EPILOGUE

Beyond the Asiento

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 slave trade and the considerable contraband trade that accompanied it connected the projects of the Spanish and British empires, creating a system in which some Britons hoped for the takeover of Spanish lands, but many profited from the existence of a large and import-hungry Spanish empire, even as the Spanish benefited from a combination of legal and illegal trade from Britons. After the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the opportunities that the asiento created for these various groups to seek power and fortune in the Americas shifted, moving away from the fluidity of the earlier period to greater attempts at control by imperial powers. As the Jamaica merchants experienced at the beginning of the South Sea Company’s asiento, more attempts at imperial control limited the opportunities of people who had exploited previous iterations of empire for their own interests. Increased success, as measured by empires, led to restriction for those who had for many years taken advantage of the spaces for trade that empires created in their early state.

By 1748 the long war reached its conclusion. Throughout the nine years of hostilities, the Anglo-Spanish conflict intersected with larger-scale conflicts in Europe, and by the last years of the ensuing War of the Austrian Succession, France, Prussia, Austria, and Holland joined the fray. The European powers brought a definitive end to the conflict in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle without actually changing the ownership of any American lands.¹ Britain and Spain settled their financial matters in a separate treaty, enacted two years later, in 1750. In the Treaty of Madrid the empires cut their losses, ended the asiento contract, and reestablished the 1667 status quo.² As compensation for losing the exclusive rights to the slave trade to their American colonies, Spain agreed to pay the South Sea Company one hundred thousand pounds sterling.³ The South Sea Company ultimately failed to secure the promised profits from their limited direct trade to the Spanish Americas, at least on an official level; instead of continuing with the asiento treaty, British merchants refocused on the previous trade through Old Spain, which could still be legally profitable.⁴

The lure of profit proved powerful enough to easily overcome any considerations of national loyalty for some British and Spanish subjects in the short term. Indeed, during the war British ships continued to visit Spanish ports (even those under attack, such as St. Augustine) in order to supply the inhabitants with European goods.⁵ Governor Trelawny noted that contraband trade actually significantly increased in some areas during the war, because of a combination of the destruction of the guardacostas and the fact that Spanish American settlements suffered from a lack of supplies that were not coming from Spain with their usual frequency.⁶ Though the official trade ended for a time, personal contacts between Britons and Spanish subjects and the attraction of the large profits possible in contraband trade meant that while extralegal trading might be more risky, not all connections between members of these empires were severed.

The 1750 treaty definitively ended the asiento trade between the British and Spanish, but it did not mean the disbanding of the South Sea Company. The company continued to hold the monopoly they had been granted until the nineteenth century, both on trade to the Spanish Americas and to the whale fishery in parts of the Pacific.⁷ Some individual and imperial British interests in economically productive contact with the Spanish continued through the mid- and late eighteenth centuries, despite the problems both nations were encountering in controlling their sprawling American empires.

Some South Sea Company employees lived in the West Indies throughout the whole war, hoping to continue the trade upon resuming peace. Edward Manning, who lived at Jamaica for many years before the war as a factor for the company, contracted during the war to supply slaves on a smaller scale to the Havana Company. He wrote to the South Sea Company, enthusiastic about the profit that could be had because of the robust market for enslaved laborers in Havana, Portobello, and Cartagena. Due to the war, the number of slaves moving into these areas was lower than the market’s demand, and Manning observed that in Cuba, since the end of the Havana Company’s contract, those seeking slaves were “daily wishing for the reestablishment of the asiento.”⁸ Though he was disappointed by the 1750 treaty, his presence in the West Indies through nine years of war makes it clear that trade was still very much possible for former company employees who continued relationships with local Spanish traders.

The end of the asiento trade came amid mixed expectations and elicited a variety of responses from the British public. Some groups still felt deeply damaged by the monopoly on the Spanish trade, while others championed the company. Arguments about the desirability of the asiento trade before the 1748 and 1750 treaties demonstrated the sharp divisions among Britons as to the advisability both of pursuing Spanish trade and of trying to incorporate Spanish American lands. Some wanted it continued; others questioned the wisdom of having entered into the treaty in the first place.

