Notes

Prologue. Before the Asiento

1. Wafer produced little documentation of his own life outside his New Voyage. No images of him exist from his lifetime. L. E. Elliott Joyce, Introduction to A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, by Lionel Wafer (Oxford: Hakluyt Society, 1933), xii. For more on Wafer and his contemporary William Dampier, see also Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–43.

2. Alison Games notes this valuing of practicalities over ideology in Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83.

3. The push for looking at the interrelated character of the British and Spanish empires comes particularly from Eliga Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 764–86. Shannon Lee Dawdy has identified a similar self-destructiveness in the French empire in Louisiana in Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

4. Travel to the Spanish empire posed significant danger to English subjects, from both civil and religious officials. While Englishmen had been traveling in very limited numbers to the Spanish Americas as contraband merchants, adventurers, and pirates throughout the sixteenth century, in defiance of the restrictive Spanish trade laws, they faced a very real threat of Inquisitorial prosecution. On early English encounters with the Spanish American Inquisition, see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 276; Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 414; Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 462–63; James A. Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1922), 108; D.M. Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490–1690 (New York: Longman, 2000), 88–91; John Hampden, Francis Drake: Privateer (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972), 26–27. The English claimed the right to sail in Spanish American waters despite Spain’s papal claim to the right to exclude others from the region. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107.

5. London merchants trading to Old Spain suggested in a petition to King James I that they could provide “good intelligence” about the Spanish if their trade was supported by the crown. The English threat was borne out during the Armada War, when many merchants to Spain turned privateers. A. J. Loomie, “Religion and Elizabethan Commerce with Spain,” The Catholic Historical Review 50 (April 1964): 45. Jason Eldred, “‘The Just Will Pay for the Sinners’: English Merchants, the Trade with Spain, and Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1563–1585,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (Spring/Summer 2010): 10.

6. Since the sixteenth century, when Walter Ralegh sailed to Guyana for England and Richard Hakluyt wrote in praise of the country’s efforts toward empire, explorers, buccaneers, and promoters had looked for potential sources of profit in seizing goods, land, or both from the Spanish. This move toward an expansion in the power of England’s nascent empire in the Americas existed alongside a trade to the ports of Old Spain conducted by generations of English merchants. See Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Richard Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935); Jean Olivia McLachlan, Trade and Peace with Old Spain, 1667–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).

7. The English seized Jamaica as part of a much larger planned expansion in the Caribbean. Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986), 570–71; Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 195–229; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 157–212.

8. Cornelius Burroughs, Rich Newes from Jamaica: of Great Spoyl made by the English upon the Enemy, both by Land & Sea. Being the Substance of a Letter from Cornelius Burroughs, Steward Generall, Dated from Point-Cagway (London: M. Simmons, 1659), 3.

9. Clinton V. Black, History of Jamaica, 3rd ed. (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1968), 61. Carla Gardina Pestana has challenged traditional periodizations, arguing that piracy thrived in the Caribbean as a result of English decisions, but was not initially directly supported from Jamaica. Pestana, “Early English Jamaica Without Pirates,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, 3 (July 2014): 321–60. Whether or not they were initially recruited for their buccaneering skills by Jamaica’s governors, many who turned to piracy did sail from the island.

10. Wafer’s A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699) and his Secret Report significantly downplay the illegality of some of his travels, focusing instead on describing the flora, fauna, native inhabitants, and military preparedness of the Spanish American lands. On this focus on ethnography and biology among pirates who became authors, see Anna Neill, “Buccaneer Ethnography: Nature, Culture, and Nation in the Journals of William Dampier,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, 2 (Winter 2000): 165–80.

11. Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage & Description of the Isthmus of America by Lionel Wafer, Surgeon on Buccaneering Expeditions in Darien, the West Indies, and the Pacific from 1680 to 1688. With Wafer’s Secret Report (1698) and Davis’ Expedition to the Gold Mines (1704), ed. L. E. Elliott Joyce (Oxford: Hakluyt Society, 1934), xii.

12. Wafer, New Voyage, xv–xvii.

13. Wafer, New Voyage, 4.

14. Wafer, New Voyage, 19–27. Integration into a foreign community in the Americas to the point of losing one’s identity was a recurring theme in the travels of Englishmen in the Americas. In the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Gage had traveled in the Spanish Americas as a Dominican friar before returning to his English roots and converting to Protestantism. His 1648 account of his experiences noted that only by changing his clothing and language was he “now changed from an American into the fashions of an Englishman.” Gage’s account goes on to provide valuable information about the trade, ports, and wealth of Spain’s empire to his readopted English countrymen. On Gage, see E. Denison Ross and Eileen Power, eds., Thomas Gage: The English-American, A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648, Broadway Travellers Series (London: Routledge, 1928), x, 365, 381–82.

15. Wafer, New Voyage, 126.

16. While this information does not appear in Wafer’s book, it has been reconstructed in great detail by L. E. Elliott Joyce in his introduction to A New Voyage and Description, xlii–xlviii.

17. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, vol. 1, 7th ed. (London: James and John Knapton, 1729), 162; Glyndwr Williams, “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750,” in Perspectives of Empire, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (London: Longman, 1973), 32. Williams notes that Dampier and other explorers did not always return with full and accurate information, but did stir interest in attractive and “vulnerable” Spanish lands.

18. William Dampier, A Collection of Voyages, vol. 4 (London: James and John Knapton, 1729), 97.

19. Dampier, Collection of Voyages, vol. 2, 19.

20. Wafer, New Voyage, 134.

21. Wafer, New Voyage, 140, 145.

22. Wafer, New Voyage, lxix. Indeed, Wafer wrote to the duke of Leeds in 1689 or 1690 to suggest attacking Spanish holdings on the Isthmus of Panama and in the Caribbean. Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 134.

23. On the variety of options as debated in political circles, see Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, 1 (January 2012): 3–34.

24. John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 172.

25. Wafer, New Voyage, li–liii.

26. Ignacio J. Gallup-Diaz, The Door of the Seas and the Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darien, 1640–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 53–75, 90, 98.

27. A Defence of the Scots Settlement at Darien with an Answer to the Spanish Memorial Against It (Edinburgh, 1699), 6.

28. Original Letters to an Honest Sailor (London: R. Thomas, 1746), 14. During the 1739 war, at least some Dariens allied with the Spanish.

29. Indeed, the English government expressed concern that Wafer had traveled to Scotland and possibly given helpful information to territorial rivals. Wafer, New Voyage, lv–lvi.

30. On the failure of the Darien settlement see in particular Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas, 127–32, passim.

31. Francis Borland, Memoirs of Darien, Giving a short description of that Country, with an account of the attempt of the Company of Scotland, to settle a Colonie in that Place (Glasgow: Hugh Brown, 1715), 21.

32. William S. Goldman, “Spain and the Founding of Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, 3 (July 2011): 436–39. On English intentions in Virginia, see April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2, 7. On the successes and difficulties of the Jamestown settlement, see, for example, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007); James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and the classic Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

33. These various approaches to imperialism would be articulated more clearly in the eighteenth century, as described in different ways by Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism,” 3–34, and Armitage, Ideological Origins, 146–69. Lauren Benton notes that imperial control of territory was often porous and tenuous. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.

34. Jean McLachlan, “Documents Illustrating Anglo-Spanish Trade Between the Commercial Treaty of 1667 and the Commercial Treaty and the Asiento Contract of 1713,” Cambridge Historical Journal 4 (1934): 300–307; George Chalmers, A Collection of Treaties Between Great Britain and Other Powers (London: John Stockdale, 1790), 2: 5–15. Members of each empire were allowed to move in and out of the ports of the other empire, in both commercial and military vessels. Some restrictions were placed on these movements, in order to allay fears of attacks from within and to prevent long-term residence by members of the other empire within a kingdom’s lands. These included the provision that travelers number no more than eight and stay only a short time.

35. Despite these official restrictions, some Englishmen were able to make trading connections with the Spanish American settlements, though this was not part of a large-scale or official English strategy of expansion. On the connections that did exist, see in particular Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia press, 2012); Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, 4 (October 1986): 570–93. Those who abandoned their English identity completely, like Gage, could also travel, though only small numbers of English subjects ever chose this path. Ross and Power, Thomas Gage. On trade and citizenship, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 94–118.

36. On the war, see Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain 1700–15 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Henry Kamen, Philip V of Spain: The King Who Reigned Twice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

37. Herman Moll, A View of the Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South-Sea Company (London: Ju. Morphew, 1711), 1.

38. Burton J. Fishman, “Defoe, Herman Moll, and the Geography of South America,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (May 1973): 227–38.

39. A Letter to a Member of Parliament, on the Settling a Trade to the South-Seas of America (London: J. Phillips, 1711), 8–9. Pincus has argued that this kind of push for expansion represented a particularly Tory approach to colonization, primarily valuing the acquisition of land, in contrast to a Whig desire for power through labor and industry instead of territory. Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism,” 25–27.

40. Letter to a Member of Parliament, 9.

41. Fayrer Hall, The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom (London: J. Peele, 1731), 25.

42. B. W. Hill, “Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Peace of Utrecht,” The Historical Journal 16 (June 1973): 241; Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 1–2.

43. Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1981); Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2013); Victoria Gardner Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America Under the Asiento, 1713–1740” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1975); Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

44. Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 132.

45. J. D. Alsop and Robert Allen, “A Darien Epilogue: Robert Allen in Spanish America, 1698–1707” The Americas 43, 2 (October 1986): 197–201.

46. Robert Allen, An Essay on the Nature and Methods of Carrying on a Trade to the South Sea (London: 1712), ii, 17. McLachlan notes that merchants from a number of European countries operated through Cádiz in the eighteenth century as well, as that was where the annual fleets trading to the West Indies left from and returned to. McLachlan, Trade and Peace, 13–14.

47. Allen, Essay on the Nature and Methods, 18–20. The importance of trade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for most European nations has been well-established, and some historians have suggested that trade and labor had become more important than holding land in building the empire. This study, however, suggests that many Britons were pursuing right and control of land in tandem with trade in order to build imperial and personal power. Armitage, Ideological Origins, 147, 166.

48. The discovery of highly productive gold and silver mines in the Spanish Americas increased the need for labor above levels that could be satisfied through forced or voluntary indigenous labor. African slaves were sent to the mines as early as 1510. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 57–99; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 96–98. Scholars have made much of the structural and legal differences between English and Spanish slavery, particularly Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Random House, 1946). See also Frederick P. Bowser, “Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society,” in Colonial Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 357; P. J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 122.

49. C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 204. Parry notes that while the competing powers of Europe could have dismantled parts of the Spanish American empire, they preferred the opportunities offered by trade over actually controlling those territories. J. H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (Berkeley: University of California, 1966), 292; Elliott, Empires, 99. Bowser, “Africans in Spanish American Colonial Society,” 360.

50. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, 1960), 44–46.

51. Davies, Royal African Company, 213–90.

52. There have been several excellent studies of the South Sea Company and its trade, though they do not address the national and imperial intermixture that its trade created in depth. Colin Palmer’s work provides a very useful overview of the structure of the trade, the numbers and demographics of slaves being transported, and the profitability of the trade. Palmer, Human Cargoes; see also Jorge Palacios Preciado, La trata de negros por Cartagena de Indias (Tunja: Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia, 1973); Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War; Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America.”

