to allow them to prevent others from trading in the South Sea Company’s jurisdiction.18
The Spanish allowed this British presence in order to maintain importations of enslaved African laborers. As holders of the asiento contract, the Spanish required the South Sea Company to import 4,800 piezas de indias, the standard unit for slaves, annually, for a period of thirty years. For each of these slaves the company would pay the Spanish crown at a rate of 33 1/3 pesos, except for the last 800, which were to be sold without duty.19 The company would never successfully import the full complement of slaves they were allowed, and may not have expected that that portion of the trade would be particularly profitable. Instead, the real value of the asiento trade lay in the political power it offered, as well as the profit possibilities inherent in the annual “permission” ship and the extensive contraband smuggling that accompanied the movement of British ships onto Spanish American shores.20
For many in Britain, the most important function of the company was financial. It agreed to absorb a significant portion of the public debt that built up during the War of the Spanish Succession, offering stock at ever-increasing prices through 1720, when the wild speculation had run its expensive course and the bubble burst.21 While this failure has been widely studied, the trading activities of the company have been of interest to fewer scholars, despite the fact that the South Sea Company continued to function in the Spanish Americas long after it ceased to be of financial benefit to the nation.22
The provisions of the asiento treaty suggest some of the hopes and fears with which each of these empires entered the agreement. The British saw an enticing opportunity to expand their own trade in slaves and manufactured goods and to exercise their considerable naval power; long before the moral debates about abolition became widespread, this seemed simply another opportunity for financial gain.23 Taking over the trade also allowed the nation to reduce the trading power of the French, who had previously dominated Spanish American trade.24 While the contract allowed the ships bringing slaves and goods into the Spanish Empire to belong to and be crewed by either their own or British subjects, the British preferred and used their own extensive fleet, a key part of the Navigation Acts.25 The Spanish demonstrated their own fears over the new presence of large trading delegations from the long-oppositional British Empire by demanding that “neither the Commanders of those ships … nor the Mariners do give any Offence, or cause any Scandal to the exercise of the Roman Catholick Religion.”26 It would have been unnecessary to create injunctions against British sailors offending the Catholic religion unless the Spanish expected that this would be an inevitable problem, as it had long been with English merchants living in Old Spain.27
Like the Spanish, the British too worried, as they did during the trade to Old Spain, about the possibility of religious conflict or the prospect of Catholic conversions, voluntary or coerced. An early abstract for the South Sea Company charter required the company to employ an Anglican minister for each of their factories and their larger ships.28 These religious men would tend to the souls of those living in the factories, saving them from the temptations of Catholicism. The abstract further required these ministers to learn Spanish or Portuguese, as well as whatever native languages were in use in the area, suggesting that the court of directors could have anticipated some evangelism.
The 1713 contract allowed British individuals like Dover into the Spanish empire in an official capacity as long-term residents. They were permitted to live in the ports, and were to “be regarded and treated as if they were Subjects of the Crown of Spain,” allowed to travel and trade in the colonies, according to the text of the treaty. This display of generosity and trust by the Spanish government was immediately qualified, however, with the stipulation “that there shall not reside in any one of the said Ports of the Indies, more than Four or Six Englishmen.”29 These scattered factors would process the slaves moving through Spanish American ports and would travel into the interior of the continents in order to conduct slaves to other areas for sale.30 In 1724 the company argued further that they should be allowed to send additional agents known as supercargoes to sell the goods of the annual ship throughout the empire, and that those men should be treated as subjects of Spain, just as the company’s factors in the ports were entitled to by the original contract.31 The Spanish crown was resistant to these additional encroachments into their territory. The limitation to such a small number of Britons, combined with the insistence that these men conform to Spanish laws and respect Catholicism, suggests that the Spanish worried that their presence would disrupt the smooth running of their empire. By keeping the numbers of troublesome Britons at a minimum, local civil and ecclesiastical officials could expect to repress their potentially negative influence.32
The contract gave these small numbers of authorized factors permission not only to live in Spanish American ports, but to hold land there. The ninth article of the asiento granted Dover and his fellow factors land in the Rio de la Plata area “sufficient to plant, to cultivate, and breed Cattle therein, for the subsistence of the Persons belonging to the Assiento, and their Negroes.”33 This situation presupposed that the peace would persist for a long time, long enough for land to be cultivated and crops to be harvested. Given that the Spanish Americas were poor in labor but rich in land area, it is likely that this allowed the Spanish to accommodate the need for provisions at the distant Buenos Aires factory while facilitating the cultivation and settlement of lands that they would not themselves be required to tend. The second part of the ninth article prevented the factors from becoming too comfortable, however, decreeing that houses were to be built of timber only, and that no fortifications were to be permitted.34 Furthermore, a royal officer would be appointed to live on the South Sea Company’s land, to observe the activities there and report to Spanish officials as necessary.35 It appears that the Spanish expected British individuals living in the Spanish empire to prove at least a marginal threat, and that they had to be watched, lest the privileges extended to them by the king of Spain result in British fortifications being constructed on vulnerable Spanish territory.
The South Sea Company’s trade to the Spanish Americas forced contact between groups that for a long time had been largely officially oppositional in the Americas. While some British merchants, factors, and ambassadors lived within Spain itself during the decades before the British gained the asiento, the establishment of the South Sea Company’s factories marked the first incorporation of subjects of the British monarch within the borders of the broader Spanish empire as important agents of trade.36 Within the Spanish-controlled regions of the West Indies and South America, an area of continued contest between empires and in which no European power’s control was completely consolidated, these factors’ presence was both useful and potentially dangerous for the Spanish empire.
Officials in both nations expected that the execution and maintenance of the asiento would be bumpy, and they attempted to avoid problems in the text of the treaty. In the twentieth article, the Spanish crown promised to personally ensure that “in case the said Assientists be molested in the Execution and Performance of this Assiento,” legally or otherwise, their troubles would be addressed quickly. This provision to ensure British rights balanced article twenty-two, which explained that all ships entering Spanish ports would be searched, from the top “even to the Ballast,” by the governor and royal officers of that area. In other words, the Spanish expected that their British counterparts would attempt, either systematically or as individuals, to import and sell goods that were declared contraband by previous international laws. Persons found engaging in this sort of trade faced harsh treatment. They were “to pay a Forfeiture proportionable to their Offence, [to be] severely punished, and declared incapable to hold thereafter any Employment in the Service of this Assiento.”37 For its part, the company could be reasonably sure that there would be attempted smuggling of slaves into Spanish American ports by outside traders unauthorized to compete with them. While the French still held the asiento, factors, in combination with Spanish officials, were authorized to board others’ ships in order to halt the illegal trade in slaves.38 These provisions during the British asiento would ultimately do little to halt the massive contraband trade that grew up in
