The War of Jenkins’ Ear (from 1739 to 1748), more appropriately known in Spanish as the “Guerra del Asiento,” marked the end of the Spanish Crown’s permission for the Britain’s asiento (monopoly), held by the South Sea Company, on delivering enslaved Africans to the Spanish Americas. The end of the British Asiento led to four decades of experimentation by various players within the Spanish Empire trying to reestablish and expand the slave trade, which many strategists of the Spanish political economy increasingly saw as vital to the metropole and the colonies. This article examines some of the currents, undercurrents, and countercurrents of the deregulation of the slave trade, linking these debates with the changing policies on colonial commerce within the Spanish Empire, as authorities in Iberia and the Americas recognized the interconnectedness of these issues and their link to the actual slave trading happening in the colonies. More than in any other European empire in the Americas, the policies about slave trade to the Spanish colonies were subsumed under the regulations of the trade of commodities between the metropole and the colonies, owing to the large consumer market for European goods in the Spanish Americas. Merchants delivering captives in the Spanish colonies usually also expected to trade merchandise, whether legally or illegally. This is why imperial policies on the trade of goods influenced the timing of decisions and their implementation regarding the deregulation of the slave trade to the Spanish Americas in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. As slave traders based in Havana, Buenos Aires, and other colonial ports increased their activities during this period of expanding commerce within the colonies (and across imperial borders), they also developed a political interest in deregulating the slave trade, which favored them as merchants in the Americas over those living in the Iberian Peninsula.
This article reviews the scholarship on the shift in slave trade policy in the second half of the eighteenth century, incorporating new research, particularly on events in the Americas during the 1780s.Footnote 1 Examining the literature alongside new evidence about the discussions on the slave trade and its operation, with related considerations about the overall commerce of goods and the political economy of colonialism, helps us better understand the timeline of changes leading to the 1789 liberalization of the slave trade. By demonstrating that the shifts of colonial trade reforms and those related to the slave trade were closely intertwined, we seek to bridge the historiography of Spanish colonial commerce and its policies with the scholarship on the slave trade, as these fields have not engaged meaningfully with one another in recent times.Footnote 2
As historian Antonio García Baquero reminds us, the liberalization of the Spanish American trade of goods between 1765 and 1778 was carried out within mercantilist parameters.Footnote 3 Thus, the Crown opened an increasing number of ports on both sides of the Atlantic to commerce but did so within a structure that excluded foreign competitors. It was the liberalization of the slave trade in February 1789 (then renewed and expanded in 1791) that broke the exclusivity of commercial exchanges in the Spanish Americas, allowing foreign slavers to enter most of the authorized ports, with exceptions such as Santiago de Cuba, where only Spaniards were allowed to bring captives.Footnote 4 While the Crown started a program to deregulate the commerce of goods between Spain and the Caribbean islands in 1765, then greatly expanded it to some mainland colonies in 1778, and continued this geographical increase in 1789, the first full opening of the slave trade only took place in 1789, allowing foreigners to engage in this inhuman trafficking while they were still forbidden from the commerce of goods. However, the removal of restrictions on the slave trade to the Spanish Americas opened a window for Spanish colonial merchants and foreign traders alike to break through mercantilist restrictions in the exchange of merchandise.
The deregulation of the Spanish commercial system should not be perceived in isolation but rather as part of a broader set of aspects related to colonial relations with the metropole. For instance, the Spanish colonies increased the fiscal revenues with which the Crown (together with France) intended to continue challenging British hegemony in the Atlantic. More central to Madrid, the colonies became a magnificent market for peninsular industrial production. Yet, protectionist measures aimed at strengthening Spanish manufacturing and its marketability did not achieve the desired goals. Although peninsular manufacturing production notably increased in the late eighteenth century, it was insufficient to satisfy American demand. For García Baquero, the Spanish Americas were well adjusted to the protectionist pretensions of the Crown. Yet, peninsular Spain was far from becoming a true metropole because of its inability to increase its industrial production to satisfy American demand and strengthen the economic dependence of the colonies.Footnote 5 The increasing slave trade from foreign colonies to the Spanish Americas, sometimes conducted by foreign merchants during periods of neutral trade, also brought legal and illegal commerce of goods to unsatisfied consumers in the Spanish colonies.
We place the intellectual itinerary and implementation of the deregulation of the slave trade as part of the political-economy debates of opposite metropolitan factions divided by their understandings of trade and governability in the Spanish Americas. While examining the politics of consulados or merchant guilds, Fidel Tavárez identifies metropolitan factions supporting either “soft imperialism,” allowing profits to colonial merchants to create closer ties to the Crown, or “extractive colonialism,” privileging exclusively merchants in Iberia and the royal treasuries.Footnote 6 It is worth noting that metropolitan authorities could simultaneously adopt these extremes, namely “extractive colonialism” and “soft imperialism,” for different regions. For historian Allan Kuethe, the Spanish reformers sometimes took contradictory measures across their diverse and expanding empire. For instance, to economically revitalize an imperial periphery, the metropolis allowed progressive commercial deregulation in the Caribbean Islands, particularly in Havana, and at the same time, it kept the well-structured trade with Mexico closed, avoiding direct trade with foreigners in the main silver-producing area of the empire.Footnote 7
This article also foregrounds the actions of colonial merchants, who organized slave voyages within the Americas at the same time that metropolitan authorities debated this trafficking. In the early 1780s, the rise of the slave trade in the Spanish colonies during the American Revolutionary War showed that opening this trafficking in the colonies benefitted merchants in Havana or Montevideo rather than those in Cádiz or Barcelona. Merchants living on the Iberian peninsula did not profit from the de facto slave trade liberalization during the early 1780s, yet the Spanish metropolitan authorities wanted to prioritize them. Those prone to benefit only metropolitan interests, led by José de Gálvez, Marquis of Sonora, seemingly delayed the deregulation of the slave trade as this measure lacked benefits for Spaniards in the Iberian Peninsula immediately. Debates about the liberalization of the slave trade took place simultaneously with those of the 1778 deregulation of the Spanish Atlantic commerce of goods, followed by a brief and de facto liberalization of the slave trade in the early 1780s during wartime, which benefited merchants in the Americas. However, the complete deregulation of this horrific trafficking occurred only after José de Gálvez’s death in 1787 and the subsequent revamping of colonial administration.