53. McLachlan, Trade and Peace, 46.

54. Palmer, Human Cargoes, 60. On the port cities of the British and Spanish empires and beyond, see in particular J. R. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) and Franklin K. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

55. The English had previously been promised some limited protections from prosecution or religious threat, with treaties in 1604 and 1645. The latter noted that the English were allowed to practice their Protestant religion and to have their oaths accepted in court “as if they were natural Spaniards,” protections echoed in the asiento treaty. James Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 31; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 60; Loomie, “Religion and Elizabethan Commerce with Spain,” 28, 47; “Cedula of Privileges granted by His Majesty to the English which reside in Seville, San Lucar, Cádiz, and Malaga: Zaragossa, 19 March 1645,” in Edward Herstlet, Treaties and Tariffs Regulating the Trade Between Great Britain and Foreign Nations … Part V, Spain (London: Buttersworths, 1878), 12.

56. Peter Silver notes the expansion of the War of Jenkins’s Ear especially beyond the bounds of the Atlantic in “A Rotten Colossus: The Americas in the War of Jenkins’s Ear,” presented at the William and Mary Quarterly workshop titled “Territorial Crossings” and summarized in Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (July 2010): 395–432. The present study draws on the conceptual frameworks of Atlantic history, though the scope of the trade means that this is a wider story. On Atlantic history and global history, see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Alison Games, “Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006): 675–92; Peter Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (October 2006): 725–42.

57. Lance Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), 15. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World provides an excellent comparison of the British and Spanish empires that nonetheless omits the Caribbean, the area of greatest overlap between the empires. Reintegrating this area into histories of these empires allows for a more complex understanding of the operation of empires.

58. Operating in areas claimed by multiple empires could lead to complex problems of jurisdiction and power. See in particular Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 104–61.

59. An excellent history of both empires by J. H. Elliott, for instance, provides compelling insight into the cores of the British and Spanish Americas, but focuses on comparison rather than interaction and considers the mainland colonies in greater depth than the Caribbean, where in fact the most intense and long-standing interactions took place. Elliott, Empires. For comparisons between the empires, see also Liss, Atlantic Empires; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); James Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

60. On interconnection, see Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12; Gould, “Entangled Histories”; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); on the importance of the French to the formation of Britain and its empire, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). On connections between the English and Dutch Atlantic worlds, see Christian Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011). For recent work on the empires of the Americas and their entanglements, see in particular Kristin Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire; Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

61. Hinderaker and Horn, “Territorial Crossings,” 426.

62. Armitage, Ideological Origins, 195. On the commercial aspects of empire, see in particular Games, Web of Empire; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Philip J. Stern, Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

63. On the South Sea Bubble, see in particular Malcolm Balen, A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal (London: Fourth Estate, 2002); John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, rev. ed. (Dover, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1993); Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011), Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 197–248.

64. These histories have been critical to reconstructing the historical record of the early eighteenth-century Americas and the coming of the 1739 war. Lucy Frances Horsfall, “British Relations with the Spanish Colonies in the Caribbean, 1713–1739” (Master’s Thesis, King’s College London, 1936); McLachlan, Trade and Peace; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies: 1739–1763 (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1963); Palmer, Human Cargoes; Rafael Donoso Anes, El asiento de esclavos con Inglaterra (1713–1750): Su contexto histórico y sus aspectos económicos y contables (Sevilla: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 2010); Preciado, La trata de negros; Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979).

65. This blurring of empires extended to imperial identities for those who moved between empires, some of who chose to shift their allegiances, religious, economic, and national, during their time at the edge of empire. On other movements between empires, see Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). If British identity was becoming more salient and British imperial ideology becoming more developed in Great Britain through the 1730s and 1740s, as noted by Armitage and Colley, in the liminal spaces of the West Indies individuals found it easier to move between identities and advocate for a variety of imperial alternatives through much of the early eighteenth century. Armitage, Ideological Origins.

66. This biographical approach to explaining larger historical contexts has been quite successfully deployed by many historians, including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990); Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh; Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean. On the value of biography, see the American Historical Review roundtable “Historians and Biography,” American Historical Review 114:3 (June 2009): 573–661.

67. On competing plans for the construction of the British Empire, see Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism.”

68. On the British government’s lack of involvement with American questions in the early eighteenth century, see James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration Under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

Chapter 1. Britain Hopes for the “Riches of America,” 1713–1716

1. The court of directors announced its choice of factors at Buenos Aires, Cartagena, and Veracruz September 17, 1714, Add. Mss. 25495, f. 205, BL. Though several article- and book-length biographies of Dover have been written, none, including an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, noted his connection to the South Sea Company as a factor until Kenneth Dewhurst and Rex Doublet, “Thomas Dover and the South Sea Company,” Medical History 18 (1974): 107–21. For more on Dover, see Kenneth Dewhurst, The Quicksilver Doctor: The Life and Times of Thomas Dover, Physician and Adventurer (Bristol: Wright, 1957); A. G. Strong, Dr. Quicksilver, 1660–1742: the life and times of Thomas Dover, M.D. (London: Melrose, 1955).

2. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (London, 1712), 176, 310; Thomas Dover, The Ancient Physician’s Legacy to his Country, being what he has collected in Forty-nine years Practice (London: R. Bradley, 1733), 69.

3. Dionisio de Alcedo Ugartey Herrera, Compendio histórico de la provincia, partidos, ciudades, astilleros, ríos y puerto de Guayaquil (Madrid: Miguel Fernandez, 1741), 89.

4. Dover, The Ancient Physician’s Legacy, 6.

5. In their public statements, these merchants stressed the ways in which the trade would help the nation, rather than their own profits. For instance, company employee James Houstoun celebrates the benefits of the slave trade for the British nation. Houstoun, Dr. Houstoun’s Memoirs of His Own Life-Time (London: Jacob Bickerstaff, 1747), 147.

6. Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 196. Richard Pares, “Barbados History from the Records of the Prize Courts 3. A Trader with the Enemy, 1702: Manuel M. Gilligan,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 6, 2 (1939): 59–66.

7. The Assiento: or Contract for Allowing the Subjects of Great Britain the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America (London: John Baskett, 1713), 1.

8. Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 10; Andrea Weindl, “The Asiento de Negros and International Law,” Journal of the History of International Law 10 (2008): 229–57; Assiento, 3, 6.

9. Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 9; Palmer, Human Cargoes, 60.

10. Assiento, 45.

11. Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 74, 113; Elena F. S. Studer, La Trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII (Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1958), 152.

12. Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia general del Perú (Lima: C. Milla Batres, 1966), 131.

13. Joseph de Veitia Linage, The Spanish Rule of Trade to the West-Indies: Containing an Account of the Casa de Contratacion, or India-House, 2nd ed. (London: 1720), n.p.

14. Assiento, 5. This would cause a problem for the company, as they were required to pay the duty even on slaves they did not import, if they imported fewer than the stipulated number. Considerations on the American Trade, Before and Since the Establishment of the South Sea Company (London: J. Roberts, 1739), 9.

15. John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, rev. ed. (Dover, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1993), 55.

16. Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 123; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42.

17. On the company’s early designs, see Shinsuke Satsuma, “The South Sea Company and Its Plan for a Naval Expedition in 1712,” Historical Research 85 (August 2012): 410–29.

18. Abstract of the Charter of the Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain, Trading to the South-Seas, and other parts of America, for Encouraging the Fishery. Add. Mss. 25494, f. 2, 6, BL. Though this printed document is undated, it is in a collection of manuscripts from the 1711–1713 period.

19. Palmer, Human Cargoes, 8–9.

20. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 241.

21. On the financial aspects of the company, see Carswell, The South Sea Bubble.

22. On the South Sea Company in the Americas and its slaving activities, see in particular Palmer, Human Cargoes, and Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011).

23. Indeed, Great Britain would not abolish its slave trade until half a century after the end of the asiento trade. See in particular Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 205–41.

24. Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower, and the Atlantic (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2013), 163–71.

25. The Navigation Acts, reiterated and refined throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, required that most trade to the colonies be conducted by British ships, and restricted colonial produce from being sent anywhere but England. For most of this period, the British did not vigorously enforce these laws. Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 249–54, 307–8.

26. Assiento, 7.

27. On early English troubles with the Inquisition, see Adrian Finucane, “British Traders, Religion, and the Asiento in Spanish American Port Cities,” in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era, ed. Carole Shammas and Peter C. Mancall (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 2014), 197–221.

28. Abstract of the Charter of the Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain. Add. Mss. 25494, f. 9, BL.

29. Assiento, 13.

30. A 1725 cedula from the Spanish king specifically allowed two or three Britons to go into otherwise off-limits inland areas to bring slaves to markets. July 28, 1725, Ind. 2769, Legado 8, f. 297–98, AGI. See also the Marquis de Grimaldo’s letter to William Stanhope, June 22, 1725, Add. Mss. 25562, f. 208, BL.

31. Court of Directors, February 4, 1724. Add. Mss. 25564, f. 96, BL.

32. English traders in Europe had faced problems in Catholic countries for many decades. See, for example, Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100.

33. Assiento, 10.

34. This stipulation was reinforced in a 1716 royal order to the governor of Buenos Aires to allow the local factors to build only out of wood, and only in ways that would not constitute fortification. Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 41v, AGI.

35. Assiento, 11.

36. Liss stresses the importance of British control of the legitimate trade to Spain in Atlantic Empires, 2.

37. Assiento, 23–25.

38. Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 2, AGI.

39. John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989), 36, 144–51.

40. John Pullen, Memoirs of the Maritime Affairs of Great Britain (London: T. Astley, 1732), 14–15.

41. This population, according to Modyford, was as large as 1,500 buccaneers. Trevor Burnard, “European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (October 1996): 771.

42. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 154–56.

43. Nuala Zahedieh, “Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986): 590. Governor Molesworth and many on the island enumerated the benefits of the free Spanish trade in 1688. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company, 2nd ed. (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), 332.

44. Curtis Nettels, “England and the Spanish-American Trade, 1680–1715,” Journal of Modern History 3:1 (March 1931): 20.

45. For his part, the sloop’s captain insisted he was bringing the slaves to Carolina. South Sea House February 6, 1716, Add. Mss. 25563, f. 6, BL.

46. Fayrer Hall, The Importance of British Plantations in America to this Kingdom (London, 1731), 53.

47. On these protests and their connection to the Royal African Company, see Victoria Gardner Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America Under the Asiento, 1713–1740” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1975), 19. This conflict between interests who wanted a strict mercantilism and those who resented the state regulation of trade had caused tension in the empire from the late seventeenth century. April Lee Hatfield, “Slavery, Trade, War, and the Purposes of Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, 3 (July 2011): 407.

48. “A Gentleman who has resided several years in Jamaica,” The Trade Granted to the South-Sea-Company: Considered with Relation to Jamaica (London: Samuel Crouch, 1714), 23. A pamphlet of the same year by Samuel Page claims that the author of this pamphlet has stolen Page’s own ideas about the matter for profit: The Representation of Dr. Samuel Page to the South-Sea Company (London: 1714).

49. William Wood, The assiento contract consider’d. As also, the advantages and decay of the trade in Jamaica and the plantations, with the causes and consequences thereof: In several letters to a member of Parliament (London: Ferd. Burleigh, 1714), 6.

50. Wood, The assiento contract consider’d, 6, 8.

51. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, money, and the English State, 1688–1793 (New York: Knopf, 1988), 125; Carswell, South Sea Bubble.

52. Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, 1 (January 2012): 26–27.

53. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 39.

54. Shinsuke Satsuma, “The South Sea Company and Its Plan for a Naval Expedition in 1712,” Historical Research 85:229 (August 2012): 413.

55. The Considerable Advantages of a South-Sea Trade to our English Nation (London: S. Popping, n.d.), 7.

56. Daniel Defoe, A True Account of the Design, and Advantages of the South-Sea Trade: With Answers to All the Objections Rais’d Against It (London: 1711), 9–20. On the Royal African Company, see Davies, The Royal African Company; Kenneth Morgan, ed., The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, vol. 2 (Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2003); on its factors, see in particular David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175–86.

57. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the South-Sea Trade. With an Enquiry into the Grounds and Reasons of the Present Dislike and Complaint … 2nd ed. (London: 1712), 38.

58. Defoe to Harley, n.d. (1711?), Add. Mss.70291, f. 9, BL.

59. Defoe, Essay on the South-Sea Trade, 38–39. Jane H. Jack notes that the enthusiasm for a British settlement in South America is present in much of Defoe’s other work as well, particularly his General History of the Principal Discoveries and Improvements in Useful Arts (1726–1727) and Review. Jack, “‘A New Voyage Round the World’: Defoe’s ‘Roman a These’,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24:4 (August 1961): 323–36.

60. On Bolingbroke, see Glyndwr Williams, “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750,” in Perspectives of Empire, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (London: Longman, 1973), 51; on Defoe, Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War, 58.

61. July 23, 1711, Defoe to ?., Add. Mss. 70291, f. 23, BL.

62. Burton J. Fishman, “Defoe, Herman Moll, and the Geography of South America,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36:3 (May 1973): 227–38. Glyndwr Williams notes that Defoe’s vision for the Americas was different, and “more constructive,” than the plans of the privateers and pirates of the previous century. Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 170; Williams, Perspectives of Empire, 33.

63. Kings Mss. 73, f. 73, BL.

64. In his chapter on the profitability of the South Sea Company slave trade, Palmer notes the difficulty of accurately calculating the costs and profits of the company. He concludes that the company was profitable, but that a significant portion of the money could not be collected successfully, lowering the actual profits significantly. Palmer, Human Cargoes, esp. 155.

65. On the extensive contraband trade in the region, see especially Lance Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).

66. Jean O. McLachlan, Trade and Peace with Old Spain, 1667–1750: A Study of the Influence of Commerce on Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1940), 61. McLachlan notes that Bolingbroke hoped the South Sea Company would, in its new position, be able to prosecute foreign contraband trade while supporting and protecting British contraband interests.

67. Add. Mss. 25562, f. 17, 23, 24–27, BL.

68. Ugarte, Historia general del Perú, 110.

69. Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 6, 1702–1714 (London: Longman et al., 1810), 1362.

70. Henry Partington to the Court of Directors, February 16, 1714/15. ADM 1/2281, n.f., TNA.

71. Dewhurst and Doublet, “Thomas Dover,” 113.

72. Davies, Royal African Company, 44–46.

73. An Account of the Proceedings of the Court of Directors of the So Sea Company from their first Institution in Relation to Trade. Kings Mss. 73, f. 15, 223, 63, BL. These slaves were to be delivered at Jamaica then carried on in Company ships. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 55.

74. Davies, Royal African Company, 344.

75. On the mixing of religious and commercial groups in the West Indies during the seventeenth century, see in particular Kristin Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

76. In the Americas, illegal trade could often be conducted somewhat openly, as in New Orleans. Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 103.

77. There are significant points of comparison between these Caribbean conflicts and those internal to the Old World. Linda Colley argues for attention to the “deals and compromises constantly going on between European and non-European powers,” in contrast to the focus on “opposition and antagonism” that is usual in the historiography, and the present study makes a similar argument for the British and Spanish in the Americas. Colley, Captives: Briton, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 69.

78. The dangers of the climate in the Caribbean and surrounding regions is covered in depth in J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Long, History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2:556.

79. Partington reported from the River Plate in September 24, 1715, ADM 1/2281, n.f., TNA.

80. ADM 1/2281, n.f., n.d, TNA.

81. Susan M. Socolow, “Buenos Aires: Atlantic Port and Hinterland in the Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 240–46.

82. Gaining this concession took some convincing. As Colin Palmer has noted, the Court encouraged Spanish officials to agree that they could move slaves inland in part by stressing the dangers of keeping large numbers of enslaved African laborers in the city of Buenos Aires. Palmer, Human Cargoes, 70–71.

83. Studer, Trata de negros, 204.

84. In fact, only about 2,000 whites lived in Jamaica in 1700, a number that grew during the first half of the century. Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997), 89.

85. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica (London: B.M.,1707), xlvi; Additional instructions for our trusty & well beloved Sir Nicholas Lawes, January 16, 1717/18, CO 137/14/113, TNA.

86. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1740), 38–39.

87. Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America: Describing at Large, the Spanish Cities, Towns, Provinces, &c. on that Extensive Continent, 2nd ed. (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1760, first pub. 1758), 24–25; Sloane, A Voyage to the Island of Madera, lxxxii.

88. Ulloa, Voyage to South America, 29–42.

89. Grahn, “Cartagena and Its Hinterland in the Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 171–78.

90. Allan J. Kuethe, “Cardinal Alberoni and Reform in the American Empire,” in Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759), ed. Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vásquez Varela (Boston: Brill, 2013), 29–35.

91. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 145; Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 167.

92. James Houstoun, surgeon to the Cartagena factory, notes that this would be a two-day journey by mule. Houstoun, The Works of James Houstoun, MD Containing the Memoirs of His Life and Travels in Asia, Africa, America, and most Parts of Europe (London: S. Bladon, 1753), 15.

93. Ulloa, Voyage to South America, 91.

94. A Gentleman who had resided several years in Jamaica, The Trade Granted to the South Sea Company: Considered with Relation to Jamaica (London: Samuel Crouch, 1714), 29.

95. Ulloa, Voyage to South America, 97.

96. Christopher Ward, Imperial Panama: Commerce and Conflict in Isthmian America, 1550–1800 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 18–19, 80–87.

97. Ulloa, Voyage to South America, 102–5. It is unclear whether this number indicated the tonnage in cargo, the tonnage the ship could carry, or the registered tonnage of the ship. On the tricky issue of tonnage measurements, see John J. McCusker, “The Tonnage of Ships Engaged in British Colonial Trade during the Eighteenth Century,” in Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World, ed. McCusker (New York: Routledge, 1997), 43–75. Thanks to Michael Block for pointing me toward this literature. Ward, Imperial Panama, 154; Vargas Ugarte, Historia general del Perú, 131; Gage quoted in Ward, Imperial Panama, 67; Walker, Spanish Politics, 74; Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 4.

98. Inventory of the Veracruz factory February 27, 1740. Ind. 2786, n.f., AGI.

99. Cartagena had just this breakdown of factors at one point in 1732. Minutes of the Committee of Correspondence of the South Sea Company. November 15, 1732. Add. Mss. 25553, f. 147, BL.

100. This became an issue, as the Spanish government complained that the presence of the supercargoes violated the eleventh article of the asiento, which limited the number of Britons in the factories to four to six. The Court of Directors insisted that the contract said nothing about the supercargoes, and that they had carefully restricted their numbers in these ports. Letter from Wescomb to the Duke of Newcastle November 3, 1724. Add. Mss. 32741, BL.

101. The asiento contract permitted the factors to hire servants and colleagues from among the Spanish. Assiento, 13. One case of British servants living in a South Sea Company factor can be found in a letter from the Buenos Aires factory. Assiento House November 5, 1730. Add. Mss. 25553, f. 111–112, BL. The presence of English musicians present in Caracas for several months “at the governors request” is recorded in a letter from Samuel Collit, September 12, 1734. Add. Mss. 32785, f. 457, BL.

102. Letter from the Court of Directors to the Factory at Veracruz February 8, 1716. Letters almost identical to this one were sent to each of the company’s factories at the beginning of the trade. Add. Mss. 25563, f. 7, BL.

103. William (sic) Dover, President at Buenos Ayres January 13, 1716 (NS), to the Rt Hble the Prince of Wales. Add. Mss. 24221, f. 1–2, BL.

104. This British interest in taking over land and exploiting natural and mineral wealth continued well into the eighteenth century, contrary to the characterization of this as a particularly Spanish behavior in later colonization by Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 73.

105. Letter to Factors of the Royal Asiento Company of Great Britain at Veracruz, February 8, 1716. Add. Mss. 25563, f. 11–17, BL.

106. Benjamin Woolley, The Particulars into the Enquiry into Mr. Woolley’s Conduct; and his Being Stationed, by the Court of Directors of the South-Sea Company, First Factor at Porto Bello and Panama (London, 1735), 10.

107. Petiver to William Bumpsted for Cartagena, January 10, 1715. Sloane Mss. 3340, f. 67, BL; Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, 4 (October 2013): 637–70.

108. Letter from the Court of Directors to the Factory at Buenos Aires, March 7, 1717. Add. Mss. 25563, f. 144–9, BL.

109. Letter from the Court of Directors to the Factory at Veracruz. n.d. Add. Mss. 25563, f. 59, BL.

110. Letter from the Court of Directors to the Factory at Buenos Aires. December 12, 1723. Add. Mss. 25564, f. 8, BL.

111. Minutes of the Court of Directors. September 22, 1714. Add. Mss. 25469, f. 206, BL.

112. Minutes of the Court of Directors. June 15, 1715. Add. Mss. 25496, f. 41, BL.

113. Translation of a letter from the president of Panama to the Marquis of Monteleon. October 28, 1715. Add. Mss. 25562, f. 72, BL. A similar problem occurred in Cartagena in November 1714. Kings Mss. 73, f. 76v, BL.

114. Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 16v, AGI.

115. Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America,” 170–79; Rafael Donoso Anes, “Accounting and Slavery: the Accounts of the English South Sea Company, 1713–1722,” European Accounting Review 11:2 (2002): 445; Walker, Spanish Politics, 81; Reales Cedulas Originales v. 37, f. 279, November 12, 1716, AGN.

116. Rafael Donoso Anes, “El Barco Annual de Permiso del Asiento de Esclavos con Inglaterra: El caso del Viaje a la Vera Cruz del Navio La Real Carolina en 1732,” Revista de Historia Naval 93 (2006): 70.

117. Jorge Palacios Preciado, La Trata de Negros por Cartagena de Indias, 1650–1750 (Tunja: Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia, 1973), 183. Spanish officials complained of flour being smuggled through the South Sea Company factory at Cartagena in 1726. March 2, 1726, Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 313r, AGI. Flour was also smuggled into Caracas before the establishment of a factory there, from Jamaica and the Dutch colonies: Proposals for the Royal Assiento Companys Carrying on a Trade to the Windward Coast of the North Seas of America. Shelburne Collection 43, unnumbered folio, no date, CL. Even British merchants complained about the company’s supplying the area with staples: because of the company’s presence in the market, the merchants in Old Spain bought less from British traders there, explaining that the market was already saturated. Charles Townshend, 1730, Some Considerations upon the Assiento Contract, Sydney Papers, CL. By the late eighteenth century, large amounts of flour flowed from British North America to the Spanish Caribbean colonies, sometimes closing those markets to Spanish merchants. Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 80; Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 176–77.

118. Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 124–25.

119. Ugarte, Historia general del Perú, 135.

120. Letter from Archibald Hamilton to Mr. Secretary Stanhope, Jamaica, November 14, 1715. CO 137/11, f. 3, TNA.

121. Letter from Archibald Hamilton to Secretary Stanhope, Jamaica, February 27, 1716. CO 137/12, f. 30, TNA.

122. Memorial from Lord Archibald Hamilton to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, March 16, 1716. CO 137/13, f. 104, TNA.

123. Ibid.

124. Letter from Archibald Hamilton to Secretary Stanhope, Jamaica, February 27, 1716. CO 137/12/30, TNA.

125. Letter from Colonel Heywood to the Governor of the Havana, August 16, 1716. CO 137/12/79, TNA.

126. Letter from Thomas Onslow to the Secretary from Jamaica August 1716. CO 137/12/35, TNA; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 410.

