early eighteenth-century land holdings and trade monopolies were very attractive to the expanding British Empire. Map by Darin Grauberger, University of Kansas Cartographic Services.

Many in Great Britain enthusiastically embraced the asiento in 1713.⁵² The contract did not guarantee the full and direct trade that the British would have preferred, but the agreement did allow for some trade to the West Indies and kindled hopes for further expansion.⁵³ The asiento treaty gave the British the opportunity to make use of their extensive trade to the African coast to move directly into the Spanish American empire. The broad outlines of this trade have been well-documented. Queen Anne permitted the South Sea Company to fulfill the contract, giving them a monopoly on Spain’s American slave trade. The contract obligated the company to import 4,800 slaves into the Spanish Americas each year for a term of thirty years. The British won a further concession from the Spanish, with permission to send one ship of five hundred tons to the trade fair at Portobello each year, a key opportunity to bring British goods into the protected markets of the Spanish colonies. The Spanish allowed the Company to place a limited number of British slave traders in Spanish American port cities, including Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Veracruz, Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Portobello, and Panama.⁵⁴ In these ports the South Sea Company agents, called factors, came into close and sustained contact with subjects of the Spanish empire, and formed trading and personal relationships that extended far beyond the legal limitations established by the contract.⁵⁵ As a result, new networks of illegal trade developed, causing tension between the British and Spanish on an imperial level while strengthening interpersonal alliances and cooperation in the West Indies.

Drawing on decades of information gathering from settlers and travelers, the British knew that the Spanish could be valuable trading partners. Moving forward would mean increased contact between empires, both on an imperial level and for individual subjects of each empire, contact that would mean both profit and potential danger. As English Protestant men and women founded their own colonies, and traveled through those of Spain, they moved away from the center of English power, and new situations and environments challenged their imperial and confessional identities. On the edges of empire, simultaneously the most important site of expansion and maintenance and the most vulnerable imperial location, merchants and travelers could find that being British was not the most salient of their identities. Being Europeans engaged in the importation of thousands of African slaves, being traders with ties to a particular locale, or being individuals with a desire for personal enrichment could all become much more important than being Britons and supporting their nation through conquest or trade. As the English began the process of building their own imperial Americas, they faced new troubles and greater opportunities than ever.

The South Sea Company trade was a tempting opportunity for many Britons. One of the major benefits of the trade, from the perspective of individual merchants and even some South Sea Company officials, was that it offered a legitimate cover for British ships operating in Spanish American territories, where they might engage in a combination of legal and contraband trade. This could mean great profit for the country and its subjects, some argued, especially if one considered the additional smuggling opportunities available at the yearly trade fair. These hopes, projected onto imperial designs, drove the support for the company’s trade in the Americas, but it would ultimately prove destructive. Imagined profits always exceeded actual profits for the company and the nation in this trade. Conflict over contraband, and the piracy that surrounded it, would ultimately drive the British and Spanish empires to a war that ended the contract. Enthusiasm for the company had always been based on possibilities, on potential that would not ultimately be fulfilled.

The British asiento trade and the resulting interactions between the merchants and the Spanish encompassed both empires and comprised an inter-imperial history that developed over a large geographical area. Anglo-Spanish relations made possible by the asiento treaty extended to the greater West Indies, through the Spanish Main, well into South America and even along parts of the Pacific Coast; some Britons even hoped, as the name of the company suggests, that the trade would give the empire access to the markets of Asia through the South Sea, the contemporary term for the Pacific Ocean.⁵⁶ The British and Spanish empires shared an interest in the Caribbean and its surroundings, as it was a major avenue for providing the colonies with slaves and trade goods, and a source of enormous wealth because of shipping and sugar. The economic power of the Caribbean, and the mix of people who settled there, made it a center of European concern.⁵⁷ While this may at first seem a peripheral space, in fact, a study of social relations and economic cooperation in this area illuminates it as an area of considerable concern for these empires. Trade, both legal and illegal, piracy, religious conflict, and the complicating presence of non-Europeans in areas claimed by the empires, all drew the attention of the wider British and Spanish worlds.⁵⁸ Trade along the edges of these empires led to the development of deeply interconnected histories. British and Spanish individuals could become intimately involved in building up each other’s colonial projects, supplying their sometime enemies with enslaved laborers, trade goods, and profits.