Metropolitan concerns about contraband commerce of goods carried out by merchants, mariners, and ordinary subjects living in colonial ports also shaped the debates and policies about the slave trade. Since the Spanish Crown had granted licenses and contracts of this trafficking to benefit royal financiers, whether Italian or Dutch in the second half of the seventeenth century, and then used the asiento as a way to settle imperial conflicts with the French and the British in the following century, the Spanish lacked direct commerce with sub-Saharan Africa before the 1790s liberalization of this trafficking. Therefore, the slave trade linked merchants in the Spanish colonies with foreign European traders who brought captives from either Africa or their American colonies. The slave trade within the Americas raised the chances of smuggling goods, which was one of the main reasons British merchants had pursued the asiento. Skirmishes over British contraband led to intermittent Anglo-Spanish wars during the first half of the eighteenth century, culminating in the “Guerra del Asiento.”Footnote 8 After the end of the asiento in 1750, and particularly during the years of liberalization of the slave trade after 1789, local and foreign merchants exploited the regulations of this trafficking to run voyages carrying few captives but loading contraband goods to sell in ports such as Cartagena and Montevideo.Footnote 9
This smuggling of merchandise associated with the slave trade within the Americas had political implications for metropolitan authorities as well as colonial elites and commoners. This is another distinctive aspect of the Spanish Empire: Spanish Americans used the contraband trade to assert local control and contest the metropole, unlike British Americans, who protested colonial rule by engaging in piracy or boycotting British imports.Footnote 10 Contraband trade by Spanish American subjects was part of the balance of power within the colonies, where authorities tolerated illicit trade as a means of broader colonial governance. In this context, changes in slave trade policies could also upset the balance between the metropole and the wealthiest segment of the colonial elite—the Spanish American merchants.Footnote 11
Against the British Asiento and All Asientos
In her overview of the Spanish Crown’s relationships with the slave trade, Reyes Fernández Durán asserts that the Spanish economic literature during the eighteenth century thought very little about the slave trade and slavery.7 Still, this assertion is more applicable to the early era of the British Asiento than to the second half of the eighteenth century. Between 1710 and 1740, the works of Gerónimo de Urtáriz, Álvaro Navia-Osorio, and Bernardo de Ulloa almost bypassed the British Asiento or lacked references about the slave trade. As the Spanish King Felipe V received 25 percent of the benefits of the slave sales of the South Sea Company in the colonies, his official support of the asiento prevented the formation of direct slave trade networks connecting the metropolis and the Americas, which became a hindrance for Spanish merchants on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 12 This royal benefit, at the expense of Spanish subjects, made it unsuitable to criticize the asiento openly in print during its heyday, illustrating the Spanish political economy of this trade at the time.Footnote 13 As stated by historian Josep M. Delgado Ribas, the Crown regarded the slave trade “as a royal prerogative that was used to reward loyalty, pay off loans, and make tacit alliances with European maritime powers” during the three centuries following 1500.Footnote 14 In fact, this use of the slave trade to achieve the Crown’s political goals started to break down after the British Asiento ended in 1750.
The manuscript Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América, which vehemently sought the liberalization of commerce within the Spanish empire around 1750, then circulated widely in Spain and the Americas during the second half of the century. Traditionally attributed to José Campillo (1693–1743), historians Stanley and Barbara Stein, as well as Fidel Tavárez, point to Melchor Rafael de Macanaz (1670–1760) as its author. Tavárez believes that Macanaz completed the manuscript probably between 1747 and 1750, by the end of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (from 1739 to 1748) that terminated the South Sea Company’s monopoly.Footnote 15 This timing undoubtedly shaped Macanaz’s negative views on the asiento and, more broadly, on the role of the slave trade and slavery for the empire.Footnote 16 He considered the labor of Indigenous people to be the basis for expanding agriculture and mining in the Americas and, thus, trade with the metropole. Macanaz discouraged the extension of the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in the Spanish colonies, as he expressed (before Adam Smith) that the self-interest of free (Indigenous) laborers made their work more productive than the labor of the enslaved. After the fall of the asiento, other reflections on the slave trade and slavery gained traction in connection with the overall reexamination of colonial trade policies.Footnote 17
The ending of the asiento did not sever Anglo-Spanish slave trading networks but instead relocated these links to the Cádiz–Havana axis. The peace treaty between Great Britain and Spain, signed in Aachen in 1748, led to the termination of the asiento through the Treaty of Madrid on October 5, 1750, which improved the conditions for British merchants with interests in Cádiz, aiming to secure peace. The Treaty of Madrid also illustrates the Spanish Crown’s interest in minimizing its dependence on the entry of captives directly from Africa via English merchants. Because of these two reasons, the Crown granted the importation of enslaved people to the privileged trade company Real Compañía de Comercio de La Habana, associated with Basque and Navarrese merchants with substantial interests in Havana and Cádiz. While the slave trade was not the main activity of this company, agents of the Havana Company, such as Juan de Miralles, traveled to Jamaica, where they acquired a considerable number of captives to be sent to Cuba.Footnote 18
In 1760, at the beginning of the reign of Carlos III, José de Gálvez produced an extensive unpublished tract of the Spanish policies over the Americas, wherein Gálvez does not consider slavery or the slave trade to be a distinctive aspect of colonial policy.Footnote 19 His main concerns were the Spanish conflicts with other European powers in the Americas, trade with the colonies, the implementation of colonial rule, tropical agriculture, and mining. Not surprisingly, Gálvez inserted his first mention of the slave trade in a comparison of what the Spanish and the British extracted from their respective colonies, complaining about the British profits over the slave trade and contraband to the Spanish Americas. Gálvez was more interested in increased trade and shipping between the metropole and the colonies, which were related to two distinct aspects. First, for merchants in Iberia to sell more Spanish merchandise in the Americas, more agricultural products needed to come from there to the metropole rather than silver. Thus, he envisioned increasing cultivation of tobacco, quinine, cinnamon, and other staples, but did not mention the slave labor usually associated with tropical agriculture. Second, Gálvez encouraged the growth in shipping to encompass more vessels and mariners for naval defense, as a more robust merchant fleet could supply the needs of the Spanish Navy just before Spain joined France in the Seven Years’ War.Footnote 20 In this regard, Kuethe points out that the deregulation of the Spanish commercial system was deeply influenced, if not conditioned, by the military needs of the Crown. Concerns over the threat by foreign powers to the integrity of the Spanish Americas influenced the distribution of wealth within the empire. The main Spanish military enclaves in the Caribbean and the Río de la Plata absorbed much of the silver produced in Mexico and the Andes, which otherwise would have been sent to the metropole to provide relatively cheap cash capital to the weak peninsular manufacturing industry.Footnote 21
