British Trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808 (review)

For scholars of the old regime, the question, 'how much' imposes a nagging frustration owing to a general lack of reliable archival data. This truism is particularly valid for trade, and even more so for foreign commerce with Spanish America, which normally was illegal and therefore poorly documented, if at all. In this book, Adrian Pearce boldly steps up to this challenge through an analysis for the period 1763–1808 that centres 'around the question of how goods and produce moved from Britain to Spanish America, and from Spanish America to Britain, and in what quantities' (ix). Pearce consulted an impressive array of repositories in Great Britain, Spain, Latin America and the United States as he pieced together scraps of information to illuminate his enquiry, informing his search through an impressive selection of secondary materials. This work originated under the encouragement of John Fisher, whose accomplishments in documenting commerce between Spain and America rank as the standard reference.

Pearce begins his presentation with an insightful overview of Spanish American commerce before 1763, as Great Britain secured an important position in its rivalry with France and established a foundation that served superbly in subsequent decades. While the French held an advantage in the re-export trade out of Cádiz, the British improved substantially their position following the War of Jenkins' Ear. More important, up to the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, they ably exploited the asiento awarded at Utrecht and the resulting 'annual' 500-ton ship to the fairs at Portobelo and Veracruz. These legal footholds also opened the gates to a flourishing contraband trade from Britain's Caribbean entrepôts, particularly Jamaica. Pearce attaches great significance to the fundamental shift that developed during the 1750s, when the Spanish sought out trade in their own vessels and actually achieved supremacy.

A chapter on the period 1763–1783 launches the principal analysis. In response to a slump following the Seven Years' War, the British instituted a 'free port system' in Jamaica and Dominica, a step calculated to exploit the opportunities offered by the pre-eminence of Spanish shippers in the contraband trade. By the early 1770s, Pearce postulates, the Free Port Acts, which legalized a broad range of commercial activity, were working smoothly. Despite the implementation of the Regulation of Free Trade for Spain and its Caribbean islands in 1765 and a hardening attitude towards contraband, Britain's commerce with Spanish America flourished, although it waned during the hostilities of the American Revolutionary War.

As John Fisher has shown, Madrid's Regulation of Free Trade of 1778 produced impressive results in the Spanish Empire during the post-war period. Yet Pearce found 'strong and sustained growth in British trade with Spanish America during precisely the years when Comercio libre was at its zenith' (97). This success, which scholars had previously underestimated, came partially as a consequence of Madrid's recourse to legalizing commerce with neutrals during the war years, which encouraged a flexibility that subsequently redounded to the Jamaican marketplace, as it lured in Spanish dealers. Moreover, between 1787 and 1793, additional Free Port Acts expanded the system throughout the British West Indies. Then, too, when Madrid legalized the free slave trade in 1789 for the Greater Antilles and Caracas, which it later extended to New Granada and Río de la Plata, it also opened the gates to covert dealings not easily contained. Only Mexico stood on the sidelines. For the British West Indies, Jamaica remained dominant followed by Grenada and the Bahamas.

Remarkably, complete accounts exist in the British National Archives for 1792–1795, and useful, albeit more limited, data back to 1788. Pearce concludes that the early 1790s, which featured a Spanish alliance during the war with revolutionary France, 1792– 1795, 'marked the consolidation of Hispanic America as Britain's most important commercial partner in the West Indies after the United States – a position from which there would be no subsequent retreat' (101). An ambitious statistical appendix details the...