The British and the Spanish had long been in conflict, often clashing over politics, trade, and religion. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, these empires signed anasientoagreement ...granting the British South Sea Company a monopoly on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic, opening up a world of uneasy collaboration. British agents of the Company moved to cities in the Caribbean and West Indies, where they braved the unforgiving tropical climate and hostile religious environment in order to trade slaves, manufactured goods, and contraband with Spanish colonists. In the process, British merchants developed relationships with the Spanish-both professional and, at times, personal.
The Temptations of Tradetraces the development of these complicated relationships in the context of the centuries-long imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. Many British Merchants, in developing personal ties to the Spanish, were able to collect potentially damaging information about Spanish imperial trade, military defenses, and internal conflict. British agents juggled personal friendships with national affiliation-and, at the same time, developed a network of illicit trade, contraband, and piracy extending beyond the legal reach of the British South Sea Company and often at the Company's direct expense.
Ultimately, the very smuggling through which these empires unwittingly supported each other led to the resumption of Anglo-Spanish conflict, as both empires cracked down on the actions of traders within the colonies.The Temptations of Tradereveals the difficulties of colonizing regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.
PROLOGUE Finucane, Adrian
The Temptations of Trade,
03/2016
Book Chapter
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,
EPILOGUE Finucane, Adrian
The Temptations of Trade,
03/2016
Book Chapter
The asiento trade laid bare some of the competing interests that complicated the project of British and Spanish settlement, commerce, and imperial expansion in the Americas. The first half of the ...eighteenth century marked a period of experimentation in the Americas, an attempt by multiple parties, including the British and Spanish governments, various local governments in the Americas, individual agents of groups like the South Sea Company and Royal African Company, independent traders, and settlers in the Americas, among others, to create a system that best served their own aims, often in ways that conflicted with the needs of others.
The asiento trade had been interrupted repeatedly by war in its first decade and a half of implementation, but despite these conflicts the governments of Britain and Spain reinstated the treaty and ...resumed trade after each break. In the 1730s, relations between the nations in the Americas faltered once again, as contraband, ship seizures, and internal disruptions within the colonies made conditions in the West Indies difficult for all. The groups involved in the area—independent traders, company agents, settlers, government officials, and those in London and Madrid with investments in the Americas—each had distinct and conflicting interests that
As the provisions of Bubb’s treaty created new expectations for trade, the South Sea Company’s factors went about the business of establishing themselves in their new cities. Trade depended on ...finding mutual interests with members of the oppositional empire, and many of the company’s employees wasted little time in identifying Spaniards with whom they could socialize and make deals, based on a mutual interest in science or profit. Despite this enthusiasm among some, the company’s operations faced challenges during the next decade as trade disagreements, smuggling, piracy, and two resulting wars shook the fragile peace between the empires. The wars
Through the seventeenth century, the English had been interested in taking over lands claimed by the Spanish, particularly in the West Indies and the North American mainland. By the second decade of ...the eighteenth century, this push for land was partially overtaken with a concern for trade as the main method of extracting Spanish American riches. The career trajectory of one South Sea Company agent, Thomas Dover, mirrors the shift in British strategies in regards to the Spanish. Although he had sailed against the Spanish during the War of the Spanish Succession, after the peace Dover became a company surgeon,
In the years leading up to the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the situation in the West Indies between Britain and Spain steadily deteriorated. Even as they lined their pockets through the contraband trade ...and by navigating the ambiguous edges of empire, agents of interimperial trade corroded cooperation by exploiting the contact between empires, along with pirates,guardacostas,and others. The South Sea Company employees who lived in the Spanish Americas certainly felt this shift, but the crumbling of the official trade did not mean an end to contact or commerce with the Spanish for all involved. Some company employees continued
This dissertation examines interactions between the British and Spanish empires in the Caribbean during a period of intense trade, 1713–1739. The South Sea Company was a facilitator of close contact ...between members of each empire at a time of imperial growth and in a region of much cultural and ethnic intermixing. The asiento of 1713 established the British as the sole slave traders to the Spanish empire, and resulted in British factors living in Spanish American ports despite the longstanding conflicts with that empire. This study explores the contact of peoples through commerce, sea travel, and the slave trade, positing that the empires and their subjects were not as oppositional as traditional scholarship suggests. In fact, these empires were united in this period as Europeans in their subjugation of enslaved Africans. Looking at both of these empires and their relationships to each other expands the history of the Americas beyond nationally centered stories, highlighting areas of contingency and complication in the early modern Atlantic world. Using the records of the South Sea Company preserved in the British Library, letters and accounts from individuals living and traveling in the West Indies from London's National Archives and the National Library of Jamaica, and official records collected by the Spanish imperial government in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, this dissertation reconstructs the history of the ports through which the slave trade to the Spanish Americas flowed during this period. It focuses in particular on the lives of the South Sea Company factors that lived in these cities, and their responses to the trade and turmoil that surrounded them. A study of this area, which was a center of significant economic concern for both empires, reveals a region of early eighteenth-century possibility. Within this area, individuals' seemingly established imperial, economic, and confessional loyalties were challenged, and sometimes blurred. The history of the South Sea Company demonstrates the power of trade and profit to bring together opposing groups, as well as the limits of that power.