As the British Empire had tried to organize a trade that would benefit the government and a certain group of merchants, others who profited from a less structured imperial system suffered. One anonymous 1739 pamphlet focused on the failures of the company and the preferability of the pre-asiento private trade. It claimed, as had pamphlets in 1713, that the latter was more profitable by far, and strong enough to avoid problems with guardacostas: “the Private Traders were in no wise subject to the King of Spain’s seizures to lessen their profits.”⁹ The pamphlet observed that the company “have been severe Sufferers by” their monopoly on the slave trade to the Spanish Americas, as “they have yearly been deficient some Thousands in the Number of Negroes which by the Contract they were oblig’d to furnish the Spaniards withal.”¹⁰ If the company could not fulfill the needs of the Spanish Americas for goods and enslaved labor, this suggested, it would only be fair for private traders to take over again. Another pamphleteer complained in 1744 that unscrupulous factors could never be as diligent and profitable in their work as private traders, because the employees of the South Sea Company “may have an eye to their own or Friends Interest” rather than that of the company or the nation.¹¹ Indeed, it appears that the company’s detractors uncovered multiple abuses and errors committed by the court of directors, including failures of communication and payments to Spain, smuggling, falsifying the weight of ships, and supporting unscrupulous factors.¹² Despite the initial hopes for a South Sea Company that would support the growth of the British Empire, at the end of the trade it became clear to many that some directors and factors were all too happy to act against the public interests.

A few Britons felt sure of their ability to succeed in the West Indies trade, regardless of the eventual status of the asiento contract, which was in any case scheduled to end during the War of Jenkins’s Ear. The failure of the asiento for the South Sea Company did not stymie the enthusiasm some still had for the personal and public opportunities of empire.¹³ Even during the war, British merchant John Campbell assured his countrymen that they would triumph over the Spanish, who had by their own poor decisions driven their lands and trade to a low position. Campbell bemoaned the use of guardacostas and characterized the Spanish empire as poorly managed and consequently underproducing: “with the richest Territories the Spanish Monarch is one of the poorest, as well as proudest Princes in Christendom.”¹⁴ Trade would continue, Campbell was sure, because Spain was and always had been unable to meet its own need for enslaved laborers. Some country would necessarily import African slaves, as “the Inhabitants of Peru never could be without Slaves.”¹⁵ Given their long history of supplying labor and merchandise to the area, Britons were well-positioned to continue the trade, as far as Campbell was concerned.

Other Britons defended the South Sea Company’s asiento trade for its profitability and for the opportunities it gave Britain for a direct trade with the Spanish Americas, unmediated by the merchants and tax officials at Cádiz. James Houstoun rebutted the slanders of detractors and blamed the failures of the trade on the misdeeds of the Spanish. From its inception, the British-held asiento contract was a stroke of genius, Houstoun wrote. Indeed, “if rightly executed, [it] would have fairly laid open all the Ports of the Spanish West Indies to the British Trade, without giving Umbrage, or the least Offence to any Nation,” avoiding the international grudge that establishing a direct and unlimited trade between the nations would have created.¹⁶ The South Sea Company, Houstoun argued, benefited the country greatly, bringing in more money by far than had private trade alone. The real problem, as he presented it, was the mismanagement of the asiento by the court of directors and some few unscrupulous factors abroad.¹⁷ With proper leadership, the South Sea Company would be able to continue its original mission, which was to succeed as near as possible in conducting a free trade to the Spanish Americas without involving Spanish merchants or taxes, to the general profit of the British nation. Other Britons feared the decline in trade if the loss of the asiento were to be permanent. A letter from Havana warned British prime minister Henry Pelham that Cádiz merchants were angling to win the contract for themselves. If they were successful, “the English Merchants must lose the many advantages they have reaped by this commerce” and “our trade to Africa will be reduced to the supply of our own collonys with Negroes + in all probability this will be done very scantily,” hurting both the profit from trade to the Spanish colonies and the British colonies themselves.¹⁸

Some Spanish subjects also supported the continuation of the asiento trade, given the mutual profit available to some involved in it. In 1748, Don Manuel de Cosuela and his brother wrote to the governors of the South Sea Company to ask to be included in the trade, should it be resumed. Their earlier proposals had been interrupted by war, but Cosuela hoped that if a permission ship was to be sent in 1749 that it might be entrusted entirely to him. This would be less expensive than reestablishing a factory to deal with the merchandise, and the brothers argued that they were uniquely qualified to dispose of the goods for the company, as “from the knowledge we have of this Country, and the inhabitants who reside here, we shall be able to give the proper esteem to the cargo.” As proof of their knowledge of the Spanish American market, they included detailed instructions on which goods would sell well, going so far as to warn that while dark colored cloth would sell best, “grave few reds” should be sent.¹⁹ While the 1750 treaty made the fulfillment of the Cosuela brothers’ hopes impossible, it is clear that individual Spanish subjects were still willing to conduct a trade with the British, even considering the long war they suffered. Despite the support of some groups of people on both sides for the continuation of the asiento contract, the prospects for this kind of trade came to an end with the Treaty of Madrid.