127. Studer, Trata de Negros, 183.

128. Copy of Mr. Bubb’s letter to Mr. Secry Stanhope February 10, 1716, Eg. Mss. 2171, f. 101v, BL.; Copy of Mr. Bubb’s letter to Mr. Stanhope Madrid April 20, 1716. Eg. Mss. 2171, f. 292, BL.

129. Many of the details of this treaty can be found in both George Bubb to Secretary Stanhope, Madrid, June 4, 1714, SP 94/85, f. 171, TNA, and in June 12, 1716, Ind. 2785, f. 142, AGI. The latter is a pamphlet printed in Spanish, with an appended note indicating it was submitted to George Bubb and sent to England September 12, 1716.

130. Ibid.

131. Ibid.

132. Memorandum of Some Particular Grievances Under which the Company Labours. London March 25, 1725. Add. Mss. 25556, f. 63–5, BL.

133. Block, Ordinary Lives, 210.

134. Kennet Dewhurst and Rex Doublet, “Thomas Dover and the South Sea Company,” Medical History 18 (1974): 116. Dewhurst and Doublet suggest that this was the result both of Dover’s private trade and his inability to cheerfully accept orders from his superiors.

135. Weekly Packet, August 18–25, 1716. In company correspondence this man is referred to as Thrupp or Thruppe, though in the Packet he is listed as Thrubb.

136. To Mesers John Thruppe … Factors to the Royal Assiento Company at Buenos Ayres South Sea House London January 24, 1716, Add. Mss. 25563, f. 1–1v, BL.

Chapter 2. The Stuttering Success of the Early Trade, 1717–1728

1. Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade” William and Mary Quarterly 70, 4 (October, 2013): 666.

2. Court of Directors, August 8, 1716. Add. Mss. 25469, f. 147, BL.

3. South Sea Company Cast of Treaty of England and Spain of 1713 and 1717 re tonnage of yearly ship. August 10, 1722. MS 1369, NLJ.

4. Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 131.

5. Weekly Journal or British Gazeteer, Saturday, June 28, 1718. The issue had improved a few years later, when the Spanish king allowed the company to send the goods that remained from the fair inland for sale just as Spanish merchants did. Heads of sundry matters necessary to the reestablishment of the Asiento trade, to which the Company are entitled to be restored under the Treaty of Seville with some Explanations. September 1721. Add. Mss. 33032, f. 45v, BL.

6. John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 145; Lance Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 108–11.

7. John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, rev. ed. (Dover, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1993), 64.

8. Frank Wesley Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1917), 83.

9. Jamaica Courant, April 15, 1719.

10. On further complaints about the restriction of the Jamaican trade to Spanish America following the asiento contract, see Charles King, The British Merchant: A Collection of Papers Relating to the Trade and Commerce of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1743), 3: 217–18.

11. J. Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 71; Max Savelle, Empires to Nation: Expansion in America, 1713–1824 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 123–24.

12. Jamaica Courant, February 11, 1718/19.

13. His Majesty’s Declaration of War against the King of Spain. December 16, 1718. HCA 1/30/118, TNA.

14. George Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (London: J. Senex, 1726), xi.

15. Jamaica Courant, April 15, 1719.

16. Deposition of Laurence Van Huesslan, September 11, 1716, Jamaica. In A Person who resided several Years at Jamaica, The State of the Island of Jamaica. Chiefly in relation to its commerce, and the Conduct of the Spaniards in the West-Indies (London: H. Whitridge, 1726), 69–70.

17. Extract of a letter from Mr. John Kelly, dated at Port Royall, Jamaica April 30, 1719. CO 137/13/166, TNA.

18. For other British calls for deregulation, see April Lee Hatfield, “Slavery, Trade, War, and the Purposes of Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, 3 (July 2011): 406–7.

19. Elena F. S. Studer, La trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII (Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1958), 205; Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 64.

20. Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, Saturday, February 7, 1719. Satsuma argues that the company and the British Government undertook no serious plans for colonization from the beginning of the asiento trade to the 1730s. Shinsuke Satsuma, “The South Sea Company and Its Plan for a Naval Expedition in 1712,” Historical Research 85 (August 2012): 410–29.

21. The copy of this map in the holdings of the John Carter Brown Library is labeled as having a publication date of 1708–1720, though Dennis Reinhartz argues that Moll produced it in 1713–1715, suggesting that the 1715 wreck of the Spanish treasure fleet sparked his interest in the area. Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 42.

22. Extract of a letter from Mr. John Kelly, dated at Port Royall, Jamaica April 30, 1719. CO 137/13/166, TNA.

23. O. Nigel Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize: Essays in Historical Sociology (Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cubola, 1988), 19–20; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica 2 (August 23, 1717): 247.

24. Glyndwr Williams, “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750,” in Perspectives of Empire, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (Longman: London, 1973), 46; Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower, and the Atlantic (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2013), 241.

25. This is based on Burnet’s testimony about his early life and his time in the employ of the South Sea Company, from information in the Archivo General de Simancas in Vera Lee Brown, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” American Historical Review 31, 4 (July 1926): 670.

26. Burnet, quoted in Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 387.

27. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane. Cartagena, August 6, 1723. Sloane Mss. 4047, f. 29, f. 329, BL.

28. Official Copies of Letters and Instructions from the Court of Directors of the South Sea Company to their Factors Abroad. February 22, 1716. Add. Mss. 25563, f. 18, BL.

29. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane, Kingston, November 30, 1716. Sloane Mss. 4044, f. 250, BL.

30. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 666.

31. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 111, 123.

32. Letter from Robert Millar, Kingston, Jamaica, February 12, 1737/8, CO 5/639/86, TNA.

33. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 326–29.

34. Letter from Robet Millar, Kingston, Jamaica, May 26, 1738. CO 5/640/105, TNA.

35. The tropical environment of the Caribbean made it a particularly rich source of unusual specimens for those from Great Britain. Parrish, American Curiosity, 19.

36. Burnet explains that he intended to send a pair of live specimens, but was unable to keep the animals alive; “therefore I send you the old ones skin stuffed & the young one in spirits that you may see I did not forgett what you encharged me with.” Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane, Cartagena, April 6, 1722, Sloane Mss. 4046, f. 227, BL.

37. Kay Dian Kriz notes the importance of men of science to commercial success. Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica,’” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (January 2000): 41–42.

38. Richard Drayton notes the coincidental development and interrelation of the Scientific Revolution and the formation of the British empire; scientific knowledge allowed the empire to both partially understand and ideologically claim new lands and species. Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 231, 234.

39. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane. Cartagena August 6, 1723. Sloane Mss. 4047, f. 29, BL. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 645.

40. See for instance John B. Blake, “The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721–1722,” The New England Quarterly 25 (December 1952): 489–506; Larry Stewart, “The Edge of Utility: Slaves and Smallpox in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Medical History 29 (January 1985): 54–70.

41. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane. Cartagena April 7, 1725. Sloane Mss. 4047, f. 333, BL.

42. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane, Buenos Ayres, March 29, 1716. Sloane Mss. 3322, f. 91, BL.

43. Letter from John Burnet, no addressee. May 14, 1716. Sloane Mss. 4065, f. 248, BL.

44. Slaves and native informants were vital sources of information for men of science in this period in the Americas. Parrish, American Curiosity, 17–18.

45. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane, Cartagena April 6, 1722. Sloane Mss. 4046, f. 227, BL.

46. Ibid. Religious men were apparently considered an excellent source of scientific information. James Petiver encouraged South Sea Company surgeon William Toller to seek friendships with local Jesuits in search of botanical information. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 384, n. 153. Jesuits were also involved with a great deal of the contraband trade into the Spanish empire. Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 132–34.

47. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane. Cartagena February 24, 1724. Sloane Mss. 4047, f. 323, BL.

48. Letter from the Court of Directors to the Factory at Buenos Aires, December 12, 1723. Add. Mss. 25564, f. 8, BL.

49. Letter from Court of Directors to William Bumpstead and the other Supra Cargoes of the Royal George, November 19, 1724. Add. Mss. 25564, f. 78–79, BL.

50. These numbers are drawn from tables in Colin Palmer’s Human Cargoes, detailing the number of ships and slaves to Panama, Portobello, Buenos Aires, Cartagena, Havana, Caracas, Veracruz, Maracaibo, and Campeche based on his research in the Archivo General de Indias. See especially Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 97–111. For the entire 1713–1739 period, ships owned by the South Sea Company alone transported 34,471 enslaved African laborers into the ports of Spanish America and Jamaica, some for reexport, on 115 voyages, as recorded in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at slavevoyages.org.

51. See especially Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling; George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 5 (October 1945): 55–67.

52. John G. Sperling, The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay and Bibliographical Finding List (Boston: Baker Library, 1962), 39.

53. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company, 2nd ed. (New York: Athenaeum, 1970), 44–46. Historians disagree on the course of the relationship between the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company. In her collection, Elizabeth Donnan suggests that the companies signed a new agreement in 1724 or 1725, while both Davies and Sperling say the trade had effectively stalled at this point. Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 2 (Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1931), xxxvi; Davies, Royal African Company, 344; Sperling, The South Sea Company, 39.

54. Davies, Royal African Company, 344.

55. Sperling, The South Sea Company, 27–35; Carswell, South Sea Bubble; Malcolm Balen, The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The World’s First Great Financial Scandal (New York: Fourth Estate, 2003).

56. Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, 334.

57. This characterization is widespread, and is supported by recent histories of piracy such as Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 8. Clinton V. Black further narrows this to note that the biggest decade for West Indian piracy was 1714 to 1724. Black, Pirates of the West Indies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), i.

58. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 19; Kris Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 183.

59. G. Earl Sanders, “Counter-Contraband in Spanish America: Handicaps of the Governors in the Indies,” Americas 34 (July 1977): 59–80. Guardacostas were often supplied through foreign traders. Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 187. On the relationship between piracy, privateering, and sovereignty, see Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–20, 150. Benton notes that while privateering was legally distinct, the British labeled this activity as piracy often, but inconsistently.

60. February 3, 1724. Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 204, AGI. These accusations were backed up by British sources, including Burnet and Plowes. Studer, La trata de negros, 198.

61. To the King’s most excell.t majesty the humble address of the Council and Assembly of Jamaica. August 9, 1718. CO 137/13/61, TNA.

62. State of the Island of Jamaica, 8.

63. Jamaica Courant, June 20, 1722.

64. Attempts to dissuade piracy through the example of morally charged executions were made particularly in New England. Daniel E. Williams, “Puritans and Pirates: A Confrontation between Cotton Mather and William Fly in 1726,” Early American Literature 22, 3 (1987): 233–51; on pirate trials, see especially Mark Hanna, “The Pirate Nest: The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1670–1740” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2008), 198–282. Benton notes that the many pirate trials of the 1720s corresponded to an increase in global British naval power: Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 149. Some of the most famous pirates, such as Captain William Kidd, were tried in the metropole. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. 206–27.

65. The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates (Jamaica: Robert Baldwin, 1721).

66. Ibid., 14.

67. While Rackam and his crew were some of the more colorful pirates and may have happily flouted international law, the research of Lauren Benton and others suggests that pirates often attempted to stay within the letter of the law in order to avoid prosecution and hanging. Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (October 2005): 707.

68. The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, 15. Other European nations also participated in deceptive flag-raising, as practitioners and as the nations represented. For instance, during his voyage George Shelvocke raised a French flag when about to be boarded by a Spanish officer attempting to determine whether his ship was illegally present of the coast of Chile. Shelvocke, A Voyage Round the World, 82.

69. Tryals, 15.

70. The whole proceedings of Captain Dennis’s Expedition to the Governor of the Havana; being a memorial, or journal of what occurrences happened during his stay there. January 26, 1718. CO 137/13/139, TNA.