In this context of Spain’s joining the Seven Years’ War, Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes finished his manuscript Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias in 1762, which the scholarship usually identifies as belonging to the first batch of debates leading to the libre-comercio reforms of 1765 and 1778.Footnote 22 Yet, at this time, Campomanes was not part of the metropolitan decision-making process over trade, which involved others.Footnote 23 Yearning to participate in this debate, Campomanes was one of the most forceful proponents of the liberalization of commerce in the Spanish Americas and the ending of the fleet system. He envisioned that opening free trade within the empire would increase production in the Americas. In addition, he expected this measure to lower the prices of Spanish products in the colonies and cut down contraband. In Reflexiones, Campomanes’s first mention of the slave trade was to open it as “libre y franc[o]” (“free and open”) to Cuba, though only for Spaniards.Footnote 24 An entire section focuses on the slave trade, historizing the Spanish royal contracts with foreign merchants to oppose them, considering that asientos contributed to the ruin of Spanish transatlantic commerce after 1660. Campomanes saw that one of the limitations for Spanish merchants in conducting this trafficking was their lack of access to European manufactured products with which English, French, and Dutch slavers bought captives from African merchants. Rather than full liberalization involving foreigners and intra-American trafficking, as would happen in 1789, Campomanes proposed designating a port in the Canary Islands for foreign merchants willing to sell captives to the Spanish. In the Canaries, Spanish shippers would reembark enslaved Africans for the Americas.Footnote 25 This suggestion had a precedent, as the Canary Islands played a leading role in organizing the slave trade in the late sixteenth century.Footnote 26
Campomanes mentions that Spanish merchants were conducting voyages from Africa to Buenos Aires after the fall of the British Asiento, but he probably ignored the fact that these traders bought captives from other Europeans on the coast of Africa. He referred to the 1750s slave voyages conducted by Ramon Palacio, acting on the contract sponsored by the merchant of Cádiz Manuel Diaz de Saravia. They dispatched three voyages to Buenos Aires: One was performed by an English ship and crew, another was captained by Palacio himself with a partially English crew, and the third was conducted on an English vessel nationalized Spanish in Cádiz. A failed fourth voyage from Cádiz to Africa shows how this circuit operated. In 1755, the Spanish ship Santa Bárbara arrived in the Portuguese Island of São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea, from which the vessel was intended to sail to Malembo, in today’s northern Angolan exclave of Cabinda, to meet the English ship Tortola, which would transfer the enslaved people onboard to the Santa Bárbara. However, the Santa Bárbara never made it to Malembo. Instead, it continued to Buenos Aires, given that most of the crew became ill in São Tomé. The crew mutinied and forced the captain to sail to Buenos Aires without the rendezvous.Footnote 27 This same transfer of captives from English to Spanish slavers on the coast of Mayumba and Malembo probably occurred on the previous Palacio-Diaz de Saravia voyages.Footnote 28
In contrast to Gálvez and Campomanes, proposals made in Cuba during the time of the Havana Company’s involvement in the slave trade advocated for the liberalization of this trafficking from Africa to the Spanish colonies. Nicolás Joseph de Ribera, a professor at Havana’s Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Gerónimo, wrote the manuscript Descripción de la Isla de Cuba in 1760, which included a description and a program of reforms for the island. One of the most extensive sections advocated for the liberalization of the slave trade from Africa to Cuba, which would boost the island’s population and wealth, generate revenue for military defense, and provide additional Spanish subjects (in the form of emancipated descendants of the Africans) to serve in the military defense.Footnote 29 Ribera excluded trafficking from foreign colonies such as Jamaica owing to the costs of transportation being added to the price of captives and the likelihood that this route encouraged the smuggling of goods.
After the 1762 British occupation of Havana, some Spanish officers sent to rebuild the city’s defenses contemplated how to generate revenue for the military buildup, which inspired them to write about the slave trade. While stationed in Havana from 1763 to 1770, the engineer Agustín Crame authored the Discurso politico sobre la necesidad de fomentar la Ysla de Cuba (1768), which, as indicated in the three-line full title of this work, portrayed the slave trade as crucial for enhancing the island’s wealth and defenses.Footnote 30 He devoted ten pages out of sixty to this topic in the manuscript, exploring various strategies to conduct this trade. Ranked from most to least favorable for the Spanish, he advocated for allowing Spaniards to sail from Iberia to Africa for captives, which Crame considered the best yet least likely option in the short term. Next, he contemplated sending ships from Spain to foreign colonies such as Jamaica, where the British established free ports in 1766, to purchase captives for Cuba, as this route was on the way from Spain to Havana. To deter contraband, these vessels would forfeit their registration if they embarked with anything other than enslaved people in Jamaica. However, this plan was impractical since the Spanish in the Caribbean typically acquired captives using silver and livestock rather than goods from Spain. Crame opposed monopolistic contracts, as did most Spaniards in this period, so his next best alternative was for the Crown to contract with two or three companies for providing captives, only allowing foreign merchants if their price per captive was ten pesos below the Spanish slavers’ bids. As a last resort, he would permit foreign merchants to bring captives to Cuba, but only to smaller ports such as Trinidad de Cuba on the south-central coast, as the limited consumer market in that town would help restrict contraband. Note that, by 1768, British and Dutch merchants were allowed to anchor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which Crame opposed, to sell captives to the recently formed Compañía Gaditana de Negros for resale in Havana. Throughout his reflections, Crame argues that increasing the slave trade would ultimately reduce contraband of goods by boosting investment in production rather than commerce. Still, in the short term, Crame recognized that some smuggling of goods would be unavoidable as long as foreign merchants brought captives to Cuba, which shows that those attempting to reform the slave trade considered the implications for the overall commerce.
The British occupation of Havana led to new efforts to reform the financial backing of Spanish colonial defenses, pushing the first round of trade liberalization policies in 1765 and reopening debates about the slave trade. That year, the Crown liberalized the exchange of goods between Spain and the Caribbean Islands from the fleet system, allowing commerce between Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Margarita, and Trinidad, with the ports of Cádiz, Seville, Málaga, Alicante, Barcelona, Cartagena, Santander, La Coruña, and Gijón. The 1765 consulta (policy recommendation) leading to this reform reexamined the slave trade without creating new measures. The introduction of the consulta states that the “enemies of the Crown” had developed their colonies through the slave trade, which they owned, enabling them to transport captives to the Spanish colonies. With the excuse of selling enslaved people, these foreigners also smuggled merchandise. The Crown imposed high taxes on this Caribbean slave trade, but the duties were ultimately paid by the Spanish colonial purchasers rather than the foreign merchants, contributing to the limiting of the trafficking and the decline of local production and, thus, trade with Spain. In the fifth section, the authors argue that producing tropical staples in the Spanish Caribbean increased revenue for the Crown through taxing trade. To increase commerce, ships should sail from the Americas to Spain with cargoes of tropical crops for consumption, processing, and sale. They also argue that the rise of the slave trade would contribute to repeopling the Caribbean coasts and their defense, which was in line with Joseph de la Ribera. Then, the authors not only recommend allowing Spanish subjects to sail to Africa to buy enslaved people for the colonies but also eliminating taxes on exports of merchandise for slave trading, victuals, and the arrival of captives to support Spanish involvement in this cruel activity. They asserted that there was no Spanish slave trade then; thus, the royal treasury would not lose funds with these tax exemptions.Footnote 31 Rather than paying twenty or forty additional pesos per captive, as the slave trade from foreign colonies was taxed by the colonial treasuries, Spaniards could bring captives from Africa duty-free. Yet, the Spanish had no direct commerce with sub-Saharan Africa, so the authors recommend traders first sail to free African ports to start trade. Once they developed knowledge of the African coast and trade with local merchants, Spanish slavers could request the Crown to establish a Spanish foothold in Africa without disrupting affairs with foreign European powers. This last proposal seemingly became the seed for the 1778 Spanish invasion of the islands of Fernando Poo and Annobon to create a Spanish port in the Gulf of Guinea for the slave trade, which is examined in the next section.