The treaty effectively ended the opportunity for the sustained, sanctioned interaction that the factors of the South Sea Company enjoyed during the asiento period. Regardless of the hopes they maintained during the war, no longer could British subjects expect to be able to spend years at a time in the major ports of the Spanish empire without facing significant problems with local officials. This put new limitations both on opportunities for individual trade and on the nation’s ability to access Spanish American markets and to collect information about Spanish lands. However, the conclusion of the official trade in no way meant the end of all Anglo-Spanish trade, and the accompanying contact, in the Americas. As they had during the official periods of peace and cooperation, despite legal limitations against private trade in the Spanish Americas, contraband traders continued to exploit the extensive markets in the area during and after the nine-year war between the crowns. In part, Britain’s willingness to continue some trade with Spain officially, and to turn a blind eye to unofficial trade, came from the gains they perceived for the country; Spain continued to offer a market from which specie could be extracted.²⁰ Diplomatic considerations, economic motives, and military worries influenced the trajectory of Anglo-Spanish relations, first tending toward friendly interaction and then toward renewed hostilities as global war broke out and the American empires of both nations began to crumble. On the ground in the Americas, those independent traders who operated between the empires in times of war and peace continued to carry goods, though conditions in the West Indies made this more difficult at some times than others.

The period from the 1750 treaty to the onset of the Seven Years’ War has been dubbed by several historians as the “Seven Years’ Peace.” The chief Spanish ministers during that period, José de Carvajal y Lancáster and Richard Wall, were particularly sympathetic toward Great Britain, hoping for alliance with the country.²¹ It was during this period of peace that Houstoun published his final book, reiterating a good deal of the information on his time in the company that he included in his Memoirs (1747). Houstoun’s Works (1753) demonstrated that Spain and relations therewith remained relevant for British readers and suggested what might be possible once again if friendly relations on the level of the asiento treaty resumed. For their part, British ministers hoped to ally with the Spanish as tensions mounted with France.²² Europe’s multiple upheavals and wars would only get more traumatic with the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. In this context, strategic alliances appeared particularly important, and the outlook for Anglo-Spanish cooperation seemed promising.

While the empires turned once again to peace, throughout the 1740s and 1750s the Spanish had become more adept at supplying their own empire with the goods they needed to maintain settlements. While the asiento contract was in effect, and for several decades before, the Spanish sent galleons to the colonies only sporadically; sometimes years could pass without landings of goods at terra firma. After the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the reforms undertaken by the Bourbon monarchs led to a much more frequent transit of ships between Cádiz and the Americas, making reliance on foreign trade, legal or illegal, less necessary for colonial governors and merchants.²³ With these changes, direct trade in slaves and merchandise between the British and Spanish in the Americas was replaced, at least in part, by Spanish shipping, making British merchants’ long-term presence in the empire less necessary.

The end of the asiento and challenges to trade did not remove all British subjects from Spanish territories. A significant number of them also continued to live in lands officially claimed by the Spanish empire along what was called the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. For nearly two centuries, Britons were involved in the illegal trade in dyewoods and other natural resources from this heavily wooded coast, and the native populations appear to have been receptive to their presence.²⁴ These men logged the rich Central American woods of areas such as Honduras and Campeche, shipping the deep red dyewood back to Europe to supply the cloth manufacturers. The official Spanish position had long been that foreigners were not permitted to settle in any of the king’s dominions, but in 1754 Ferdinand VI sent orders that the viceroy of New Spain and his governors should be instructed to “immediately desist” from destroying the British settlements, preferring to address the issue through diplomatic channels rather than direct violence.²⁵ In the decades after the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the Spanish complained heartily about the estimated two thousand British subjects living in the area and exporting dyewood.²⁶ This trade produced significant profits for merchants in the British Empire, who did not have to buy from the Spanish because of the extensive production of the British interlopers.²⁷ Despite Spanish complaints, many Britons asserted the importance of these settlements to the empire and their right to maintain them because the Spanish had not taken advantage of the site themselves: “had not the subjects of England settled themselves in the bays of Campeachy and Honduras, they would in all probability have been uninhabited to this time,” one claimed.²⁸ Though the degree of interaction that these woodcutters had with the Spanish subjects living along the coast is unclear, the persistent presence of Britons in lands claimed by the Spanish reveals a continued interest in exploiting or completely seizing Spanish territories.