71. For an example of this sort of dispute, see “Panama Año de 1714 Antonio de Echevers y Subiza, Presidente de la Real Audiencia de Guatemala con Henrique Harris Capitan de una Balandra Ing.a apresada por dho Echeverz sobre que se declarase por legitima de dha presa,” Escribania 485B, AGI.

72. Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London: Ch. Rivington, 1724), 43.

73. Ibid., 55. On the similarities between piracy and legal activities, see Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 113–14.

74. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, ed. Percy G. Adams (New York: Dover, 1970), 181.

75. Translation of the Marquis de Grimaldo’s Letter to His Excellency Mr. Stanhope, Sr. Idelfonso June 22, 1725. Add. Mss. 25562, f. 207–18, BL.

76. Dolores G. Molleda, “El contrabando inglés en América: Correspondencia inédita de la factoría de Buenos Aires,” Hispania 10, 39 (April/June 1950): 365.

77. Savelle, Empires to Nations, 124; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 78.

78. Mathew Kent to Mr. Rigby at Paris, October 3, 1728. Add. Mss. 25562, f. 113, BL.

79. Court of Directors, September 15, 1721. Add. Mss. 25500, f. 104, BL.

80. Court of Directors to the King, October 12, 1726. Add. Mss. 25560, f. 51, BL; Court of Directors, November 25, 1726. Add 32781, f. 101v, BL.

81. South Sea Company, Abstract of the Charter of the Governour and Company of Merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South-Seas (London: 1711), 6.

82. Complaints against Swartz and Johnson, August 9, 1728. Add. Mss. 25552, f. 32–33, BL; A Considerable Stockholder, Enquiry into the Misconduct and Frauds Committed by Several of the Factors, Super-Cargoes, and others, Employed by the Late and Present Directors of the South-Sea Company (London: R. Walker, 1736), 49.

83. Translation of an extract of the Spanish instructions that was transmitted to Mr. Stanhope’s & Mr. Walpole’s very secret letter of July 2/13, 1728. SP 78/188/205, TNA.

84. Ibid., f. 206.

85. British Journal (London) Friday, January 14, 1726, 2; Walker, Spanish Politics, 155.

86. Colonel Spotswood to Lord Townsend, 1727. In obedience to your Lordships commands therein offer my notions as to what may be done against the Spaniards in the West Indies. Add. Mss. 32694, f. 3, BL.

87. On these represalias see, for instance, Contaduria 1880, Contaduria 1881A, AGI.

88. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane. Jamaica, February 4, 1728. Sloane Mss. 4050, f. 54, BL.

89. Speech of the Honourable John Ayscough Esq; President, at the meeting of the Assembly the 1st of March, 1726, Jamaica Courant. March 22, 1726.

90. Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War, 211.

91. The Treaty of Peace, Union, Friendship, and Mutual Defence, Between the Crowns of Great-Britain, France, and Spain, Concluded at Seville on the 9th of November, N.S. 1729, 19–20.

92. Jean O. McLachlan, Trade and Peace in Old Spain: 1667–1750: A Study of the Influence of Commerce on Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 87.

93. Robert Walpole, Observations upon the treaty between the crowns of Great-Britain, France, and Spain, Concluded at Sevile on the ninth of November, 1729 (London: J. Roberts, 1729), 17–18.

94. Walpole, Observations upon the treaty, 20–21.

95. A more complete analysis of Burnet’s decision to ally with the Spanish can be found in Brown, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” 670; Victoria Gardner Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America Under the Asiento, 1713–1740” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1975), 157.

96. On Plowes’s and Burnet’s reports to the Spanish, see in particular Brown, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” 677–78; Studer, La trata de negros, 196–99; Molleda, “El contrabando inglés,” 336–69; Jorge Palacios Preciado, La trata de negros por Cartagena de Indias (Tunja: Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia, 1973), 183–84; Leslie B. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 54–56; Sorsby, “British Trade,” 157.

97. Rout, African Experience, 54; Preciado, La trata de negros, 185; Studer, La trata de negros, 197.

98. Ibid., 668–77; Studer, El trata de negros, 197–99; Molleda, “El contrabando inglés,” 351–53.

99. Molleda, “El contrabando inglés,” 366.

100. Sorsby, “British Trade,” 158–59.

101. See in particular Sloane Mss. 4055, f. 103, 129, 214, 307; Sloane Mss. 4054 f. 266, 314; Sloane Mss. 4026 f. 320; and Sloane Mss. 4058 f. 80, 82, BL.

Chapter 3. “Unjust Depredations” and Growing Tensions, 1729–1738

1. The simultaneous possibility of profit and danger had long existed in one form or another in areas where Spanish and English American interests overlapped. See in particular Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 65–91.

2. Sobre que el Governador de la Havana haga se restituia al Factor del Asiento de Inglaterra una Negra Conga llamada Isabel. December 7, 1731. Ind. 2769, Leg. 9, f. 116v–119r, AGI.

3. Another very similar case occurred three years later, with a Mina slave woman named Ana Maria. Sobre que al factor de la Compania del Assiento de Inglaterra de la Havana se le restituia una Negra llamada Ana Maria de Casta Mina. February 22, 1734. Ind. 2769, Leg. 9, f. 217v–219r, AGI.

4. Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 29.

5. Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 131.

6. On general smuggling in the West Indies, see Lance Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997); Christian Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York: New York University Press, 2011); George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade Under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 5 (October 1945): 55–67; Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

7. Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling, 127.

8. Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower, and the Atlantic (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2013), 232.

9. Court of Directors to Duke of Newcastle, 6 July 1733, Add. Mss. 32,781, f. 307, BL. This claim is supported by Colin Palmer’s research on the profitability and extent of the slave trade. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).

10. Considerations on the American Trade, Before and Since the Establishment of the South-Sea Company (London: J. Roberts, 1739), 10.

11. John Merewether to Peter Burrell, Jamaica, September 5, 1736. Shelburne Collection, v. 44, f. 875–76, CL.

12. Considerations on the American Trade, 15–16.

13. H.H. to Hon Louell Lea Comp. Panama, December 14, 1737, Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 533, CL.

14. On the importance of contraband to political economies, see Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 103; Grahn, Political Economy of Smuggling. On Buenos Aires, see Elena F. S. Studer, La trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1958), 233. The colonists eagerly accepted the company’s contraband goods: Dolores G. Molleda, “El contrabando inglés en América: Correspondencia inédita de la factoría de Buenos Aires,” Hispania 10, 39 (April/June, 1950): 349.

15. An Address to the Proprietors of the South-Sea Capital. Containing a Discovery of the Illicit Trade, carry’d on in the West-Indies; and shewing the great Detriment thereof to the Publick; and the Necessity of Discouraging it with Rigour, notwithstanding the Pains taken to gloss it over; and to Recommend your cautious and tender Resentments. By a Proprietor of the said Company (London: Stephen Austen, 1732), 6.

16. An Address to the Proprietors of the South-Sea Capital, 6–7.

17. The Case of the South Sea Company’s Agents at Barbados and their Factor at the Carracas. Shelburne Collection 43, f. 377, CL.

18. An Address to the Proprietors of the South-Sea Capital, 11–14.

19. Letter of Benjamin Keene, October 27, 1732. Add. Mss. 32779, f. 15, BL.

20. Letter from the South Sea Company to Benjamin Keene, May 15, 1730. Add. Mss. 32768, f. 50, BL.

21. In part, this willingness to accept direct contraband trade was the result of the much lower prices paid for goods not coming through Spain itself. Walker, Spanish Politics, 13.

22. For an additional similar case, see Esc. 60A, Leg. 25, Plietos de Havana, no. 1, 1733, AGI.

23. Letter from the South Sea Company to Benjamin Keene, May 15, 1730. Add. Mss. 32768, f. 50, BL.

24. His Catholick Majesty’s Manifesto, Justifying his Conduct in relation to the late Convention with his reasons for not paying the ninety-five Thousand Pounds (London: Robert Amey, 1739), 42–43.

25. His Catholick Majesty’s Manifesto, 42–43.

26. Silvia Espelt Bombín, “Trade Control, Law and Flexibility: Merchants and Crown Interests in Panama, 1700–1750,” in Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759), ed. Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vásquez Varela (Boston: Brill, 2013), 135.

27. West Indian Trade: Extension Treaty (1667) with Spain to the West Indies, 1739. MS 450, NLJ.

28. His Catholic Majesty’s Conduct Compared with that of His Britannick Majesty (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 7.

29. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 150.

30. On the “golden age of piracy,” see in particular Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 8.

31. Several scholars have made the point that pirates operated not only in opposition to established governments, but sometimes in support of government power. This seems to have been the case with the guardacostas and British privateers operating at this time. See in particular Erin Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures,” Cultural Critique 59 (Winter 2005): 35; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 113.

32. Letter from the Duke of Newcastle to Benjamin Keene, March 24, 1729/30. SP 94/101, n.f., TNA.

33. Letter from the duke of Newcastle to Benjamin Keene, January 13, 1736/7. Add. Mss. 32794, f. 26, BL.

34. An account of the murder of Captain Thomas Weir from an Inhabitant of Santa Martha, 1736. Add. Mss. 32794, f. 36, BL.

35. Norwich Gazette vol. 24, October 10 to October 17, 1730. Letter from Jamaica, July 25, 1730. MS 436, NLJ.

36. Letter from Shadrick Bastie to Sir John Eyles Bart. La Vera Cruz, June 29, 1732. Add. Mss. 32779, f. 41, BL.

37. Copy of Gov. of Jamaica’s Letter to the Gov. of St. Iago de Cuba, March 18, 1732/3. Add. Mss. 32781, f. 281, BL.

38. New Providence. Deposition of Lane Whitehall, September 12, 1729. ADM 1/231/25, TNA.

39. Letter from Jonathan Dennis and Leonard Cocke to Benjamin Keene, Santiago de Cuba, August 10, 1731. Add. Mss. 32775, f. 114, BL.

40. Ibid., f. 115.

41. Letter from Charles Stewart at Jamaica. April 6, 1732. ADM 1/123/398, TNA.

42. June 17, 1731, SP 94/101, n.f., TNA.

43. The truth of Jenkins’s claims has been debated. William Laird Clowes, Clements Robert Markham, et al. The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 3 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1898), 51.

44. Ernest G. Hildner, “The Role of the South Sea Company in the Diplomacy Leading to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1729–1739,” Hispanic American Historical Review 18:3 (August 1938): 323.

45. Edward W. Lawson, “What Became of the Man Who Cut Off Jenkins’ Ear?” Florida Historical Quarterly 37, 1 (July 1958): 33–41; J. K. Laughton, “Jenkins’ Ear,” English Historical Review 4:16 (October 1889): 748–79.

46. Cádiz February 1, 1737. Add. Mss. 32,797, f. 148, BL.

47. La Guira July 22, 1736. No names given. Shelburne Collection, vol. 44, f. 667, CL.

48. Burnet mentions that he has not received a shipment of books because it is being examined by the Inquisition. Letter from John Burnet to Hans Sloane, Cartagena, October 6, 1725. Sloane Mss. 4048, f. 70, BL. Likely for both religious and financial reasons, the Spanish officials were sometimes quite strict about exactly where British subjects could live and travel. In 1724 the king sent orders to officials in New Spain reminding them that factors were only allowed to live in Veracruz, not in Mexico. December 3, 1724. Ind. 2769, Leg. 8, f. 261v–262r, AGI.

49. Court of Directors of the South Sea Company to the Duke of Newcastle. June 17, 1725. Add. Mss. 25556, f. 69, BL. The Spanish were concerned both about the religion and the quality and habits of the slaves brought from British colonies rather than directly from the African coast. October 20, 1724. Ind. 2769, f. 253, AGI.