In 1765, and almost concurrently with the aforementioned liberalization of trade between Spain and her Caribbean Islands, a Spanish company dedicated solely to the slave trade, the Compañía Gaditana de Negros was formed. This initiative continued the royal reinforcement of the commercial axis between Cádiz and Havana for the organization of the slave trade, following the royal permissions for the Havana Company after the end of the British Asiento. Not coincidentally, the establishment of the Compañía Gaditana for this brutal trafficking in September 1765 preceded Havana’s authorization to trade with the peninsula three weeks later in October. The commercial restructuring in Havana, where the Crown allowed private trade of merchandise instead of the monopoly previously held by the Havana Company, included most of the commercial goods of interest to the merchants of Cádiz. Once again, the timeline of reforms of the slave trade policies overlapped with those for the overall colonial commerce of goods.
The Compañía Gaditana, run by merchants who were Basque and gaditanos (from Cádiz) with strong interests in the peninsula, was the most significant effort made by the Crown to grant the commercial community of Cádiz a monopoly over the trade in human beings, by eliminating all previous licenses. The Compañía Gaditana had its headquarters in San Juan de Puerto Rico, the easternmost port of the Spanish Caribbean and the closest to Europe and Africa, to facilitate the creation of a triangular circuit running through Cádiz, West Africa, and Puerto Rico, from which captives would be distributed to other Spanish colonial ports. However, the Compañía Gaditana soon encountered significant difficulties in acquiring a sufficient number of enslaved human beings at competitive prices, so it had to turn to British, French, and Dutch ships and crews. Note that the British occupation of Havana enabled the arrival of some British and particularly Irish traders, such as Cornelius Coppinger—linked to the sizeable intra-Caribbean slave trade—who ended up settling in Havana after the city returned to Spanish rule and became intermediates between the Compañía Gaditana and British Caribbean slavers.Footnote 32 By 1772, the company’s debt with British Caribbean slavers reached one million pesos fuertes, necessitating a restructuring. In 1773, Havana became the Compañía Gaditana’s headquarters, and abandoning the facade of bringing enslaved people from Africa, the Company openly purchased captives in Jamaica and Barbados until Spain entered into a war against Britain in 1779.Footnote 33
This brief overview of the Compañía Gaditana operations highlights the challenges all Spanish traders faced in acquiring enslaved people along the African coasts and, primarily, the weaknesses of the Cádiz merchants in organizing this abhorrent business without relying on Havana’s connections to the British Caribbean. The new phase that began with the American Revolutionary War would reveal the ability of the merchants in the Spanish Americas to bring enslaved people to the colonies while avoiding purchases from British slavers, as well as the inability of the Spanish Crown to secure a foothold in Africa for this trafficking.
The 1778 Libre-Comercio, Fernando Poo, and the American Revolutionary War
The Crown issued the second large and more significant round of measures to liberalize trade between Spain and the colonies in 1778, extending the liberalization already applied in the Caribbean Islands to most mainland regions, except New Spain and Venezuela. A document from the Council of Indies, a dictamen (opinion) that analyzed the options of libre-comercio and was produced in 1777, mentioned the slave trade in terms very similar to those of the 1765 consulta, even locating this issue at the same numeral—the fifth—as this dictamen. Footnote 34 While explaining the “decay of Spain,” this report identified the problem of: “el descuido de poblar nuestra costas por falta de negros” (“the neglect of populating our coasts for lack of Blacks”). The council recommended that Spanish merchants conduct the slave trade from Africa to the Americas as a remedy. Departing from Campomanes, this dictamen explains the nonexistence of a Spanish slave trade owing to a lack of control over enclaves in Africa and opposition from other European powers established there. In this text, Spanish anxiety about the slave trade was more focused on defending the coastlines from Venezuela to Honduras than on capitalism, echoing the idea that “gobernar es poblar” (“to govern is to populate”). The colonial elites’ lack of capital impeded the purchase of captive Africans, as the dictamen noted that, along these coasts from South to Central America, there were no two locations where twenty individuals could buy twenty enslaved Africans.
Despite the interest of the Council of Indies in the slave trade within the reforms of colonial commerce, as expressed in the 1777 dictamen, the 1778 Reglamento y Aranceles Reales para el Comercio Libre de España, enacting these reforms, failed to mention the slave trade. This omission was deliberate. The Spanish Crown arranged an alternative measure for the slave trade on March 24, 1778, by signing the Treaty of El Pardo with Portugal. While this treaty outlined the territorial limits of the Iberian powers in South America, a secret clause transferred the islands of Fernando Poo (now Bioko) and Annobon in the Gulf of Guinea to Spain as a hub for slave trading. The Spanish also gained special port rights in São Tomé and Île Príncipe, which were essential for securing their occupation of Fernando Poo and Annobon. The treaty allowed free trade in enslaved people for the Spanish at São Tomé and Île Príncipe, with the expectation that Spanish merchants would purchase enslaved people to transport them to the Americas.Footnote 35
In 1778, the Crown allocated naval and financial resources to secure a Spanish outpost in West Africa for the slave trade, rather than deregulating this trafficking in the colonies. They possibly envisioned that, to create a Spanish slave trade, they first needed to control a piece of territory in Africa for Spanish merchants living in Iberia to organize this trafficking. The attempt to establish a presence in Fernando Poo and Annobon turned into a disaster for Spain owing to the resistance of the Africans and the lack of commercial infrastructure to support this initiative.
Scholars typically view this Spanish venture in the Gulf of Guinea within the broader context of the slave trade, rarely recognizing the connections between this colonial sally into Africa, with the libre-comercio measures of 1765, the 1777 dictamen, and the 1778 decree extending the free trade of merchandise within the empire. Expectations in Madrid surrounding this expedition hindered any liberalization of the inter-colonial slave trade in 1778, as metropolitan authorities anticipated the development of trafficking of captives direct from Africa, organized by those in Cádiz or Barcelona. Ironically, the immediate result of these measures was not the development of transatlantic slave trading voyages outfitted in the Iberian Peninsula but rather an increasing involvement of colonial merchants in trafficking within the Americas.
The American Revolutionary War influenced the timeline of the Gulf of Guinea expedition and the expansion of the slave trade in the Spanish Americas during the early 1780s. In Madrid, authorities believed this conflict would prevent the British Navy from intervening against Spanish naval forces attempting to seize Fernando Poo and Annobon in 1778, while Spain was still neutral. However, as Emily Berquist notes, delays in the arrival of the Portuguese commissioner to these islands to implement the treaty compromised the element of surprise in 1778, allowing British slavers in the Bight of Biafra to learn about the Spanish presence in the region and act against it, particularly after Spain declared war on Britain in June 1779.Footnote 36
Spain’s entry into this war also marked the timeline of the slave trade in the colonies during the next five years. Merchants from the Spanish Americas, the United States, the Danish and French Caribbean, and Brazil undertook intra-American slave voyages to Cuba, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata, dramatically increasing the volume of this trafficking to these regions. Notably, from 1781 to 1783, there was a de facto opening up of the slave trade in the Spanish Americas to neutral and allied powers. However, this liberalization occurred within the Americas and was driven by slavers residing there, taking place almost a decade before the Spanish Crown officially deregulated this trafficking in 1789.
