Since George Scelle's ground-breaking work La traite négrière aux Indes de Castille. Contrats traités d'assiento from 1906, few historians have dared to take on the complex subject of the Spanish asiento de negros.Footnote 8 The incredibly detailed work of Alejandro García-Montón provides historians with a new handbook that offers fresh perspectives on the hazardous trade.
García-Montón opposes the view that, following the Age of the Genoese, the period between 1557 and 1627 during which Genoese merchants made fortunes serving the Spanish Crown, the Genoese were pushed out of international circuits by the Dutch and the English. Instead, García-Montón shows how the Genoese “sought new markets and commercial partners, diversified their investment portfolios, and found creative solutions to deal with a new phase in the mercantile world” (p. 6). They were, as García-Montón argues, “agents of change”.
One of these agents of global change was Domenico Grillo (1617–1686), born in Genoa. Grillo is an interesting case in point. His family had profited from the Age of the Genoese but was not as politically influential and wealthy as other Genoese families. In 1647, Grillo and his associate Ambrosio Lomellino (†1667) were expelled from Genoa. They were apparently involved in “a reactionary plot against venality in the promotion of new patricians” (pp. 87–88). They fled to Madrid. While in Spain, they created new networks but also maintained close relations with Genoa. García-Montón points out that they were constantly balancing their “dual allegiance” to the Spanish Empire on the one hand and the Republic of Genoa on the other hand (p. 67). With the case of Grillo, García-Montón shows how Genoese merchants sought entrepreneurial opportunities after the Age of the Genoese and how they successfully adapted to the changed mercantile world.
Just by looking at the abbreviations, one sees the vast number of archives García-Montón has explored, in Italy, Spain, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. This is one of the many strengths of García-Montón's work. Instead of letting the historiographical traditions lead him, he lets the sources speak. Juxtaposing sources from these archives – sources that are, one should not forget, often incredibly hard to locate and complex to comprehend – allows for a new perspective, one in which the multitude of actors and their motives come to light. This attests to the fact that Grillo's business activities, most importantly among them the acquirement of the asiento, were based on and executed using trans-imperial and intra-imperial networks.
Apart from the introduction and epilogue, García-Montón's book consists of seven chapters. In the first chapter, García-Montón provides us with an overview of the Grillo family, which is contextualized in the second chapter about Genoese entrepreneurs in the seventeenth century. While the Age of the Genoese had ended, Grillo's trade would flourish more than ever. In the chapters that follow we move to the Grillo and Lomellino asiento. In the third chapter, García-Montón explains in detail how the Spanish slave trade developed during the seventeenth century and how Grillo changed the system, a point I return to later. In the early modern time, and especially in an empire as vast as that of Spain, one of the main problems of merchants was how to control their agents (principal-agent problem). García-Montón's fourth chapter deals with this, focusing on the factors, ships’ captains, and judges (jueces conservadores) that were employed by Grillo. What we learn is that those who were employed by Grillo represented a “cross-section of the amalgam of invisible actors that populated the Spanish Empire” (p. 160). It is, perhaps, the most important chapter as it presents one of García-Montón's main arguments, namely, that Grillo was a network maker and a network taker, a point that he returns to throughout the book. In Chapter Five, for example, García-Montón shows that the international wool trade provided him with services and capital for the asiento. It further demonstrates Grillo's strategy to access the Dutch and English Atlantic. In the sixth chapter, García-Montón convincingly argues how the asiento opened the door to (contraband) trans-imperial and intra-Spanish American trade. In the last chapter, we return to Genoa. It is shown how Genoa was a Mediterranean hub: Spanish American produce, mainly silver, was transported from Genoa across the Levant and beyond.
Before 1640, the Spanish slave trade was operated by multiple merchants simultaneously. García-Montón shows how Grillo and Lomellino used their negotiated privileges to transform the asiento into an estanco (monopoly) in 1662 (p. 109). By assessing Grillo and Lomellino's proposal to the Spanish King and the negotiations that followed, García-Montón shows how the former exploited the entrepreneurial opportunities that arose from Spain's fiscal and financial crisis. Firstly, Grillo and Lomellino offered to build the Spanish king ten vessels in Spanish shipyards, a welcome proposal considering the weak state the Spanish Armada was in. Secondly, by granting Grillo and Lomellino the proposed monopolistic charter, tax collection would be increased: taxes were raised over the fixed number of enslaved Africans introduced in the Spanish Americas. In essence, the asiento functioned as a tax-farming contract. Lastly, the Junta de Negros (naively) argued that granting the asiento to Grillo and Lomellino was a way to externalize the costs of monitoring contraband trade (pp. 113–114).
As expected, however, the interests of Grillo and Lomellino and the Spanish Crown ended up not aligning at all. In the years that followed, Grillo's and Lomellino's policy was, as García-Montón explains, to meet “as few of their obligations to the Crown” as possible to maximize “the political support that the Crown afforded them through the privileges granted in the asiento”, which led to constant conflict (p. 119). For example, not all ten ships were built, and they failed to meet payments. Whereas Seville's consulado perceived the asiento and the Carrera de Indias as two separate trades, nothing was less true. The products that arrived with the Spanish galleons were sold at fairs in the Isthmus of Panama. In between these fairs, there were no transactions. This meant that the merchants in the Isthmus were dependent on the arrival of the galleons for the trade in products from Europe. Grillo's and Lomellino's ships, however, now arrived in between these fairs with products imported from Curaçao, thus competing directly with the merchants of the consulado. This contraband trade went untaxed, which meant the Spanish Crown missed out (pp. 208, 213–214).
The underlying question is why Grillo and Lomellino were interested in the asiento. As García-Montón explains, there were other ways to enter the Caribbean slave trade. Their connections to Cadiz and Amsterdam merchants would, according to García-Montón, have provided Grillo and Lomellino with access to “the flourishing trans-imperial markets in the Caribbean” (p. 105). While they probably invested some of their resources in these transactions, they ultimately chose to negotiate for the asiento instead.
Was it related to the “silver puzzle” that García-Montón identifies (p. 70)? Silver was widely available in seventeenth-century Genoa, yet it remains unclear just how much silver reached the city, why it arrived there, and how it was subsequently used. García-Montón points out that “silver was the product highest in commercial priorities for Grillo and his partners” (p. 254). Further, he explains that silver was often shipped from Genoa to other places “to redeem loans contracted with the merchants who backed the financial machinery of the asiento in Europe” (p. 257). It seems likely that the asiento gave Grillo control over the distribution of Spanish American silver to Genoa and elsewhere, but, perhaps lacking the evidence to dissect this system, García-Montón does not fully substantiate this argument.
García-Montón's research reaffirms the role private actors and foreigners played in the Spanish empire. The case study of Grillo is an excellent example of this. García-Montón's work is based on the thorough investigation of complex, international archival collections. The outcome is an in-depth study of the Genoese Domenico Grillo and the asiento, an inspiring work that any historian researching the early modern Spanish empire must read.