The nations did not maintain their peace for long. Contraband trade slowed little during the postwar period, and illegal commerce and the related seizure of ships continued to cause problems as the empires clashed over trade and control in the West Indies.²⁹ By the second half of the 1750s war again enveloped the major European empires, and opportunities for legal trade quickly disappeared. The Seven Years’ War disrupted legal commerce in Europe and the Americas, though contraband merchandise continued to flow among all the empires involved, both in the West Indies and in North America.³⁰ The illegal trade, like that sanctioned by the government, proceeded unevenly. Despite the official bans on supplying goods to the enemy, in the early years of the new war contraband was quite lucrative, especially for those trading from Jamaica. The independent traders once again found themselves with willing and hungry markets in Spanish America. From the perspective of the empire, the success enjoyed by these British individuals was actually damaging to broader interests. By 1759, the British government’s crackdown all but ended this illicit commerce with the Spanish.³¹

A different sort of wartime mixing and contact between the empires arrived with the British occupation of Havana in 1762.³² A major victory for the British in the Seven Years’ War, the capture of Havana meant both a blow to the Spanish empire and a different set of opportunities for British merchants. While the British flag flew in Havana, trade flowed into Cuba from the British Empire once again, though not in the way it had during the asiento period. In less than one year, they imported thousands of slaves into the island.³³ During this brief period many British ships also managed to travel to other Spanish American ports, stretching the rules of the Spanish in order to transport trade goods to the manufactures-starved Spanish subjects in the viceroyalties.³⁴ Subjects of the British and Spanish Empires could expect to come into periodic contact with one another to engage in trade or combat, but sustained cooperation on an imperial level of the sort aspired to during the British asiento period was unlikely.

The Seven Years’ War came to an end not long after the occupation of Havana, bringing a temporary conclusion to overt aggression between the British and Spanish. Unlike in the preceding major European war, the peace led to a significant shuffling of territories among the powers, with Britain taking West Florida and Spain gaining the massive Louisiana territory from the French. While the empires remained officially at odds with one another, and relations within Europe continued to be uneasy, the intense cultural and international mixing that characterized the West Indies during the early eighteenth century occurred in new locations in the period after the war. Individual imperial subjects took it upon themselves to create new areas of cultural mixing that increased their profits but disregarded the policies of London and Madrid. Under Spanish rule, the Louisiana territory attracted large British and French populations.³⁵ This was not the sort of officially sanctioned interaction that the South Sea Company fostered in the Spanish American ports, but did exemplify the primacy of economic interests over official imperial loyalties for those French and British subjects who moved into territories belonging to the Spanish empire, and the Spanish subjects who accommodated them.

The peace brought no official additional trading rights for the British, though the contraband trade and the indirect trade allowed by the 1667 treaty (and resanctioned by the treaties signed after the War of the Austrian Succession) meant that profits were still available to those independent merchants who sought them.³⁶ In a 1762 reprint of a 1712 pamphlet, British subject Robert Allen, who had been part of the Darien expedition and later lived in the Spanish Americas, noted that illicit trade flourished for years in the Indies despite official sanctions against it. Before the asiento treaty, he observed, “interest, the true loadstone of all merchants, brought the Spaniards in those parts, to come and trade with our vessels in the private creeks; where our vessels commonly lay to trade with them.”³⁷ His nearly ten-year residence in Panama and Quito gave him ample opportunity to observe this trade. There was little to suggest that this behavior would not continue in the postwar period, as Spanish need for European goods had in no way abated and British thirst for gold and silver showed no signs of declining.³⁸

By 1765, the British were called upon once again to indirectly provide slaves to the Spanish Americas. The Compañía Gaditana de Negros, a Cádiz-based company that held the new monopoly on the Spanish American slave trade, turned to slave traders in the British Caribbean to provide the laborers needed in the empire as the Portuguese and French had in previous contracts. This company imported slaves, and with them flour, ostensibly as provisions rather than for sale. In reality, this trade provided the Spanish Americas with a huge amount of British North American flour, which was difficult to obtain by other means. This trade met with numerous problems, not least because of the repeated complaints about the company smuggling excess flour, which was needed far more than slaves in places like Cuba that had recently experienced poor harvests.³⁹

The renewal of legal trade brought with it some of the same problems that vexed the South Sea Company’s asiento. In 1765 British accountant John Wright noted the dangers that attended the trade given the continuing activity of the guardacostas. The murky legality of the scope of the trade actually being carried out, and the participation of smugglers from both empires, is suggested in Wright’s warning that “in trading with the Spaniards, whether in their own Ports in the West Indies, or in their Creeks and Bays, or with such as come with money to buy Goods at Jamaica, Pensacola and Mobile in West Florida, or at any other Port or Settlement belonging to the English in America,” it was important to determine in advance whether the cost of goods was to be paid in full dollars, or in some currency of lesser worth.⁴⁰ Even when certain types of trade were officially sanctioned, different expectations and standards in each empire might create confusion for those moving between them, a continuing source of strain.