While many historians have considered the Spanish and British empires entirely separately, a close consideration of the whole of the early modern Americas reveals a region that is best considered as a site of interaction and overlap.⁵⁹ This book joins recent scholarship that highlights the interactivity of the Americas, arguing for what one historian has called the “entangled” nature of the European colonial projects, especially those of Britain and Spain in the early eighteenth century.⁶⁰ Looking at the points of articulation between the areas controlled to various degrees by each empire, and considering the connections, cooperation, and entanglements they experienced as they grew and fell apart, allows for a more complex understanding of the formation of large parts of the American landscapes.⁶¹ If the British Empire was, in one historian’s formulation, “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free,” these categories could, and indeed did, become muddled on the edges: Protestants mingling with Catholics, official trade flowing alongside contraband, and interest in commerce mixing with calls for geographic expansion.⁶² Britons moving on the edge of empire sometimes preferred the Spanish to their countrymen and Spanish lands to English ones. Entanglement had consequences for individuals, but more importantly influenced the development of empires even at the broadest levels.

This book takes a new approach to the South Sea Company. Histories of the company have largely focused on the stock bubble of the 1720s, which destroyed many fortunes and devastated the English market.⁶³ That scholarship has emphasized how the trade was, in the end, a failure. Other historians detail the complex workings of the trade in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, though they have said little about the interactions between British and Spanish subjects and the influence of these interactions on the empires at large.⁶⁴ Without discounting the importance of the financial disaster to which the company contributed or the contract’s diplomatic or business details, this study puts aside the well-documented impact in Europe to argue that the real importance of the South Sea Company’s presence in the Americas lay in its bringing together of the Spanish and British imperial projects at the level of individual actors. With greater attention to the activities of the company’s agents on the ground, and their interaction with larger political and economic forces within the empires, it becomes clear that these empires were crucial to one another’s development, internally contested, and blurred on the margins, especially in a Caribbean context.⁶⁵

At the intersection of individual and imperial history, individuals’ decisions had impacts on empires, and individuals’ opportunities were created or limited by the particular forms empires took. Given these connections, this study approaches the history of the South Sea Company and the eighteenth-century British and Spanish empires through a biographical lens. Particularly detailed historical records have survived concerning the lives of Thomas Dover, John Burnet, Jonathan Dennis, and James Houstoun, all company employees who lived and worked in the Spanish empire, many for years. Attention to their individual lives allows for the reconstruction of the history of the British and Spanish empires at the level of the people building it, people who were tempted by the American trade and at the same time threatened by it.⁶⁶

The South Sea Company trade offered a wealth of opportunity to a specific subsection of British and Spanish subjects, working within, on the margins, or outside the control of their empires. The early eighteenth-century Spanish and British empires were made up of a wide variety of interest groups, operating not only in courts and legislatures in Europe but also in the Americas. The development of the Anglo-Spanish slave trade in the British asiento period was part of a larger set of struggles, between private enterprises and those granted a monopoly by the state, between those who envisioned an empire mainly built on territorial expansion and those who wished to expand British power through trade, and between the needs of the empire as a whole and its agents on the ground, who were often most concerned with benefiting themselves.⁶⁷ While the exercise of greater governmental control benefited those involved with the South Sea Company, those who had profited from the “salutary neglect” of the earlier period found themselves shut out of the imperial gains.⁶⁸ In London, those involved with running the trade, and those few who were able to make their fortunes from South Sea stock before the bubble burst, also found the possibilities opened by the asiento contract quite exciting. The Spanish American subjects who received these British imports, in both slaves and merchandise, benefited also from access to otherwise unavailable goods, and some Spanish American officials were more concerned with supplying their viceroyalties and filling their pockets than with the policies promulgated from Madrid. Individuals from each empire connected, made friendships, and traded goods and information. This interimperial network, created on the ground in the Americas, created the necessary framework to facilitate interimperial commerce and guarantee profit to some.

The multidimensional opportunities inherent in the company’s trade caused problems that eventually led to the end of cooperation. As networks developed, so did the prospects for a variety of contraband trade, illegal in the eyes of the imperial metropoles, sometimes sanctioned by local officials, and at other times more clandestine. Far from the halls of government in the metropoles, the official policies of the colonial governments were consistently less important than the practicalities that surrounded these agents of empire. Individuals operated within empires, leading to conflict between official policy and the execution of imperial plans on the ground. The very peace that allowed for this trade also created lawlessness and disorder in the Americas. In order to take advantage of the large amounts of specie and merchandise moving through the West Indies, and unable to engage in the privateering that had once been so important to Caribbean life, pirates sprang up in both empires, and Spanish guardacostas, or coast guard ships, meant to protect against both pirates and the smuggling trade, attacked British ships. The contraband trade, piracy, and the discontent that these caused in both empires, paired with complaints lobbed by both the Spanish government and the South Sea Company, precipitated the ultimate breakdown of cooperative relations between Britain and Spain in the slave trade. For the South Sea Company, empire was practiced at the periphery in ways that relied on but were ultimately destructive to the imperial plans constructed in London and Madrid.