Abstract
During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Seville consolidated its position as the main logistical and operational maritime hub of the Spanish Empire. The city had hosted the House of Trade since its creation (1504), thus concentrating shipping, and human and mercantile flows, to and from the Americas. During the 1560s, a biannual system of convoyed fleets crossing the ocean was established and, a decade later, the Mediterranean galleys at the service of the King started wintering there too. Yet Philip II's embargoes against the Flemish rebels (1574–1579, 1585–1590, 1595–1596) severed trade between the Iberian Peninsula and northern Europe for obtaining naval supplies, and the city lacked a suitable hinterland to support its powerful industry in preparing, repairing and finishing ships with the necessary materials. How, in spite of all these hindrances, was supply and demand met? In A Dissimulated Trade: Northern European Timber Merchants in Seville (1574–1598), Germán Jiménez-Montes offers a convincing answer to this question by unveiling the traders on whose shoulders rested the viability of the leading port city of the Spanish Empire: the Flemish and German merchants residing in the Reales Atarazanas (Royal Shipyards) complex of Seville. This is a story that for too long has gone unnoticed by historians.
The book unfolds in six chapters. As shown in the first chapter, Atarazanas traders took leadership in the timber trade within a context of war and economic sanctions against the Low Countries. Chapter 2 sheds light on the drivers of the Flemish and German migration to Seville and how the community flourished in the city. Chapter 3 focuses on the traders’ families and households. The rest of the book covers the foundations of mercantile cooperation (Chapter 4), how the Atarazanas merchants organized the timber trade between Andalusia and northern Europe (Chapter 5), and how and what precisely these merchants supplied to private shipowners and royal officials alike, and what they got in return (Chapter 6). The conclusions offer a well-articulated view of the most important findings of the book. Nicely written and supported with illuminating graphs, tables and maps, there are four interrelated elements that characterize this work.
First, Jiménez-Montes unravels the worlds of the Atarazanas merchants by unearthing a collection of sources that are rarely explored beyond the margins of local studies: notarial records. The core of the research comprises over 3,700 notarial deeds for a period of 30 years, including powers of attorney, dowries, testaments, partnerships and all sorts of contracts. Despite using an apparently homogenous set of records, the author squeezes the most out of them, both from quantitative and qualitative angles, answering different questions and uncovering different realities. When notarial records are combined with other types of material within the book, the results are illuminating and one wants the author to explore this path further. Nevertheless, A Dissimulated Trade will become an inspiring reference for how to exploit notarial deeds, as well as the challenges they raise.
In interrogating notarial deeds rather than simply offering a static picture of a given merchant community, the author portrays a merchant community in the making. This is a commendable exercise. During the years covered in the book, the Flemish community in Seville transitioned from almost 60 male members and their families to approximately 175 – almost half of all the foreign residents of the city. Not all of these migrants were timber traders, but the Atarazanas merchants evolved into a distinguished group among them. As convincingly evidenced, fixed marrying patterns, the selective recruitment of prospective grooms among new migrants, and specialization in trade converged to foster social capital – and therefore trust – within the group. References to group tensions or tensions among partners and relatives are scarce (122, 146), and a deeper reflection on conflicts and power asymmetries would have enriched the analysis of the group’s formation and inner dynamics. However, the overall outcome notably refines and enlarges Eddy Stols’ classic works – for instance, De Spaanse Brabanders oj de Handelsbetrekkingen der Zuidelijke Nederlanden met de Iberische Wereld, 1598-1648, Bruxelles, Palais des Académies, 1971 – on Flemish migration to Andalusia.
Third, in disclosing the strategies used by the Atarazanas merchants to penetrate Seville's urban fabric, the city and the network of small ports and towns along the Guadalquivir River become the other protagonists of the book. The analysis of how this community strived to control most leasing contracts over the Atarazanas warehouses – a complex of over 10,000 square metres – is particularly illuminating regarding how and why physical space mattered in port cities. The history of the community was framed by its members’ relationship with those warehouses. Controlling the space of the Atarazanas meant dominating the timber trade in the city, which, in turn, allowed the community to farm the tax on timber sales, thus achieving a central position in the balance of local powers. In revealing these facets about the inner life of the city, the book questions a long-standing assumption: that Seville's connection with American trade was the main motivation for migrants to move to the city. Jiménez-Montes cleverly shows that this story was far more intricate. Seville ‘offered efficient contract-enforcement solutions to everybody, facilitating the integration of newcomers’ (20) in the form of open courts of justice or notaries. In fact, as the book builds on the traces left by the Atarazanas merchants in making use of those open-access institutions, it serves as an excellent testimony to that reality. This opens an exciting line of research that should be seriously explored in the future.
Although little information is offered on how Seville was supplied with timber and naval provisions before the 1570s, and by whom – something that is crucial to better understand what came later – the activities of the Atarazanas merchants are thoroughly examined. The book comes with refreshing insights in this regard. For example, contrary to common wisdom, the timber connection between Andalusia and northern Europe was not built from Amsterdam but from Seville by the Atarazanas merchants. North European shipmasters played a crucial role in this trade, not only as carriers but also as investors. Frequently, they obtained Andalusian salt and American silver from the Atarazanas merchants, who infiltrated the American trade due to their role as timber suppliers to shipowners, shipmasters and supercargoes sailing the Spanish Atlantic. To explore some of the solutions that the Atarazanas merchants used, ensuring and governing cooperation in local, regional and long-distance trade, almost 30 partnerships and approximately 1,200 powers of attorney are interrogated. This allows Jiménez-Montes to shed light on the reasons Atarazanas merchants had for choosing some types of partnerships over others, and to disclose the multifunctional use of powers of attorney and the purposes principals had for delegating agency to proxies. Inspired by authors such as Oscar Gelderblom and Jeroen Puttevils, this is a much-needed analytical contribution to the history of trade in the framework of the Spanish Empire.
A Dissimulated Trade is mostly framed as a contribution to the naval history of the Spanish Empire not from the perspective of the state – as frequently done – but in relation to traders and their involvement in that story. Drawing our attention to a period disregarded by Spanish maritime historians, Jiménez-Montes does an important job in showing the Empire's capacity to access naval resources beyond resorting to asientos or direct administration, and the role foreigners played in sustaining Philip II's maritime empire. These are significant contributions. However, this book has something else – and perhaps more important – to offer. Ultimately, it provides a comprehensive picture of the human and institutional environments in which the Atarazanas merchants progressed. Throughout the book, the reader is immersed in the mercantile, social and political milieus making up late sixteenth-century Europe, while also navigating the affairs of foreign merchants’ families, young migrants, local oligarchs, imperial rulers and ship captains, whose lives and interests pivoted on the maritime worlds of the early modern period.