Nearly 15,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Havana between 1781 and 1785, primarily between late 1781 and the signing of the peace treaty in 1783. They were shipped by merchants based in Cuba, the Danish Caribbean, and the United States. Spanish ships departing from Havana, as well as those flying the flags of Denmark and the United States, transported captives mostly from Saint-Domingue and the Danish colony of St. Thomas. In return, these slavers extracted from Havana large amounts of silver, which had been previously transferred from Mexico to Cuba to cover the war expenses and ultimately ended up in the coffers of local merchants who were lenders of Havana’s treasury. This surge in trafficking set the stage for the significant growth of Cuban slave trading after the liberalization of such commerce in 1789, as many of the networks of Spanish, Danish, and US merchants established in the early 1780s persisted into the 1790s.Footnote 37
In June 1777, metropolitan authorities permitted merchants and planters in parts of colonial Venezuela to purchase enslaved Africans in foreign colonies, primarily to support the French Caribbean, as France was already at war with Great Britain. Yet, the edict requested that Venezuelan merchants and planters ask permission from local authorities.Footnote 38 Petitioners typically stated that they would sail to Martinique and Guadeloupe to sell mules, livestock, cattle hides, tobacco, and provisions such as corn and fish in exchange for enslaved Africans and, to a lesser extent, cash.Footnote 39 The intendant José de Abalos reported to Madrid that 800 enslaved Africans had arrived in the Province of Caracas, and 560 more had arrived in the Province of Cumaná from January 1778 to May 1779.Footnote 40 This trafficking continued into the early 1780s, extending to other Venezuelan ports beyond La Guaira (the seaport serving Caracas) and Cumaná. If we apply the figures of slave arrivals reported by colonial authorities to periods where we lack data, we estimate that 3,200 enslaved people disembarked in La Guaira from 1778 to the end of 1783, about 640 per year. Another 3,000 captives may have been forced to disembark in Cumana from mid-1777 to mid-1783, or 500 per year, while fewer arrived in Maracaibo, Guayana, and Trinidad. This may be a higher-bound estimate, as Francisco de Saavedra, intendant of Venezuela from 1783 to 1788, judged that merchants and planters in the entire Captaincy of Venezuela were unable to purchase more than 1,000 captives per year in 1784, owing to a lack of capital and credit.Footnote 41 These Caribbean slave trade routes resurfaced and rose in Venezuela after the 1789 deregulation of the slave trade.
The American Revolutionary War also marked the first major arrival of enslaved people into the newly established Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. As this conflict interrupted trade between Spain and the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the Crown permitted Portuguese ships to sail from the Río de la Plata, mainly to deliver silver essential for funding the war, and cattle hides, which were the region’s main export. According to the permit, these ships had to sail empty from Brazilian ports to Montevideo, the port serving Buenos Aires, where they would load hides and silver to be safely shipped to Spain under the neutral Portuguese flag. In association with rioplatense (from the Río de la Plata Ports) merchants, most of these Portuguese ships, often disguising their true intentions in official statements by citing distress at sea and shortages of water and supplies, would request permission to disembark captive Africans in Montevideo, simultaneously bringing in merchandise that had been previously loaded in Brazil. This large-scale smuggling operation resulted in nearly 5,400 enslaved people being disembarked in the Río de la Plata from Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, along with 600 captives from Africa, just from 1782 to 1783. As in Cuba and Venezuela, networks of rioplatense and Brazilian slavers, which had been active in the early 1780s, later resurfaced when the Spanish Crown deregulated this trafficking for the Río de la Plata in 1791.Footnote 42
This slave trading within the Americas also led some metropolitan officials, who had relocated to the colonies owing to the war, to encourage the deregulation of this trafficking. Francisco de Saavedra, who had drafted the 1778 libre-comercio edict under Gálvez, became one of the first to advocate for the complete liberalization of the slave trade. In 1780, the Crown sent Saavedra to Cuba as a commissioner to coordinate the colonial treasuries in support of the Spanish and French armed forces. He left behind a comprehensive diary, which indicates that, while in Havana, he sailed to Cap Français (on the northern coast of Saint-Domingue) to coordinate with French commanders from March to April 1782, coinciding with the ongoing slave trade from Saint-Domingue to Cuba, which was facilitated by the permanent connection between these ports because of the war. On April 5, Saavedra noted that a Danish ship had arrived in Cap Français with 380 captives, mentioning that French traders with commissions from Havana intended to purchase these Africans for reshipment.Footnote 43 This news prompted Saavedra to reach out to the seller of these Africans, encouraging him to sail to Havana with the Danish vessel to sell the entire group there; however, the owner declined. Saavedra points out that this neutral trafficking was not permitted in Havana, yet we know that Danish, US, and French ships delivered captives from other Caribbean islands to Cuba. There was indeed a grey area between what was “allowed” and what was “encouraged.” This situation led Saavedra to advocate for the “free trade” of enslaved people, even permitting foreign merchants in Havana and explicitly linking this trafficking to the development of the island. These reflections also included ideas about the enslaved and the unnatural state of slavery, which he expressed by criticizing the branding of humans. Saavedra wrote about the “free trade” of captives to Secretary of the Indies José de Gálvez, even as Gálvez opposed the slave trade with foreign colonies, which he prohibited in almost all of the colonies after the war’s end.
If the King desires the Island of Cuba be one of the most profitable possessions of the Indies, it is essential that he promote the trade in Blacks by allowing free trade, by removing from it all duties, both import and excise, as well as taxes on second sales, and by abolishing the inhumane and odious custom of branding the slaves. The Negroes ought to be regarded as necessary tools of agriculture, and importation of them, far from being taxed, ought to be rewarded. Moreover, it is essential that the king treat the Island of Cuba in such a way as to enable it to attain the level of prosperity that its location and fertility can support, both because that island is a possession easier to preserve than is the continent and because it serves as a brake on the realm of Mexico.Footnote 44
While Saavedra envisioned the economic growth of Cuba based on plantation slavery, we also perceive his ideas as rooted in the defense of the empire and royal finances to keep Cuba Spanish. Despite the military victory over the British, Saavedra later presents a grim retrospective on the effects of the American Revolutionary War on Spain. He believed efforts to revitalize Spanish trade with the Americas had been strikingly successful. From the free-trade proclamation in 1778 until the declaration of war in 1779, the volume of merchandise and the fluidity and regularity of ship arrivals greatly benefited the Royal Treasury. However, Saavedra argued that, if Spain had maintained neutrality in the conflict, profits from neutral trade and the trafficking of captives would have increased even more for both Spanish private and royal coffers. Consequently, Saavedra did not hesitate to describe Spanish participation in the war as “impolitic” and “inopportune,” posing risks to Spanish trade and causing deep unrest in the colonies while promoting the emergence of “a formidable enemy at the back of the most opulent of our possessions.”Footnote 45
The significance of Saavedra’s reflections on political economy also comes from their application, as he held both metropolitan and colonial offices. In 1784, two years after his statement on the “free trade” of enslaved people, Saavedra urged Gálvez to prohibit the branding of enslaved individuals, which was subsequently approved and implemented throughout the colonies. Saavedra’s experience in Cap Français also influenced his policies regarding the slave trade in Venezuela, where he was the intendant from 1783 to 1788 and thus oversaw all commerce. He first allowed the continuation of small-scale Caribbean slave voyages with foreign colonies during peacetime, a practice that was banned in other Spanish colonies. Additionally, he assisted in financing Edward Barry’s license to transport enslaved men, women, and children from Africa to Venezuela. To address the lack of cash among the planters and merchants of Caracas for purchasing enslaved people from British ships operating under Barry’s license, Saavedra implemented a measure he observed in Cap Français during the American Revolution. He had seen French authorities use royal funds to loan to planters, who then employed these loans to purchase African captives.Footnote 46 From 1784 to 1788, the Caracas treasury provided loans for local planters to acquire captives brought by British slavers and issued libranzas (a financial instrument similar to an order of payment not to be confused with a bill of exchange) to pay British slavers for these captives, which British captains cashed for silver held in Havana’s treasury.
