The Temptations of Trade. Adrian Finucane
in the Spanish empire, whether it meant trading slaves and goods for Spanish specie or determining where the British might usefully make incursions into Spanish American land holdings. Dover bragged of his extensive travels and experiences abroad, opining that “if Travelling be necessary to make an accomplished Physician, I am very sure that I have travelled more than all the Physicians in Great Britain put together.”4 Dover’s explorations made him more useful both as a doctor and an agent of expansion for Britain’s merchant empire.
Dover and his fellow traders would find their loyalties challenged, their systems shocked by new social environments and climates, and their ability to conduct their trade thwarted by the vagaries of life in the West Indies. At the same time, these men participated both in the construction of their own nation’s overseas power and that of the often-enemy Spanish empire. As agents of the trade in slaves and other goods, the employees of the company simultaneously hoped to enrich themselves and their home country even as they lent support to the growing Spanish empire, supplying it with much-needed labor and supplies.5 By taking advantage of the asiento contract, the British government and its agents in the company could not help but assist the Spanish in building their own power in the Americas.
Dover was far from the only man with extralegal experience in the Spanish West Indies before turning his attention to supporting the interests of the South Sea Company. Manuel Manasses Gilligan, an Irish Catholic merchant, had also spent extensive time on the Spanish American coasts. During the 1702–1713 war, when the legality of trade to the Spanish empire was in flux and at times unclear, Gilligan took advantage of the confusion and conducted a trade to the Spanish Main. As far as the Barbados Vice-Admiralty Court was concerned, this was a contraband trade, and they prosecuted and convicted Gilligan. He eventually won an appeal in England and returned to his business, taking advantage of policies after 1704 that allowed a limited trade to the Spanish coast by English and Dutch vessels despite the war. As the war came to a close, the British government called Gilligan to Madrid, where he was asked to draw on his extensive experience with legal and illegal Anglo-Spanish trade in the Caribbean to participate in negotiations for the asiento contract.6 His work had been limited and illegal at the beginning of the war; at the end, his flouting of English colonial law transformed him into a valuable asset to those in Britain interested in formalizing the trade. Like Dover, Gilligan moved from illegal or quasi-legal activities to participating in official aspects of the expansion of the British Empire, and potential profits, on the coasts of Spanish America. These South Sea Company agents, like so many of their countrymen, took advantage of the British Empire in whatever way seemed most profitable at the time.
The British Asiento Contract
Dover and his fellow factors had permission from the Spanish to live in the Spanish Americas because of the asiento contract. Spain’s King Philip V and Britain’s Queen Anne signed the asiento treaty on March 26, 1713, intending it to come into effect on the first of May of that same year. The contract stipulated that for a period of thirty years, until 1743, the British would supply the Spanish Americas with slaves brought from Africa.7 This had the dual benefit of creating a legal way for Great Britain to trade to the Spanish Americas and banning the rival French from these same areas. It required the South Sea Company, which had been given a charter that allowed them the sole right to trade from British territories to South America from 1711 onward, to provide the vast regions of the Spanish Americas with 144,000 slaves, at the rate of 4,800 per year.8 In order to conduct this massive trade in human beings the Spanish permitted the British to construct trading posts, known as factories, and to place agents known as factors at the Spanish American cities of Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Vera Cruz, Havana, Panama, Santiago de Cuba, Caracas, and Portobello, and allowed them to import slaves to but not live in several additional Spanish ports.9 The Spanish also made an exception to the laws forbidding most non-Spanish trade with the colonies, allowing the British to send one ship to Portobello each year for the major trade fair.10 This trade agreement gave Britain more extensive access to Spanish American markets than even the French had enjoyed, and the Spanish agreed to this stipulation reluctantly, given the damage it was sure to do to the monopoly previously enjoyed by their own importers.11 This “permission ship” had an advantage over British trade through Cádiz or Seville, as merchants were able to avoid paying Spain’s taxes.12 The British ship would bring a variety of goods coveted in the Spanish Americas: according to the Spanish trade official Joseph de Veitia Linage, these included serges, woolen hose, silk hose, wrought pewter and tin, Scotch linen, calicoes, pepper, musk, amber, civet, and other merchandise.13 In return for these considerations, the Spanish king required that the South Sea Company provide him with a payment of two hundred thousand pieces of eight, in addition to a duty on each slave sale.14 The trade would provide needed goods and slaves to Spanish ports, enrich the Spanish king, and fill the pockets of the South Sea Company’s investors.
Though the contract technically existed between the monarchs, Queen Anne granted the right to fulfill the trade to the South Sea Company, formed in 1711 by the Tory lord treasurer, Robert Harley.15 The East India Company and others had set a precedent for overseas trading, but the South Sea Company was engaging in a fundamentally different sort of commerce, bringing slaves and merchandise mainly to the subjects of another European power in the Americas. The South Sea Company did not ultimately support the type of settlement and establishment of sovereignty over the areas to which they traded exercised by the East India Company, though some did have aspirations in that direction, especially considering the important routes to the Pacific controlled by the Spanish.16 Early on, the South Sea Company’s designs for the Spanish Americas extended beyond controlling its interimperial commerce, as in 1712 the company planned to send an expedition into Pacific South America to establish a settlement that could trade directly to the Spanish colonies surrounding it, though this was not carried out.17
As a corporation meant to take over a major overseas trade concession, the South Sea Company was organized to govern itself and the small groups of Britons it sent abroad. The company’s charter established a court of directors of thirty members under a governor, subgovernor, and deputy governor, all to be elected by the stockholders. The directors maintained regular contact with the company’s agents abroad, making decisions about who to hire and where to deploy their merchants and surgeons. While the company did not have control of large areas of land as the East India Company eventually would, they did have “ordering, rule, and government” of their forts and settlements, and were allowed to organize a force for their defense. While they were required to adhere to some Spanish laws, they were permitted to create a court of judicature to hold hearings on merchant and maritime cases. The crown intended this legal power to allow them to prevent others from trading in the South Sea Company’s jurisdiction.18
The Spanish allowed this British presence in order to maintain importations of enslaved African laborers. As holders of the asiento contract, the Spanish required the South Sea Company to import 4,800 piezas de indias, the standard unit for slaves, annually, for a period of thirty years. For each of these slaves the company would pay the Spanish crown at a rate of 33 1/3 pesos, except for the last 800, which were to be sold without duty.19 The company would never successfully import the full complement of slaves they were allowed, and may not have expected that that portion of the trade would be particularly profitable. Instead, the real value of the asiento trade lay in the political power it offered, as well as the profit possibilities inherent in the annual “permission” ship and the extensive contraband smuggling that accompanied the movement of British ships onto Spanish American shores.20
For many in Britain, the most important function of the company was financial. It agreed to absorb a significant portion of the public debt that built up during the War of the Spanish Succession, offering stock at ever-increasing prices through 1720, when the wild speculation had run its expensive course and the bubble burst.21 While this failure has been widely studied, the trading activities of the company have been of interest to fewer scholars, despite the fact that the South Sea Company continued to function in the Spanish Americas long after it ceased to be of financial benefit to the nation.22
The provisions of the asiento treaty suggest some of the hopes and fears with which each of these empires entered the agreement.