The Spanish Atlantic World In The Eighteenth Century

This book covers the evolution of royal policy in Spanish America as eighteenth-century Spain modernized its empire and transformed itself into a power of the first order. Tracing the interplay between war and reform, the analysis confronts the diverse realities of the Spanish Atlantic world, which stretched from the northern Mexican borderlands to Argentina and Chile. Unlike earlier studies on eighteenth-century Spain, this work incorporates the early Bourbon experience into the narrative and integrates the impressive reemergence of the Royal Armada into a fuller picture of administrative, commercial, fiscal, ecclesiastical, and military change.

Shows how merchants sought to minimise losses by forging strong bonds of interpersonal trust amongst a range of employees, partners, and clients.

An Economist Book of the Year, 2001. In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of essays focusing on the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the economy of the Atlantic basin—comprising parts of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thirteen essays, the contributors examine the complex and variegated processes by which markets were created in the Atlantic basin and how they became integrated. While a number of the contributors focus on the economic history of a specific European imperial system, others, mirroring the realities of the world they are writing about, transcend imperial boundaries and investigate topics shared throughout the region. In the latter case, the contributors focus either on processes occurring along the margins or interstices of empires, or on "breaches" in the colonial systems established by various European powers. Taken together, the essays shed much-needed light on the organization and operation of both the European imperial orders of the early modern era and the increasingly integrated economy of the Atlantic basin challenging these orders over the course of the same period.

The Smugglers' World examines a critical part of Atlantic trade for a neglected corner of the Spanish Empire. Testimonies of smugglers, buyers, and royal officials found in Venezuelan prize court records reveal a colony enmeshed in covert commerce. Forsaken by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. They found a solution in exchanging cacao, a coveted luxury, for the necessities of life provided by contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. Jesse Cromwell paints a vivid picture of the lives of littoral peoples who normalized their subversions of imperial law. Yet laws and borders began to matter when the Spanish state cracked down on illicit commerce in the 1720s as part of early Bourbon reforms. Now successful merchants could become convict laborers just as easily as enslaved Africans could become free traders along the unruly coastlines of the Spanish Main. Smuggling became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry; persistent local need elevated the practice to a communal ethos, and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and even violent political protests. Negotiations between the Spanish state and its subjects over smuggling formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.

Early modern, long-distance trade was fraught with risk and uncertainty, driving merchants to seek means (that is, institutions) to reduce them. In the traditional historiography on Spanish colonial trade, the role of risk is largely ignored. Instead, the guild merchants are depicted as anti-competitive monopolists who manipulated markets and exploited colonial consumers. Jeremy Baskes argues that much of the commercial behavior interpreted by modern historians as predatory was instead designed to reduce the uncertainty and risk of Atlantic world trade. This book discusses topics from the development and use of maritime insurance in eighteenth- century Spain to the commercial strategies of Spanish merchants; the traditionally misunderstood effects of the 1778 promulgation of "comercio libre," and the financial chaos and bankruptcies that ensued; the economic rationale for the Spanish flotillas; and the impact of war and privateering on commerce and business decisions. By elevating risk to the center of focus, this multifaceted study makes a number of revisionist contributions to the late colonial economic history of the Spanish empire.

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.