Abstract
Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and their Overseas Networks, Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2010; 211 pp.; 9780861933068, £50.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Christopher Albi, SUNY New Paltz, USA
In this important monograph, Xabier Lamikiz uses the private letters of merchants to analyse relationships of trust in Spanish overseas trade. In so doing, he helps to refresh a stale historiography concerned primarily with quantitative issues and overly dependent on official records. He also deftly puts under the same microscope Spain’s northern European commerce out of Bilbao and its Cadiz-based colonial trade to Peru. He shows how Spanish merchants in both ports gained advantages over foreign rivals in the eighteenth century by developing long-distance networks based on common ethnic or regional origin. While Lamikiz’s focus is trade, his study has larger implications: it suggests a new periodization of Spanish imperial history. The turning point may not have come in the 1760s, with the end of the Seven Years’ War and start of ambitious colonial reforms under Charles III, but 20 years earlier, when the War of Jenkins’ Ear forced Spain to abandon the fleet system. The ad hoc arrival of direct, individual shipping to America triggered an information explosion to which the more activist policy of the later Bourbons can be seen as a belated and perhaps misguided response.
Lamikiz organizes his material in three sections. The first two chapters examine the merchants and mariners of the Basque port of Bilbao, which enjoyed duty-free status by virtue of the medieval fueros that regulated the Basque relationship to the Castilian crown. In the seventeenth century, English merchants settled in Bilbao to participate in a triangular Atlantic trade that ferried Spanish wool and iron to England, English manufactured goods to North America, and North American cod to Spain. According to Basque law, foreign merchants could not live alone or set up their own guilds. The huésped tradition, in which foreign merchants lodged with local families, helped to build relations of trust between Basque and English merchants and thus facilitated the Basque penetration of North Atlantic trade in the mid-eighteenth century. The other crucial factor helping the Basques was that the Consulado of Bilbao, the merchant guild with jurisdiction over all trade disputes, worked hard to gain the trust of foreigners, who constantly threatened to relocate to the rival port of Santander. The 1737 Ordinances of Bilbao became the model for commercial law throughout the Spanish world. Lamikiz thus links Basque commercial success in the eighteenth century to cultural and legal norms emanating from the fueros.
The next three chapters focus on trade between Cadiz and Peru. Lamikiz examines here the changing commercial environment in the middle decades of the eighteenth century and provides fascinating detail on the everyday concerns of merchants, from contracting sea loans in Cadiz to collecting debt in provincial Peru. During the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48), the Spanish crown suspended the fleet system, in which convoys of merchant vessels escorted by warships set sail from Cadiz every two or three years destined for Veracruz and the Atlantic coast of Panama. In its place, the crown licensed Cadiz merchants to send individual ships directly to Peru via Cape Horn. This measure, the author argues, transformed colonial markets. It quickened the flow of merchandise and information, giving more clout to colonial consumers. Spanish merchants, facing greater competition and risk, sought reliable and creditworthy agents in America, who could accept goods on consignment and liquidate them expeditiously. They naturally turned to their paisanos, family and friends from the same regions in Spain. The Basques and the Montañeses from Santander formed the most important transatlantic networks. Lamikiz argues that historians relying on official documentation have overplayed the importance of the Consulados, the official merchant guilds, at the expense of the informal networks that cut across guild affiliations.
The final two chapters examine in finer detail the issues of confidentiality, public reputation, credit, and the role of legal institutions, such as the Consulado of Bilbao, in mitigating risk in overseas trade. It is a small quibble to point out that Lamikiz might have integrated this material in the first two sections to avoid some repetition.
This study was made possible by a fortuitous find in the National Archives in London: the correspondence of merchants seized from Spanish ships by the British navy in the course of the eighteenth century. Most extraordinary was the haul from La Perla, captured off the Azores in 1779. Its mail bags contained 2269 letters, as well as hundreds of commercial documents. Although limited to a single year, the mail bags of La Perla offer an unparalleled amount of information on the thinking and behaviour of Spanish overseas traders. Lamikiz thoroughly analyses this unique source, with a sensitive eye for the manifold ways that trust shaped the course of transatlantic commerce. This lucid study will interest all scholars of long-distance trade, the Atlantic World, early modern Spain, and Colonial Latin America.