Further evidence of the debates regarding the liberalization of the slave trade during the final years of Gálvez’s administration is found in the 1786 royal decree permitting this trafficking for the vecinos of Santo Domingo, serving as an immediate and relevant precedent for the 1789 deregulation.Footnote 47 The Spanish Crown aimed to designate Santo Domingo as a port of entry in the agreements with Barry and later with Baker & Dawson to transport captive Africans to Venezuela and Cuba in the mid-1780s, a proposal the British slavers rejected. Nonetheless, Gálvez instructed Saavedra in Caracas to redirect some slave ships arriving there to proceed to Santo Domingo in 1785.Footnote 48 The insufficient number of slave vessels arriving in Santo Domingo prompted the Crown to liberalize this trafficking in 1786, but this initiative failed for several reasons. First, the seemingly low demand for captives in Santo Domingo was already being met, either legally or illegally, from Saint-Domingue.Footnote 49 Second, the limited production of tropical staples such as sugar, which were in demand in European markets, diminished the interest of human traffickers in sailing to Santo Domingo. Only tobacco had the potential to draw the attention of slavers, but its production was stagnant and exclusively directed toward the royal factory in Seville. Third, the commercial and financial infrastructure in this Spanish colony was weak, making it impossible to purchase enslaved individuals on credit. All these factors hindered the development of the slave trade in Santo Domingo.Footnote 50
In 1785, criollo intellectuals such as Antonio Sánchez Valverde, who wrote Idea del valor de la Isla Española, also viewed slavery as essential for Santo Domingo. Born on the island, he compared Santo Domingo with the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The key to understanding the enormous difference between the two colonies was the extensive use of enslaved people by the French. Because of this, Sánchez Valverde emphasized the need to speed up the arrival of captives into Santo Domingo. As he considered other European powers to control the entire African coast, making Spanish trade difficult or impossible, he suggested two ways to obtain enslaved people: either by allowing Santo Domingo merchants to go to foreign colonies to purchase them or by opening the port of Santo Domingo to foreign slave ships. He believed the second option was better because it would reduce risk for local merchants and enable them to acquire captives in exchange for local products.Footnote 51 Yet, the 1786 liberalization of this trafficking for Santo Domingo was limited to the vecinos and did not apply to foreigners.
The 1786 royal decree aimed at “encouraging agriculture, industry, and trade” in Santo Domingo by permitting “a todos los vecinos” to bring enslaved Africans, exempting taxes on their sale and resale in the case that captives worked on plantations.Footnote 52 The Crown anticipated rewards for vecinos of Santo Domingo who brought in large numbers of enslaved individuals, along with provisions, as later seen in the edict of 1789 liberalizing this trafficking to most of the Spanish Caribbean. These premiums included allowing payments in gold, silver, and “frutos” (“agricultural products”) in exchange for captives, as well as the importation of machinery and tools from foreign colonies, thus expecting slave voyages from those regions. The key aspect was designating the vecinos as the focus of this measure, which motivated local subjects to travel to foreign colonies to purchase enslaved people while implicitly prohibiting foreigners from docking in Santo Domingo. However, some foreigners, primarily French, could become “vecinos” of Santo Domingo, effectively bypassing this restriction.
The case of Santo Domingo helps broaden the discussion on Spanish American slave trading and slavery beyond stories too frequently centered on Cuba alone. As shown by Fidel Tavárez’s article on this issue, the strategies of planters, merchants, letrados or “men of letters,” and colonial authorities in Santo Domingo that led to the abovementioned 1786 royal decree were later adopted and modified by Cuban elites, aiming to expand their own slave trade and slavery.Footnote 53 The Santo Domingo case also broadens the study of the 1789 deregulation of the trafficking of captive Africans in the Spanish Americas beyond Cuba and Havana’s elites, such as Francisco de Arango y Parreño, whom we will introduce in the next section, as it leads to a more expansive geography, a longer timeline, and a larger cast of characters.
Unrelated to Spanish Santo Domingo, discussions surrounding the Spanish trafficking of captives were influenced by Saint-Domingue and the French transatlantic slave trade for various reasons. Traditionally, scholars note that Spaniards aimed to reshape Cuba, modeling it after Saint-Domingue before 1789.Footnote 54 The economic instability of metropolitan France following the American Revolutionary War drove many merchants and financiers to seek safer investments. Saint-Domingue attracted a large portion of these funds from the French commercial bourgeoisie, as it was the most lucrative French colony. Expanding agricultural operations required a vast number of enslaved men and women, which fueled the substantial increase in the French slave trade.Footnote 55 Consequently, from the end of the American Revolutionary War to the start of the Haitian Revolution, French slavers, aided by royal subsidies, surpassed their British counterparts in transporting captives across the Atlantic.Footnote 56 As the French became the leading transatlantic slavers during this brief period, they undoubtedly served as a model for the Spanish in developing their trafficking. Nevertheless, no direct evidence links the rise of the French transatlantic slave trade to Spanish discussions on this trafficking. One of the few connections identified is Saavedra’s use of Caracas’s royal treasury for loans to planters for purchasing enslaved Africans, which he advocated on the basis of a French Caribbean example.
From Gálvez’s Death to the 1789 Liberalization of the Slave Trade
Secretary of the Indies José de Gálvez passed away in mid-June 1787 while the Spanish licenses for Baker & Dawson to deliver captives in Cuba and Venezuela were still active. In mid-July 1787, metropolitan policy changed with the issuance of the Instrucción Reservada by José Moniño, Count of Floridablanca, which detailed his views on state affairs. This instruction established the guidelines for the newly created Junta de Estado and marked the end of the Secretary of the Indies, whose functions were redistributed among the offices of commerce, war, and justice, encompassing the metropole and the colonies jointly.Footnote 57 The section titled “On the Acquisition and Shipping of Blacks” began by emphasizing the longstanding need for enslaved Africans for repopulation, agriculture, trade, and mining in the Americas. However, rather than deregulating this trafficking, Floridablanca tasked the recently established Real Compañía de Filipinas with reclaiming the islands of Fernando Poo and Annobon as centers for the Spanish slave trade. He also ordered the revocation of Baker & Dawson’s license owing to allegations of contraband and the rising abolitionist movement in Great Britain, which was already becoming apparent in Madrid. This renewed effort to sever ties with British transatlantic slavers once again attempted to create a Spanish-organized slave trade in the Iberian Peninsula.
