Abstract
In the mercantilist world of the long eighteenth century the state was expected to use its resources, including its military strength, in the struggle for economic supremacy in Europe. In Richard Pares’s words, ‘the navy was a branch of business’.1 Powerful groups such as the Jamaica lobby repeatedly sought to solve economic problems with military action, and they frequently got their way. There has been surprisingly little systematic effort to assess the real economic gains of this undoubtedly economic war, but most historians have felt that, in general terms, the policy paid off.2 According to Curtis Nettels,
the Peace [of Utrecht] brought the advantages for which England had gone to war. Both the Dutch and the French had been crowded out of the favoured position in Spanish colonial trade… by the end of the war, markets so long closed or partially closed had been forced open.3
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Notes
Pares, Richard: War and trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936, p. viii.
O’Brien, P. K.: ‘Inseparable connections: trade, economy, fiscal state and the expansion of empire, 1688–1815’, in Marshall, P.: Oxford history of the British Empire, vol. 2: the eighteenth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 53–77.
Nettels, Curtis: ‘England and the Spanish-American trade, 1660–1715’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1931), pp. 1–32.
For dissenting voices see Penson, L.: ‘The West Indies and the Spanish American trade, 1713–1748’ in Holland Rose, J, Newton, A.P, and Benians, E.A. (eds): Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929, p. 30.
Estimates of bullion production are tabled in Stein, Stanley J. and Stein, Barbara H.: Silver, trade and war: Spain and America in the making of early modern Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000, p. 24.
Estimates of sugar production are provided by Deerr, Noel: History of sugar, 2 vols, London: Chapman and Hall, 1949–50.
On the business of privateering see Zahedieh, Nuala: ‘“A frugal, prudential and hopeful trade”: privateering in Jamaica, 1655–89’, Journal of Imperial and Colonial History, Vol. 18 (1990), pp. 145–68.
Walker, Tamara: ‘“He outfitted his family in notable decency”: slavery, honour and dress in eighteenth century Lima, Peru’, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 30 (2009), pp. 383–402.
Haring, C.H.: Trade and navigation between Spain and the Indies in the time of the Habsburgs (1947), pp. 201–30.
Cadiz’s exports to the colonies were estimated to be worth £1.5 million per annum in the late seventeenth century. McLachlan, Jean O.: Trade and peace with Old Spain, 1667–1750: A study of the influence of commerce on Anglo-Spanish diplomacy in the first half of the eighteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
Lynch, John: Spain under the Habsburgs, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, second ed., 1981, II, p. 208.
Walker, Geoffrey J.: Spanish politics and imperial trade 1700–1789, London: Macmillan Press, 1979, p. 12.
Osborne J.F.: ‘James Castillo – asiento agent’, Jamaican Historical Review, vol. 8 (1971), pp. 9–18; Zahedieh, Merchants of Port Royal, p. 390.
Defoe, Daniel: A plan of the English commerce, 1927, p. 244.
For commentary on Defoe’s views, see Novak, Maximilian E: ‘Colonel Jack’s ‘Thieving Roguing’ trade to Mexico and Defoe’s attack on economic individualism’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1961), pp. 349–53.
Pritchard, In search of empire: the French in the Americas, 1670–1730, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 362–3.
Dunmore, John: French explorers in the Pacific: I, the eighteenth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 10–11.
For a full account of de Beauschesne’s expedition see Dahlgren, E.W: Les relations commerciales et maritimes entre la France et les côtes de l’océan Pacifique: commencement du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Librairie Ancienne, 1909, pp. 123–46.
James Drake quoted in Bourne, Ruth: Queen Anne’s navy in the West Indies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939, p. 20.
TNA CO 137/7, No. 22, Capt. Gardner to Lords of Trade, 10 Apr. 1706. Sperling, J: ‘The international payments mechanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review, Vol. 14 (1962), pp. 446–68
Nettels, Curtis: The money supply of the American colonies before 1720, Maddison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1934, p. 38
Paul, Helen: The South Sea Bubble: an economic history of its origins and consequences, New York: Routledge, 2011.
Kamen, Henry: The War of Succession in Spain 1700–1715, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, p. 179.
Phillips, Carla Rahn: The treasure of San Jose: death at sea in the War of the Spanish Succession, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2007.
McNeill, J.R.: Mosquito empires: ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 144–9.
Lespagnol, Andre: Messieurs de Saint-Malo: une elite négociante au temps de Louis XIV, Saint-Malo: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1991.
Pearce, Adrian: British trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, pp. 7–9.
Defoe, Daniel: An Essay on the South Sea Trade with an Enquiry into the Ground and Reasons for the Present Dislike and Complaint against the Settlement of a South Sea Company, London, 1712; Sperling, J.G.: The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay and Bibliographical Finding List, Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1962.
Davies, K.G.: The Royal African Company, London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1957, pp. 133–52; 133–52; BL Add MS 25,562, fos. 4–6, 19.
Palmer, Colin: Human cargoes: the British slave trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981, p. 155.
Eltis, David and Richardson, David: ‘Prices of African slaves newly arrived in the Americas, 1673–1865: new evidence on long-run trends and regional differentials’, in Eltis, David; Lewis, Frank D; Sokoloff, Kenneth L. (eds), Slavery in the development of the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 181–218.
Sheridan, Richard: Sugar and slavery: an economic history of the British West Indies 1623–1775, Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974, pp. 216–22.
Earle, Peter: The pirate wars, London: Methuen, 2003, ch. 9.
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Zahedieh, N. (2015). Commerce and Conflict: Jamaica and the War of the Spanish Succession. In: Leonard, A.B., Pretel, D. (eds) The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432728_4
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