50. Court of Directors of the South Sea Company to the Duke of Newcastle. June 17, 1725. Add. Mss. 25556, f. 70, BL. The company complained on numerous occasions of the difficulty of supplying the Spanish colonies with sufficient slaves if they could not keep slaves at Jamaica to make up for mortality on the voyage from Africa to the West Indies. Remarks on the Method of Making up the Acct of the Negroe Trade. No date. Shelburne Collection 43, f. 507, CL.

51. Letter from the Court of Directors to Lord Carteret, Principal Secretary of State, South Sea House August 11, 1721. Add. Mss. 25556, f. 14, BL.

52. Inquisición 791, f. 186–89; see also Inquisición 791, f. 190–93 and f. 197–200; Inquisición 1241, f. 155–65; Inquisición 789, f. 49–52, AGN.

53. Inquisición 848 v. 2, f. 398–416, AGN.

54. The South-Sea Kidnapper. Address’d in a Letter to the Court of Directors of the South-Sea Company. In Answer to the last paragraph of an Advertisement inserted in the Daily-Post-Boy, the 2d of August, and dated from the South-Sea House the 30th of July. By an Englishman (London: A. Moore, 1730), 4.

55. Ibid., 5.

56. Indeed, Irish subjects had been circulating in and periodically influential to the Spanish Americas since at least the seventeenth century, as demonstrated by the case of Don Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán. Ryan Dominic Crewe, “Brave New Spain: An Irishman’s Independence Plot in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” Past and Present 207 (May 2010): 53–87. See also Óscar Recio Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825 (Portland: Four Courts Press, 2010); Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘riotous and unruly lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (October 1990): 503–22.

57. Eamonn O Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Portland: Four Courts, 2002), 30, 136.

58. Letter from the Duke of Newcastle to Benjamin Keene, February 24, 1735. Add. Mss. 32787, f. 46, BL.

59. James Houstoun, Dr. Houstoun’s Memoirs of His Own Life-Time (London: Jacob Bickerstaff, 1747), 347.

60. Letter from Rd. Hopkins to Newcastle. February 21, 1734/5. Add. Mss. 32787, f. 58, BL.

61. At a Court of Directors, November 25, 1737. Add. Mss. 25509, f. 51, BL.

62. Petition to English King from Directors of SSC. April 3, 1735. Add. Mss. 32787, f. 58, BL.

63. Samuel Collit’s Answer to Patiño’s Complaint. Add. Mss. 32785, f. 456–57, BL.

64. Copy of a letter from Jamaica to a merchant in London, extract. Jamaica, September 21, 1730. Add. Mss. 12431, f. 31, BL.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. Considerable Stock-Holder, Enquiry into the Misconduct and Frauds Committed by Several of the Factors, Supercargoes and Others, Employed by the Late and Present Directors of the South-Sea Company (London: R. Walker, 1735), 53.

68. South Sea Company Court of Directors to Benjamin Keene, London, July 4, 1735. Add. Mss. 32788, f. 172, BL.

69. This was the rationale for not allowing slaves to be brought first into the British colonies. Letter from the Court of Directors of the South Sea Company to the Duke of Newcastle. London June 17, 1725. Add. Mss. 25556, f. 69, BL.

70. Court of Directors to Mr. Farril at Havana, June 5, 1718, Add. Mss. 25563, f. 172–172v, BL.

71. Letter from the Board of the South Sea Company to His Excellency Mr. Keene, London, July 4, 1735. Add. Mss. 32788, f. 174, BL. Mentions of this case also appear in cedulas from the Spanish crown asking for information on the practices and standards operating in the area in response to the company’s complaints in Ind. 2769, Leg. 9, f. 276v–278r, AGI.

72. La Junta del Asiento de Negros, January 10, 1735, Ind. 2786, n.f., AGI.

73. Demanda puesta por algunos negros que hicieron fuga de la isla de Jamaica a la de Cuba … Esc. 96b, Quaderno 12, AGI. For similar cases of potential slaves from one empire ending up in another, see David Barry Gaspar, “‘Subjects to the King of Portugal’: Captivity and Repatriation in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Antigua, 1724),” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), esp. 107–14; Block, Ordinary Lives, 19–62.

74. Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–1740,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 247.

75. His Excellency’s Speech to the Assembly the 17th of June, 1730, Jamaica Courant, June 24, 1730.

76. Letter from Edward Trelawny to the Duke of Newcastle, London, June 30, 1737. CO 137/56/74, TNA.

77. Ibid., f. 75.

78. R. C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons, From their Origins to the Establishment of their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone: Including the Expedition to Cuba, for the Purposes of Procuring Spanish Chasseurs; and the State of the Island of Jamaica for the last Ten Years: with a Succinct History of the Island previous to that period (London: A. Strahan, 1893), 35.

79. Captain Christopher Allen, This ALS and Journals to May. Gen. Robert Hunter, Governor re: Molly’s Town, March 1731–1732. MS 440, NAJ.

80. January 3, 1731, CO 137/20/53. n.d, f. 57, TNA.

81. Governor Robert Hunter His Speech to the Assembly, April 5, 1732. MS 439, NLJ.

82. Letter from Coll Cornwallis to Lord Cornwallis Port Royal March 15, 1730/1. CO 137/19/1/27, TNA.

83. Ibid. On the dangerous climate in Jamaica, especially during the English conquest of the island, see in particular J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 97–105.

84. Jose L. Franco, “Maroons and Slave Rebellions in the Spanish Territories,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 41.

85. Letter from Governor Hunter to Board, July 4, 1730. CO 137/18/78, TNA.

86. Deposition of Captain William Quarrell, June 23, 1730. CO 137/18/100, TNA. Orlando Patterson notes that rumors of this were widespread: Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 264. For another suggestion that Cubans would unite with the Maroon communities, see Add. Mss. 12419, f. 68, BL.

87. Deposition of John Tello, June 18, 1730. CO 137/18/98, TNA.

88. Governor Hunter to Duke of Newcastle, Jamaica, January 23, 1731. CO 137/52/299–309, TNA.

89. Jos Maxwell, Secry, November 21, 1730. CO 137/19/1/43, TNA.

90. Lieutenant Governor Thomas Broughton to Duke of Newcastle. Charleston, February 6, 1737. CO 5/388/137, TNA.

91. Edward Long reports that the Maroon communities were also weary of the long war. Long, The History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 2: 344.

92. Anon. Narrative of the Maroons, n.d. in Papers Relating to Jamaica [kept by Edward Long as notes toward his book]. Add. Mss. 12431, f. 69–75, BL.

93. Address by the Merchants of Kingston to the President. Add. Mss. 12418, f. 307v, BL.

94. Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2006), 163; Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xii.

95. Declaration of Sommerset Master and Wm Benson, December 28, 1730. Add. Mss. 32773, f. 93–4, BL. These soldiers were present on Jamaica as part of the military action against the Maroon communities.

96. Letter from Leonard Cocke to Commodore Dent, January 8, 1736/7. Add. Mss. 32794, f. 250, BL. For more on Wall, see John Tate Lanning, “Don Miguel Wall and the Spanish Attempt Against the Existence of Carolina and Georgia,” North Carolina Historical Review 10:3 (July 1933): 186–213; Lanning, The Diplomatic History of Georgia: A Study of the Epoch of Jenkins’ Ear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Aileen Moore Topping, “‘A Free Facetious Gentleman,’ Jean Savy, Double Agent?” Florida Historical Quarterly 56, 3 (January 1978): 261–79.

97. Copy of the memorial of the South Sea Company to His Grace the Duke of Newcastle March 16, 1731/2. Add. Mss. 32776, f. 218, BL.

98. October 27, 1731. Shelburne Collection 44, f. 571, CL.

99. Copy of the memorial of the South Sea Company to His Grace the Duke of Newcastle, March 16, 1732. Add. Mss. 32776, f. 219, BL.

100. “The subgovernor acquainted the court with his intentions to quit that station; that he had put into writing what he thought proper to say upon this occasion, which he read, and is as follows.” December 20, 1732. Add. Mss. 25505, f. 202, BL.

101. Address from the South Sea Company to the King, London, May 15, 1735. Rd Hopkins, Sub Governor, Jn Bristowe. Add. Mss. 32787, f. 288–91, BL.

102. Proposals for the Royal Assiento Company Carrying on a Trade to the Windward Coast of the North Seas of America. Shelburne Collection, v. 43, unnumbered folio, no date, CL.

103. Letter from W. Smith to Benjamin Keene, September 14, 1738. Add. Mss. 32799, f. 17, BL.

104. Ibid. Additional orders were sent to the officials at Panama instructing them that they were not to prevent Dennis from performing his duties as an employee of the Company. Letter to Don Dionoso Munoz de la Vega, May 24, 1738, Panama 364, n.f., AGI.

105. Letter from Edward Manning to Peter Burrell, Jamaica June 13, 1738, Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 778, CL.

106. Dennis complains of this problem in: Jonathan Dennys to Peter Burrell, Jamaica, November 24, 1738, Shelburne Collection, v. 44, f. 719–20, CL. On the Spanish side, see especially Panama 364, n.f. Panama, May 24, 1739, and Portobello June 1, 1739, AGI.

107. Letter from Jonathan Dennis to Peter Burrell, Panama, February 15, 1739. Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 463, CL.

108. Letter from Francis Humphreys, South Sea Company Factor at the Havana, to Anthony Weltden, Portobello September 28, 1739, CO 23/14/330, TNA.

Chapter 4. The End of the British Asiento, 1739–1748

1. James Houstoun, Dr. Houstoun’s Memoirs of His Own Life-Time (London: Jacob Bickerstaff, 1747), 20. Houstoun’s memoirs were collected and published by Bickerstaff along with a short appendix of Houstoun’s correspondence. Houstoun republished much of the same material in Memoirs of the Life and Travels of James Houstoun, M.D. (London: J. Robinson, 1747) and The Works of James Houstoun, M.D. Containing Memoirs of His Life and Travels in Asia, Africa, America, and Most Parts of Europe (London: S. Bladon, 1753). Houstoun admits that on his arrival in Paris, where he was to study in the Salle des Accouchments of the famous Hôtel-Dieu, he “lived two or three months … without having the least thought of business, and went into all the Gayeties of the town.” Houstoun, Memoirs, 64. In addition to the works listed above, Houstoun published his True and Impartial Account of the Rise and Progress of the South Sea Company Wherein the Assiento Contract is Particularly Considered (London: T. Cooper, 1743).

2. James Brydges to Sir John Eyles Bart, January 17, 1724/1725. Huntington Library, Stowe Papers 57, vol. 25, f. 155. Particular thanks to Lindsay O’Neill for altering me to this source.

3. Larry Stewart, “The Edge of Utility: Slaves and Smallpox in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Medical History 29 (January 1985): 62–66. Houstoun addressed the situation on the coast of Guinea and made recommendations for the Royal African Company soon after moving to Cartagena, in his Some new and accurate observations geographical, natural, and historical (London: J. Peele, 1725).

4. Houstoun’s memoirs fall into the genre of travel writing that British readers consumed voraciously in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Jon S. Lawry suggests that Houstoun’s writings share the same category as Gulliver’s Travels, questioning the truth of his story.

Houstoun’s assertions are backed up at several points by the official records of the South Sea Company. Lawry, “Dr. Lemuel Gulliver and ‘The Thing Which Was Not’,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67 (April 1968): 218.

