to Spain’s holdings and the possibility that the English could launch piratical attacks from the North American coast.32 The anxiety expressed by the Spanish at the Jamestown settlement suggests the reality of the new threat posed by English expansion.
As Wafer, Dampier, and their fellow writers suggest, merchants, privateers, adventurers, settlers, and thinkers of England did not, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have any single agreed-upon approach to the creation of what might be called empire. They hoped to be able to take advantage of the riches that the Spanish had found in their American holdings, though no one model existed for transferring these riches into English hands. Some expected that taking land directly from the Spanish would do the most to benefit themselves and their nation while doing damage to their rivals in the Americas. Others were content to allow the Spanish to do the hard work of extracting silver and gold from the ground, intending to collect it later through trade. Many with plans for the Americas took the most pragmatic approach on the ground; they would whittle away at Spanish lands where they could, and trade with the Spanish where supplanting them seemed impossible.33
If English access to the Spanish empire was to be had peacefully, the most lucrative inroad would be through trade. Opportunities for trade to the Spanish empire had grown piecemeal during the late seventeenth century, with treaties in 1667 and 1670 offering legal if limited trade to Old Spain within certain conditions and delineating appropriate channels for members of each empire to claim redress against the other.34 It did not allow Englishmen any extended residency in Spanish American lands, a necessity if they were to conduct a long-term trade. Until 1713, very few English subjects could hope to have extensive contacts with members of the Spanish empire in the Americas while maintaining close affiliation with and loyalty to their country of origin.35
In the first two decades of the eighteenth century the nations of Europe clashed over the future rule of Spain and its colonial dependencies. The Spanish king Charles II died late in the year 1700, leaving the throne to the French Louis XIV’s grandson. The succession of Philip V to the throne had the effect, troubling to the rest of Europe, of transferring control over the Spanish throne from the House of Habsburg to Philip’s own House of Bourbon. The new possibility that the same person might hold the French and Spanish crowns, with the concomitant threat of divisive international alliances for and against this possibility, incited a twelve-year war. England particularly dreaded the potential for strengthened national connections between the French and Spanish monarchies, given the country’s long history of conflict with Catholic powers. If these two enemy nations were to unite, English power in the Old and New Worlds would be unable to stand against the Catholics in Europe and the Americas. Opportunities to trade to Spanish territories might be wholly swallowed up by competition from the French, who had been so successful in the Spanish American trade in previous decades. Given the Bourbon threat, England and its allies, including Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire, united against the Spanish succession and waged war against the possibility of Philip’s rule. The war not only extended through Europe but included battles in areas as diverse as the English North American frontier in Massachusetts Bay and the harbors of the Caribbean Sea.36
As the war drew to a conclusion, Britons continued to move through the West Indies and the Americas and to collect information from diverse sources in order to assess the possibilities for British profit in the area. The cartographer Herman Moll, for instance, published his observations on the “Coasts, Countries and Islands within the Limits of the South-Sea Company” in 1711, anticipating the trade that would be possible with the imminent peace. He based his information concerning the fortifications of the Spanish and the state of their mining of precious metals on the existing publications and manuscripts on the subject in Britain.37 The details of Moll’s maps suggest that they influenced Daniel Defoe, the propagandist whose support for the South Sea Company and general British settlement in the Americas helped kick-start the trade in the succeeding years.38 Printed and reprinted throughout the early eighteenth century, Moll’s maps would provide some of the best and most public information on the Spanish Americas and encourage Britons to take advantage of this knowledge.
In addition to maps, the printers of London published numerous encouragements for Britain to engage with Spanish lands, including a reprint of Wafer’s book in 1705, just a year before his death. In a letter to Parliament in 1711, an anonymous pamphleteer sang the praises of the Spanish American holdings, noting that “South America is indeed the only inexhaustible Fountain of those Treasures, and from its first Discovery and Possession by the Spaniards, immense Sums have been from Time to Time brought from thence, in Returns of the Goods of Europe.”39 If the English could take over the area, their superior naval capabilities and considerable trading network could move into parts of the Spanish Americas, enriching the metropole and providing an important outlet for excess manufactured goods and idle population. If the Spanish Americas were not at the moment producing stupendous riches for their owners, the pamphleteer suggested, this was not the fault of the colonies, but of the Spaniards themselves. He argued that “the Spaniard from their Slothfull Temper, and from their innate Pride, or from an inaptness to Manufactures, have not had the Advantages that they might have had, by the Possession of those Treasures.”40 If the English possessed these lands, this suggests, they could easily leverage their situation in order to place themselves in control of the majority of trade to the Americas. This opinion would persist for decades. In 1731, British captain Fayrer Hall echoed this sentiment, noting that wealth made the Spanish “supine, indolent, careless and inactive” and that the Church made them weak. Though they held extensive and potentially productive lands, they did not make full use of possessions like Puerto Rico.41 Controlling the Americas, it was hoped, would also allow the English to halt further conversion of the native peoples to Catholicism, and to weaken Spain’s control globally.
In 1713, with the success of anti-Bourbon forces, the contending parties agreed to the Peace of Utrecht. In addition to ending the threat of the union of the French and Spanish thrones under a single monarch, this treaty had significant consequences worldwide. Great Britain largely controlled the details of the peace, and the treaties were written very much to their advantage. In addition to breaking down the growing power of the House of Bourbon in Europe, Britain won Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain and in the New World forced Spain to concede trading rights to its formerly closed American empire. The treaty created a defensive alliance of sorts between Britain and Spain: Spain was forbidden to allow other nations to take control of its own American colonies, and Britain pledged to defend those colonies from foreign encroachment.42 One of the most important concessions that the British forced in the formulation and signing of the Peace of Utrecht related to the slave trade, especially the highly coveted asiento. The economic and political importance of this trade has been well established by historians, but to this point there has been little attention to the effect of the asiento contract, the consequent sustained individual interaction between members of the British and Spanish empires, and the influence of the trade on the formation of the empires.43
The innovation here was in allowing British subjects long-term residency in Spanish American trading posts and the right to a limited legal trade, but a limited contact in the form of contraband had long flourished between the empires. The writings of Britons such as Robert Allen make clear that the official status of Anglo-Spanish trading in the West Indies sometimes had little to do with the actual trade that occurred in the Americas. Allen, who had survived the Darien settlement, based his observations on the authority of his having lived in Panama and Quito for several years.44 Allen had an unusually broad experience of the Spanish empire, given the usual limits to travel by non-Spaniards; after the Darien experiment failed, he reported, he was captured while on a raiding expedition on the Isthmus of Panama and became a secretary to a high-ranking official in the region that eventually became Ecuador.45 Having made his way back to his own empire, he encouraged the expansion of foreign trade. Allen noted that trade from England to the Spanish lands in America had for a very long time been conducted through Spanish agents living in Cádiz, creating an extra step in selling merchandise and subtracting significant Spanish duties from the profits of the British.46 After the 1655 takeover of Jamaica,
