This book takes a new approach to the South Sea Company. Histories of the company have largely focused on the stock bubble of the 1720s, which destroyed many fortunes and devastated the English market.63 That scholarship has emphasized how the trade was, in the end, a failure. Other historians detail the complex workings of the trade in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, though they have said little about the interactions between British and Spanish subjects and the influence of these interactions on the empires at large.64 Without discounting the importance of the financial disaster to which the company contributed or the contract’s diplomatic or business details, this study puts aside the well-documented impact in Europe to argue that the real importance of the South Sea Company’s presence in the Americas lay in its bringing together of the Spanish and British imperial projects at the level of individual actors. With greater attention to the activities of the company’s agents on the ground, and their interaction with larger political and economic forces within the empires, it becomes clear that these empires were crucial to one another’s development, internally contested, and blurred on the margins, especially in a Caribbean context.65
At the intersection of individual and imperial history, individuals’ decisions had impacts on empires, and individuals’ opportunities were created or limited by the particular forms empires took. Given these connections, this study approaches the history of the South Sea Company and the eighteenth-century British and Spanish empires through a biographical lens. Particularly detailed historical records have survived concerning the lives of Thomas Dover, John Burnet, Jonathan Dennis, and James Houstoun, all company employees who lived and worked in the Spanish empire, many for years. Attention to their individual lives allows for the reconstruction of the history of the British and Spanish empires at the level of the people building it, people who were tempted by the American trade and at the same time threatened by it.66
The South Sea Company trade offered a wealth of opportunity to a specific subsection of British and Spanish subjects, working within, on the margins, or outside the control of their empires. The early eighteenth-century Spanish and British empires were made up of a wide variety of interest groups, operating not only in courts and legislatures in Europe but also in the Americas. The development of the Anglo-Spanish slave trade in the British asiento period was part of a larger set of struggles, between private enterprises and those granted a monopoly by the state, between those who envisioned an empire mainly built on territorial expansion and those who wished to expand British power through trade, and between the needs of the empire as a whole and its agents on the ground, who were often most concerned with benefiting themselves.67 While the exercise of greater governmental control benefited those involved with the South Sea Company, those who had profited from the “salutary neglect” of the earlier period found themselves shut out of the imperial gains.68 In London, those involved with running the trade, and those few who were able to make their fortunes from South Sea stock before the bubble burst, also found the possibilities opened by the asiento contract quite exciting. The Spanish American subjects who received these British imports, in both slaves and merchandise, benefited also from access to otherwise unavailable goods, and some Spanish American officials were more concerned with supplying their viceroyalties and filling their pockets than with the policies promulgated from Madrid. Individuals from each empire connected, made friendships, and traded goods and information. This interimperial network, created on the ground in the Americas, created the necessary framework to facilitate interimperial commerce and guarantee profit to some.
The multidimensional opportunities inherent in the company’s trade caused problems that eventually led to the end of cooperation. As networks developed, so did the prospects for a variety of contraband trade, illegal in the eyes of the imperial metropoles, sometimes sanctioned by local officials, and at other times more clandestine. Far from the halls of government in the metropoles, the official policies of the colonial governments were consistently less important than the practicalities that surrounded these agents of empire. Individuals operated within empires, leading to conflict between official policy and the execution of imperial plans on the ground. The very peace that allowed for this trade also created lawlessness and disorder in the Americas. In order to take advantage of the large amounts of specie and merchandise moving through the West Indies, and unable to engage in the privateering that had once been so important to Caribbean life, pirates sprang up in both empires, and Spanish guardacostas, or coast guard ships, meant to protect against both pirates and the smuggling trade, attacked British ships. The contraband trade, piracy, and the discontent that these caused in both empires, paired with complaints lobbed by both the Spanish government and the South Sea Company, precipitated the ultimate breakdown of cooperative relations between Britain and Spain in the slave trade. For the South Sea Company, empire was practiced at the periphery in ways that relied on but were ultimately destructive to the imperial plans constructed in London and Madrid.
CHAPTER 1
Britain Hopes for the “Riches of America,” 1713–1716
Through the seventeenth century, the English had been interested in taking over lands claimed by the Spanish, particularly in the West Indies and the North American mainland. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, this push for land was partially overtaken with a concern for trade as the main method of extracting Spanish American riches. The career trajectory of one South Sea Company agent, Thomas Dover, mirrors the shift in British strategies in regards to the Spanish. Although he had sailed against the Spanish during the War of the Spanish Succession, after the peace Dover became a company surgeon, profiting from the Spanish in an entirely new way. This was not a complete shift to trade for the British; among the many conflicting interests in the empire, there remained those who hoped to seize Spanish American lands throughout the British asiento period, but the early eighteenth century was a period of experimentation and possibility. During the difficult first years of the treaty, men like Dover took advantage of the newly agreed upon peace to take a new approach to the Spanish empire based on cooperative trade, an approach that pursued economic opportunities that would never be fully realized for the British Empire.
Dover already had quite a bit of experience in the Spanish Americas before the South Sea Company appointed him chief factor at its Buenos Aires factory in the fall of 1714. A physician educated at Oxford and Cambridge, with an active practice in the bustling port city of Bristol, Dover traveled to the West Indies several times on slaving voyages and explorations. As third in command on the famous voyage of privateer Woodes Rogers in 1708–1711, he had a hand in circumnavigating the world and attacking Spanish settlements along the American coast.1 As a member of one of the early voyages meant to harass the Spanish and gather information for possible English encroachment into the area, Dover was part of the wartime move to begin to displace the Spanish. As a factor for the South Sea Company, he meant to profit from their presence in the Americas. These tensions, including the desire of some to oust the Spaniards, the need for them to be present and to consume British merchandise, and the pragmatic attempt of many to take advantage of the situation in the Americas regardless whether it benefited the empire or just their own pocketbook, persisted throughout the asiento period.
Dover sailed with the first group of ships to travel from Great Britain to the Spanish American coasts after the 1713 peace, but unlike many of the other South Sea Company employees, he had seen those shores before. As part of the Rogers voyage, Dover insisted on taking aggressive actions against the Spanish in 1709, despite the relative weakness of his own small fleet. Under Dover’s command, the English ships attacked and seized Guayaquil in what would become Ecuador, which had recently been ravaged by what Dover called a “plague,” and burned the city.2 The city’s weary inhabitants capitulated to Dover’s assault, which permanently drove out many inhabitants whose wealth was seized and homes destroyed.3
When choosing Dover to conduct their trade in Buenos Aires, the South Sea Company opted for a man who had already taken an aggressive stance toward the Spanish. As a trading agent, he would be well