5. Houstoun, Memoirs, 43.

6. Houstoun, Memoirs, 40. Historian Colin Kidd’s investigation of British patriotism suggests that many Scottish individuals simultaneously embraced the English because of the economic opportunities that alliance offered, while maintaining a core “emotional identification” with their Scottish roots. Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms,” Historical Journal 39 (June 1996): 363.

7. Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 112–14.

8. Houstoun, Works, 34.

9. Houstoun, Memoirs, 23.

10. Ibid., 203.

11. Ibid., 15, 20, 40, 147.

12. The court of directors made Houstoun surgeon at Cartagena in March 1724, and he sailed shortly thereafter. Add. Mss. 25564, f. 101, BL.

13. Houstoun, Works, 156–58.

14. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 193–94. In his chapter addressing the Royal African Company, Hancock suggests that the interactions between British factors and their employees in Africa were unusually harmonious, indicating again the influence of trade and profit in overcoming international and racial dissimilarity. On the employees and activities of the Royal African Company, see also K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company, 2nd ed. (New York: Athenaeum, 1970); Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politic of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

15. See especially Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

16. Houstoun, Memoirs, 159.

17. Ibid., 43.

18. Ibid., 173–74.

19. Houstoun, Works, 157.

20. Houstoun, Memoirs, 159.

21. Ibid., 276.

22. Brown’s fellow factors complained of him at great length in a number of letters contained in the Letters from James Savill, Francis Humphreys, and Robert Hilton to Peter Burnet, April 27, 1730 to March 25, 1731, Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 413–38, CL. See also Victoria Gardner Sorsby, “British Trade with Spanish America Under the Asiento, 1713–1740” (Ph.D. dissertation, University College, London, 1975), 184.

23. Letter from Francis Humphreys to John Eyles, Buenos Aires, March 15, 1731. Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 429, CL.

24. Committee of Correspondence. Add. Mss. 25551, f. 81f., BL.

25. Jean McLachlan, Trade and Peace in Old Spain: 1667–1750: A Study of the Influence of Commerce on Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 129.

26. Houstoun, Memoirs, 157–58.

27. Ibid., 274.

28. Houstoun, Some Observations, 33–34.

29. Houstoun, Memoirs, 163–64; Cuenta de la segunda represalia, Contaduria 266, N.F. AGI; Add. Mss. 33032, f. 43, BL.

30. Ruth Bourne, “The Wooden World Dissected,” Pacific Historical Review (September 1945), 331; Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 155; Shinsuke Satsuma, Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower, and the Atlantic (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2013), 232.

31. Houstoun, Works, 167–78., 167. It is possible, even likely, that this Irish translator was Catholic.

32. Houstoun, Works.

33. Houstoun, Memoirs, 168.

34. Houstoun, Works, 169–70.

35. On cosmopolitanism among merchants, see especially Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

36. Letter from James Houstoun to Sir H. Sloane November 12, 1730. In this letter Houstoun also includes astronomical data recorded in South America by other observers, indicating contact with a wider scientific community in the Americas and Europe. Sloane Mss. 4051, f. 85, BL.

37. Houstoun, Memoirs, 194–95.

38. Houstoun, Works, 172.

39. June 17, 1729. Add. Mss. 25552, f. 64v, BL.

40. September 4, 1733. Add. Mss. 25554, f. 34v, BL. Two years later, Ord would cause a stir in Cartagena, where he would be accused of involvement in smuggling. AGI, Santa Fe 1167, n.f., 1735.

41. Houstoun, Memoirs, 198; Lance Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview 1997), 132.

42. Houstoun, Memoirs, 191.

43. On the diplomatic history of the war, see in particular Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Rochester: Boydell, 1998).

44. On the role of public opinion and the South Sea Company in the war, see especially Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present 121 (November 1988): 74–109.

45. Errnest G. Hildner, Jr., “The Role of the South Sea Company in the Diplomacy Leading to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1729–1739,” Hispanic American Historical Review 18:3 (August 1938), 323; John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 136–39.

46. On arguments about the possibility of reopening the asiento, see in particular McLachlan, Trade and Peace in Old Spain, 122–45.

47. Considerations on the American Trade before and since the Establishment of the South Sea Company (London: J. Roberts, 1739), 9. The claim about the losses sustained by previous asientists cannot be entirely confirmed, though some, like Nicolas Porcio, certainly experienced significant losses during their trade. Helen Paul’s recent investigations into the finances of the South Sea Company suggest that there was a clear opportunity for profit in the trade available to the company. Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: an Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011).

48. Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 145–55.

49. Considerations on the American Trade, 24.

50. The importance of the press in influencing the push toward war did not escape eighteenth-century Britons. Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (New York: Allen Lane, 2007), 251, 275.

51. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics,” 78. Wilson notes that there were at least four dozen petitions and memorials sent to the British government between March 1738 and March 1739 regarding the situation in the Americas. Indeed, merchants continued to complain about the depredations of the 1720s through the final years of the war. Sydney Papers, Great Britain, Merchants, Sufferers by Spanish Depredations before June 2, 1721. Cy to Great Britain, House of Commons, 1746, CL.

52. The Merchant’s Complaint Against Spain (London: W. Lloyd, 1738), 3.

53. Simms notes that the war with Spain was uniquely colonial and commercial for eighteenth-century Britain. Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat, 273. Richard Pares also observes that in a conflict between Britain and Spain, the British could be assured of their relative military superiority in the Americas, while a war within Europe would be more difficult to prosecute: Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies: 1739–1763 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963), 65.

54. Micaiah Towgood, Spanish Cruelty and Injustice a Justifiable Plea for a Vigorous War with Spain (London: R. Hett, 1741), 16.

55. Francis L. Berkeley, “The War of Jenkins’ Ear,” in The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernathy, ed. Darrett R. Rutman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 41–61.

56. Jack Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ix.

57. Reasons for a War against Spain. In a Letter from a Merchant of London Trading to America, to a Member of the House of Commons. With A Plan of Operations (London: J. Wilford, 1736), 17.

58. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 127–29.

59. A Reply to a Pamphlet intitled, Popular Prejudices against the Convention and Treaty with Spain, Examin’d and Answered in a Letter to a Member of Parliament (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 25. The author refers here to Carolina and Georgia, the two colonies most hotly disputed at the time.

60. Reasons for a War Against Spain, 28.

61. Ministerial Prejudices in favour of the Convention, Examin’d and Answer’d (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 11.

62. Ibid., 11–12.

63. The British Sailor’s Discovery: or the Spanish Pretensions Confuted (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 36.

64. Ibid., 70–71.

65. On published arguments for war, see Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics,” 98–100.

66. The Merchant’s Complaint, 32.

67. Trelawny to Newcastle, Jamaica, February 1, 1739/1740. CO 137/56/284, TNA.

68. His Catholick Majesty’s Conduct Compared with that of His Britannick Majesty (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 13.

69. Ibid., 11.

70. A Reply to a Pamphlet Intitled, Popular Prejudices against the Convention and Treaty with Spain, Examin’d and Answered (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 7.

71. A State of the Rise and Progress of the Disputes with Spain (London: H. Goreham, 1740), 16.

72. A review of All that hath Pass’d between the Courts of Great Britain and Spain, Relating to Our Trade and Navigation, From the Year 1721, to the Present Convention; with some Particular Observations upon it (London: H. Goreham, 1739), 25.

73. State of the Rise and Progress, 75.

74. The Spanish Merchant’s Address to all Candid and Impartial Englishmen (London: J. Roberts, 1736), 13.

75. David J. Weber, “Conflicts and Accommodations: Hispanic and Anglo-American Borders in Historical Perspective, 1670–1853,” Journal of the Southwest 39 (Spring 1997): 4. Manuscripts produced by the British make the connection between establishing a colony in the Carolinas and the dangers from other European nations clear. One writer argued that “had South Carolina faln into the hands of either of the French or Spaniards … the Consequence would have been very fatal not only to all the settlements in North America, but also to the British navigation to the sugar islands.” Reasons for the Crown to Purchase the Carolinas. Sydney Papers. 1729, CL.

76. State of the Rise and Progress, 50.

77. Reply to a Pamphlet, 25. Pagden notes that the push for universal monarchy had fallen away in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the complaints of Spain and Britain demonstrate a continued fear of this kind of ambition into the mid-eighteenth century. Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 29–62.

78. Peace and No Peace: or an Enquiry whether the late Convention with Spain will be more advantageous to Great Britain than the Treaty of Seville. With a postscript upon the King of Spain’s Protest, which is not printed with the Convention (London: R. Chissen, 1739), 10.

79. In some ways, Spain was at a disadvantage. Even in the seventeenth century a declining population and inability to completely control commerce in the wider empire made it less promising than England, though the Bourbon reforms aimed to correct some of the major structural problems the Spanish faced. J. Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 47.

80. On the long history of British interest in Spanish American lands, see Glyndwr Williams, “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750,” in Perspectives of Empire, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (London: Longman, 1973), 27–53.

81. Abstracts of several schemes under consideration, October 1739. Add. Mss. 32694, f. 60–1, BL.

82. On Spanish offers of freedom to British slaves, see in particular Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 29–61.

83. Houstoun, Works, 15–19.

84. Mr. Knight’s Letter to the Duke of Newcastle November 20, 1739. Add. Mss. 32694, f. 9–10, BL.

85. CL, Shelburne Collection, v. 43, f. 433–34. No sender, no date. Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 272–80.

86. A Proposal for Humbling Spain (London: J. Roberts, 1740), 19.

87. David Campbell’s Opinion Re: Chief Prospective sites of attack in the Spanish Indies during Present war. January 7, 1741. MS 458, f. 5, NLJ. Campbell provides extensive information on the Spanish holdings in the New World, including the nature and location of fortifications, the economic potential of various areas, and the habits and strategic usefulness of the native peoples.

88. John Hart to Townsend, May 8, 1729. Add. Mss. 32694, f. 37, BL.

89. Indeed, in 1762 Great Britain was able to strike a significant blow against the Spanish empire by seizing Havana. For more on the occupation of Havana, see Elena Schneider, “The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Cuba” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2011).

90. Fayrer Hall, The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom (London: J. Peele, 1731), 58.

91. “Remarkable Occurances from the year 1745 to 1748, during the far greater part of which time I was a prisoner in the hands of the French and Spaniards: transcribed from my private notes in Rhode Island, anno 1748.” Codex Eng 120, f. 237–8, JCBL.

92. Pares, War and Trade, 52.

93. Hildner, Role of the South Sea Company, 323–30.

94. His Catholick Majesty’s Manifesto, Justifying his Conduct in relation to the late Convention with his reasons for not paying the ninety-five Thousand Pounds (London: Robert Amey, 1739), 6–7.

95. Ibid., 11, 17.

96. Ibid., 53.

97. His Majesty’s Declaration of War against the King of Spain, October 19, 1739 (London: John Baskett, 1739); Greene, Evaluating Empire, 37.

98. On the conduct of the war, politically and militarily, see Philip Woodfine, Britannia’s Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 1998); Larry E. Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia, 1733–1749 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974); Pares, War and Trade; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry.

99. Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics,” 80.

100. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 89. Oglesby notes that attacks were not initially launched against Cuba because of its dangerous proximity to Jamaica. J.C.M. Oglesby, “Spain’s Havana Squadron and the Preservation of the Balance of Power in the Caribbean, 1740–1748,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (August 1969): 475.

101. On the Cartagena siege, see in particular Charles E. Nowell, “The Defense of Cartagena,” Hispanic American Historical Review 42 (November 1962): 477–501; James Alexander Robertson, “The English Attack on Cartagena in 1741; and Plans for an Attack on Panama,” Hispanic American Historical Review 2 (February 1919): 62–71; Pares, War and Trade, 85–97.

102. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 93.