The British and Spanish found the possibility of profit and convenience valuable enough to set aside some of their differences on an imperial level and conduct a limited legal trade between Jamaica and the Spanish colonies. A Spanish act in 1765 and the British Free Port Act of 1766 allowed for certain goods to come into the Spanish Americas, and for the British to exchange European wares for bullion and other merchandise through Jamaica.⁴¹ Once again, individuals living in the British and Spanish empires might have some limited contact with one another as trading partners, but without the extended and organized residence of British factors in Spanish American ports. In 1773 the Spanish definitively turned to Jamaica for enslaved Africans once again.⁴² The terms of the trade would be different, without British factors resident in the Spanish colonies, but this peaceful commerce between empires was nonetheless encouraging to merchants who hoped for continued contact with the other empire. Britain remained very active in the slave trade to the Americas until the success of abolitionists in ending their Atlantic slave trade in 1808, and controlling at least part of the importation of enslaved laborers into Spanish colonies would remain an attractive possibility until the end.⁴³

Through the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, groups of Britons conducted trade with Spain, though the legality of this trade varied depending on imperial policy and times of war and peace. The South Sea Company offered a brief opportunity for a trade that was legal in both empires, and the British hoped that it might offer an entryway into an even larger trade. By connecting this company trade to a government monopoly, the asiento trade displaced the merchants from Jamaica and elsewhere in the British Empire who had previously supplied Spanish markets, though often contrary to Spanish law. Legalizing and regularizing the trade between the empires had allowed long-term residence in Spanish America for British subjects, a situation that would not be replicated in later years. While the decline of the company’s trade opened opportunities for other Britons to supply Spanish viceroyalties, the possibility of using a government monopoly trade to encroach on the Spanish empire closed.

The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution marked a definitive conclusion to both Anglo-Spanish cooperation as it existed in the early eighteenth century and the “Seven Years’ Peace” and an end to realistic British aspirations regarding the control of large parts of the Americas. Despite this, however, the South Sea Company continued to profit from its technical rights to the Spanish American trade even a half-century and more after its main purpose had come to an end. As the British attempted to reestablish trade with the Spanish viceroyalties, even after the loss of many of their American colonies, the government continued to require merchants who wished to trade legally to South America and other areas covered by the company’s monopoly to cease their activity or to financially compensate the court of directors.⁴⁴

Those who acted as factors for the South Sea Company had diverse experiences of the post-asiento period. Houstoun remained in the West Indies as a sometimes-contraband merchant; Burnet lived in Madrid as a royal physician. Both found ways to make the close contact with Spanish American merchants and subjects benefit them personally. While many of their actions supported the development and interests of the British Empire, both engaged in self-interested projects that were made possible by the British Empire and doing damage to it. The fates of many more company agents are not preserved in the records, though their experiences likely drew in similar ways on their lives in the Spanish Americas. Living in the Spanish empire and interacting with Spanish subjects gave these men a set of skills and contacts that would make them valuable after the end of the trade, though the break with the Spanish created a frustrating distance from the friends and business contacts they made during their years as factors.

By the late eighteenth century, problems within the European territories in the New World made it clear that the era of major American empires was coming to an end. As debates within the British Empire about the morality and desirability of slavery heated up in the years before the American Revolution, the selling of slaves began to seem less attractive to many of those outside the trade.⁴⁵ When the trade came to an official end for the British in 1808, slavery, and likely some clandestine trade in slaves to Latin America, continued in the West Indies, but the widespread asiento trade of the early eighteenth century was a success the British could not hope to replicate or reinstate.

From the end of the asiento period with the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the collapse of the British American empire in the 1770s, the structure of the British Empire in the Americas shifted dramatically, and the opportunities for the British and Spanish to have sustained legal contact in an area in which the rules and borders were still in flux came to an end. Trade, legal and illegal, would be reestablished periodically between the British and Spanish empires, but the intense prolonged interaction between subjects of each empire occurring in an area as contested and economically important as the Americas was no longer possible. The increase in imperial control enacted by the British and Spanish in the second half of the eighteenth century shifted the opportunities of empire away from those who succumbed to the temptations of trade during earlier iterations of empire.

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