The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire by Adrian Finucane (review)

At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Queen Anne granted the British South Sea Company the monopoly contract, known as the asiento, to sell enslaved Africans in Spanish America. That contract gave British merchants unprecedented access to select markets in Spain's American empire, and in exchange, the South Sea Company promised to consolidate Britain's wartime debt. The subsequent sale of the company's stocks created a spectacular bubble that burst in 1720, causing a well-known financial panic that has been the subject of a robust body of scholarship.¹ Far less, however, has been written about the activities of the company on the other side of the Atlantic or about the individuals operating the slave trade in Spanish America, despite the importance of the South Sea Company to wider British economic and imperial history.

Adrian Finucane's The Temptations of Trade fills this void by examining the experiences of British South Sea Company factors who were sent to Spanish America during the tumultuous decades from the beginning of the trade to the War of Jenkins' Ear. Writing "at the intersection of individual and imperial history" (17), she argues that the actions of individuals on the ground in Spanish America shaped the trajectories of the British and Spanish Empires. Factors built close relationships with Spain's colonial subjects, but though such interpersonal alliances initially helped establish South Sea Company factories, they also facilitated smuggling. Conflicts over these illicit trade relationships, she argues, ultimately pushed Britain and Spain into a war that ended the British asiento. Finucane offers an exciting rethinking of British imperial history from the perspective of individual British factors. But she fails to provide a similarly nuanced portrait of Spain's American empire.

Building on a wave of recent scholarship that uses quotidian encounters to reveal larger truths about early modern empires, The Temptations of Trade follows the experiences of four South Sea Company agents from 1713 until 1748 to argue that "unofficial acts could often influence the development of official policy" (7).² As Finucane shows, the actions of British factors in Spanish America often conflicted with the demands of imperial commerce and warfare. Acts of individual self-interest on the part of South Sea Company factors sometimes benefited their employers but more often sabotaged the company's bottom line by provoking Spanish American officials to seize company goods or temporarily halt trade. According to Finucane, a series of European wars resulted from these conflicts between South Sea Company factors and Spanish American officials, which repeatedly interrupted the asiento contract.

The chapters follow the different phases of the South Sea Company's trade to Spanish America. In an extended prologue, Finucane explores the origins of British interest in conducting trade with Spain's colonies in the early eighteenth-century narratives of seafarers such as William Dampier, who provided the British reading public with descriptions of the wealth of Spanish America. The first chapter examines Thomas Dover, who became chief factor in Buenos Aires after serving as a privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession and as a physician for the Royal African Company. Dover's career exemplifies the change from territorial aggression against Spain during the war to exploiting commercial possibilities after it. Such exploitation took an official form through the South Sea Company, but individual factors also used their positions for personal gain. From 1713 until 1716, Dover, like many of the company's factors, forged illicit trade networks. This widespread smuggling, along with religious tensions between factors and Spanish American residents, forced a renegotiation of the asiento treaty in 1716. Despite diplomatic attempts to solve the problems surrounding the South Sea Company's trade, two wars between Britain and Spain interrupted the trade from 1717 through 1728. For this period, Finucane follows South Sea Company physician John Burnet, who enabled illicit trade through the factory at Cartagena...