While the primary mandate of the Real Compañía de Filipinas was to facilitate commerce between Spain and the Philippines, the Crown also tasked this company with enhancing transoceanic trade connecting the metropole with its colonies. Consequently, since its inception in 1785, the company had considered reestablishing Fernando Poo as a hub for the slave trade. Although the Crown suggested that the company reassert Spanish sovereignty in the Gulf of Guinea, the company never ventured to Africa.Footnote 58 Historian Antonio Ibarra has analyzed the arrangement between the Real Compañía de Filipinas and Spanish merchant Fermin Tastet in London, who acted as an intermediary with British slavers. The latter transported enslaved Africans from the Bight of Biafra to the Río de la Plata from 1788 to 1789 under the Real Compañía de Filipinas’s name. Ibarra illustrates that metropolitan and colonial authorities, along with the company’s investors, viewed the outcome of this operation as a financial disaster due to the high costs in Europe, the price of captives in the Bight of Biafra, and the elevated mortality rate in the Río de la Plata. Yet, as most captives were reshipped from Buenos Aires to Lima, the rioplatense slavers serving as middlemen ultimately profited, demonstrating that colonial merchants could still succeed even if extreme conditions radically diminished the earnings for the outfitters of the transatlantic slave voyages.Footnote 59
Slave traders in the Spanish Americas also sent petitions to the Crown to implement transatlantic voyages in the same years the Real Compañía de Filipinas sallied into this trafficking. However, they faced challenges in outfitting ships to Africa because they lacked suitable goods to trade for captives and therefore needed to purchase them in Europe.Footnote 60 In 1787, the merchants of Cartagena de Indias and the miners of Chocó proposed to the Spanish Crown that captives be taken directly from Africa to fulfill expected rising labor demand in the mines due to heightened European interest in platinum.Footnote 61 They intended to send a ship to Riohacha to load abundant and inexpensive redwood for sale in Amsterdam in exchange for products deemed appropriate for purchasing captives in Africa. After embarking enslaved men and women there, they planned to transport them to Cartagena, after which the captives would continue to Chocó. As recommended by the Bishop-Viceroy of New Granada, the Crown approved this proposal.
The implementation of this voyage illustrates that, while Spanish Caribbean slavers could typically deliver captives from nearby colonies, they experienced the same issues as their metropolitan counterparts when outfitting the transatlantic trafficking. The merchants from Cartagena faced challenges loading a boatload of redwood in Ríohacha, with additional problems after embarkation, which led the ship San Antonio (Beaumon) to seek refuge in Saint-Marc (Saint-Domingue) for repairs. From there, the Spanish sent part of the redwood on board another vessel to Nantes, while the Beaumon made its way to Amsterdam. Upon their arrival, the Spanish found that redwood prices had plummeted owing to market saturation by British and Dutch suppliers, limiting their capacity to acquire goods for sale in Africa. The ship required additional repairs in Amsterdam, which the Spanish paid for at an exorbitant cost of over 10,000 pesos. They sought help from the Spanish consul, who provided 30,000 pesos for the repairs and the purchase of rifles to sell in Africa. The Spanish then sailed to the Bight of Biafra after hearing about the low prices of captives there. Once they arrived in Bonny, slave sales moved slowly, hindered by illnesses that took the lives of the captain, nearly all the officers, and several captives in the holds. The arrival of British vessels sent by the Real Compañía de Filipinas, as mentioned above, along with Spaniards onboard, aided the slavers of the Beaumon. Some of these Spaniards and 46 enslaved men and women were transferred to this vessel to continue to Cartagena. After embarking more captives, the Beaumon set sail for Cartagena, where it ran aground and sank in the shallows of Salmedina on March 25, 1788. Boats from the bay rescued nearly all the crew and 158 enslaved Africans. Merchants and officials viewed this voyage as a failure due to the mortality and the expenses incurred by the royal treasury, which deterred the Crown from endorsing similar proposals.Footnote 62
In the second half of 1788, the metropolitan intentions to divest from British slavers and the inability to establish Spanish transatlantic trafficking, either outfitted in the metropolis or the colonies, resulted in the liberalization of this trafficking in 1789, when foreign slavers were permitted to dock in Havana and other Spanish Caribbean ports.
Historian José A. Piqueras offers one of the most thorough analyses of the months leading up to the 1789 deregulation. While Cuban historiography often overstates the significance of Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Havana’s merchant guild representative in Madrid, Piqueras emphasizes the long-term importance of Campomanes’s views on the political economy designed and implemented by Floridablanca after the death of Gálvez, which roughly overlaps with the transition from Carlos III to Carlos IV between 1787 and 1789.Footnote 63 After the disintegration of the centralized Ministry of Indies in 1787, the slave trade policy was assigned to the new Secretario de Estado del Despacho Universal de Marina e Indias, Antonio Valdés, a naval officer whose military experience placed him in charge of the Navy and the colonial trade policy. Valdés had circulated a survey to merchant guilds and other institutions in late 1787 regarding the implementation of the libre-comercio policy of 1778, which influenced his perspective on the slave trade. The response from the Council of Castile, written by Campomanes, requested further liberalization and even the establishment of foreign merchants in colonial ports to mitigate the new trade privileges created by the libre-comercio. As Piqueras and Llombart note, this meant “más mercado y más Estado” (“more market and more state”).Footnote 64
In a relatively brief period from mid-1787 to February 1789, the long-standing Spanish policy regarding the slave trade shifted to open ports in the Americas for foreigners while heavily encouraging Spaniards to engage in this horrific trafficking through tax exemptions and premiums. Analyzing this timeline reveals that the reevaluation of colonial trade policies following the implementation of the 1778 libre-comercio and, particularly, Gálvez’s death accelerated this change. Here, we follow Tavárez’s research on the timeline of another policy influenced by Gálvez: the creation of new consulados in the 1780s and 1790s. Tavárez points out that the 1778 libre-comercio decree prompted towns throughout the empire to submit applications for the establishment of merchant guilds in the 1780s. However, Gálvez only approved consulados in the Iberian Peninsula. Following his death and the restructuring of metropolitan bureaucracy, the new authorities approved the creation of many consulados in the Americas.Footnote 65 A similar rationale applies to the slave trade, thereby benefiting colonial merchant elites with the 1789 deregulation.
The de facto liberalization of the slave trade in the Spanish colonies during the American Revolutionary War may have also influenced the official deregulation of this trade in 1789. Tavárez’s views on consulado policy and Piqueras’s perspectives on slave trade regulations center on events in Spain. In a different direction, the experiences of individuals such as Valdés, who witnessed the British takeover of Havana, along with Saavedra’s recent involvement in Cuba and Venezuela, also contributed to this shift. A common opinion shared by Gálvez, Campomanes, and everyone in between encouraged more extensive Spanish shipping, including the trafficking of captives, as this trade would support additional Spanish vessels and crews that the Spanish Navy could incorporate during wartime. This viewpoint resonated strongly with Valdés, one of the most influential Spanish Navy officers, who recognized the importance of boosting shipping in the colonies for the sake of naval defense. Valdés likely viewed the maritime activities of colonial merchants, including slave traders, favorably rather than as competitors to merchants based in metropolitan ports.
