The Temptations of Trade. Adrian Finucane

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The Temptations of Trade - Adrian Finucane The Early Modern Americas

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      THE TEMPTATIONS OF TRADE

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      THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

      Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

      Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

      The TEMPTATIONS of TRADE

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       Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire

      ADRIAN FINUCANE

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      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4812-8

      CONTENTS

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       Prologue: Before the Asiento

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

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

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

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

       Epilogue: Beyond the Asiento

       List of Abbreviations

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      PROLOGUE

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      Before the Asiento

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

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

      By the seventeenth century, Englishmen had long traded to Spain, but could not legally travel directly to the Spanish Americas except in very rare circumstances.4 Despite these restrictions, or perhaps in part because of them, English merchants and their government developed a strong thirst for knowledge about the Spanish colonies and access to their attendant wealth.5 In an attempt to fulfill this need, English travelers and privateers probed the edges of the empire, and circulated information about the little-known interiors of the Spanish territories. Despite the differences in government, religion, and demographic constitution of the British

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