103. Instructions to Anson quoted in Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 104. On Anson’s voyage see also Pares, War and Trade, 104–8.

104. Great Britain, Merchants, Sufferers by the Spanish Depredations before June 2, 1721. Cy to Great Britain. House of Commons, 1746. Sydney Papers, f. 3, CL.

105. Original Letters to an Honest Sailor (London: R. Thomas, 1746), 27. This quote comes from an October 11, 1740 letter from Wager to Vernon.

106. Until British troops arrived in sufficient numbers, Jamaica was reliant on the same sorts of forces that they had amassed against the Maroons during the beginning of the war. Governor Trelawny complained that these soldiers did not believe they had to obey the officers, and he even asked for an official order from the king to reinforce the officers’ authority. Letter from Trelawny to Newcastle, January 6, 1738/1739. CO 137/56/177, TNA.

107. David Campbell’s Opinion Re: Chief Prospective sites of attack in the Spanish Indies during the Present War. January 7, 1741. MS 458, NLJ.

108. Pares, War and Trade, 227–64.

109. J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 149–69.

110. Edward Trelawny Letters 1740–1750. Letter to Mr. Pelham, May 17, 1741, Jamaica. MS 306, NLJ.

111. The white population of Jamaica was only 8,230 in 1730 and about 10,000 in 1752, according to Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 16.

112. Edward Trelawny to Rt Honble Mr. Pelham, May 17, 1741, Jamaica, MS 306 Edward Trelawny Letters 1740–1750, NLJ.

113. Georgia Historical Society, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 7: 3, The Spanish Official Account of the Attack on the Colony of Georgia, in America, and of its Defeat on St. Simons Island by General James Oglethorpe (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1913), 4. This volume contains translations of sources from the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla dealing with the planning and execution of the Spanish attack on Georgia.

114. “The Governor General of Cuba Appoints the Governor of Florida Commander of the Expedition against Georgia, and Issues his Orders for the Conduct of Operations,” in Georgia Historical Society, Collections, 32–34.

115. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 91. Slaves running away to the Spanish colonies were expected to convert to Catholicism, and were subsequently granted freedom and land.

116. Repeated cedulas issued by the Spanish crown had promised slaves the opportunity for freedom if they left the English and converted to Catholicism. One of the major reasons for arguments against allowing slavery in Georgia was its proximity to St. Augustine, a major destination for runaway slaves trying to gain their freedom in this way. See Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 35. In part this fear was related to the high slave to white ratio in the Carolina colonies. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 79.

117. Nicholas Lawes to the Lords Commissioners for Trade &c. August 24, 1720. CO 137/13/2/44, TNA.

118. Pares, War and Trade, 99.

119. Report of Edward Trelawny, Governor of Jamaica, to Duke of Newcastle re Lt. Hodgson’s Expedition Among the Mosquito Indians in Nicaragua, 1742. June 14, 1741. MS 306, MS 460, NLJ.

120. Letter from Edward Trelawny to the Duke of Newcastle, September 22, 1739. CO 137/56/253, TNA.

121. Don Sebastian de Eslava to Edward Vernon, June 30, 1741. CO 5/12/93, TNA.

122. Nowell, “The Defense of Cartagena,” 481.

123. Copy of a letter from the South Sea Company’s Factors to M Trelawny dated September 30, 1739. CO 137/56/275–6, TNA. On the admiral, see Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia, Don Blas de Lezo: Defensor de Cartagena de Indias (Bogota: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2002). The factors finally arrived at Jamaica June 26, 1740, as reported in: James Houstoun to Peter Burrell, Jamaica, July 28, 1740. Shelburne Collection 44, f. 691, CL.

124. The American Traveller; Being a new Historical Collection Carefully compiled from Original Memoirs in several Languages and the most authentic Voyages and Travels (London: J. Fuller, 1743), 395.

125. Copy M. Trelawny to the Governor of St. Jago de Cuba Jamaica, August 4, 1740. CO 137/56/389, TNA.

126. Ibid. There are numerous other examples of Spanish prisoners being captured by the British in the Spanish records. See for example Jamaica, November 24, 1739, Santa Fe 1155, n.f., AGI.

127. James Houstoun to Peter Burrell, Jamaica, July 28, 1740, Shelburne Collection 44, f. 692, CL.

128. Letter from Charles Wager to Edward Vernon. Original Letters to an Honest Sailor, 44–45.

129. Houstoun, Memoirs, 216–18.

130. A remarkably detailed example of this conflict, involving traded insults, assault, and an eventual court case, can be found in the Shelburne Collection 44, f. 695–726, CL. Particular thanks to Kristen Block for alerting me to this source.

131. Houstoun, Works, 219.

132. Ibid., 222.

133. Houstoun, Memoirs, 228.

134. Houstoun, Works, 223.

135. Houstoun, Memoirs, 249.

136. Ibid., 257–61.

137. Ibid, 224.

138. George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 51 (October 1945): 61–62. Flour in particular was difficult to come by in the Spanish empire in times of crisis. During the second half of the century, the British North American colonies supplied large amounts of flour to Spain’s American holdings, despite the official ban on this trade. See Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 79.

Epilogue: Beyond the Asiento

1. J. Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), 97–100. For the text of this treaty see Great Britain, A Collection of all the treaties of peace, alliance, and commerce, between Great-Britain and other powers, from the revolution in 1688, to the present time, vol. 2 (London, 1772), 68–107.

2. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 102.

3. Great Britain. A Collection of all the treaties, 108.

4. Jean O. McLachlan, Trade and Peace in Old Spain, 1667–1750: A Study of the Influence of Commerce on Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 122. This agreement with Spain was a reversal of earlier ministerial policies. Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (New York: Allen Lane, 2007), 381.

5. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 99.

6. Letter from Edward Trelawny to Thomas Pelham, November 1, 1741, Jamaica. MS 305, n.f., NLJ.

7. Dorothy Burne Goebel, “British Trade to the Spanish Colonies, 1796–1823,” American Historical Review 43 (January 1938): 306.

8. Letter form Edward Manning, Jamaica, October 4, 1748. Shelburne Collection, 44, f. 683, CL.

9. Considerations on the American Trade, before and since the Establishment of the South-Sea Company (London: J. Roberts, 1739), 15. James Houstoun disputes this, arguing that the South Sea Company exported twice the number of African slaves to the Spanish Americas as compared to all of the private traders when the asiento was not enacted. Houstoun, A true and Impartial Account of the Rise and Progress of the South Sea Company: Wherein the Assiento Contract is Particularly considered; Proving the Great Advantages that would have accrued to England by a Faithful Observance of it on the Part of Spain (London: T. Cooper, 1743), 14–15.

10. Considerations on the American Trade, 9.

11. An Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, Consequently of the Value of the Lands of Britain, and On the Means to Restore Both. Begun in the Year 1739 (London: John Brotherton, 1744), 24.

12. See in particular A Considerable Stockholder, An Enquiry into the Misconduct and Frauds … (London: R. Walker, 1736), 53.

13. John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 175.

14. John Campbell, The Spanish Empire in America (London: M. Cooper, 1747), 289.

15. Ibid., 308. Objections to the trade based on moral concerns about slavery were still quite rare. Jack Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 158.

16. Houstoun, True and Impartial Account, 11.

17. Houstoun specifically complains that the company fired all of its servants at once in the 1730s on unfounded accusations of mass promotion of private trade, which was the occasion of him leaving the company’s service in the Spanish Americas. Houstoun, True and Impartial Account, 21–26.

18. Ord. James, ALS to Henry Pelham, inclosing Manning to Ord, May 3, 1751, and Ord, “The Present State of the African Trade” September 1751, Sydney Papers, CL.

19. Peter Burnet to the Governors of the Royal Company. Mexico, September 23, 1748, Shelburne Collection 44, f. 236–37, CL.

20. Richard Pares contrasts this to the disliked French trade, in which British capital was needed to pay for foreign goods. War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (London: Frank Cass, 1963), 411.

21. Jean O. McLachlan, “The Seven Years’ Peace, and the West Indian Policy of Carvajal and Wall,” English Historical Review 53 (July 1938): 457–77. Lawrence Henry Gipson adopts the same term for this period in his article “British Diplomacy in the Light of the Anglo-Spanish New World Issues, 1750–1757,” American Historical Review 51 (July 1946): 627–48.

22. Gipson, “British Diplomacy,” 637.

23. Xabier Lamikiz, “Transatlantic Networks and Merchant Guild Rivalry in Colonial Trade with Peru, 1729–1780: A New Interpretation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, 2 (2011): 312.

24. Gipson reports that English subjects had been cutting logwood on the Spanish Main since 1638: “British Diplomacy,” 633.

25. Richard Wall to Benjamin Keene. Buen Retiro September 15, 1754, Add. Mss. 3680, f. 8, BL.

26. McLachlan attributes the decline of cooperation in 1757 to logwood disputes: McLachlan, “The Seven Year’s Peace,” 457. Numbers for this population of Britons vary, but Gipson notes that there were about 1,500 Britons living in the area in 1715, and Brown relates that in 1753 there were about 2,000 British settlers and African slaves living among 8,000 Miskito Indians. Gipson, “British Diplomacy,” 634; Vera Lee Brown, “Anglo-Spanish Relations in America, 1763–1770,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (August 1992): 351.

27. Merchants in the Northern colonies were earning about £160,000 annually from the logwood produced from these settlements. Gipson, “British Diplomacy,” 634.

28. The Constitutional Querist, Containing the Sentiments of an Impartial Englishman on the Present Rupture with Spain, its Political State, Internal Weakness, and Best Method of Attacking Her (London: W. Nicoll, 1762), 37.

29. Richard Lodge, “Presidential Address: Sir Benjamin Keene, K.B.: A Study in Anglo-Spanish Relations in the Earlier Part of the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4:15 (1932): 11.

30. Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), deals with the contraband trading between the British and French on the New York border.

31. Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 18.

32. Ralph Lee Woodward, “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana, 1763–1803,” Louisiana History: Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 44 (Spring 2003): 136; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 108.

33. John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 167. On the British occupation of Havana, see Elena Schneider, “The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Cuba” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2011).

34. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry, 117.

35. Woodward, “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana,” 146. On earlier colonial Louisiana, see in particular Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

36. Alan Christelow, “Contraband Trade Between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Three Port Act of 1766,” Hispanic American Historical Review 22 (May 1942): 314.

37. Robert Allen, The Great Importance of the Havannah, Set Forth in an Essay on the Nature and Methods of Carrying on a Trade to the South Sea, and the Spanish West Indies (London: J. Hinxman, 1762), 22. On Allen’s experience in Spanish America, see J. D. Aslop and Robert Allen, “A Darien Epilogue: Robert Allen in Spanish America, 1698–1707” Americas 43, 2 (October 1986): 197–201.

38. Christelow notes the continued enthusiasm among the British for trade to the Spanish for both specie and natural resources. Christelow, “Contraband Trade,” 314.

39. Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 63–80.

40. John Wright, The West-India Merchant, Factor and Supercargoes Daily Assistant (London: David Steel, 1765), xvii.

41. Liss, Atlantic Empires, 19.

42. Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, “Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing in Jamaica, 1655–1788,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (January 2001): 210. Burnard and Morgan note that from 1759 to 1773 the Spanish did not seek slaves in Jamaica, though of course the clandestine nature of contraband trade makes it impossible to determine the volume of the illegal trade in slaves that may have persisted in the interim. On 1773, see also Contratación, 5758, Cádiz, July 1, 1773, n.f, AGI.

43. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 15.

44. The company’s position and Anglo-Spanish trade at the end of the eighteenth century is covered at length in Goebel, “British Trade to the Spanish Colonies,” 305–6.

45. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119.