The increased activity of slave traders based in the colonies preceded the changes in slave-trading policy in 1789. First, this deregulation derives from the practices of the slave trade during the American Revolution, and second, it allowed slavers from Cuba, Río de la Plata, and Venezuela to become the initial beneficiaries of this liberalization, as most of them conducted voyages within the Americas instead of across the Atlantic after 1789. This pattern was illustrated by the rising slave trade to Santiago de Cuba in the first five years following the liberalization, which depended almost entirely on Spanish Caribbean shipping.Footnote 66
While metropolitan and colonial officials had been debating the liberalization of the slave trade since the libre-comercio reforms of 1765 and more so in 1778, numerous petitions from colonial elites called for deregulating this trafficking, particularly after the American Revolutionary War. These requests originated from most corners of the Spanish Empire where enslaved men and women worked to generate profits for colonial elites. Historian Ada Ferrer highlights that, after this conflict, Havana planters persistently sought a faster shipping of captives to achieve sugar production levels similar to those in Saint-Domingue.Footnote 67 Francisco de Arango y Parreño, a wealthy Cuban landowner and lawyer, epitomized these efforts of the “sacarocracia/sugarocracy.” In early February 1789, he requested complete liberalization for the slave trade, which the Crown granted three weeks later owing to more significant changes in colonial administration. Arango y Parreño’s request was added to the complaints of many Havana landowners against Baker & Dawson’s slave trade contract. Whether these protests were justified or not, they persistently demanded the liberalization of the slave trade.
The dictamen of the Junta de Estado on February 10, 1789, which deregulated the slave trade, acknowledged ongoing complaints against Baker & Dawson’s license in Havana due to the small number of enslaved people disembarked, along with concerns about their alleged quality and the unexpectedly high presence of captive women. Additionally, these complaints indicated significant damage to the Royal Treasury resulting from the extensive extraction of silver and products limited to circulating within the empire. All of this prompted the elimination of this system. While establishing direct trade with Africa was desirable, as the Portuguese, French, and English had been doing, the lack of Spanish factories there and Spanish traders’ insufficient knowledge about outfitting this trafficking across the Atlantic made it unattainable. In their view, what had been decided for Santo Domingo in 1786 should be applied to and improved in the Spanish Caribbean as the most effective and secure means of bringing enslaved people.Footnote 68
This liberalization opened the slave trade to Spaniards and foreigners—favoring the former—to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and the Province of Caracas in 1789 and was later extended to the Viceroyalties of New Granada and the Río de la Plata in 1791. Deliberately, in the same year of 1789, the Crown finally included the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Captaincy of Venezuela in the libre-comercio system, freeing the trade of goods between these two colonies and Spain, further highlighting the connections between policy over the slave trade and overall colonial commerce, which was intended to create a more integrated Spanish transatlantic system able to profit from the increasing multilateral commerce within the colonies.
Conclusions
This article has focused on metropolitan debates and politics but also highlights how events in the Americas shaped the timeline of the deregulation of the slave trade. Historians Josep M. Delgado Rivas and Josep M. Fradera emphasize that the rising military expenditure in the colonies after the fall of Havana to the British led Spanish metropolitan authorities to implement extensive fiscal and political reforms aimed at generating revenue to support colonial defenses.Footnote 69 Rather than pursuing centralization, modernization, or capitalism, a common thread in these Bourbon policies was the desperate need for funds in colonial treasuries to invest in fortifications, equipment, and salaries for land and naval forces. Also focusing on the British occupation of Havana, historian Elena Schneider examines both the top-down and bottom-up effects of this event, centering her analysis on Cuba. She grants that “the American Revolution is still somewhat underacknowledged as a cause of growth in the Cuban sugar economy,” moving closer to recognizing the acceleration of the timeline leading to the deregulation of the slave trade.Footnote 70 We agree about the importance of the British occupation of Havana in driving the increase in military expenditure that led to new colonial policies. However, the 1789 deregulation of the slave trade had a more condensed timeline, beginning with late-1770s discussions of the libre-comercio system, which involved new slave-trade policies such as the invasion of Fernando Poo, and the increasing role of Spanish colonial merchants as slavers during the American Revolution.
The War of US Independence (from 1775 to 1783) and the 1778 reforms that partially opened trade for Spanish subjects between the metropole and the Americas marked the dual beginnings of a widespread transformation, establishing the trafficking of captive Africans as a crucial component of mainstream commercial activities linked to colonial and trans-imperial commerce in the Spanish Americas. While these events and debates shaped the timeline leading to the deregulation of 1789, they also paved the way for the growing importance of the slave trade and slavery in the overall commerce and production in the Spanish Empire, which was interrupted by the wars of independence in the mainland in the 1810s but continued to reach unprecedent heights in Cuba and Puerto Rico well into the nineteenth century.
José de Gálvez’s administration avoided deregulating the slave trade in 1778 by orchestrating the failed Spanish invasion of Fernando Poo and Annobón. After his death, the 1787 Instrucción Reservada still relied on the Real Compañía de Filipinas taking control of these islands as a hub for the Spanish-organized slave trade. From that point until early 1789, officials such as Valdés and Saavedra, who had more direct experience in the Caribbean, rose to occupy key metropolitan positions. They had witnessed the increasing actions of Spanish colonial merchants when it came to bringing captives to Cuba and Venezuela during the American Revolution and the rapid growth of Saint-Domingue’s plantation exports driven by the French transatlantic slave trade. These new metropolitan authorities had further motivations for deregulation, including generating fiscal revenue for colonial treasuries based on plantation exports and boosting Spanish shipping. From 1778 to 1789, colonial elites throughout the empire, particularly the Cuban merchants and planters who sent Arango y Parreño to Madrid, also intensified their demands to the Crown for acquiring enslaved people.
The long-standing claims about establishing a peninsular-centered Spanish slave trade, expressed by Spanish authors of political economy since the fall of the British Asiento in the mid-eighteenth century, shifted toward deregulating this trafficking in the 1780s. Initially, this was put into practice by colonial merchants from Cuba to the Río de la Plata. Subsequently, it was formally enacted in Madrid in 1789, which primarily benefited colonial merchants rather than those in Cádiz or Barcelona. The 1789 deregulation of the slave trade was one of the policies making colonial elites stockholders of the empire, as articulated by historian Jeremy Adelman, and aligned with economic views of “soft imperialism,” as he asserts that these elites integrated borderland regions into the Atlantic economy with slave labor, diversifying and increasing colonial trade and royal revenue.Footnote 71
In addition to focusing on colonial elites and reforms in colonial governance, this article illustrates that the timeline of the deregulation of the slave trade was linked to broader transformations in the overall commerce within the Spanish Atlantic. Notably, the liberalization of the slave trade, occurring between 1789 and 1791, broke with the long-standing Spanish exclusivist policy by allowing the entrance of foreign slavers in the colonies, while they were still barred from the commerce of merchandise. Of course, this change in the slave trade policy enabled more commerce of goods, both legal and illegal, with increasing exchanges between the Spanish Americas, foreign colonies, and the United States over the following two decades.
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